ArtsMarketing.org

One of the visitor groups that marketers struggle to accommodate is families. One bad experience can alienate multiple generations of potential museum visitors, and deter other families from visiting through word-of-mouth. On the other hand, a positive cultural outing can start a lifelong love of the arts with kids, and engage their parents with a new institution or art form.

What do families with young children need when they visit a museum filled with modern and contemporary art? Most importantly, they need to know that that they are genuinely welcomed! Some may appreciate having a bit of assistance from museum professionals as they take their kids-and themselves-through galleries encountering art that they may not know much about.

Though all families with children have a basic need to be acknowledged and welcomed upon entering a museum, not all families visiting the Guggenheim Museum with children are the same. Our visitors are a microcosm of our global/local society and thus quite varied. Many are international tourists, including some who have limited fluency in English. Some may be neighborhood regulars who may also be members. Others can be low income and/or low literacy families, who come to us through the wonderful organization Cool Culture, which provides families with passes for free admission to many museums in New York City. What is clear from observing the range of families that come through our doors is that, regardless of their background, they all deal with many of the same challenges:

• Kids have limited attention spans
• Adults may have little/or no prior knowledge of the works of art on view
• Adults are concerned about how to talk about art with their children
• Audio guides are not developmentally appropriate for children and separate family members from each other
• Kids need something to do

What then, can a museum like the Guggenheim do to help families make their visit more meaningful and exciting so that they leave saying "wow; that was cool, let's do it again sometime!" Art museums, including the Guggenheim, have considered this question for a while and have come up with some solutions. The list of options includes:

• Special guided family tours led by museum educators that may even include a studio workshop component
• Big annual Family Day events which turns the museum into a total family extravaganza for a few hours-bringing in hundreds of families together.
• A printed scavenger hunt that provides a map suggesting several stops and activities. (Here is a link to the Guggenheim's current Architecture Activity Guide)
• A child-centered audio tour with tour stops and information tailored to the interest of younger visitors

The Guggenheim's family programs guiding principal is to provide opportunities for families to engage with and explore art and architecture in the museum-actively communicating with each another. Given the high volume of visitors that the Museum serves-over a million per year-we decided to offer a new kind of program. One that any family would be able to use any time they chose to come to the museum. No reservations or pre-planning would be required. We were going to create a Family Activity Pack that would incorporate our core beliefs about what makes a museum experience for families successful. This program would combine our printed activity guide format, with our guided tours methodology and also include best ‘tricks of the trade'. The pack would be a well designed, pre-curated, child centered, open ended, hands on interactive thematic experience ... in a bag.

The plan included the following pedagogical guidelines:

• Open-ended conversations, with questions that don't have a right or wrong answer
• Extended viewing, encouraging families to sit down in front of artworks
• Limiting the number of artworks that are explored to between three and six
• Hands-on activities that encourage careful looking, while participants were engaged in conversations, writing, drawing, puzzles solving, board games and drama activities with each other.

After conversations with other departments including curatorial, conservation and visitor services, we put together a broader plan that included design, budget, conceptual and some logistical guidelines including:

• Packs would be produced on a shoestring budget
• There would be 5-7 packs available to check out-free of charge-at the information desk.
• Each pack would be in the form of a backpack or shoulder bag that would be comfortable to carry
• Convenient location of pack dissemination-at the information desk
• Families leave some form of ID as they check the pack, and when they are done, they return the pack and receive their Id back
• Inside each pack there would be items like sketch books, colored pencils, games, books, and puzzles that can be bought at a toy store or an art supply store which would always need to be approved by the conservation and curatorial departments.
• In each pack, there would be a laminated activity guide (format TBD) that would serve as the tour framework for families and provide all the information that the adults would need.

Our first Family Activity Packs were offered to the public almost two years ago. We have not looked back since. Two years later, the packs, have become a staple of our offerings. As initially conceived, they provide suggestions and materials that allow parents to offer a varied, multimodal, child-centered, interactive experience for their entire family to enjoy together and explore at their own pace. The text is written in a way that is accessible to younger children, while the explorations are open and rich enough that parents and older siblings, including teens, can appreciate and enjoy.

One of the best parts of having the packs available is that they allow the Guggenheim Education staff to provide parents/adults a modeling framework for how to engage kids, and each other, in meaningful, conversations around art-even when educators are not in the galleries to guide them through such an experience. The main message is that one doesn't need to be an art expert to appreciate and enjoy an art museum. Art relates to everyday life experiences; art relates to everyone!" Hopefully some of the methods offered in the pack for engaging with art are transferable to other art exploration experiences in other settings.

The public's reaction to the packs has been very positive. Below are a few comments from our evaluations:

• "The Family Pack was especially helpful for the parents because we aren't able to listen to the audio guide or read all the written material when accompanied by children. "
• "This made our visit much more fun. Thank you!"
• "It helped keep little people engaged! -We appreciated the idea!"
• "It is terrific as it is, there is something for everyone."

Our work is ongoing. Aside from creating new pack material for every major exhibition, we are constantly thinking of ways to improve the pack in content, presentation and dissemination. Some challenges we still face include:

• Size and weight of the pack is still not ideal. We would love to have back packs but those are not allowed in the museums. Currently we have side bags which are typically carried by the parents who sometimes complain that they are a bit heavy.
• Many families fail to see the T sign and the e sign for the family packs. We are trying different ways of ensuring that all visiting families are aware that the packs are available free of charge for them to use.
• The check-out location for the pack is at the Information Desk, which is right at the entrance to the rotunda/lobby. The area that is extremely busy and loud, not ideal for families.
• The packs require a brief 5 minute orientation so that volunteers need to be available to distribute and provide basic user information. Since these volunteers are also general museum volunteers, they are not always available.
• We still need to better serve families that do not have fluency in English or in reading. Though even they enjoy our packs which have strong visuals and many hands on components, we are currently thinking about creating a pack with directions that are all symbol or cartoon-based.
• We would like to get a higher rate of evaluations completed. Parents are harried and ready to leave by the time they drop off their packs at the end of their visit. We are attempting to reach them via internet based evaluation tools.

The Guggenheim's Family Activity Packs are always available when the museum is open to the public, ready to guide all the hard working, harried, sleep-deprived parents who want to provide their kids and themselves with educational and enjoyable artistic experiences-whenever they have the time. Please come and visit-and bring the kids!

For more information, click here