Understanding Online Museum Audiences: Academic Research on Digital Visitor Motivations
Circa 2016, we co-led a study into the motivations of museum website visitors, with 23 institutions participating. We presented this work through several conference presentations and in an article in the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing.
For an overview of the project, see our post about the MW 2016 presentation. To watch various study participants present on their findings, see the video of the MCN 2016 presentation.
The Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing is
the major peer-reviewed, professional journal for all those involved in the marketing of products or services using digital channels. Its overriding goal is to provide an authoritative, practitioner-focused forum to support the professional development of all those working in, or entering, the field. As such, the Journal’s content is both of direct relevance to the practice of digital marketing and intellectually rigorous.
Volume 5 Number 4 (Spring 2018) includes the piece, Identity-related motivations online: Falk’s framework applied to US museum websites by Sarah Wambold and me. Our piece presents the results of our VMS project.
The abstract:
In his book ‘Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience’, John Falk examines the visitor experience as it relates to what he terms ‘identity-related motivations’: a series of specific reasons used by visitors when choosing to attend a museum, based on their particular needs and values. Through thousands of interviews with museum visitors, Falk identifies five key types of museum visitor and the internal motivations that drive repeat visitation as: experience seeker; explorer; facilitator; recharger; and hobbyist/professional. This study utilises Falk’s framework in an online survey of 23 museum websites. This is the first survey to utilise Falk’s framework online, the first focused primarily on small- and medium-sized organisations, and the first US-based study to view the data in aggregate. This article presents high-level results from the survey, as well as an in-depth look at online audiences for one museum from the project.
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Posted July 2018