Why Museums?

Knowing that our Connecticut Cultural Consumers panelists were just that, cultural consumers who enjoy museums, we decided to kick off the panel with a direct question:  why museums?  They could fill their leisure time with a myriad of other activities.  What drives them to choose museums?  

The results were heartening.  As Diane put it:

“Museums are like books once can browse thru according to interest or curiosity. New discoveries might appear at any point. They provide variety. In an unstructured experience, the restless or bored can move on. They excite & satisfy curiosity.  All objects, place & people have stories. Everyone loves stories. Museums are filled with those stories. I like the museums that let me ‘hear’ the stories, add my individual imagination, experiences & reflections, have fun & better understand myself, others & the world.”

These individuals often cited that same curiosity that Diane mentions, and most simply loved to learn, feeling that learning was a fun or enjoyable activity that was also extremely satisfying to the heart, mind, and soul. 

Additionally, the panelists enjoyed how museums provide insight into the lives of others, whether people of the past or people of other customs and cultures today.  There was an extremely strong sense of empathy among these panelists, trying to understand the lives of others and how our society ticks or evolved to tick the way it does. 

Although the panelists didn’t explicitly talk about the idea of authenticity, the idea of it permeated the responses of many.  They generally felt that museums provided experiences that could not be found anywhere else.  A few weeks later, having pored over their responses to several questions, I returned to this theme and asked them directly about one facet of authenticity that came up over and over:  original objects.  Why were original objects so important to them?  What difference did they really make to the experience? 

For most of these respondents, original objects represent truth and authenticity.  They also helped them connect emotionally with individuals from the past and the stories they had to share.  Once again, Diane spoke eloquently on this:

“In a museum, the authentic enables us to connect in a visceral or spiritual sense with the past. These experiences enhance the learning experience but they also provide an emotional understanding & connection that goes deeper & sometimes becomes part of who I am.”

Or, to put it another way, the objects have what I call cooties.  It is the idea that an object can become infected with, well, cooties of some sort, and then pass those cooties to others.  It is what makes Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk different than any other old writing desk, because Thomas Jefferson infected it with an essence that sets it apart.  It includes the essential qualities of authenticity, in that an object has to be the authentic object for it to apply, but it adds in an intangible and much more visceral, emotional response.  (I wrote about this concept at length for the Reach Advisors’ blog.)  

And for these panelists, that mixture of emotional connection that they felt with individuals from the past was a crucial part of a museum experience . . . but so was informational content.  The best museum experiences offered both, as the informational content provided depth and context and the stories and objects provided the emotional connection.

But there was more.  Interestingly, just like the students we worked with over the summer, the majority of our panelists wanted to retain control and autonomy over their museum visits, and they didn’t want to be forced into experiences they did not care for.  For some, this meant guided tours, for others it meant first-person interpretation, and for some it meant excessively hands-on experiences (which were largely viewed as completely appropriate for children).  They wanted choice.  And overall they had no consensus on what made for the best interpretive experience as they all had individual preferences.  Thus, the real consensus could be summed up as “don’t force me into anything and give me lots of options, please.” 

We must be mindful, however, that these panelists are representative of our most avid museum goers.  And while they are very similar to the broader public in their desire for control and choice, they also differed from casual visitors to museums, as well as non-visitors, in their visitation, their comfort in, and their ability to navigate museums.  They also had given much more thought to how a museum does what it does and, as we will begin to see in our next post, why history specifically is important. 

We’d love to hear what you think!  To comment, click below where it says how many individuals have commented on this post (e.g., “no comments,” “1 comment,” etc.).


Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She is leading several phases of audience research for this project.

The Connecticut Cultural Consumers Panel

Recent posts on this blog have focused on the extensive work we did with students, but that was only one component of our research. 

For historic house museums, expanding audiences is imperative, and that is going to entail new methods of sharing the stories of the past.  But it is also important to better understand current history audiences, what really motivates them to explore history, what sparked that interest to begin with, and how much we can push the envelope with new interpretation methods. 

To find out, we delved into some significant qualitative work with 59 Connecticut Cultural Consumers, recruited from a list of survey respondents from a 2008 study Reach Advisors did with 24 Connecticut organizations for Connecticut Landmarks, and funded by Connecticut Humanities.  These individuals are all what we would call cultural consumers, and on the email list of one or more Connecticut cultural organizations.  They enjoy culture (including history), proactively seek it out, and support it. 

So let’s be absolutely clear.  This group is what I would call “the choir.”  They are the converted, and if you grew up in the South, like I did, you know that “preaching to the choir” means validating what they know and not necessarily converting any new individuals. 

