Enhancing visitor experiences is essential for museums seeking to attract, engage, and retain diverse audiences. The latest report from the Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (COVES) provides crucial insights collected from a wide variety of museums across the U.S., covering the period from July 2023 to June 2024. Here are key insights museum directors and curators can use to drive visitor engagement and satisfaction.

Understanding Visitor Motivations:

• Visitors come to museums with diverse expectations, emphasizing the importance of tailored content.
• At art museums, visitors primarily seek personal enrichment, relaxation, and a deepening of their interests.
• At science and history museums, families and groups primarily focus on educational experiences, social enjoyment, and interactive entertainment.

The duration visitors spend at museums provides insight into engagement opportunities:

• Visitors spend longer times at science and natural history museums (over two hours on average), demonstrating the importance of interactive and engaging exhibits.
• Visits to art museums typically last around 1 hour and 20 minutes, suggesting opportunities to enhance content engagement through concise, impactful storytelling provided by tools such as mobile audio-guides.

Visitor satisfaction is consistently high across various museum types:

• Museums achieve a robust Net Promoter Score (NPS) average of 71, showing strong visitor recommendations.
• Educational experiences, entertainment value, and staff interactions consistently receive high ratings, underscoring the importance of personalized and enriching content delivery.

Understanding the visitor demographic helps museums strategically plan their offerings:

• Non-members (76-85% of visitors) typically seek maximum educational or entertainment value per visit, making them ideal candidates for enriching experiences such as audio-guides.
• Members tend to visit more frequently and value in-depth, ongoing engagement, benefiting from personalized and regularly refreshed content.

Distinct audience groups have varying needs, easily addressed through versatile technologies:

• Adult-only groups (dominant in art museums): Prefer individualized content focused on personal interests, deeper learning, and relaxation.
• Family groups (dominant in science museums): Require interactive, group-friendly educational experiences.

To leverage these insights effectively, museums can adopt flexible, interactive, and visitor-focused solutions. Mobile audio-guides provide a dynamic approach, combining personalized storytelling with intuitive technology to deepen visitor engagement, enrich educational experiences, and increase overall satisfaction.

You can find the study here: https://understandingvisitors.org/images/downloads/Reports/coves_aggregate_report_fy24.pdf