When you participate in the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, you receive detailed insights about your museum—who your visitors are, what they value, and how their experiences compare to those at museums nationwide.

But your data doesn’t stop there.

When at least five museums of the same type, budget size, governance, and/or geographic area (city, state, and region) take part, you’ll also receive a data cut—a specialized comparison showing how your museum stacks up against a focused peer group.

These comparative data cuts are provided for free as part of your enrollment in the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers.

The more museums that participate, the more comparative data we can provide—and the more meaningful the insights become for the entire field.

We will update these lists as museums continue to enroll.

By adding on Broader Population Sampling in your area, you can create a more complete picture of who does and doesn’t engage with your museum, as well as their values, attitudes, and behaviors. This can then help you develop a more informed audience engagement strategy to broaden audiences.

About Broader Population Sampling

The Survey: Because we want to ask the same questions of all population segments, we create a survey that is nearly identical to the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers. The main difference is that since we can’t assume respondents have visited your museum, we don’t ask them to assess the visitor experience at your museum. Instead, they are asked about leisure-time activities and more general attitudes towards museums and lifelong learning. 

Identifying casual visitors from non-visitors: The survey includes a question asking about visitation at local attractions, including your museum. We use this question to identify your casual visitors and your non-visitors. (This also tells you the other places and organizations you’re competing with for leisure time and educational activities.)

The sample: We purchase the sample from our survey vendor, Alchemer. They do a great job filling samples with a demographic mix that is typically pretty close to the broader population in a state or metro area, including by race and ethnicity and educational attainment.

The geographic area: We can offer this for either an individual metro area or by state. If you are in a small city or rural area, we may have to do it by state, but we’ll discuss this with you and only field the survey if you agree with this decision.

Reporting: Wilkening Consulting will include the broader population results in your reports. For your results spreadsheet, this includes directly comparing your frequent visitors, casual visitors, and non-visitors. On your slide deck results, the broader population results will be visually represented as one of your comps.

Cost: There are two factors that affect the cost–the cost of purchasing the sample itself and the time of Wilkening Consulting staff to extensively customize your reports to include your local broader population comparison. The base fee of $2,000 includes the extra reporting and the sample fee for 250 respondents (this is in addition to your Annual Survey participation fee).

Adding respondents: If you want a sample of more than 250, you can do so for the cost of procuring the sample (our reporting fee doesn’t change). We’ll know in January what it will cost but we estimate $3.50-$4.00 per completed response.

Partnering with other area museums: If multiple museums in a metro area or state wish to field the broader population sampling, the sampling fee can be split among all of them (also enabling you to get a larger, more robust sample). The portion of your fee that covers reporting ($1,000) remains unchanged. It is strongly encouraged that this partnering take place prior to fielding the broader population sample to ensure the possibility of sampling fee-splitting.

Custom questions: We may be able to include the custom questions you select for the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers into your broader population sample. It depends on whether those questions are appropriate for respondents who may have never visited your museum.