But that’s OK.  In fact, we recruited them knowing that this is who we would have in our panel, and we balanced our research with individuals who are certainly not “the choir.”  Additionally, even the converted can tell us a lot about why people enjoy history, how they enjoy experiencing it and learning about it, and how we might do a better job sharing history with more people.

This group of individuals was amazing.  Each week we posed about two really substantive questions of them.  Meaty, sometimes hard questions that challenged them, made them think, and sometimes even changed what they thought they knew about themselves and their enjoyment of history.  They responded with extremely detailed, thought-provoking, lengthy responses that were, for us, enlightening, funny, sad, and tremendously useful.  We were extremely humbled by how generous they were with their time and thoughts. 

Over the next few posts, I’ll be sharing some of the highlights from this wonderful panel. 

Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She is leading several phases of audience research for this project.

From “Scary” to Hide-and-Seek: Youth and Historic House Museums, Part 2

Picking up where I left off last week, let’s now turn our attention to the content-based themes that emerged in our work with students this past summer. 

Throughout the summer, the students latched onto stories at the museums they visited, the stories of the Hempsted Houses, and the creation of stories for their Open House.  These stories bring us our next three themes:  emotional connections, relevance, and meaning. 

Emotional connection came in multiple ways.  First, the story of Joshua Hempsted and AdamJackson, and teasing out the nuances of northern slavery in the early eighteenth century, clearly resonated with the students as it formed the core of much of what they produced at their open house.  But there was another story of New London slavery that sixteen-year-old Kimmy in particular was extremely affected by:  the story of Zeno, a 9-year-old girl beaten to death by her master . . . who got away with the murder.  This video clip shares Kimmy’s reaction:

During the open house, Kimmy shared this story to visitors as a counterpoint to the relatively good treatment Adam Jackson may have received from the Hempsted Family, expressing shock and dismay that a child had been treated so egregiously (shock and dismay that the historical record does indicate was felt by New London residents of the eighteenth century). 

The open house provided reactions from another perspective as well:  the visitor reaction.  During the open house, as I shared in a previous post, some of the students did what I would call a mixture of first-person interpretation and museum theatre.  They had stories they wanted to playact, certainly, and visitors watched them, but visitors also had opportunities to interact and engage with the students.  The stories they shared through this method were rather emotionally fraught, and visitors responded to that.  In post-visit interviews of adult visitors, time and time again I was told how the palpable emotions of the students affected them, and engaged them much more deeply in the stories of the house.  The emotions proved to be an amazing catalyst for connecting with the stories, and for vividly remembering the experience even several weeks afterwards. 

The day after the open house, I myself put it my own way when I said to a colleague “I think the house was . . . happy.  It certainly has not been as alive as it was last night since probably the nineteenth century, the last time children lived in the house.”  Which underscores my earlier point about historic house museums today being rather sterile,personality-less places.  We need to bring the messiness of emotions and the human condition back into these houses and make them, once again, homes, if they are going to be relevant to visitors today.

It also brings us to the next theme:  relevance.  Throughout the summer, students kept returning to the theme of relevance.  Why should they care about a slavery story from 300 years ago?  What does it matter to them?  To their community?  In particular, fifteen-year-old Roy often talked about this, thinking about the relevance of history and linking it to connections that people need to feel, as he does in the video below:

Some students, however, were not so vocal about their need to find relevance.  In fact, fourteen-year-old Seth was not an overtly active participant in our work with the students this summer, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t engaged.  Turns out, relevance was something that was rather important to him, as seen in the following video: 

So there are now two forms of connection that need to be made:  emotional, which can help trigger empathy, and relevance, which makes it important.  But there was a third phase that was also important:  meaning.  What meaning did the students now see in the stories of the Hempsted House, and the house itself?  To find out, let us return to our videos, this time to eleven-year-old Eliza:

It was amazing to see how, for Eliza, the house, and the stories it represented, came to mean New London for her.  The house went from being negligible to representing her community.  Isn’t that something we all strive to have happen in our history museums?  And Roy.  Well, Roy simply astounded us with his deep insights, day after day.  His search for meaning was much more intentional than for the other students, and he found it. 

Ultimately, when we share messy, compelling stories about the people who lived in or near our historic properties, ones that engage the emotions and engender empathy in visitors, we create more relevant and meaningful experiences, thus fulfilling our missions in the best way possible and better assuring sustainable futures for ourselves as we make greater impact with our visitors and in our communities.  Because ultimately historic house museums are not about the architecture or the Queen Anne chairs, as impressive and beautiful as they are, but the stories that make a difference in the lives of our visitors and our communities, and about those visitors and local residents taking ownership of the stories, and even the properties, for themselves. 

