What experiences do visitors look for?

I am going to talk about some visitor research we undertook last year across the country about gallery visitors. It is based on quantitative research and I hope it will have practical relevance to your own organisations. We wanted to explore how different visitors behave.

Data capture in the visual arts sector presents some challenges: for many exhibitions there is no ticketing so no data capture is carried out. Free admission also means there is no relation between the success of a particular exhibition and the success of the gallery.

Many galleries judge their success by how they engage with quite a narrow band of people who are other curators, their peers and people in the arts world and sometimes the audience comes a little low down that list. Despite that, lots of people are doing fantastic audience research in galleries and are enthusiastic to know more about audiences. There is also a keenness amongst many galleries to collaborate and share insights about visitors.