Becky Pierson Davidson is a community-driven product strategist. Her background is in digital transformation tech working with both Fortune 500 companies and startups before she pivoted to the information industry and was Head of Product at bossbabe, managing a membership program for female entrepreneurs. She has taught user experience design courses with General Assembly, and has recently launched her own program teaching customer journey mapping & product ideation.
My favorite interviews on Museum Questions are those that bring expertise from other fields into the museum space. When I first approached Becky about an interview, I thought we would talk about education, because in most museums, community partnerships primarily live in the education department. But Becky surprised me by asking to focus on membership. This appeals to me for a few reasons. First, it is a way of moving community partnerships into the focus and work of the larger institution. Second, it is a way of thinking of community partnerships as an economic benefit to the museum, not just a theoretical, mission-focused benefit to the museum (and as much as I like to prioritize museum mission over income, income is essential and many museums are currently struggling for income). Membership is an important source of income for museums, and membership numbers are an indicator of health. How can we grow membership programs in a way that builds the strength of the museum as a whole – strengthening connections to communities and diversifying members and visitors?
Prior to conducting this interview I revisited the work of Nina Simon, who has has been an important spokeswoman in this area. Nina is an advocate for community relevance, and shares stories of how this builds audience and income. The nonprofit she founded, Of/By/For All, focuses on co-creation of content – exhibits and programs.
Her recommended first steps in doing this work are (1) self-assess; (2) specify the community you want to work with (start with just one); (3) empower others. As you’ll see below, Becky’s tips are: (1) Talk to people, and collect data from the community that you want to work with; (2) Analyze and use that data as a space for experimentation; (3) Use those partners not just to collect data, but then to reach their audiences. Both emphasize creating an environment in which it is safe to experiment and take risks. Nina focuses more on empowerment; Becky, on data-driven decision-making.
Becky, thanks for talking to me about how community marketing works in the digital, for-profit world, and how this relates to museums. You mentioned that for you, museum membership programs feel like familiar spaces in which to do this work. Can you talk about how the work you do relates to museum membership programs?
In the online space, when I say “community products,” a lot of times I mean a membership. One of the things about memberships is that often businesses set them and forget them. For example, a museum might create a membership that includes admission, a monthly event, the opportunity to attend quarterly openings. Those are the perks, end of sentence. They are not doing experimentation with their programming and events in order to figure out what gets people in the door, what gets people excited, what brings in the people that are not otherwise visiting. There’s a lot of opportunity for experimentation there.
Let’s think through growing museum membership through your approach. Imagine that you have a museum that wants to grow their members. Perhaps they want to engage Millennials in the growing tech industry, or parents of young children, or young Black professionals. What would be your recommendations for the steps that they should take?
I start my work with clients by developing an idea of who that ideal person they want to reach is, and write that out. What are some qualities about this person or this group of people, what do they care about? What are their goals and challenges? What do they care about? What are their pain points? What are they trying to solve for? Is it loneliness? That sort of thing.
Then you want to recruit people to talk to. Online, I use groups on sites like Facebook or Reddit. But if I wanted to find a local group of people that were interested in something, I would go to relevant community organizations who already serve this audience to ask people to help with recruitment. I would tell these leaders or organizations that I was looking for ten people to talk to that fit the description I had written up, and share the profile we had created. I might also ask community leaders to participate in coming up with ideas. Hold a roundtable or a workshop, where everyone lists ideas and then you discuss the ideas shared.
Working with these community groups, I would find ten people in this demographic who haven’t visited the museum, and five or ten people who have. I would offer a participation incentive that’s related to whatever you’re talking about, not something random like an Amazon gift card. Then I would ask each of them to visit, and have a one-to-one conversation with them asking, what was the most interesting? What stories or objects stuck with you? What did you enjoy about being here? What did you find less exciting about your visit? Do they belong to any other museums?
The goal is to suss out what made it worth it for them and what would make them come back. Maybe you give them a list – is it small programs? Social events? The first glimpse of an exhibition? You ask them to pick the three that they are most interested in – but make sure the list is shuffled every time, so you’re always presenting it differently to people, and then see what kind of responses they pull out. You need to interview at least five people – that’s when you start to see trends within a specific segment. So five interviews with existing members or visitors, more with non-members. Do the same process with the two different groups and see how their answers differ.
