A couple weeks ago I saw a blog post from Museums as Progress talking about how staff expertise isn’t necessarily relevant to visitors. The point they made was just because expertise is important to us as insiders, doesn’t mean that is what visitors directly value.
The visitor taking pictures of their kid having fun isn’t there to learn about your discipline. The couple on a date isn’t asking for engagement programming. People come to museums to relax, connect with others, discover something about themselves — and, yes, sometimes learn something new along the way or “engage” with the museum — but for most people, most of the time, the goals are manifold and your expertise matters only to the extent that it helps them achieve what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
Except I eventually realized what I was reading wasn’t a blog post, but a six paragraph description of a session they are holding next Thursday.
For a moment I wondered how effective such a long session description would be in attracting participants. But that was through the lens of thinking people have too short an attention span to bother reading six paragraphs promoting an event.
The fact is, they were informing people about the problem the session was meant to address and what type of conversation they could expect.
” — expertise becomes a shield against harder questions about relevance and impact. If we admitted that people’s goals differ from ours, we’d have to become students again, learning what actually matters to the communities we claim to support.
The challenge isn’t whether your museum has valuable expertise — it does. The question is whether that expertise can serve community progress in ways that generate institutional returns
In the first paragraph of this post I mentioned expertise may not be something visitors directly value. But I do think people value the product of that expertise without consciously realizing it.
I have mentioned that research has shown people perceive cultural organizations as more trustworthy than media outlets, government entities, and other NGOs. It is likely due to the care and exercise of expertise that has led people to regard cultural organizations in that manner. While people may not be driven to attend to learn more about biodiversity and colonial history, they probably want to be confident that what they do learn about these topics while visiting is reasonably accurate.
