What is COVES?

COVES (“Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies”) is a system that provides for the ongoing collection of meaningful data about museum* visitors, allowing museum leaders to make data-informed decisions, while providing relevant points of comparison within our industry.

* The COVES initiative, system, and instrument was originally focused on the experiences and needs of science centers. The initiative is expanding to support museums of all types, creating unique instruments as necessary to meet the needs of different types of institutions: anthropology, aquaria, art, history museums or historic sites, botanical and zoological, science, natural history, children’s, planetarium, and visitor center. 

Goals

COVES seeks to achieve the following:

  1. Establish a sustainable, responsive program to support museums of all sizes and types across the country to engage collaboratively in ongoing visitor experience studies;
  2. Create a coalition of museums focused on understanding and improving the visitor experience;
  3. Integrate visitor data collection and analysis across a diverse range of museums in order to build field-wide knowledge and understanding of museum audiences and their experiences;
  4. Build the evaluation capacity of museums across the nation; and
  5. Increase and enhance the use of visitor data-based decision-making among museum professionals.

Get Involved