The next step is really analyzing what you came up with. You are looking at the data you collected, but also at existing quantitative data. How many young Black professionals are there in your area? Can you find data about this group and what they are members in? Because you really want to pair qualitative data with quantitative data to help you make decisions about the membership.
What are your tips for data analysis?
Often people will do a survey and then generate pie charts and say, here’s my data! But what’s actually interesting with quantitative data is posing questions that can be answered with the data, by exporting it to a spreadsheet and playing with it. For example, you might ask, “How did the people ages 22-25 answer a specific question, and were their answers different than those of people 26-30?”
With qualitative data, one of the best things you can do is record your conversations, because then you are less likely to add your own bias to the answers. You can go through the transcripts and highlight and pull out their exact words, identifying themes across these conversations. That’s called affinity mapping. I use online tools to do this – a program called Miro – and I put each insight on one sticky note. Then you map your data by dragging it into groups, and you start to see the themes. This is a design thinking exercise you can do as a team – put insights into groups and categories to generate takeaways.
So now you have your data analyzed – you’ve answered questions and pulled out takeaways. What next?
Next is the ideation stage where you ask: What ideas are coming out of this? It’s great to do this as a team, and even to include a couple of your museum members there – have it be a community experience where you share what you learned and then come up with new ideas to invigorate the membership experience.
Be careful about group think. You’ll want to have individuals do their own thinking before they share – have everybody write down a ton of ideas, put them up on the wall, and then step back and look at them. Group them, see what people came up with, and then talk about it. This is what I do with my clients, and it’s really a full day workshop. And at the end of the day, you have a decision-maker in the room, and they choose the thing they want to focus on.
The next step is refining your idea and coming up with a way to test it. And before you run the test, you set your criteria for success. If your idea is for an event that is intended to bring in a specific audience, you need a goal for how many will attend. You set a minimum requirement goal to consider the event a success, and also a stretch goal – this is how many we want.
Let’s imagine this works, and you get new members. How do you retain these members?
The membership department should set targets for retention as well as new members. There are lots of strategies for retention that you could experiment with and try. So, for example, what special things can you do for people who have been members for three years?
People love to feel like VIPs. If I were coming up with ideas for a museum, I’d probably do some kind of promotion with the cafe or something like that. If somebody told me, hey, thanks for being a member for three years, come in and have lunch on us and bring two friends I would love that, and I’d bring my friends. And you can experiment – do this with a section of your membership – you just want to be careful about data bias, so you’d need to randomize your list to get a percentage of them.
You also want to keep collecting data. During the membership application process you want to limit the number of questions so people actually complete their membership. But after people sign up you can send them an email and say, if you complete this membership profile you get access to something additional – maybe four free guest tickets to an upcoming event.
I would do interviews with long-term members to find out why somebody has been a member for a long time, and also when someone churns – doesn’t renew – I would send an automated email asking them to have a 15-minute conversation with me. Probably most people will ignore it, but you will get some responses.
A lot of your ideas center on data collection. Often museums struggle with productively collecting and using data. What tips do you have for museums in this area?
Data-driven decision making is central to my way of thinking. That comes from my experience working in user experience design and product for huge companies building custom software.
Only collect what you need. I think one of the reasons people get stressed out by data is they’re collecting too much, and then they’re way overwhelmed with it. When you are building a survey, you want to look at every single question and be able to answer the question, what am I going to do with the answers I get from this? I write down every single question I can think of and then I just critique the hell out of it until I’m happy with it. Then get a couple people to take it as a test, and make sure that they don’t get tripped up on any questions. Start the survey with really easy answers because if people get quick wins, then when they get to a harder question they’re less likely to abandon the survey.
Create a research database that you can reference. Because if you make decisions based on data then you’re more likely to be successful. Keep a spreadsheet or a document to enter in the interviews and your main takeaways and insights from them, that you can look back at and collect over time.
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