Why COVES?
This system is designed by museum professionals, for museum professionals. By leveraging research tools within the field where they exist, we can build evaluation capacity where it doesn’t—and we can also stay true to the measurement issues that matter most to us.
COVES is designed to unite museums across the country in launching an effort to systematically collect, analyze, and report on visitor experience data. By facilitating collaboration and discussion, developing common instruments, and providing training on how to use these instruments and make sense of findings, COVES enables museums of all types to become data-driven organizations focused on their audiences while providing a platform that allows museums to learn from one another.
Is COVES Right For My Institution?
COVES is valuable for you institution if you want to…
- Build internal capacity around understanding your visitors;
- Use a set of common tools and measures developed by museum colleagues for the field; or
- Benchmark or compare your museum to other institutions, regionally or by size.
There are many other reasons to consider using COVES as your ongoing visitor data gathering system, but these will be specific to you.
The COVES Story
COVES was born out of a collective need across the science center and museum field for systematic, comparable visitor experience data... the initiative was initially driven by a need within several founding science centers which, in turn, helped us identify a larger field-wide need. Science centers wanted to answer questions about their visitors, but they also wanted to know the answers to larger questions, such as, “How do we compare to other museums?” Points of reference exist in other sectors, but few, if any, data points were relevant to the work of cultural institutions such as science museums. Additionally, while several individual institutions are already studying their own visitors’ experiences, the infrastructure to support collaboration across science museums is currently lacking. Conversations with colleagues at other science centers revealed that this need was shared by institutions across our field.
The first group of museums to come together to begin imagining a field-wide system for gathering and comparing visitor data was funded through a National Forum Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2011, Creating a Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (C-COVES) (LG-66-12-0634-12). Through this grant, the Museum of Science, Boston hosted a convening where experts representing all areas of the museum discussed the possibilities that creating a collaboration like COVES might bring about. 27 museum professionals from 11 science centers and three consulting organizations from across the United States spent 2 days together discussing the various objectives, outcomes, and potential pitfalls of such a collaborative endeavor. At the end of this convening, the consensus was that a project like COVES was worthwhile and necessary for the science center field as a whole, and we submitting our next grant proposal to the IMLS funding opportunity, National Leadership Grant for Museums.
The “Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies” (COVES) project (MG-20-14-0060-14) funded the development of the system that supports the COVES initiative. Running from November 2014 through September 2018, thanks to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the grant project focused our efforts, solidified relationships, and allowed us to build a process that worked for the 12 participating museums. The COVES initiative was officially born.
Since COVES’ inception in October 2014, we have solidified the primary instrument, which we use with the "Science+ cohort" of science centers and museums of varying sizes and locations nationwide. In 2021-2022, with support from another IMLS grant (COVES:Art), we worked with a cohort of art museums to explore whether COVES would be useful for art museums and revise the Science+ instrument to better meet the needs of art museums. The "Art cohort" has been gathering and exploring visitor data since July 2022, and an "Art Bridges cohort" supports small art museums in resourcing data collection and discussing the results.
