Creating audience advocates: a case study

Creating audience advocates: a case study

By Alex Burch

SUMMARY

Over the last ten years, the Science Museum has used audience advocates on its exhibition, events and website projects. This has been to ensure that the needs, wants and expectations of its audiences are taken into account at all stages of a project and that the end product is one that is engaging and accessible to those visitors it was developed for. In this case study you'll find a discussion about the role of the audience advocate as a trainer and advisor to the rest of the museum, the impact their work has had, and how they have made staff more audience-focussed.

So what do advocates do?

  • Help teams define target audiences, content objectives, learning outcomes and to formalise the whole process
  • Train teams in visitor awareness
  • Conduct front-end, formative and summative evaluation
  • Ensure things get changed in response to the evaluation.
Resource type: Case studies | Published: 2013