Audience Research to Support a Master Interpretive Plan for Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage
Client: Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage | Location: Nashville, TN | Funding: Institute of Museum and Library Sciences
We conducted audience research for Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage to help build its understanding of current visitors and their visit experience to guide interpretive planning.
OVERVIEW
As Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage prepared to develop a new long-range interpretive plan that would inform new interactive programming and impact how visitors experience the site, RK&A worked with staff to identify knowledge gaps about visitors and their visit experience that we could answer through audience research to move their decision-making forward.
APPROACH
We designed an multi-season exit survey of adult walk-in visitors to the Hermitage, aimed at helping the Hermitage understand current visitors’:
Demographics
Knowledge and perceptions of Andrew Jackson and the Hermitage, and
Preferences for new topics and storylines the Hermitage might explore through interpretation
To help staff unpack and use the survey results, we also led a workshop to reflect on the implications of the findings, including small group exercises aimed at developing audience outcomes that would keep visitors at the center of the Hermitage’s interpretive planning process.
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
Our findings helped guide decisions for the future directions of interpretation at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. We found that current visitors are very open to interpretation that would broaden their perspectives of Andrew Jackson and provide a nuanced understanding of life during the Jacksonian Era. For example, when asked about potential interpretive topics the Hermitage might explore, visitors showed strong interest in the lives of Indians; women; workers, servants, and slaves; and African Americans during the Jacksonian Era.
It is quite positive that there was strong interest in learning about the lives of people from many different backgrounds, since the stories of historically underrepresented people can be among the hardest to tell at historic sites for prominent individuals.
