Redefining Audience Engagement: A Conversation with John Falk
Last week, I spoke with Dr. John Falk about how museums understand and support their audiences. Our discussion challenged some common assumptions about audience engagement and diversity. Below, you’ll find the recording, a few highlights, and the transcript.
Why Demographics Fall Short
Museum professionals often define audiences through demographic data. This approach can reinforce stereotypes – an irony, given how sensitive many of us are to bias. During our conversation, John shared an insight from his early career that illustrates this problem:
… 20-some-odd years ago. I got a grant from the US National Science Foundation to understand why African Americans were underrepresented at science centers … [It] turned out not to be a reasonable question. It turned out there were reasons why individuals didn't go to science centers, but it wasn't because they were African American. In fact, there was greater diversity in attitudes towards science centers within the Black community than between the Black and White community. Framing the question in that way was the wrong way to frame the question, which really was an aha moment for me in terms of thinking about users and how to think about user experiences.
What People Actually Value
John emphasized a fundamental truth about museum value: It's defined by users, not institutions. While we often frame our value in terms of preserving cultural heritage or protecting biodiversity, visitors describe more immediate benefits:
Quality time with children
Making connections between ideas they've been considering
Finding a relaxing, pleasurable experience
These needs aren't primarily determined by demographics. As John wryly noted, “I may be an old White guy from America, but what I need today may not be the same thing as I needed yesterday. Why I go to a museum tomorrow may not have anything to do with why I went to a museum yesterday.”
A Process for Understanding Users
John outlined four steps in the value realization process that he describes in his forthcoming book, Leaning Into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum:
Calibrate: Listen to and understand user needs, desires, and expectations
Articulate: Interpret these insights within your institution's context
Create: Develop experiences that support identified outcomes
Validate: Use evidence to determine if you're meeting goals
This cycle resonates with the Progress-Space Research approach we use at MaP. Both methods emphasize understanding people's goals rather than their surface-level characteristics.
Moving from Theory to Practice
In talking with museum leaders over the past year, John found universal agreement on the importance of being user-focused. Yet few had a clear process for achieving this goal.
This gap between intention and implementation is why John and I are collaborating on a program to help museums become more user-focused through the Value Realization Collaborative. Participating institutions will:
Read and discuss John's forthcoming book on becoming a user-focused museum
Learn techniques for listening to community members
Develop opportunity maps that visualize how people approach specific goals
Create practical ways to support diverse approaches to these goals
Measure the impact of changes on audience engagement
Why This Matters
As John pointed out in our call, the position and future of museums is uncertain. There are no guarantees of long-term survival for institutions that can't adapt to changing community needs. While organizational change is never easy, understanding and supporting user (community) needs provides a practical path forward.
Want to learn more about this collaboration? View program details or email us with questions.
Full Transcript
Kyle Bowen: Let's do some introductions. I'm Kyle Bowen. I'm the founder of Museums as Progress. I've been helping nonprofits and cultural institutions understand their users and better support their communities for over 14 years now. Museums as Progress began in 2020 as a pandemic experiment and by 2022, it had grown to become our primary focus. We now have this odd hybrid approach to serving the sector that combines these collaborative learning experiences with client research initiatives. John, I don't think you need an introduction, but go ahead, would you like to introduce yourself?
John Falk: Sure, I'm John Falk. I am currently the CEO of a not-for-profit called the Institute for Learning Innovation. For a long time, half a century actually, I have been investigating why people go to places like museums, what they do there and what they take away. After 50 years, I think I'm finally beginning to figure it out, but there are days I'm not sure. I've spent a lot of time thinking about these issues and I'm delighted to be working with Kyle and MaP to try and support institutions in their journeys as well in terms of trying to figure out more about their users and how to be a more user-focused institution.
Kyle: All right. For today, our two main objectives here are to gather your thoughts and questions to help us shape this program that John and I have been working on. The second thing is we want to see if what we can share today will help you decide if the program may be a good fit for your institution. I'll give just a little bit of background, like how did we get here? I was talking with John a month or two ago about a question that one of our museum members had. They were wondering really how their museum could make more decisions that are rooted in data so that they can realize better outcomes.
I had been thinking for a while, kicking this question around and trying to think of how we might do a research study in the community and dig into this question, see how other people are addressing it, but nothing quite clicked with me. I was talking with John about this and he really clarified some things in saying, it seems like it's a, to paraphrase, it seems like a question in search of an anchor. What is the challenge that needs to be solved in some way with this data-driven approach?
