Find out how to use focus groups and user panels to evaluate experiences, exhibitions, events or programmes in museums and galleries.
Focus groups and user panels bring together small groups of people to talk about specific topics, usually as part of a facilitated conversation with an evaluator. They can help you with many aspects of museum work, like finding out the opinions of visitors or non-visitors, selecting objects for exhibitions, contributing to text, or reviewing displays.
Our Impact Evaluation Resource guides you through the whole process, from planning your evaluation through to what to do with the data. The full resource is available for download at the bottom of this page.
A focus group is usually made up a group of people who come together to talk about subjects that the museum wants to evaluate. They might meet a few times, but usually over a constrained period such as a few weeks or a couple of months. A user panel usually meets for a longer period of time (many months or a year) and might look at many different parts of museum work. They can be flexible techniques that can help you to dig deeply into areas where you want to understand the perspective of specific audiences. User panels and focus groups can give you targeted and rich results. You can use them to have more sustained conversations, and feedback on a wide range of your work. They can both take a lot of time: the recruitment, session facilitation, and analysis of results can all be highly resource intensive. They can be financially costly too, especially when you compensate the participants for their time and travel. You will have to work out whether you have the skills to facilitate this in house, or if you need to hire an external facilitator.
Both focus groups and user panels are fantastic opportunities to build relationships with audiences. Carefully planned and sensitively run, you can uncover a wealth of information about your museum and its programmes.
If you would like to learn more about carrying out your own evaluation study using focus or user groups, download our Impact Evaluation Resource, which includes information on how to do it, some basic ideas of what to do with the results, ethics, safety and security and a helpful list of further reading.
If you have any questions, or would like any support or guidance on your own evaluation projects, please feel free to get in touch: info@museums.cam.ac.uk
