This autumn, museums across the county want to know what you think.

We here at the Museums Advisory Service have devised a Visitor Survey to help us find out who visits museums in Wiltshire and what visitors think of them. Although the Museums Advisory Service doesn’t run any museums , we work with museums around Wiltshire giving advice and support and the Visitor Survey is one of the things we are doing with museums this year.

The Bradford on Avon Christopher Pharmacy

Why are we doing this?

Last year, a report into how well Wiltshire museums promote themselves showed that we don’t know as much as we’d like about who visits our museums, or to put it another way, who our customers are. If we don’t know who’s visiting and whether they enjoyed their visit, museums can’t plan properly for the future. Finding out about visitors also helps us discover which groups of people don’t visit museums in Wiltshire. Museums can use that information to deliver new things for specific groups or just do better at letting people know what’s on.

Malmesbury Athelstan Museum

What will we do with the information we collect?

All surveys are anonymous (there’s a section at the end to leave contact details in case you’d like your local museum to keep in touch about what’s going on but these will be separated before the results are analysed). Once the survey ends all the responses from all the participating museums will be collected and the information analysed. Each museum will receive its own results and The Museums Advisory Service will be able to look at all the results and see if there are areas which we can help several museums with. We’ll also be looking for areas where a museum is doing really well so we can share that with others.

Market Lavington Museum

How to join in

The survey is running in museums at different times between now and October so if you visit a museum in Wiltshire, just pick up a survey, fill it in and pop it in the big black box all our participating museums have. The more responses we get, the better our picture will be.

If you forget to do it while you’re at the museum, you can still have your say by visiting the online version at www.wiltshire.gov.uk/museum2011survey

I’ll blog more about what we find out once the results are in later in the year.

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Congratulations Wiltshire Museums

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PS - don't forget our free Open Day on Saturday 1st October, 10am to 4pm; it's well worth a visit!