We got to thinking and we started polling our community members about top challenges. I'm sure some of you probably responded to that ranking question. What are the top 10 challenges? The results that we got by a long stretch was audience engagement and diversification was really the number one challenge that the people that we heard from had. John and I were thinking about this challenge as we always are, but realizing that focusing on engagement and diversification has these nice second-order benefits.
Other challenges that folks shared were things like financial sustainability, measuring and communicating institutional impacts, community outreach, all these sorts of things. If we think of audience engagement as the crux, addressing that challenge loosens up problems further downstream. If we can engage and diversify our community, that has implications for financial sustainability, it has implications for measuring and communicating impact. This was our journey along this path to bringing these frameworks together to try to invite you all here today.
Let me jump into our questions and I'm going to preview these, John, you've already seen these, so people have our basic outline. We have six questions that we've chosen from you all. The first one is, well, it's a statement. Curious what these methodologies are, so we'll start there. How will this work? How will this help me better understand our museum audience? This is a great question from someone last week who said that our institution has utilized John Falk's identity types to help inform our visitor experience. How does this build on or differ from that model? What's the through line here from that earlier work to this program that we're putting together?
How do you think this methodology can help remove barriers to making changes within an organization? Would this approach work for institutions with living collections, so not strictly speaking museums? What does the year-long program entail and how might we participate? All right, so let me rewind here. I think we're going to talk about progress-based research, that's my piece, and the value realization process. John, would you like to share?
John: To understand this value realization process that I've been talking about, I need to provide also a little bit of a backstory. This has been a journey for me, but I have been trying to understand and focus on how to understand and enhance the value of museums. Over the past roughly a decade now, as I've thought more about this, and this presages a little bit of the answer to the question about identity-related motivations as well, I decided that where I really needed to begin was to look back at the data that I and others have been collecting over decades about understanding why people go to museums and what the value is that they perceive, they get from it.
The first goal in terms of value realization and the first principle of everything I'm about to say is that value is defined by the user, not by the creator of the experience. Historically, museums have been very good about talking about their value based on what they perceive they do well and what they perceive is important.
We are here collecting the world's treasures, preserving the world's cultural heritage, helping to support conservation, protect biodiversity, bring communities together. There are lots of things that you find in your mission statements and your descriptions of how you perceive you are valuable to your community.
The bottom line is, none of that really defines your value. It's a little like your brand. Value is defined by the user. The only way to know how users define your value is to actually ask them. People have asked them. I went back to look at that data. As much as we'd like to believe that we accomplish all these wonderful, large goals, the public's perception of the value of museums, frankly, is much more personal and much more prosaic.
People say, "I found this experience at the museum valuable because I got to spend quality time with my children." "I found this experience valuable because it opened up ideas for me that I've been thinking about, but I didn't know quite how to put my finger on. Now I have a better clue for what the relationship is between this artist and that artist or this concept and that concept." People say, "I found it valuable because it was just such a relaxing and pleasurable experience."
People have lots of reasons for describing the value. To be honest, social scientists like myself have sliced and diced this in many ways. The bottom line is that if we are committed to being valuable in our communities, then the place to begin really has to be with those users. It turns out that there is a process by which you can be more user-focused. It is a process called value realization.
Now, to be honest, it's a process that was created and has by and large been implemented in the for-profit world. As I've thought more about it, I've taken that basic strategy and adopted it and adapted it to a museum context and come up with my own way of thinking about value realization. To be honest, what I'm about to suggest as a process echoes other kinds of models that are out there, like design-based thinking.
What is important is not so much the details but the reality that it is a user-focused way that really begins and ends with the assumption that to be valuable, to be sustainable as an organization, you ultimately have to understand how to build and support long-term value amongst your users and all your different users. It's not sufficient to have a one-size-fits-all model.
I've articulated-- that's actually a good choice of words. I have defined four steps in this process, what I've called calibrate, articulate, create, and validate. It's a cyclical process, but it starts with actually talking to, listening to, and trying to deeply understand the needs, desires, and expectations of your users. Figuring out how to interpret that in a way that makes sense within your assets and your strengths as an institution, a unique institution within your community, and be able to communicate that both internally as well as externally, ultimately then to create experiences that support those kinds of outcomes, and finally validate that you've actually achieved those, to use evidence to determine, rather than just your own taste committee, to decide whether you're actually meeting those goals. Then building on those evidence, recalibrate, rearticulate, recreate, revalidate, and just keep going on, because you'll never get it exactly right, and the world keeps changing, so you need to keep-- This is an ongoing process. That's the gist of what I'm talking about here.
