This evaluation tool helps institutions understand how they are perceived and experienced by their potential ticket-buyers or visitors—people they would like to attract and serve but who, for whatever reason, haven’t decided to attend. As its name implies, experience sampling involves inviting a handful of those non-attenders to attend as part of a research study, then tell us (in a focus group or interview) how they felt about it. We sometimes call these studies “immersion focus groups.”
In the museum and arts communities, it’s relatively easy to get current patrons to participate in research, so those are the audiences that get studied most often. But when it comes to growing or diversifying the audience by targeting new segments, non-profits need to learn about those non-patrons, as well. The best way to do that is sometimes the simplest: recruit individuals in the target segments to participate in a research study and ask them to attend one of your offerings as part of the research. Their responses to your program may be very different from those of your “core” audience, revealing current barriers and new potential pathways to engagement.
We conduct experience sampling studies when organizations want to enlarge or diversify their audiences for existing programming and need to understand how that programming—or the institution as a whole—is experienced by the target segments. Simple focus groups can tell you how your organization is perceived; experience sampling can tell you how it’s actually encountered and how well it “works” for the audiences you’re hoping to serve. Experience sampling studies are also used when organizations want to test innovations with current audiences.
Experience sampling research is structured as a “sandwich”: first, participants are interviewed about their perceptions and expectations. Then they attend the institution or program, often writing their responses in a diary that we provide. Finally, they are interviewed again or attend a focus group discussion about how the experience jibed with their perceptions and met their expectations.
