Reports, Conferences, and Publications
COVES Aggregate Report - CY25: A Closer Look
Dive in to our newest aggregate report, where we take a closer look at visitors and their unique identities. In this report we explore the question: How do different visitors perceive our museums and the experiences offered?
The data shared in Understanding Our Visitors: A Closer Look were ...
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COVES Aggregate Report - FY25
Happiest of Septembers, COVES community! We are excited to bring you our fourth fiscal year aggregate report. This year's report includes data from 84 member institutions, including art, children's, natural history, and science museums. The data in this report were collected between July 2024...
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COVES Aggregate Report - CY24
Does your annual reporting cover the calendar year, instead of the July-June fiscal year that COVES usually reports? We have good news for you! This year's Annual Visitor Snapshot includes data for January - December 2024 collectively gathered at 78 COVES institutions across the United States. In th...
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Understanding Museum Visitors Today (Visitor Studies Journal 2024)
The COVES team authored a peer-reviewed journal article using aggregated visitor experience data collected at 54 COVES member museums and positions as a response to questions from the visitor studies field in the 1990s about who visits museums. Read the article here: Understanding Museum Visitors To...
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COVES Aggregate Report - FY24
We’re back at it with the third aggregate report from COVES! Since our last report, COVES has grown substantially and now represents a wider variety of museum types, including art, children’s, history, natural history, and science. In this report we share data from July 2023 ̵...
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COVES Aggregate Report - FY19
The second aggregate report for the field from COVES is here! Here is the aggregate report of all of the data gathered by 21 museums in the past year, free to the field. This report is the second of its kind, and one we hope will spur conversations in your institution about who our visitor...
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COVES Aggregate Report - FY18
At long last… the FIRST aggregate report for the field from the COVES initiative! After 3 years of building, testing, tweaking, discussing, and finally launching the system for gathering ongoing visitor information from across science centers, science museums, and other museums ...
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Visitor Data in an International Context (VSA 2024)
Large-scale research initiatives spanning the U.S., U.K., and Germany share high-level trends comparing international visitor experience data for the first time. COVES (U.S.), MAGIC (U.K.), and LePAS (Germany) contribute findings showing similarities and differences in museum audiences, the metrics ...
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Sharing is Comparing (Ecsite 2024)
Using data from three large-scale research initiatives (spanning cities and nations), this session shared insights to help the sector respond to and expand the use of visitor-related data. Spanning the U.S.A, U.K., and Germany, findings were shared from three projects, each of which seek to enhance ...
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Better understanding visitors through data
This session presented visitor data and shared experiences from participation in the Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experience Studies (COVES), a national project designed to unite museums in systematically collecting audience-level data, with a focus on institutional and field-wide improvement.
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