Centring audiences: What is the value of audience mapping for influencing public engagement with cultural heritage?

Centring audiences to improve collections use

To do this, we first need to know who our audiences are, and how they are currently being excluded from engaging with or participating in maritime heritage. That’s where our audience mapping research comes in.

What is audience mapping?

Audience mapping is a type of research that identifies and understands different audiences' needs, interests, and motivations.

At MOLA we carry out audience mapping for many of our developer-led projects, as well as our research projects, so we were able to build on this experience. This included adapting our methods to account for the strengths and weaknesses of audience mapping – your research is only as good as the data you have access to.

For our Unpath’d research we compared audience data (that’s interviews, web analytics, reports, feedback forms and more!) from 18 organisations involved in maritime heritage, including museums, archives and citizen science projects. This helps us see how people engage with and access maritime heritage and who the current audience is.

The current audience for maritime heritage is quite narrow: they are generally white, from older age groups, and with high levels of education. Our research has helped us home in on three target audiences for Unpath’d Waters, who each face different barriers in engaging with maritime collections. This means we can focus on ensuring their access to and inclusion in co-design and development activities.

Access refers to the ability for individuals to meaningfully participate in our activities. Inclusion refers to a person’s sense of feeling welcomed, respected, and able to ‘be themselves’ in contexts related to Unpath’d Waters.

The three key audiences we studied

1. Non-coastal/ inland communities who do not identify with the sea.

   Much of the UK population lives inland and has limited access to the sea. This audience group also includes people who live close to the sea but choose not to – or cannot – engage with it.
    

2. Cross-disciplinary natural science and cultural researchers.

   Non-archaeological and non-maritime specialists who currently don’t use the national virtual maritime heritage collection as part of their research.
    

3. People who are visually impaired (with either sight impairment or severe sight impairment)

   Archaeological data is often visual and technologies that Unpath’d will use to bring maritime heritage to a new audience - such as VR - focus on visual immersion.

What have we learnt

As well as developing an understanding of how our target audiences for the Unpath’d Waters project are being served by existing maritime heritage institutions, our research has also revealed important findings about effective audience research and mapping within the heritage sector. You can read more about these in detail in the article.

• To make our activities truly inclusive and accessible, our engagement AND evaluation must be designed collaboratively by individuals with lived experience and organisations that support them.

• Pre-existing audience data and population data can be useful, as it helps us identify groups or individuals we can collaborate with. It can also help us identify important issues. However, this data cannot be taken at face value.

• We need to revamp heritage evaluation. It must address access requirements PLUS individuals’ inclusion needs, communication habits, tastes, and interests. If we don’t, we aren’t collecting the right information and the data we have isn’t useful.