Nurturing Engagement

Designing for Engagement: Changing the Museum to Build Participation

Robert SteinDeputy Director

Dallas Museum of Art@rjstein

Flickr Credit ~adforce1

WHY DO MUSEUMS

MATTER?

Flickr Credit ~adforce1

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

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART

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

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART

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

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART

ARE WE FAILING?

According to a study by Indiana University,

museums are considered a more reliable source of

historical information than books, teachers, or even

personal accounts by grandparents.

TRUSTED

The 2010 U.S. census reports that only 14.5% of US Adults visited museums in the prior 12 months (Census, 2012).

BUT NOT VITAL

Studies at the Metropolitan 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.

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

GRAZING

TIME FOR A CHANGE

FREE ADMISSION

FREE MEMBERSHIP

ARE YOU A MEMBER?

PARTICIPATION ISTHE NEW CURRENCY

OF MEMBERSHIP

ARE YOU A MEMBER?

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.”

Promoting participation and engagement with art

Badges are bundles of activities that are created by DMA staff.

Badges are used to magnify existing visitor behavior and encourage new forms of engagement

Points are awarded for completing badge activities

DMA Friends can use their points for a variety of rewards

For the first time, we can have a stream of data about what visitors do inside the museum, not just when they show up…

Social Media Listening

Listen to the social web comprehensively

Credit Friends for online engagement

Use high engagement as a “mirror” to the community

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”.

WHY DO MUSEUMS

MATTER?

Jason Farago, The Gaurdian, London, 30 Nov, 2012

“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”.

WHY DO MUSEUMS

MATTER?

Jason Farago, The Gaurdian, London, 30 Nov, 2012

THANK YOU!