Over the course of the summer, it was extremely gratifying to watch the students, most of them minorities, take ownership of the Joshua Hempsted House.  It did become “their” house, and in their minds, it became less of a sterile historic house museum experience and more the home of people they had grown to care about.  It also became a different place in their landscape and even more importantly, their psyche, as one last anecdote illustrates.  At the beginning of the summer, eleven-year-old Eliza, the subject of the fourth video, told me that she thought the house was scary.  On the day of the open house, Robert and I caught her and her friends playing hide and seek in the house.  A sea change had taken place, as these students made the house their own; it wasn’t scary any more. 

But the events of this summer are not easily replicable on a day-to-day basis, especially with limited resources and staff.  Yet historic house museums must make these changes, and embark on a new strategy to engage visitors, or obsolescence lies in the future of many historic house museums.  Focusing on these five themes, and building on the need for those compelling stories, entails a new model for historic house museums.  This new model encourages staff interaction with visitors without guided tours, and will likely require historic house museums to violate long-held taboos about touching to create a more multi-sensory, immersive experience rooted in the messy human experience of all of us. 

In coming posts, Robert will explore more about how Hempsted Houses will be implementing changes to create a different kind of experience for visitors.  I will be shifting gears to share some of the most interesting findings from our Connecticut Cultural Consumers panel of museum goers. 

We’d love to hear what you think!  To comment, click below where it says how many individuals have commented on this post (e.g., “no comments,” “1 comment,” etc.).

Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She is leading several phases of audience research for this project.

From “Scary” to Hide-and-Seek: Youth and Historic House Museums, Part 1

So after our intense work with the students this summer, what were our big takeaways for museums, especially historic house museums? 

Overall, five main themes emerged through our observations, the direct comments of the students, and in what they produced as part of their summer program.  These themes were both methodological, focusing on how museums, including historic house museums, present themselves, and content-based, focusing on what a museum shares.

Methodological  Themes

Control.  The students, time and time again, made it abundantly clear that they wanted to retain control over the experiences they had in museums.  We particularly noted this during our museum field trips, as they were much more engaged in the content when they controlled whether they participated or not, how they participated, and when they exited the experience.  So long as the students were in control of the environment they were much more likely to look around, engage, and even participate . . . or seek opportunities to do so. 

During the times when museum staff addressed them they very clearly shut down, brains turned off, and they became downright fidgety.  They wanted OUT.  They told us rather explicitly how much they disliked certain interpretation methods, such as guided tours (which they tended to call “lectures”),  as you will hear for yourself in this video from eleven-year-old India:

Immersive and Multi-Sensory Environments.  In our museum visits, and in the Open House the students hosted, they sought out or created environments that were highly immersive and multi-sensory.  This includes immersive environments, such as dioramas, the recreated Pequot Village at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, theatre-style movies, and hands-on experiences.  But hands-on experiences themselves are actually rather tricky.  In our CT Cultural Panel (qualitative research with 59 adult museum-goers, which I will be posting about later this fall), it was a pretty universal perspective that hands-on activities are just for kids.  One student, sixteen-year-old Kimmy agreed, underscoring a need for more substantive hands-on experiences that engage more than just “little kids,” as seen in this video: 

It was fascinating to hear from Kimmy throughout the summer, as this was a common refrain of hers.  But in addition to commenting on it, she did something about it at the Open House, by making cornbread for visitors to taste (adding to the multi-sensory experience) as well as engaging visitors in buttermaking so that visitors could butter their cornbread . . . and learn something about food and buttermaking.  Given that the buttermaking made a direct link to the content Kimmy wanted to share at the Open House, it qualified for her, and for visitors, as a substantive hands-on experience.

But making methodological changes isn’t enough.  Far from it.  Indeed, based on this research, as well as broader research of Reach Advisors, I would go further to say that  original objects and an immersive, multi-sensory experience doesn’t get you very far at all without a good story.  The gut-wrenching, emotional, relevant, meaningful story that provide fodder for that post-visit car ride conversation and that sticks with you for days, weeks, months, sometimes years afterwards.  And that brings us to the next set of themes:  content.  We’ll pick up on the content themes in our next post.

We’d love to hear what you think!  To comment, click below where it says how many individuals have commented on this post (e.g., “no comments,” “1 comment,” etc.).

Susie Wilkening is a Senior Consultant and Curator of Museum Audiences at Reach Advisors.  She is leading several phases of audience research for this project.