Visitor Survey Reveals Our Visitors
NZ FOSSILS - DEAD PRECIOUS! and HOCHSTETTER - FATHER OF NZ GEOLOGY have now closed
and I can report that we had a total of 11,840 visitors to the exhibitions. This
is two thirds of all visitors to the Museum between 9 May and 27 September. Of the
total visitors one third had free admission either because they were pre-schoolers,
school students in education groups or were part of the extra FREE week so ably
promoted by The Nelson Mail and More FM - 900 people in the last nine days alone.
Amongst the overall total 2433 school students did curriculum related programmes
devised by our Education team. If you add the children who attended with families
my estimate would be that we have seen one in three of the school aged children
of the region through the exhibition. This is a marvellous result.
For the record, based on 300 surveys we completed of visitors during the season,
we estimate that over 70% of the visitor total are people from the Nelson-Tasman
region. The balance is split evenly between other parts of NZ and International
visitors. The satisfaction rating shows that two thirds of those surveyed rated
the exhibitions 8,9,10 on a 10 point scale.
For two thirds of the visitors this was not their first visit to our Provincial
Museum. If we had to generalise which is always a bit dangerous I would say we had
a very strong uptake from loyal local families, parents in the 31-50 demographic
with children under 12 years. For more than 80% of visitors the specific reason
they attended was to see this exhibition and the main sources of information was
the trusty 'word of mouth' and very large numbers who cited the newspaper and the
radio. The signage on the street is very important for visitors to the region and
electronic media more frequently used by the younger visitors. 1400 email newsletters
a month are now being sent out and many of these are to children in families.
Promotion is important but exhibitions do not just happen. In this case there was
huge intellectual input from GNS Science coupled with major financial support from
Shell NZ. That created it. Bringing it to Nelson was quite an expensive process
and the support of the Cawthron Trust made it possible. The enhancements to the
exhibition were made possible with financial support of local business and private
sources. Neither should we neglect the fact that The Nelson Provincial Museum exists
due to the ongoing support we enjoy from our two co-funding councils; Nelson City
Council and Tasman District Council.
|
