Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, AZ
Research for Audience Development

The Desert Botanical Garden is a spectacular desert landscape. No wonder they attract so many visitors — especially during the peak months for ‘snowbirds’ from northern climes (by the way, ‘snowbirds’ are people, not birds). But senior staff wanted to reach farther and do better with interpretation. They engaged Judy Rand, Rand & Associates (Seattle), and Judy said you’re going to need to understand who your audience is and what they’re thinking, and so they engaged us too. A successful proposal to IMLS made it possible with matching funds from the Garden.

The process of creating an Interpretive Master Plan (IMP) is not so simple — if it were, everyone would have one. In this case, a series of workshops stimulated staff to talk about what they knew (about their appeal, their audiences, patterns of behavior, etc.), and what they would like to know (more detail about their visitors, about what kinds of interpretation could connect with a wider range of audiences including families, etc.). It was particularly clear that the collected team of professionals needed to know whether visitors were actually interested in interpretation – a small proportion sought it out in the audio tours and guided tours, but what about the others?

Adults visiting DBG without children, receptive to interpretive information, are more common than the other three segments (FAMs, R-nots, F-nots).

So we undertook a major visitor study over the peak season (February through April), getting great cooperation from visitors (despite pushing the limit on how many questions we were asking). The analysis really helped to clarify many issues: one interesting outcome was that among various possibilities, three primary factors differentiated the experience of the variety of visitors: prior visits or not, the presence of children in the group or not, and interest in interpretation or not. Five ‘audience segments’ were defined from relevant variables, yielding the finding that 80% of the visitor audience were receptive to interpretive information (btw, we took great care to make sure this finding was not based on ‘leading’ questions).

Judy Rand’s thorough and thought-provoking Interpretive Master Plan led to two immediate experiments — one about the entry/orientation experience, and one about a design element for the proposed Horticulture Center (now built). DBG’s liaison on the project, Elaine McGinn, Director of Exhibits, takes the IMP binder to every meeting and now the Big Idea, a series of 10 principles, visitors’ strong interests in two topics, and departmental input work together in a coordinated way to shape planning, interpretation, and visitor experience. (You should go there; you won’t be disappointed!)