Kyle: Yes, and I'm going to just drop, I think probably most people have seen this, but this article outlines that process in more detail for your consideration later. What I find really compelling about the cycle that John describes is how much overlaps or aligns with the process that we advocate for in progress-space research, which is so much about starting with listening to, John will say users, we'll say community, because one thing we try to do is expand beyond existing users and to consider groups of people, rather than based on solely on demographics, based on the goals that matter to them, and critically, to John's point earlier, which goals the institution is uniquely positioned to support.
The method that we're talking about, I really want to, I am eager to piggyback on what John has outlined here, and really explore the overlaps and divergences between what he's described in his forthcoming book and the process that we use. More sort of granular detail on that to come.
How will this work to help me better understand our museum audience? The arc of the program that we have outlined, which I'll share shortly, begins with listening. Many museums of all sizes, but especially smaller to mid-sized museums, don't necessarily have a listening practice in place, which is understandable. There is sometimes surveying that happens. However, to get the deeper insights that we need around motivations and goals, we need to go a little bit further.
Progress-based research is not something I invented. It comes from for-profit practices as well, and it's well-proven in those domains, but it is fairly new to museums. One of the ways that we want this program, and MaP as a whole, to help museums is to realize the benefits of continuous listening and understanding people on their terms, in terms of what matters to them, their goals, rather than purely defining them in terms that are familiar to stakeholders and funders, which is primarily demographic in nature.
The change that we're hoping to facilitate is based on that core listening process, which in John's vernacular would be calibration. That's a critical piece here, understanding through listening. John, what would you add to this question?
John: Kyle mentioned this new book. I do have a new book coming out, and I spent the better part of a year trying to systematically understand the state of the field. In addition to just informally talking with hundreds of museum leaders, I began a process of more systematically interviewing leaders and I ended up conducting more than four dozen, 52 in fact, formal interviews with museum leaders from around the world. How do you define the value of your organization? How do you make sense of this? What sets you apart? What makes you unique? What are the processes that you're using to ensure that you create value? There was good news and bad news.
The good news was that without exception, every leader I spoke to indicated that they were committed to being user-focused and to helping, support, and broaden. their audiences. The bad news was that with very few exceptions, most really didn't have a clear sense of how to pull this off. They waved their hands at the process. When I tried to probe, "That's great, but what does that actually look like?" They said "It's a work in progress. We're still figuring this out."
What I've done in terms of trying to articulate this value realization process is as suggested by both Kyle and myself, I'm not claiming that this is the most innovative, new, greatest thing since sliced bread approach, but it is a proven approach. It is a tangible approach for making sense of how you better understand your audience. It moves beyond the approach we've had in the past, which frankly has just failed to say, "We don't attract enough African-American visitors. How can we make our museum more appealing to African Americans?" Or "We need to attract more older visitors. What do older visitors like?"
To be honest, those kinds of demographic approaches don't work because they missed the point. Everybody is motivated by needs that they have. Those needs are only partially determined by their gender, their race, ethnicity, by their age. They're determined by two things, their lived experience, which sometimes correlates with those demographics, but not always, and more importantly, their needs in the moment.
I may be an old White guy from America, but what I need today may not be the same thing as I needed yesterday. Why I go to a museum tomorrow may not have anything to do with why I went to a museum yesterday. What you have to do is not try and pigeonhole me into one of these big coarse grain boxes, but you actually need to understand why I would derive value from a museum experience now and in the future, which is largely determined by my experiences in the past.
The only way to understand that is to really talk to people like me and understand my needs. You may discover that, as Kyle was suggesting, that there are categories of needs. There are people who are looking for experiences to do with their kids, and there are people of all races, genders, and ethnicities who are looking for experiences, for example, to do with their kids.
Creating experiences that support families and parents and significant adults doing good things with their kids is a much more viable approach to attracting and diversifying audiences than to try and say, "What would this kind of flavor person, or that kind of flavor person do?" You can break that down into lots of different ways of making sense of the needs of your community and serving your audience.
Kyle: I think that it's not just ineffective, that sort of approach, labeling or categorizing people in that demographic way. It's also potentially harmful in that, I've always been fascinated by the fact that museum folks are often the most sensitive to stereotype and bias, and they really want to go out of their way to avoid that. Yet we adopt these frames that only make it more likely that we will stereotype groups of people.
