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Nurturing Engagement
The document discusses how the Dallas Museum of Art is changing its approach to promote more participation and engagement from community members. It notes that while the metro Dallas area has over 6.5 million residents, the museum only attracts around 500,000 annual visitors. To address this, the museum has implemented a "badges" program to encourage new forms of visitor participation and engagement through activities. It also listens to social media to understand online engagement and use that as a mirror to the community. The goal is for the museum to become a more integral civic platform for the community.
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Nurturing Engagement
- 1. Designing for Engagement: Changingthe Museum to Build Participation Robert Stein Deputy Director Dallas Museum of Art @rjstein
- 2. WHY DO MUSEUMS MATTER? Flickr Credit ~adforce1
- 3. WHY DO MUSEUMS MATTER? Why is your community better off because it has a museum? The answer must necessarily be something more than, because otherwise it wouldn’t. Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide the communities they serve something of value beyond their own mere existence. Stephen Weil, Making Museums Matter Flickr Credit ~adforce1
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- 5. DALLAS MUSEUM OFART Founded in 1903, the DMA’s collection spans 5,000 years of human history Located in the largest arts district in North America Dallas is the 4th largest metro area in the United States with over 6.5M residents
- 6. DALLAS MUSEUM OFART While 2,500 new people move to Dallas each and every day… Attendance has hovered around 500,000 for most of the last decade. With just over 500,000 visitors last year, we are reaching no more than 7% of our community
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- 8. According to astudy by Indiana University, museums are considered a more reliable source of historical information than books, teachers, or even personal accounts by grandparents. TRUSTED
- 9. BUT NOT VITAL The2010 U.S. census reports that only 14.5% of US Adults visited museums in the prior 12 months (Census, 2012).
- 10. Studies at theMetropolitan Museum of Art found that most visitors spend much less than 30 seconds viewing works of art The study reports that rarly do visitors spend more than a minute with any individual artwork. GRAZING Spending Time on Art” by Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith in Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol 19, Number 2, 2001. On the Brink of Irrelevance? Art Museums in Contemporary Society” by Douglas Worts, 2003. Flickr Credit ~Petereck
- 11. TIME FOR ACHANGE FREE ADMISSION FREE MEMBERSHIP
- 12. ARE YOU AMEMBER?
- 13. ARE YOU AMEMBER? PARTICIPATION IS THE NEW CURRENCY OF MEMBERSHIP
- 14. A CULTURE OF PARTICIPATION A participatory culture is one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another Jenkins, Henry. 2006. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.”
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- 18. Badges are bundlesof activities that are created by DMA staff. Badges are used to magnify existing visitor behavior and encourage new forms of engagement
- 21. Points are awardedfor completing badge activities DMA Friends can use their points for a variety of rewards
- 22. For the firsttime, we can have a stream of data about what visitors do inside the museum, not just when they show up…
- 23. Social Media Listening Listento the social web comprehensively Credit Friends for online engagement Use high engagement as a “mirror” to the community
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- 25. WHY DO MUSEUMS MATTER? “When you can slip into a gallery for just 15 minutes to see a favorite painting, or when parents can take their children without having to budget for it, the museum takes on a societal function. It's no longer just a fortress or an amusement: it's a civic platform, where education and citizenship go hand in hand”. Jason Farago, The Gaurdian, London, 30 Nov, 2012
- 26. WHY DO MUSEUMS MATTER? “For Dallas, a museum membership should be like a library card: everyone should have one, and it should foster an engagement with the museum that goes beyond the occasional visit to a kind of civic pride”. “I hope it works. Because in a perpetually privatizing world, the kind of civic culture that the Dallas Museum of Art is trying to foster has become rarer than any antiquity”. Jason Farago, The Gaurdian, London, 30 Nov, 2012
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Editor's Notes
- #10 Empirical data supports the view that visitors spend little time at individual exhibit components (often a matter of a few seconds and seldom as much as one minute); seldom read labels; usually stop at less than half the components at an exhibit; are more likely to use trial-and-error methods at interactive exhibits than to read instructions; that children are more likely to engage with interactive exhibits than adults, and that attention to exhibits declines sharply after about half an hour.
- #11 Studies of 150 visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art found a mean time of less than 30 seconds viewing an object to be typical, with most spending significantly less time. Douglas Worts, former interpretive planner and audience researcher at the Art Gallery of Ontario and museologist, summarizes this behavior as “grazing” and theorizes that the pattern may arise from a mismatch in the goals of curators and visitors. It is relatively rare to watch a visitor spend more than a minute with any individual artwork.
- #15 A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another…Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.