Understanding Our Visitors: FY18 COVES Report

The Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (COVES) is designed to unite science centers across the country to systematically collect, analyze, and report on visitor experience data. We envision a collaborative museum community seeking to better understand and improve the visitor experience. We believe that studying the visitor experience in science centers—who visits a particular museum, why they visit, what they experience during their visit, and how they react to different aspects of their experience—can help organizations learn about their visitors, make evidence-based decisions about services and programming, and respond to challenges, interests, and concerns in a visitor-centered manner. This report represents the first presentation of our aggregate data and findings to the science center field. It contains data collected between July 2017 and June 2018 in multiple science centers in the United State and Canada.