„Audience Research in Polish Museums”. Project Narodowego Instytutu Muzealnictwa i Ochrony Zbiorów

Project „Audience research in Polish museums” was started in March 2017 as a multi-annual project of the research and educational shape. The starting point was our belief that recognition of your own audience is the first step for each museum to frame the methods of performing your mission, creating educational programmes and offer for visitors. Regularly repeated, it helps museums to follow changes in the structure of the audience and in its intents, and to find common ground to form and maintain the cooperation with the public. Hitherto, NIMOZ completed two annual editions of the project: the pilot one in 2017 committed to the general overview of the Polish museums’ audience and the second one in 2018 entitled „Museum in the local society”. The project is now being continued in the contexts of the elderly people as recipients of the museums’ offer. To achieve the educational aims of the project we facilitate our studies to the museums, organize trainings for the museums’ staff and publish the handbooks. 

The article is based on the results of a questionnaire survey of visitors to two major aristocratic residences in Poland (Castle Museum in Łańcut and Castle Museum in Pszczyna). Sketching the specificity of this type of museums and heritage sites as the background for further analysis, in the text several key issues important from the perspective of management of such institutions and getting financial support for them are discussed. These include: an up to date socio-demographic profile of visitors (direct users of the museums’ offer), their motivations to visit, local spending patterns linked with the visitors’ stay in a given town, the level of satisfaction with the visit, shortcomings of the museums or their surroundings from the perspective of tourists. Undertaking this sort of audience studies might also, as shown by research results, provide a broader perspective on the social perception of museums, supplying them with evidence on the complexity of values that might be linked with such heritage institutions by society in general.

How to Find our Oudience? Experiences of Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów

The Museum of King Jan III’s Palace in Wilanów is one of the biggest and most-visited cultural institutions in our contry. As a protector of the cultural and natural heritage, museum runs its own programs of historical and environmental education, reenactment of old crafts and also conducts large-scale events for mass audience (exhibitions, concerts, performances, festivals). It addresses its offer to children, adolescents, adults, recipients from the senior group, school groups, individual tourists as well as organized groups of foreign tourists. Such a large diversity of the offer has a significant impact on the structure of the audience, which we have started to examine a few years  ago.

The text is a first attempt to formulate a synthetic summary of the activities of the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów in the field of the audience research, taking into account the context of contemporary reflection on the borderline of sociology, anthropology, museology and culture marketing. The elaboration presents selected topics from surveys conducted by the museum in recent years (evaluation of the educational offer, examination of a new audience, foreign tourist profile, brand and image study, auditing the quality of service for visitors, product turnout statistics), and tools located on the periphery of audience surveys, which enable in-depth and multidimensional analysis of the obtained data. The time perspective of the conducted research (about 10 years) allowed for a better understanding of the results obtained and the relations between them. 

Local Community in a Museum – Scientific Research and Everyday Practice

Visitors in a museum are also people who live nearby. Keeping in mind the all-over-Poland research conducted by NIMOZ. The research done in Sulejówek is the example of widening the social range of influence of Polish museums and creation of new actions. Why did these aspects become a part of the creation process of the museum? For which reasons did the relation between the museum and the local community become a part of work of the museum employees and the team responsible for generating the strategy of the new institution? Was it because of the specific features of a given museum or was there a different ground? Putting together the results of two different research processes allowed to identify a number of reasons that determined the creation of a bond between the local community and the museum. It became the subject of a Poland-wide research and the experiment conducted by the Jozef Piłsudski Museum in Sulejówek.

In the article, I presented the results of the study of the social impact of Mazovian public libraries, focusing on groups of users coming from disadvantaged backgrounds – older people, people in the worse financial situation and residents of villages and small towns. Surveys were carried out in 2017 on 1098 users of 38 Mazovian public libraries (rural and urban). Based on the data I concluded that there are some differences both in the models of public libraries’ use in the analyzed groups, as well as in the range of the benefits of contact with libraries.

Theatre Talks emerged as an audience reception research method in Sweden. In this article I describe the evolution of the method and put it into practical perspectives. At first, Theatre Talks provided extensive insights into the experiences of Stockholm theatre audiences in the 1980s. Those results inspired the inventor of the method, Willmar Sauter, to develop a theatre communications model, which changed the academic discourse on the theatrical communication process. In Australia, Rebecca Scollen successfully applied the method for an audience development projects aimed at non-attenders. In Denmark, Louise Ejgod Hansen noticed that Theatre Talks might access a democratic potential of theatre. All of these effective applications of the method inspired me to look at Theatre Talks as an audience development tool from three combinatory perspectives: (1) marketing – its potential for increased ticket sales and changing the behaviour of the customers, (2) cultural policy – for higher diversity and participation in theatre, and (3) theatrical communication – for improved understanding and better satisfaction from participation in the performance.

The Aleksander Wegierko Drama Theater in Bialystok in the Opinions of Recipients of Culture

The Aleksander Wegierko Drama Theater in Bialystok is one of the oldest and largest cultural institutions in Bialystok. The offer of local institutions allows theater enthusiasts to choose from a variety of proposals. How to reach viewers? How to encourage them to come exactly to the Drama Theater? Until 2012, the research on consumer preferences was not conducted in this institution. Almost seven years ago, in cooperation with the Institute of Sociology of the University of Bialystok and the “SocLab” Foundation, the study was carried out and the report “Diagnosis of participation in culture in the Podlasie Voivodship” was create. The aim of the whole project was to learn about the cultural needs of the inhabitants of the Podlasie region, as well as their opinions on artistic activity and the image of cultural institutions.

After six years – in 2018 – the theater staff decided to ask the viewers again to share their opinions about the institution. In May last year, a study entitled “Theater in the opinions of theviewers” was conducted. Thanks to all the information, the institution managed to find out how audience rate it’s offer, what are the expectations regarding future repertoire proposals, as well as from what communication channels viewers obtain information about the operations of the institution. The article aims to describe the most important research results also it presents the distribution channels used to inform about the offer of the Drama Theater. 

Raport z projektu badawczego „Krakowski odbiorca kultury”

Marcin Bańdo, Łukasz Gaweł, Patrycja Król, Iwona Parzyńska, Filip Skowron, Agnieszka Szostak (redakcja naukowa), Wydawnictwo Attyka, Kraków 2019, 192 ss., ISBN: 978-83-65644-57-2