Strategic management for visitor-oriented museums

Abstract

Abstract: Strategic management is a familiar concept in for-profit organisations but is relatively new to museums. This paper presents and discusses a model of strategic management for visitor-oriented museums that aims to be more comprehensive than current approaches. It shows how museums can overcome the tension between the strategic demand to develop visitor-oriented museum services and the duties and social mandate of museums as public institutions that are defined by cultural policy—enabling access to cultural heritage, promoting broad cultural participation and providing informal education. Visitor-oriented strategic museum management is concerned with attracting a variety of visitors as well as the development of museum services that are appropriate to diverse museum audiences. The model presented here emphasises the comprehensive strategic management concept. Audience research and evaluation are shown to be valuable analytic and revision tools for strategic management in visitor-oriented museums.

Keywords:

• Cultural policy
• Non-profit museums
• Strategic management
• Visitor-orientation
• Audience research
• Evaluation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Associate Professor Ruth Rentschler as well as the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank Carolyn Meehan, Lynda Kelly and Carol Scott for stimulating discussions about the issue of audience research and evaluation in museums. Finally, I would like to thank Dr Ralf Reussner for his continuous support, the fruitful discussions on strategic museum management and his helpful comments on this paper.

Notes

The link between strategic museum management and audience research is hardly covered in publications, except for two conference presentations, one by Tim Sullivan on the 1998 Conference “Visitors Centre Stage: Action for the Future” in Canberra, demonstrating how audience research and evaluation have influenced the development of a corporate strategy at the Australian Museum, Sydney. The second contribution is made by his colleague Lynda Kelly, listing a strategic use among the important functions of audience research in museums in her opening address at the Evaluation and Visitor Research Special Interest Group Day of the 2001 Museums Australia Conference. This paper complements their view with the theoretical incorporation of audience research into the model of the strategic museum management process and a detailed description of its role within that process.