Barbara Hope
Head of Marketing and Public Affairs at
NML

• NML has gone through considerable change management over the past few years with the need to focus more effectively on lifelong learning initiatives to realise the potential for building bigger and more diverse audiences
• One of the areas NML is good at is understanding who visits and who doesn’t and we have invested heavily in both qualitative and quantitative market research programmes as well front-end, formative and summative evaluation in the development of new products, exhibitions and public programmes.etc.
• This has helped considerably in targeting marketing activity more effectively and has led to a very satisfactory rise in attendance over the last few years. 1.5m visits anticipated this year.
• We know lots about our general audience but the target group we know least about is the formal education market. This is largely due to the fact that education marketing was not a mainstream activity of the marketing department with education marketing undertaken at the discretion of education officers.
• This fragmentation and lack of integration with the core marketing/ audience development planning was identified as a weakness in the recent learning review. Although there are lots of visits across our eight venues by schools/ educational establishments we did not systematically collect data on what the groups came for or the LEA they represented.
• One of the difficulties with a multi site organisation like NML is that we do not have a centralised booking system with each venue dealing with its own enquires/bookings. Consequently if one site is booked there is no easy way to ‘sell’ a visit elsewhere or to facilitate a booking without transferring the caller. In addition we have been collecting inconsistent data about the groups.
• A key task was to undertake a group booking mapping exercise to identify who was visiting for formal learning. The information would be used to clarify visits by venue and to identify potential areas to target marketing campaigns. The mapping exercise involved cleaning the data over a three year period so that the groups fitted with 14 different DfES group types. This provided trend data including how many groups visited, the composition of the groups and educational categories.
• We found some very useful trends across National Museums Liverpool - there has been a steady increase in the number of primary school visitors but a steady fall in the number of secondary school visitors. There has also been a fall in the number of adult learning visitors but an increase in the number of further and higher education visitors. Across the Merseyside districts penetration rates for St Helen’s and Knowsley are exceptionally low.

What does this tell us?

• Valuable information on where our educational ‘offer’ meets the needs or not of the different educational target groups. How to streamline the ‘offer’ so it is more accessible. We are working in a very competitive field with every cultural organisation in competition for educational visits
• More importantly the research provides the basis for a carefully structured marketing campaign, the success of which should be measurable against the trends established by the mapping exercise.