Museums can realize different results by prioritizing learning goals over performance goals

When museums try to address a thorny challenge like improving retention (returning visitors or renewing members), they tend to reach for solutions like improving experience or surveying participants to get their feedback.

Often, the learning (surveys) is in service of the solution (improving experience), so they ask what people like or dislike, what they want more of, why they didn’t renew, etc. By starting with the solution in mind, the organization creates an unintentional limit on what it can learn, which creates a new problem: They get caught in a loop of only hearing from a certain group of people — namely, people who share the museum’s goal of improving the museum.

Most people aren’t invested in helping museums become more engaging places — it’s just not a priority for them — so they don’t respond to the survey. The museum is left wondering how to engage them. A few years go by, and staff start getting a nagging feeling that they aren’t “listening to what people want” from the museum. Someone makes a survey they hope will shed some light. Only people who share the survey’s goal (i.e., improve the museum) respond, and the whole process repeats itself.

Progress-space research helps museums break out of that pattern, and the results can be invigorating.

This spring, we worked with an institution that wanted to improve member retention. We interviewed recently lapsed members, but the purpose wasn’t to understand why they didn’t renew (though they often told us) or what the institution could do to reengage them. We wanted to understand what was important to these people. It wasn’t about what they valued about the museum or gardens. It was about identifying their goals.

For example, one unexpected goal that emerged was related to safety. We learned that some people may feel safer enjoying the outdoors by visiting the institution than going to public parks or trails. This surprised the membership and visitor experience staff — safety wasn’t central to their work, and they hadn’t considered it a draw or benefit for members. (“We do have the guard booth at the entrance, but most of the time it’s empty … Why would that make someone feel safer?”) Gaps in perception are opportunities for the organization to develop more relevant offerings or resonant messages for people with that goal.

It’s best to frame goals in the first person, present tense, because it helps us inhabit the perspective of a person who has that goal. In this case, the goal is framed as Feel Safe When I’m Looking for the First Blooms of the Season

Notice any resistance you feel as you read that. You might think it’s odd that anyone would think so much about safety when they’re enjoying nature. If so, you’re probably a man. Or maybe you feel surprised at how specific the goal is — it may seem too narrow. But starting with more specificity helps us take action later. Someone at the organization already writes an email campaign every year about the first blooms of the season — No one is writing an email campaign about feeling safe.

Once the goal is in view, the organization can ask:

1. Is this a goal we want to support? (This question is shorthand for a collection of questions like, Can we support this goal? Does the goal align with our strategy or core challenge today?) Sometimes, people object to opportunity research because “we can’t support everyone’s goals!” But just because you identify a goal doesn’t mean you’re obligated to support it. You can always decline to support a goal. It’s better to intentionally ignore a goal in favor of another than it is to accidentally support only the goals that you can conjure from your own experience and interests.

2. How might we support this goal? Many museums tend to take an additive approach to supporting goals. For example, the organization could make sure there’s always a person in the guard booth to cultivate a sense of safety. But that may be an unnecessarily heavy lift. If the guard booth already confers feelings of safety, it may be enough to find ways to amplify its presence through messaging.

This shows what a learning-first rather than a projects-first approach can look like. Imagine it’s 2026, and a new staff member is writing the first-blooms-of-the-season email campaign. They want to remove the photo of the empty guard booth. There’s nothing fun about a guard booth. But the guard booth photo supports a real, specific goal. We can question its effectiveness in supporting that goal — there may be better ways to help people feel safe than showing a picture of the guard booth in an email campaign — but we’ve moved beyond personal preferences and taste. We’re moving toward decisions that are anchored in a diversity of perspectives.

I’m not suggesting you never survey visitors to improve their experience — just that you make room in your organization’s learning diet for different kinds of insights.

We probably need to identify why the current practice exists for that to happen.

Why do museums tend to take a projects-first, learning-second approach? Why is learning in service of projects rather than projects being a result of what the organization has learned about people’s goals?

I suspect it’s because we tend to set performance rather than learning goals.

Performance goals include engagement — more visitors, different visitors, more time, more attention — while learning goals are better suited to addressing ill-structured and unfamiliar problems. Learning goals help us define the problem and understand different ways to address it. You can read more on learning vs performance goals here, but, in short, it’s a mistake to try to achieve different results by setting the same old predictable goals for the people trying to realize those results. Learning goals require us to accept that we don’t know what we don’t know and have the patience to learn from people who can help us address our blind spots.

If you’re interested in surfacing audience goals at your organization and breaking out of the survey echo chamber, now is a good time to enroll in MaP’s Museum Membership program. Here’s what’s coming:

• July 31: Deadline to register for our next lab: Community Goals and the Purposes of Membership: Gardens & Arboreta (all labs are included with the price of museum membership)

• August 10: The price of Museum Membership will increase for new members. Start a free trial before 8/10 to lock in the current price for the next year.

• This fall: A new member retention lab will help participating organizations improve retention by prioritizing goals over engagement.

Have a good week,

Kyle