MusLi (Museums Literacy) - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

MusLi - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences
• Survey systems must take into account the potential literacy deficits of the target audiences.
It is therefore recommended that researchers avoid, if possible, questionnaires that are filled in by
the participant, especially if they are long and detailed. It is better to carry out interviews, both collective
and individual, with the support of interviewers.
• Special attention has to be paid to what people are willing to say or not to say. Linguistic or
logical difficulties, cultural deficits and emotional discomfort are easily missed by an impersonal
question-answer survey method: the researcher must catch “signs” in quite an indirect way, or create
a set of trust and confidence that invites people to speak frankly (as in the case of collective
interviews carried out in Bozen and in Paris).
• Collecting a range of emotional self-evaluations from the participants in a museum initiative about
the period “before” (their expectations), “in progress” (as the experiences happen) and “after” (their
reactions and level of satisfaction) can provide an indirect yet quite revealing index of the degree
of correspondence between the museum and its proposed experience and the participants’ total
cultural set, which is potentially strong cause of uneasiness and an obstacle to the full success of
the experience. A good example of this are the questionnaires used for the evaluation of audience
satisfaction in three projects illustrated here by the Manchester Museum, In Touch, Collective Conversations
and Early Years
After these general considerations, we can now examine the four areas of observation on which the
analysis of the case studies was focused, and we can draw further specific indications from each of
them.
Motivation
Economic factors as motivators and factors of demotivation
• cannot to be ignored, and not
only in relation to lower strata of society.
The following cases illustrated (A come Ambiente, Meeting at the Museum, In Touch, Early Years,
etc) show how, on one hand, the economic element can act as a strong demotivating factor, for
instance in the case of the older person for whom the total costs of a guided visit, travel to the
museum and other “optional” costs are not affordable.
On the contrary, a policy of targeted discounts – as in the case of A come Ambiente – clearly
reveals a specific museum’s audience-oriented approach and it can also be recognised as a sign
of special treatment for the specific group of potential visitors.
In general, one must take into account the recommendation to pay attention to the aggregate
costs related to a visit and not only ticket prices. The price of entry, a guided tour, but also
travel and lunch have to be added to the cost calculation and can really increase the “convenience”
threshold for visit decision making. Moreover, these material costs have to be added to
the intangible costs (the “start-up costs” considered in the broad sense of psychological invest-
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