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What methods do you see being successful/unsuccessful? How do you know if it is successful/unsuccessful? Why do you think that?
"I think there is Jurassic is a great example of a huge success. Next, North South Feast West is a program at Immigration Museum, where we work very closely with ECP (Education and Community Programs department). We start with the audience we want to reach and how do we build a program and communication around that. We
l
aunched an entire festival series completely out of nowhere. There is nothing like it at the Immigration Museum. We want to build that night-time audience. We were hugely successful the first year. This year we have beginning to hit all of our target audiences. That is a really good example of where we are succeeding.With Scienceworks, you have been there and you have seen it. We cannot stop people from coming to Scienceworks. We can just shut down all of our communications and you will still see floods of people through the doors anyway. What we want to do there is to start evolving that audience to broaden the age range. So right now, as you would see, it is pretty young. It is children 3-8. We want to move it that up to 2-12. So that is obviously a long-term proposition that we need to do without losing our core audience. We want to expand that out. So it is how we work with the exhibition builders as well to make sure that we are creating things that will work well with them. need to do it over time.
For Melbourne Museum, Jurassic is pulling in our core audience.
We are seeing
that
¾ of the people that go down there (Jurassic World) are coming back to the house. It is a really good result for us.What hasn’t worked:
In the case of North South Feast West, it is our short-sightedness. In setting the task of reaching the audience, we did not fully think about how to build the audience into the
Immigration Museum audience. It is easy to get an event audience, but the challenge is how to make them into a visitor audience. It is great having them in the courtyard through
February, but how do we get them coming back into our galleries in July. So in that first year, we did not see any visitation from North South Feast West event visitors. Across the second year we were thinking into making them into visitors and I think we are taking steps in the right direction. For me, coming back to how I communicate with the audiences, I do not think you start a conversation that you do not want to sustain. You do not want to start engaging a new audience if you have no plan for whether you intend on keeping them on their toes. We are now in a position where we have developed that audience, we do not want to lose them, so we have to keep investing on keeping them coming. But I do not think we had that
trajectory or that mind-set.
Our audience model is the core business. It is anyone who has come over the last year. We have two developing audiences. We have developing one, which is people who have been over the last three years and then we got developing two, which is people who have never visited, but we know they are inclined to visit. We know from their behaviour that they do go to cultural organisations and they are likely to come to ours but have not made that visit yet. So, by looking at that second developing audience, the opportunity for growth is there. We have to identify where the gaps are and how we engage those people. And that is how we grow. That is what we target museum by museum."
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What do you envision to be the next way to communicate with visitors?
“We will get more and more individualised. Content will be pushed onto the visitor
through their device, as you cross the plaza, as you walk to the museum, as you
walk to a shop that we’re affiliated with. We will push information that will trigger to
visit. Right now, the individual has to come to the information and the next step is to
provide a highly individualised set of information that arrives at the user.”
How does BOE tie back to Visitor Journey?
“Knowing the right channel for which part of the journey. Getting the right message through the right platform at the right time of day.”
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Interview #4:
Name - Kate
Position - Head of Family Branding
What stage of the visitor journey (pre-visit, during the visit, or post-visit) does your team communicate with visitors?
“My team contributes mostly to Pre visit stage because most of my communications are about talking to people before they get here to encourage them to come and then I would give an even weight to during and post.”
How does your department/branch help contribute to improving the visitor journey?
“That can be explained by a campaign. Because mostly when I’m spending money out there and talking to people it’s when I have this visitor campaign to promote, so Jurassic. It’s a really hard example because we didn’t have a lot of content to show what the visit would be, until we open. So now that we’re open we can use different channels to show video content to show what the visitor experience would look like, but generally when we’re talking about school holidays, we aim to produce content that will replicate what the visit will be like.”
What is your approach to communications?
“My approach would be around research first, understanding the audience, and what
communication tools they’re using. Then I would use a framework of a BOE approach to get to them.”
What methods do you see as unsuccessful/successful? How do you know if it is unsuccessful/successful? Why do you think that?
“Depends on the audience, need to identify the audience before saying which would and wouldn’t work.”
“Audience team is used to measure the success to see if we reach visitation, we then know we’ve successfully gotten people through the door. Then we evaluate how they heard about it.”
What would you like to improve? How?
“Improve the internal communications within the entire organisation. There is a bit of a hole there. With an outside view, understand different strategic thinking about how to reach audiences.”
What do you envision to be the next way to communicate with visitors?
“Comes down to who we are trying to reach, younger demographic is different, uses social media, Facebook is setting up a new search that works differently. Digital advertising is changing a lot and is important.”
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