Does your organization conduct surveys or have you conducted surveys of your visitorship?

If so, I would like to hear from you, specifically:

-How many people did you survey?
-What kind of questions did you ask?
-Was this information helpful, in what way?
-Were you able to better target advertising and marketing?
-Did you identify any visitor trends you didn't know about?

Any help would be appreciated.

David W.

For the past two years, the Colfax RR Museum has requested visitors to sign the guest book, with address, and we've asked how they heard of us. We have had extremely good response with our radio ads.

We have done a daily survey asking for zip codes. We learned that many of our visitors came from the county surrounding the Museum with the second highest total from the suburbs in Northern Virginia.

Wesley

My "real job" is with a consumer show promotion company, so advertising and marketing to the public is a big part of what I do. We hand a survey form to everyone who buys a ticket asking for name/address/e-mail; it also asks where they heard about the event and whether they've been before. This information has been extremely useful in gauging the effectiveness of, and targeting, our advertising. Asking for contact information, particularly e-mail addresses, is highly recommended as a way to encourage repeat business. In my experience, someone who has come to your museum once is more likely to come again (assuming, of course, that they had a reasonably good time), and e-mailing prior visitors is fairly easy and provides a much better ROI than mass-media advertising.