Making a Difference: Articulating Audience Outcomes
In our work at Kera, we often ask museum practitioners to articulate audience outcomes as a starting point for planning and evaluation. Audience outcomes are the difference a museum intends to make in its audiences’ lives through an experience (like an exhibition or a program). While audience outcomes may be a familiar concept to many museum practitioners, we know how difficult it can be for museum practitioners to shift from thinking about what they do (i.e., implementing a program or designing an exhibition) to the result of what they do (how audiences are changed as a result of experiencing the program or exhibition). Here are a few practices we emphasize with our clients to help them articulate the difference they want to make in their audiences’ lives.
1. Audience outcomes describe a result or change for a specific audience
Audience outcomes are written with a specific audience in mind. You must first identify that audience (or audiences) and be specific while doing so. For instance, instead of just “students” your audience might be high school students who identify as female. We have recently written about the importance of identifying who your specific audience is for each experience because not everything is necessarily for everyone.
2. Audience outcomes describe a concrete result or change you wish to see
Do you want students to become more curious about the scientific contributions women have made throughout history (rather than about women’s history generally)? Do you want them to become more interested in aviation careers specifically (versus all STEM careers)? Words matter and mean different things to different people. The more specific you are about the result, the more likely your team can get on the same page about what you are all trying to achieve together and why it is important to you.
3. Be realistic about the types of audience outcomes you can achieve
While audience outcomes should be aspirational on some level, they should also be grounded in what you can achieve with the resources you have available. Some types of outcomes are harder to achieve or take longer or repeated exposure to achieve. For instance, piquing someone’s curiosity during a one-time visit to an exhibition is realistic; changing someone’s behavior is not. But, if you are facilitating a long-term program with repeat participants, then behavior change (e.g., adopting more environmentally-friendly behaviors) becomes more realistic.
4. Prioritize your audience outcomes and then design an experience intended to achieve them
Audience outcomes fall into categories such as understanding, feelings/beliefs, social/engagement, skills, well-being, and actions (or behaviors). While it can be tempting to articulate outcomes in all of these categories, resist and prioritize! For instance, if your audience is already very knowledgeable about a topic, then maybe you should not expect to significantly change their understanding. Instead, a more realistic goal could be to help them build a community of peers with similar interests (a social outcome). If this is the case, then your experience should be designed with community-building in mind. This does not mean that other outcomes, like increasing knowledge, will not occur for your audiences; rather, it helps you know how to best align your resources to achieve the outcomes you have prioritized.
Often, some of the above practices for articulating audience outcomes get skipped or overlooked in favor of jumping to the next (perhaps more exciting) step of designing a new exhibition or program. However, stopping to take the time to thoughtfully articulate the difference you want to make in your audiences’ lives can help you create experiences that will actually make that difference.
