"We need to engage the community." — Every Exhibition Project Ever. Usually, the next question is, “Who do we mean by community?” But let’s consider a different question: “Who do we mean by we?” …

Maybe you’ve heard someone in a museum exhibition meeting say something like, "Let's run this through IPOP." (Especially if that someone came from a Smithsonian museum or affiliate.) And maybe you wondered: what’s IPOP? …

Wondering what kind of interactive to make for your new exhibition? Well, you kinda can't go wrong with a quiz. It's not because they're easy to make. A good quiz takes work. It's because quizzes secretly communicate something …

Exhibits are like Dr. Seuss machines.
They change minds. And do you know what that means?
Our visitors – isn’t it sad, they don’t know
The facts about forks that we all love so.

For the finale, do museums get equal amounts of each type? And does it vary by kind of museum? Here’s the lowdown. History museums, science centers, and natural history museums share a similar list, if you rank visitor types from most to least. …

Museum researcher John Falk’s “Five Visitor Identity Types” framework first appeared in his 2012 book, “Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience.” Today, many of us know his framework by name. Here are Falk’s five: …

Should our target exhibition audience be people that agree with our position? Or that don’t? The answer will seem counterintuitive. Exhibition audiences work the same way PR audiences work. First break your audience into five groups. …

We imagine our visitors moving through our exhibitions in the exact order we devise. But visitors that follow every step of our sequence … don’t exist. Even if our experience were a one-way people-mover, a visitor can still get distracted …

What if every museum were more like ... a children’s museum? Edwin Link (Executive Director, The Children’s Museum of Atlanta) discusses “Think Like a Children’s Museum” with host Jonathan Alger.

PHIL: If only museums had this many guests. (Sips chamomile tea.) MONIQUE: Museums don’t have guests. PHIL: What? MONIQUE: (Sips Americano.) They have visitors. PHIL: Guest sounds better. MONIQUE: But it’s not true. …

What if we're doing community engagement … wrong? Nu Goteh (Founder and Principal of ROOM FOR MAGIC) joins MtM host Jonathan Alger (Managing Partner, C&G Partners) to discuss “Community Engagement Misconceptions.” …

There are two audience groups that exhibitions should almost never target. At one end of the spectrum: believers, who already get it. They will come regardless. At the other end: skeptics, who refuse to listen. Don’t aim at either. Aim between them. …

Sometimes we don’t believe our visitors could ever love our subjects and collections like we do. They can, if we try. But it’s hard, yes. So we lose faith. They can tell. The truth is, either everything we have is important, or none of it is important. ...

Regulars here know the “streakers, strollers, scholars” framework. It helps tailor experiences to different attention spans. Turns out, other industries have similar mental models. Here are some from UX you might find useful. (In my studio we make websites too.) …

And you might come across two other variations on "streakers, strollers, scholars" (aka, the psychographics of attention span). One of these might be a better model for your situation. For example, “Skimmers, Swimmers, Divers” comes from web development …

We could think about our visitors by demographics: age, gender, religion. We could sort them by psychographics: lifestyle, political affiliation, values. But I prefer to plan according to attention span: streakers, strollers, and scholars. …

What if the best way to market an exhibition — wasn't marketing? How can we help visitors find us? When they do, how do we engage them? Visitor experience expert Samir Bitar (The Art of Consulting) joins host Jonathan Alger to discuss The Visitor Engagement Lifecycle. …

A curator pulls a key from her cardigan to unlock a dark, quiet storage room. She walks to drawer F138, opens it, and sees … a fork. Or does she? Experts like curators have, well, expertise. So they can think at a higher level, in abstractions and systems. They’ve done the reading. …