Listening to the audience

“They listened to my voice.” The sense of gratitude and relief in this remark is almost palpable. It reveals much about the motivations of the organisation carrying out the consultation, and the benefits of the process that created it. Visitor studies, public engagement and consultation have become more established in recent years within the cultural, heritage and public sectors. Organisations are experiencing tangible benefits as a result. Support, research and advocacy networks are helping to identify, understand, increase and diversify audiences. This activity and debate means we now have a wider range of innovative techniques at our disposal and a better understanding of the mutually beneficial potential of engagement with both participants and non-participants. Organisations recognise that consulting with people outside their organisation positively informs the development of public programming, physical, intellectual and emotional access, and often organisational cultural change.

Seeking the views of the recipients of our services can create three key outcomes.

• We fulfil their right to participate, and learn from their position as experts of their own experience. Analysing stakeholders’ importance and influence enables us to create bespoke methods of consultation. Appropriate levels of engagement also reduce consultation fatigue.
• Participants increase their knowledge and understanding of our organisations, enabling them to make informed responses.
• Sustainable relationships are created and participants become advocates with an enhanced sense of ownership. The process builds trust.

Many cultural organisations are highly motivated to carry out this work already, but external socio-economic and political trends are driving all public-facing organisations to consult with stakeholders. Funders of charitable and voluntary organisations are also seeking to demonstrate in their funding bids that their services are needed by end-users, through evaluating the results of public consultation. For example, The Heritage Lottery Fund uses Citizens’ Juries to help create public ownership of its work and its decision-making process.

Consultation methods

There are four broad methods of consultation, shown in the table below.

Conventional techniques such as part-structured interviews or questionnaires, can complement participatory techniques, as can focus groups and workshops which aim to engage a number of individuals in a discussion to explore issues collectively. Participatory techniques help groups create new knowledge together, through doing. Idea storms, visioning and mapping techniques generate a wide range of views. Ranking techniques, value continuums and graded scales probe and prioritise, and reveal conclusions and a hierarchy of choices. These techniques can engender community ownership in a way that some individual approaches cannot. We have found a number of best practice case studies across the UK:

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
National Museum Wales has revised its Royal Charter and now incorporates a new structure of public engagement. The Museum has created a framework to embed public ownership across the organisation’s seven national museums, enabling staff to undertake, evaluate and report on their department’s consultation activity. This work is co-ordinated centrally to create a balanced programme of activity across the organisation.

Inverness – Imaging the Centre
Building trust and creating public engagement were two of the aims of ‘Imagining the Centre’, part of the old town regeneration project developed by Inverness City Partnership. A further aim was to “lay the ground for other arts events [that] could inform a wider debate about Inverness’s cultural future”. It was important the project engaged with communities and with local artists, to celebrate their contributions to the Highlands. During one 12-hour event in the centre of Inverness, people were asked to write their views on the city, on a pair of pants. Responses were gathered and a documentary film was made. The innovative evaluation helped focus the vision for old town; a vision that directly responds to its community. Feedback included: “Inverness needs more of this”; “This whole art thing was… nae bad” and “This is the Highland capital. This is what we need.”

Museum of London – Belonging: Voices of London’s Refugees
During the Visitor Studies Group’s Conference ‘Out of the Comfort Zone: Exploring Sensitive Issues’, Frazer Swift, Head of Learning at the Museum of London, presented an evaluation of the exhibition ‘Belonging: Voices of London’s Refugees’ (www.museumoflondon.org). The exhibition aimed to reflect the complexity of experiences and identities of refugees in London over the past 50 years through personal memories and perspectives, and to increase understanding of their contribution to the life of the city. Consultation was critically important because the exhibition tackled a politically highly-charged subject with complex issues that aimed to challenge media stereotypes and public ignorance. It began more than 18 months in advance, with some groups meeting fortnightly until the opening. The significant aspect of the Museum’s approach was that “they listened to my voice” and embraced the views of others. Collaboratively, they created a programme that the refugee community could own. One participant in a refugee focus group commented, “When I came to the exhibition I felt really grateful – my heart was full of gratitude. I have been coming to the Museum of London for many years and never really felt like I belong here. Suddenly, I felt that they have accepted me, London has accepted me, and now I belong here, and they belong to me. I suddenly felt at ease with myself.” Frazer Swift stated, “Evaluation… not only enabled us to deliver a successful exhibition but has also changed the way the museum sees its relationship with its users and will have a long-term impact on the organisation.” The summative evaluation report concluded, “…the emotional impact of this exhibition was overwhelming. It is rare, as a visitor researcher, to encounter such engagement and impact during and as a result of one single experience of an exhibition… it was suggested by participants that one of the key interpretive media that had created this impact was the emphasis on people’s own stories…”