Hello Jill,

[I use the digest form of Museum-L so please excuse me if someone has covered this already.]

While survey kiosks are definitely a time saver, I see two main problems with unattended survey kiosks as a way of finding out who your visitors are:
1) It is up to the visitor whether they participate or not so as a result of self-selection the results will not represent your actual audience
2) Some visitors (both young and old) will fool around and have fun "playing" with the survey - sometimes this isn't even obvious enough to figure out if you should throw out data or not

In my own experience, I've found that when people self-select for feedback you typically end up with two groups: 1) those who want to reward a positive experience and give high marks, and 2) those who want to tell you what you did wrong and give low marks. Therefore, you miss that middle group who may not be motivated enough to seek out a feedback mechanism. In some cases this may be your largest group of visitors! You end up with an either/or interpretation - people either love us or they hate us, which is simply an artifact of the data collection process.

However, I am not anti-survey kiosks because they can be a big time saver for data entry if you have someone stationed to randomly select - see paragraph below - who uses the survey kiosk. You would then end up with data that are representative of your overall visitation. The kiosks can be set up so you can download data on a daily (or more frequent) basis. So I do see them as a great way to get results quickly when you're controlling who fills it out, but not very accurate when left on their own. 

If you are trying to figure out who your visitors are and want to talk about visitors with a capital "V" as I refer to them (all the visitors) there are well-established, although more time and resource intensive, ways to do this. You will need to have someone out there randomly selecting visitors (perhaps as they cross a line, real or imaginary) so that each person visiting that day has the same likelihood of being asked to participate. This is the only way to be confident that the data represent your Visitors - and you'll definitely want to be confident when reporting to senior staff and the Board. We also make sure we cover both weekends and weekdays, as well as different times during the day. Afternoon visitors can sometimes be slightly different from morning visitors, and the visitor experience itself can vary as well. 

If you are looking for some further advice about this topic please contact me off-list and I'll be happy to help.

My ten cents,

Steve



Steven Yalowitz, Ph.D.
Audience Research Specialist
Monterey Bay Aquarium
886 Cannery Row
Monterey, CA 93940
phone: 831-647-6844
fax: 831-644-7583
email: [log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
Date:    Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:53:27 -0500
From:    Jill Santuccio <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Survey Kiosks

Hello all! I am the new director of marketing at the Levine Museum of the
New South (Charlotte, NC) and one of my first charges is data collection,
data collection, data collection. I would love to hear any advice or
thoughts (i.e. good vendors) on installing a kiosk in our lobby to have
visitors take a survey on their way out ... and possibly having other
stuff (restuarant recommendations, downtown map) on it. Since I am new to
the list-serve, I apologize if this is a topic that has already been
covered.
Thanks in advance  ...
Jill

Jill Santuccio
Director of Marketing
Levine Museum of the New South
200 E. Seventh Street
Charlotte, NC 28202
www.museumofthenewsouth.org
704-333-1887 x258
704-333-1896 fax

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