Art Fund – Understanding and exploring the behaviour of your audience

Art Fund came to us for help with an intriguing question. What can museums and galleries offer an increasingly stressful society?

Museums and galleries are places where we can all reflect, learn, and find time to care for ourselves. And yet we rarely visit on a regular basis.  Art Fund wanted to know if increasing our physical engagement would improve our sense of personal wellbeing, and help us to find greater satisfaction in our lives. 

As the national fundraising charity for art, Art Fund is a passionate advocate of UK museums and galleries and the creative organisations that bring the nation’s collections to life. They wanted to create a rousing call to action: to champion wellbeing and help us tackle stress by taking back time to do what really matters to us.

Our brief was to help Art Fund understand how stressed we are as a nation and what we can do to combat our feelings of anxiety. Then they wanted to see if regularly visiting a museum has any impact on our feelings of happiness.

This required a two stage approach. We started, as always, with the research. We generated an extensive set of data using the Delineate platform. From this we gathered insights from adults of all ages across the UK. We explored about stressed they feel, how they use their free time, and the impact this has on personal wellbeing and happiness. 

This gave us the framework for a smaller qualitative study focused on the personal experience of visiting museums and galleries. Over the course of four weeks, participants recorded their activities and were regularly interviewed about their thoughts and experiences.

While other variables may be at play, our research supported Art Fund’s premise that people who visit museums and galleries regularly are happier with their lives than those who don’t visit at all.

Our findings were published in the Art Fund’s thought leadership white paper – “Calm and Collected”  which features on their website. They were also able to link this to the benefits of National Arts Pass which provides free entry and discounts to museums, galleries and historic places.