Audience-Centered Strategy: Composites
A common mantra of mine is that museums can’t be all things to all people. For a museum to have real impact in the world, it must prioritize the audiences that are most important to it, construct a clear picture of who they are, and allocate resources to support those people.
Previously, I wrote about the power of using psychographics in audience strategy. Psychographics identify the psychological characteristics people share with one another—like common beliefs, values, and lifestyles that drive their decision making. Understanding peoples’ underlying motivations can give museums a much better sense of who their audiences are than demographics alone can. Knowing only that your visitors are on average 25 to 34 years old with a graduate degree (both are demographic characteristics) is not very informative when deciding what kinds of exhibitions and programs to develop. But, knowing that a segment of your visitors is deeply interested in learning about an issue from multiple, diverse perspectives? Now that is informative, and can give you direction.
So how do you develop a clear picture of who those audiences are?
The ideal way to develop a clear picture of your audience is to do audience research, for example through visitor surveys, focus groups, or interviews. But even without data, a museum can be clear about audience. An approach I find incredibly useful is developing audience composites. An audience composite is a rich description of a target audience that brings together multiple shared characteristics into one cohesive picture. Composites go beyond demographics to also include psychographics like shared attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria among a group.
Audience composites should not be confused with personas. Personas are fictional representations of single users or visitors, most often used in user experience design and marketing. They embody specific characteristics, behaviors, goals, and pain points of a particular individual representing a segment of your audience. Audience composites, on the other hand, represent a group of people who share commonalities. They synthesize information to create a blended, holistic picture of the audience. A composite aims to capture complexity within a group and avoid oversimplification that can sometimes result from personas representing individuals. For example, below is an audience composite from a history museum that wants to build a young adult audience.
To develop an audience composite, staff should have a conversation about who they perceive to be their audience, discussing what they understand to be that audience’s motivations, life styles, interests, and values as well as barriers and pain points. If you have audience data, use it to inform development of the composite, but even without data, these discussions can be based on staff’s experiences with that audience and their own life experience. It is important for staff to come to a consensus on the characteristics they identify to describe the audience and write it down. It can be helpful to give the audience a memorable, descriptive name so that each time staff refer to that audience, a clear mental picture comes to mind.
Audience composites have a number of benefits that can make them an essential tool for museums. Firstly, composites unify staff and ensure everyone has the same understanding of its audiences. They give staff a shared language for talking and thinking about their audiences, both internally and externally. They also help staff to better imagine and empathize with the audiences. Finally, composites inform decision-making about resource allocation, respecting that the organization has limited time and resources. If you work in a museum, we highly recommend you take the first step by gathering your team to start a conversation about who your most important audiences are and what truly drives them.
