An Audience-Centric Approach for Museums Sustainability

The main purpose of this study is to propose a visitor centric perspective that can support museums towards sustainability. The main premise of this study is due to a concept of economic and social sustainability of museums, defined as the possession of sufficient resources to maintain the existence of an organization, and achieve their goals in the future, ensuring a certain flow of visitors. A great number of museums are characterized by a low number of visits; therefore, in order to become sustainable, museums should pay attention to audience and its internal diversity. In this way, a cultural site can plan tailored strategies to increase the number of visits and re-visits and to achieve community support. For this reason it is necessary to understand the cultural needs of visitors, acquiring appropriate monitoring tools, such as qualitative and quantitative ones. Generally, quantitative analyses are more reliable and complete, even if they require a considerable number of observations for the reliability of the results. Moreover, qualitative analysis provides more in depth information, even if their data do not allow us to make generalizations. The qualitative and quantitative methods for the detection of satisfaction are usually used separately, but their integration may bring significant added value in terms of the wealth of information. This study follows the analysis of the potential of the integration of qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques customized with respect to different types of targets. The results of the experimentation performed on ethnographic museums shows a consistency of the results obtained by the two different tools that increase the capacity information of survey instruments.