I did a small piece of work with the Audience Development Coordinator at Derby Museums, revising the online audience feedback report. This is provided to the Trustees and staff through out the museum to give people an opportunity to see what is being said about the Trust’s venues.
The original format was a number of reviews from Tripadviser, copied ad verbatim into a text document. it was quite lengthy and only pulled content from one online source. It was also getting difficult to present a broad spectrum of the feedback as so much is now being generated.
I started out by completing a review of just where people were leaving feedback and reviews about Derby Museums. Looking over the full breadth of sources might give an opportunity for insight. Another consideration that I had was to give the report some structure, interest and meaning. An opportunity to pull trends or insight out over a month-by-month basis or even comparing one period to another.
Originally I began to work in a Powerpoint presentation, as it allows different layouts to be easily achieved. I worked at pulling in images, and looking at the top level trends mentioned in the reviews left for the month I was examining. The report become quite long, and when I submitted it for feedback we realised that firstly the font was quite small and the report too unwieldy. Jane and I had a chat and decided that using a Word document was acceptable and so the summarised information was included in a new document.
A final format of one side was agreed, with a number of sources consulted each month. Overall I look at Google Reviews, Facebook amalgamated pages and also the managed page, Twitter statistics, and finally the Tripadvisor reviews that were our starting point.
I’ve been able to work on this task over time, I’ve begun to notice some patterns. For example, that reviews tend to drastically change when there is a specific event on that is going to pull in a large number of visitors, such as the half-term holidays, or the Georgian Christmas event. I’ve also been able to include some suggestions to improve content around the web to help with audience engagement, such as checking that the pages created by Facebook Derby Museum Trust venues have the correct addresses.
So, as of March 2016, the format is sorted and it is a regular job that I have to do. If you’d like to see an example, please click here.