Community Engagement-Attracting Audiences with Language Barriers

The United States population is growing every day and becoming more diverse by the minute is a conundrum that museums face constantly.  The communities surrounding museums are transforming through various ways such as by race, socio-economic status, culture, age, and gender.   The Center for the Future of Museums is an initiative from the American Alliance of Museums that studies the changing population by using the 2010 US Census. Their study provides future projections of how the population is becoming more diverse and examples of how different museums are engaging a variety of audiences in their community. It encourages museums to engage visitors from their surrounding communities to enhance individuals and the community as a whole. Many museums face the problem: How do we engage visitors from the community if they are immigrants who speak limited English with different perceptions of museums?  The study uses The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California and The Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, California as an example of how they implement ideas and programs to help answer this question.

Monterey Bay Aquarium in California- There is a growing Latino population in the Monterey Bay area in 1998; however, only eight percent of the growing population is attending the museum.  To alter this situation in 2002, the Aquarium executes a strategic marketing plan that specifically identifies the audience into subcategories. The Aquarium creates a plan for each of the two subcategories.  One of the subcategories is unacculterated Latinos who are: newly immigrants, pre-dominantly Spanish-speaking, larger families, and low incomes.  This subset has a very negative perception of The Aquarium. The plan to change their perception of the museum includes: advertising on Spanish television, radio and local newspapers. Offering discounts and hiring specific staff members to welcome them into the museum. The Aquarium organizes special events such as “Dia del Nino” and “Fiesta del Mar” to promote community involvement.  The Latino population increases from 8 to 24% by 2008 from their initiatives to engage the audience.

Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, California-The San Jose area has large Vietnamese-American population who migrates to the United States because of the Vietnam War. The museum quickly realizes that programs to attract Latino visitors do not work on the Vietnamese population.  Once the museum learns the complexities of the population they create a plan to engage the Vietnamese audience in 2002. They call the plan the “Vietnamese Audience Development Initiative.” One of the main parts of the plan was working with advisors from the Vietnamese community. Other parts of the plan include: adding Vietnamese cultural icons such as rice and bamboo into exhibits, inserting the Vietnamese language on signs and changing their perceptions of museums.  The most important information the museum learns and uses to engage the audience was their goals, expectations, and interests.