Over the past decade, museums and galleries have made huge efforts to open their doors to families. Lindsay Brooks looks at the progress of these initiatives and ponders the issues facing organisations wishing to be more family friendly.
In the early 1990s, taking children to museums and galleries was often a high-risk strategy. Unless your choice was a big science museum, you could easily end up with bored, fractious, whining kids alienated by barriers and difficult labels, with nothing nice to eat or drink at the end of the visit and, most important of all, nothing really to do. Today, we can take the huge re-orientation towards the family in museums and galleries for granted. It would now seem surprising if even the smallest museum didnt have some kind of family activity during the school holidays. There are plenty of opportunities to touch and explore within exhibition design, baby-changing facilities are considered standard and childrens lunch boxes are provided in the café. So what brought about this change of heart? And have we arrived at a truly family-friendly arts scene?
Family focus
Back in 1994, I launched a collaborative audience-development scheme linking Greater Manchester museums and galleries (and later theatres), calling it, for ease of recognition, Family Friendly. This was within the audience development agency Arts About Manchester, where I was funded by the Arts Council to trial different ideas to increase the numbers and broaden the range of visitors to museums and galleries, in an early attempt to pilot and evaluate such projects systematically.
Choosing families as a special focus was not exactly taking an imaginative leap. It was a target market offering huge potential: after all, just over half the population lives in family groups. There was also growing interest within the arts sector in programming for families. The timing was right. But it soon became obvious that Family Friendly had to be far more than a collaborative marketing campaign if it was to increase visits: it challenged museums and galleries to look at every aspect of their provision. Twelve years on, there are numerous arts organisations that brand themselves as family friendly, whether as part of a structured Family Friendly collaborative scheme or independently. Whatever the context, the process of establishing an organisation-wide policy is generally accepted as a first step. Back in the 90s, we debated the general principles that any museum using the term should demonstrate. With the help of a family panel, we eventually defined these as:
" encouraging social interaction between family members
" recognising that physical interaction with the environment is important for children
" recognising that provision cannot be based on a narrow age band
" providing a welcome throughout the organisation, and making sure that all the right comfort factors are in place.
These seem just as valid today. In fact its very similar to the list drawn up in 2003 by Guardian journalist Dea Birkett when she began her influential campaign, Kids in Museums. At the time, however, the list seemed hopelessly optimistic. We had endless discussions about how to reconcile existing adult visitors with hordes of noisy families disrupting their experience, how to persuade old-style invigilators to welcome small children rather than scowl at them and how we could make sure family-friendliness permeated the whole buildings programme.
The ongoing debate was how to balance education and entertainment and whether Family Friendly was going to be seen by curators as dumbing down. Today, these battles have largely either been fought and won or theyve simply faded into the background in the face of good practice and demonstrably huge demand. Gallery and museum invigilation now requires as much emphasis on visitor experience as security. Education and entertainment are accepted as different points on the same axis, along which a family visitor is happy to travel.
Building knowledge
The most radical change, however, has been in the area of programming. When we first launched Family Friendly, the photocopied quiz sheet and occasional workshop was generally the extent of what was on offer. Across the country and across all scales of organisation there can now be found examples of imaginative family activity. There are dedicated spaces for families in most museums and galleries, ranging from a corner won from gallery space, to Manchester Art Gallerys Clore Interactive Gallery or the Walker Art Gallerys new Big art for little artists. The activity bag or backpack available on entrance is commonplace yet was a new-fangled American idea in 1994, first adopted only by the V&A.
The more recent rise of interest in e-learning culture has begun to spill into family learning, with interactive games on websites. Improved provision goes hand in hand, now, with serious thought given to family learning outcomes. Its supported by another change in staffing emphasis: the growing number of posts created specifically to deliver family programmes. In the 90s, apart from research into how to design science interactives for families, we had little on which to base our ideas. As the profession (and especially gallery education) has become far more theorised, and evaluation more thorough and sophisticated, so family programmes have been developed from research findings. Perhaps one of the biggest developments over the last few years is the increased focus on the needs of pre-school children. A landmark exhibition in this development was the revolutionary exhibition Start for under 5s and their carers at Walsall Art Gallery in 1995 which used art to trigger play-based learning. Now this age group is routinely considered within activity planning.
So how has marketing to families evolved within Family Friendly schemes? As with most other markets, family marketing has benefited enormously over the years from increasingly sophisticated use of websites and email. This has added yet another cost-effective reason for collaborative practice.
But maybe one of the most noticeable developments is the proliferation (in larger organisations at least) of publicity material specifically for families. Capturing data in non-ticketed venues has always been a problem, but the offer of information precisely relevant to a familys needs now helps us gather email and postal addresses more easily.
For the purposes of marketing, the original Family Friendly definition of a family (after much debate!) was at least one adult with at least one child of 14 or under. We saw the term family as a universal concept everyone can relate to, choosing to define their own membership. It seems the jury is still out on whether a more segmented definition of the many facets of relationship within a family can help or hinder marketing. Are the needs, motivations and expectations of, for example, children with grandparents, single-parent families or lads and dads different in any way? Do we need subtly different communication methods for them? Does a more nuanced definition of the family open up opportunities to reach new visitors or does it needlessly complicate targeting?
Changing landscape
Perhaps the biggest influence on the growth of Family Friendly schemes, however, has been the political and societal climate in which we now all operate. Family-orientated government initiatives now exist in most spheres of life, particularly employment and education, and the expectations of families looking for leisure choices have risen accordingly. Current initiatives like Every Child Matters and Surestart, for example, have provided a larger context in which we can work. It is these wider frameworks, all under the umbrella of late 90s social inclusion, that have helped to change the landscape for Family Friendly. Its a heartening exercise to look back at how many arts organisations were not simply developing family-friendly policies in response to political or funding initiatives, but pre-empting them.
And where do we go from here? Weve made great progress but there are still challenges. We often still forget that being family friendly doesnt simply mean catering for children, and ensuring families are comfortable in each one of our exhibitions is still a goal for most of us. There are also possible benefits to explore in the integration of Family Friendly with other programmes such as outreach and formal education. It's still a huge market out there and although we've increased our share, we have yet to convince many more families to take a risk and explore the arts.
Lindsay Brooks is Head of Galleries at The Lowry.
e: lindsay@thelowry.com
Copies of the report on the original Family Friendly campaign are available from Arts About Manchester.
e: intray@aam.org.uk