The HRC thanks Laura Roberts and Kathleen D'Aquila for serving as guest authors for the following entry. Laura is the former Director of External Affairs at the Fairfield Museum and History Center where she managed all aspects of their marketing, promotion and public relations. Kathleen is a graduate of the SUNY Cooperstown Museum Studies Program and managed the implementation of the Fairfield Museum's audience study project.

As any marketer will tell you, an essential ingredient in developing an effective marketing strategy is having a thorough understanding of your consumers' needs and wants. In the museum world, this means thinking explicitly about who your audience is and to what programs, exhibitions and events they will most positively respond.

Market research can help an institution to identify different audience segments and their varied interests and desires. This, in turn, will aid in institutional planning--and is what the Fairfield Museum and History Center is currently doing with the results of several recent audience research studies funded by the Connecticut Humanities Council.

Fresh on the heels of the grand opening of its new museum building, the Fairfield Museum embarked upon a multifaceted audience study project in the spring of 2008.  This project included a membership survey, four focus groups, interviews with the museum's constituency and leaders of the community, participation in the Connecticut Cultural Consumers Study (conducted by Reach Advisors in partnership with the Connecticut Humanities Council and Connecticut Landmarks), and a visitor intercept survey conducted through the American Association for State & Local History's Performance Management program.

The purpose: to gain a better understanding of our community's needs in our desire to make the museum's public programming more community-focused.

Over the course of this seventeen-month process, we learned several key findings about the Fairfield Museum and History Center's audience. The knowledge we gained provided more than just demographic information; we also gained a more solid understanding about the wants and needs of our audience both as a whole group and as distinct, separate market segments.

This increased knowledge has allowed the Fairfield Museum to develop targeted strategies that respond to our audience's needs: new programs were designed and special segment-specific offerings were created.  As a result, the museum has not only expanded its slate of programming to meet specific market interests, but also increased overall visitation numbers and program attendance.

To share what the Fairfield Museum has learned through conducting its audience research studies, we've attached two documents that provide a summary of key findings and the methodology and processes we went through over the course of the seventeen month-long project.  Both documents are being used by the Fairfield Museum's board of directors to inform current strategic planning as we map out the museum's plans for the future.

Sharing this information with the museum field is an important step as we all seek to better understand the Connecticut museum-going audiences we serve. 

Specific key findings from the audience survey results are also offered here as tools for other museums to consider as they seek to become more audience focused.

To read the Fairfield Museum Audience Study--Summary of Key Findings, click on the link below.