Standing out: attracting a local audience
Why do the majority of local people wait until they have guests before they visit our organisations when we’re right here on their doorstep?
The target of this session is to try to find out best practice on how to attract more visitors. Not tourists, but mainly local visitors with knowledge and awareness of our attractions. How can we make them prioritise a visit to our science organisation? The potential is quite big and the challenge is to get local people to choose us before other activities. Once local audiences visit the museum the likelihood of visiting again is high. Our presentations will highlight positive experiences with locals, as well as initiatives that did not increase visitor numbers. Together with participants we wish to discuss what can be done and how we can change the mindsets of our local visitors.
Facilitator
Head of department, public and marketing
Session speakers
1) I will talk about how we try to tap into the expectations of the visitor and meet them.
We use John Falk’s visitor identity model and have created a set of questions in our annual visitor survey to detect to what extent we are meeting the needs of the different visitor identities – the diversity of our visitors. It seems that we are doing pretty well, but the ‘rechargers’ are not as happy as the ‘explorers’. I will share the data.
2) We made a survey among non-visitors to understand what holds them back: why are they not coming? We found out that the main reason is not the pricing, but rather: "It did not occur to me". We decided to invest more in marketing.
3) We make outreach activities and find people where they do not expect to find us. I will share the examples.
4) We try to identify underpresented potential visitor groups and connect with them. This work is mostly ‘in progress’ to put it nicely.
Programme Manager - International Relations and Learning
Our visitors rate us quite highly and they say that they will visit again but in actual fact we can see that the conversion to an actual visit is quite low. So we figured we had to do things differently. I will talk about how we are trying to develop annual themes and how these are the umbrella that covers a whole year. 2020 is the first year of doing this and this year's theme is 'Let the games begin' which covers an exhibition, a sports arena and a whole range of dynamic activities where our guests and interact directly with sports people. I will share why we chose to do this and also how it is going so far.
Someone from Universience. Update will come
Head of department, public and marketing
I will talk about how we try to attract more local visitors by being a co-host for the Gingbread city, an economic festival and an art biennale among other Things. This to make the local see the museum as not just a Place to visit With School, work or With tourist, but a Place where New and unexpected Things happen.