John: Absolutely. By the way, I should just say parenthetically, I arrived at that notion in part, I did a study, naively actually, 20-some-odd years ago. I got a grant from the US National Science Foundation to understand why African Americans were underrepresented at science centers. Seems like a reasonable question. Turned out not to be a reasonable question. It turned out there were reasons why individuals didn't go to science centers, but it wasn't because they were African American.
In fact, there was greater diversity in attitudes towards science centers within the Black community than between the Black and White community. Framing the question in that way was the wrong way to frame the question, which really was an aha moment for me in terms of thinking about users and how to think about user experiences. Actually, it was closer to 30 years ago now that I think of it. A long time ago.
Kyle: Let's jump over to our next question. Our institution has utilized John's identity types to help inform visitor experience. What is the relationship between that earlier work and the book that's coming, which I should mention is phase one for our program, is a reading of that together so that we have a shared foundation. What's the relationship between those two?
This is so clearly a question for you, John, but I'm so curious to hear how wrong I am. Here's how I'm thinking about this question. The way that I interpret the types that facilitator explore these types that you identified is that those are very centered on the individual's relationship to the organization. This is why I come. It's not that they're inaccurate by any means, but they describe why people would interact or engage with a cultural institution.
I think what we're proposing with progress-based research is a little bit divergent from that in that, we're asking, how do people approach a goal that matters to them? Within that is the acknowledgment that the museum is just one of many ways that someone can satisfy that goal. Now, correct me, John, I want to know what's on your mind.
John: No, no, actually, that's a great answer. I alluded to this earlier on. It reflects my own evolution. Call me idiotic for spending 50 years basically asking the same questions over and over again. As I've tried to get at the essence of this whole museum experience phenomenon, I began to appreciate that people's reasons for going to museums were directly related to the value they perceived they got out of them.
I'll confess that initially, the model that I used for coming up with those categories is a tried and true social science method, which most of the current models of trying to understand visitors use. Which is basically you interview a bunch of people, they give you a bunch of answers, and then after the fact, you go back and try and make sense of their answers and you categorize them.
People say these, one of the first truisms, another truism about this work is that if you ask 1,000 people who visited a museum, "Why did you go there?" and you really probe, they'll give you a thousand different answers. If you ask 1,000 people what the value was, they'll give you a thousand different answers. It's really hard to deal with a thousand different answers. You're looking for patterns and you find a pattern and you call it something. You say, "there's this group of people who seem to be coming for these various reasons. We'll call it this." It's a very ad hoc approach.
As an aside, perhaps known fact is that I actually got two doctorates in my life when I was a student and I did them at the same time. I got a doctorate in education, educational research, and also got a doctorate in biology, ecology. I was naive enough to think at the time that I was going to pursue both simultaneously, and I made a valiant effort to do that for a few years. I ultimately realized, as everybody had said to begin with, I should pick one.
At the time I picked one. I picked, obviously, the learning research and educational work, which led me to work in museums, and the rest, as they say, is history. I've never given up on the other part. About 15 years ago, I had spent a lot of time thinking about the evolution of self and identity. I decided I was going to write a book which I had started many times, but never completed on the evolution of self. I ended up discovering that self and identity, which is not a uniquely human phenomenon, although humans obviously have a very unique way of thinking about self and identity, that the core of this phenomenon is the ability for all living things to perceive the difference between self and other and use the perception of well-being as a device for ensuring their survival and their fitness in a Darwinian sense of fitness.
As I thought about that more and did, in fact, write that book, I appreciated that underlying these desires for why people say they were coming, were actually these deeper well-being-related needs that people were trying to support. These are fundamental human needs. We can think of those then as really the long-term outcomes that people are seeking the job that they're trying to accomplish. It is what Kyle was trying to say. The real goal that they're trying to achieve by going to a museum or not satisfying those needs in other ways.
These identity-related motivations provide some useful insights, but they are just in a sense one indicator of these deeper needs. If we try to better understand those deeper needs, they will actually get us closer to where we're trying to get to in terms of user value.
Kyle: How do you think this methodology can help remove barriers to making changes within an organization? John, you get to go first this time.
John: Yes. The bad news, and I'll start with the bad news, is changing the culture of organizations is really hard. Museums as organizations have been designed the way they are for reasons that go back decades if not hundreds of years. There's a lot of inertia in the system. That just has to be confronted and realized that change is difficult.
