Navigating the Partnership-Research Spectrum for Audience Development in Museums
Suppose there are two ways museums can cultivate new audiences or deepen relationships with existing audiences:
Cultivating Partnerships often entails building relationships with other organizations to gain a foothold with the group the museum wants to support.
Research focuses on listening to individuals to identify how they address their goals.
The two approaches aren’t at odds. Ideally, a museum will adopt both as part of a coordinated strategy to support a group of humans. But, for simplicity’s sake, let’s pretend that a museum embarking on an audience development initiative must choose just one of the two.
I’m biased and tend to advocate for Research because that’s how I make a living. But in the long run, it doesn’t help anyone — including me — for an organization to choose Research over Partnerships if the latter is genuinely the better path. And I’m not a fundamentalist — The goal is to help museums be more relevant to the communities they support, and there are enough museums in the world to allow for a variety of approaches.
So, what are the trade-offs between the two, and under what conditions is a museum better off choosing one over the other?
An off-the-cuff assessment based on what museums choose today would suggest that Partnerships is the better approach. Most museums choose the Partnership path over the Research route. But is the default choice actually best in most circumstances, or is the default the default because it’s familiar and feels less risky?
Partnerships promise scale
On the surface, Partnerships may seem to scale more effectively. “If we can just partner with this one church or community group, we’ll be able to build trust with so many people.” There’s some wisdom in that. After all, museums need to get as much mileage as possible from what they do — resources are often scarce. In this way, the Partnership path is a reputation-building exercise. The risk is that the museum may change how people perceive the organization for a time, but those gains may be shortlived if the museum hasn’t made changes to support the goals of the people in question.
Partnerships are headline-friendly
It’s easier to imagine a compelling headline in the newspaper about a successful Partnership. You can’t have your picture taken shaking hands with a research repository, but a museum’s executive director can put their arm around a fellow CEO.
(I worry that last bit may sound cynical, but it’s not meant to be. There is genuine value in generating headlines and cultivating relationships. I just think we’re not always aware of all the reasons why we make the choices we do, and there’s nothing wrong with being honest about our many motivations.)
Research feels out of reach by comparison
Taking a research-centered approach may feel more daunting (“Are we doing it right?”) and more time-consuming and labor-intensive than Partnerships. My (admittedly anecdotal) impression is that staff may feel they aren't qualified to do research, but they’ll have far fewer hangups about partnership outreach.
Research (deep listening) doesn’t seem to scale
I mentioned that Partnership seems to promise a scalable solution. Research doesn’t just seem not to scale as well, though — it may seem to really. not. scale.
That’s because progress-space research is just about listening. It’s about listening to one person at a time. It’s not about focus groups (which we’ll discuss in the community next month if you’d like to join) — It’s a one-at-a-time approach, which may seem inefficient. People understandably ask, “How are we ever going to get all these people coming to our museum more often if we’re just listening to one at a time?”
But listening does scale because you don’t have to listen to hundreds of people to get results — because Research isn’t just a reputation-building exercise. Our purpose isn’t just to change people’s minds about the organization. It’s to create the programs and messages that will actually support their goals. That requires the organization to change, and the organization doesn’t need to hear from everyone to understand how people with a particular goal approach their goal.
Research seems more time-consuming than Partnership
Research may be more or less time-consuming, depending on the goal the museum wants to support. But even when research does take more time, it’s predictably time-consuming.
(Aside: Isn't it strange that we want to cultivate “authentic” relationships with a group of people even as we resist taking the time to listen to them?)
With research, there is a method to follow. (There are many methods, of course, but I'm writing with a particular method in mind.) Following a method helps us predict how many people we'll need to listen to to identify patterns and opportunities to support that group. We know how long it will take to cultivate patterns and plan a response to what we learn.
I’m sure there are best practices for cultivating partnerships, but there's no avoiding the fact that a partnership is a marriage, and marriages can be unpredictable.
When we partner with another organization, there are far more variables that we can't control or foresee. The relationship may start strong but then fade for any number of reasons. The excitement may dwindle on one side or the other. Or the other organization may get cold feet. There may be a change in staff or dynamics, and the once-willing partner may begin to doubt their role. The partner, once a bridge-builder, becomes a gatekeeper.
All those things are outside the organization’s control and can’t be planned for. Not so — or certainly less so — for Research.
In my more cynical moments, I wonder if museums that choose Partnership over Research aren't actually serious about changing their priorities and supporting different goals (or people). I wonder if those museums are really hoping for a boost to their brand and not effecting real change.
But then I remember Hanlon’s Razor or, rather, my version of Hanlon’s Razor, which says: “Most organizations aren’t deliberately taking shortcuts or acting in bad faith — Most are just doing what they see other organizations doing, interpreting those behaviors as ‘best practice’, and doing the same.”
So, which is better? And when?
It depends on who you’re trying to support.
Perhaps Partnership makes more sense if you’re trying to cultivate a relationship with a particular demographic. After all, lots of organizations use ”describers, not definers” as an organizing principle. If your museum decides to adopt (or, more likely, continue to use) demographic descriptions as the core principle in defining audiences, you may find it easier to find partners who can connect you to those demographic segments.
But if you want to cultivate relationships with people on their terms — that is, by defining them in terms of their goals and then making changes that support those goals — then Research is the better choice. Because you can’t support a demographic. You can only support people’s goals. And you’re the expert on how a museum can use its resources to support a goal. No partner can do that for you.
As always, reply to this email or leave a comment to share your thoughts.
Thanks for reading,
Kyle