I think ultimately the lever that is going to allow these approaches to potentially move the system is that the other thing that was clear in talking to those 50-some-odd leaders, everybody was happy to be rah-rah and talk about how wonderful their organization is and all the wonderful things that they are doing. All I had to do was ask, "Just out of curiosity, what keeps you up at night?" Everybody had issues that kept them up at night.
We all understand that the position and the future of museums is tenuous at the moment. There are no guarantees of the long-term survival of this enterprise that's been going on for a long time. The world is changing and not necessarily changing in ways that seems to be supportive and consistent with the way we've operated in the past.
There is a strong understanding of the need for change, reluctance to change, but a perception of a need to change. I think creating a tangible strategy and process that allows change to happen organically through this basic premise that to be sustainable ultimately requires you to to meet the needs of users, and by meeting the needs of users, they will support and sustain you. It is a no-brainer in that respect, and I think it can be used as a lever to help support change. I'm under no illusions that that will be easy, but it requires everybody in the institution moving in this direction, rowing in the same direction. Otherwise, it's not going to happen.
Kyle: Yes, my initial response to this was, gosh, we're going to be collecting all this wonderful qualitative data and putting it into opportunity maps that are going to be super accessible and persuasive, and now the reality is, some institutions are more or less, and some people are more or less, accepting or persuaded by data. If you're in an institution where no amount of data is going to change the conversation, no methodology, maybe, is going to change that.
However, John brought up culture, and culture is behaviors and habits, really, over time. That's what compounds to create a culture in an organization, and this program that we're-- I am doing my best to design different levers within this program that will incentivize follow-through. One of those being not neglecting the power of financial results. One of the things that we want to do with this at the end of this program is collaborate with some folks who have expertise in fundraising and grant writing and enable participants to feed the output of this learning into funding appeals.
That is one example. There are others. I'm going to move on to our last question, John. No, we have two more. Okay. This one's quick. This one's quick. I'm just going to say, yes, this applies to botanic gardens, living collections, as much as we want to think that-- and there are differences between disciplines, Ultimately, to John's point, we're talking about satisfying people's needs or goals. If you have visitors, members, donors, people whose needs you're serving, then listening to them is a universal approach and universal value in that. John, anything that I, anything you want to jump in there?
John: I would suggest, by the way, that this value realization process in terms of calibrate, articulate, create, and validate equally applies to how you support staff, how you communicate with your donors and sponsors. You have to understand and listen to their needs, their goals, try to figure out how you can communicate with them in ways that support their needs and goals, design experiences that actually do meet their needs and goals, and then ultimately determine whether you've achieved that.
Again, that is true for funding, it is true for staff relations, and it is certainly true in terms of users. That is true of any institution that you might want to do that with.
Kyle: Yes. What does the program entail? I'm going to share a document with you that is going to give a closer view. We've taken this organic podcast-style approach to introducing the ideas here, but that document is going to present more here. I'm going to drop in the chat now a file. Let's see. This is the arc. You can pull up that image there. The arc of the program. I also want to share one other piece because we are pushing time here. In terms of one really crisp result, I had mentioned let's feed this forward into our communications with stakeholders and funders. This is, I'm going to share an example opportunity map. This is what will be an output from the listening and the learning.
In John's framework, this would be validation. I am going to dig a little bit into that. If you bring up that image, it's described in the document. It's broken down the anatomy of this thing. You can see at the top in that image, the words of the phrase cultivate a child's curiosity about living nature. In this program, we're going to, as I said before, begin with a reading of John's book so that we have this common foundation. Then we are going to invite participants to identify a goal, a user goal, or community goal, that is important or of strategic value to the institution.
This won't be your goal because we want to introduce local solutions. In this example, you'll see, at the top, we have the results of the listening that we've done. John mentioned that categorizing from interviews. We're feeding that into the map and it becomes an assessment tool when we are able to group these different approaches to a addressing a goal and assess what communications, interventions, programs the institution has in place to support those different neighborhoods of mental attention, areas of focus that emerged from the listening of community members. John, as we wrap up here, the last two minutes, what else is on your mind?
John: Again, I am excited about the prospect of working with a group of people to try and make all this real. It's great to talk in broad strokes and theory about supporting users and being a more user-focused institution designing experiences and measuring experiences. It will be great to dig in and really be able to work with a group of people to actualize these ideas and make it happen.
Kyle: All right. Thanks, y'all. Thank you, John. This was a great discussion.
John: Thank you all. Thanks, everybody. It's great to see all you folks, many of whom I actually know. I hope to get to know some of the rest of you.
[00:37:05] [END OF AUDIO]
