Museums Consultation Headline Results

This consultation was conducted on behalf of ASPIRE, a consortium of the Oxford University Museums and Oxfordshire County Council Museums Service.

The aim of the consultation was to discover how residents of Oxfordshire view the county’s museums, what encourages them to visit and what stops them from visiting more. We would like to thank the 216 respondents who participated in the consultation ‐ your feedback will help us make changes to our service to better engage the local community.

Congratulations to the winner of the £50 amazon voucher, Stewart from East Oxford.

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Only 3% of respondents had not visited a museum in Oxfordshire before, but 15% had not visited within the last two year.

98% of respondents who had visited one of the OU Museums would recommend them to a friend.

The number of respondents who had visited the Ashmolean, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, , Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock, and Museum within the last two years is shown in the table below.

Visited (within 2 years) 90 80 70 60 50 40 Visited (within 2 30 years) 20 10 0

The main reasons respondents gave for not visiting Oxfordshire’s museums more often were:

 Not enough time and not a priority  Museums not open in the evening  Transport/Parking expensive and difficult  Displays do not change often enough  Not child friendly  Not well advertised. Key activities that respondents indicated would encourage increased their likelihood to visit museums were:

 Special tours/behind the scenes tours  Talks on specific topics  Evening openings  Events with music, bar, etc.  Both family activities and opportunities to engage with the museum in a child‐free atmosphere.

Engaging audience online:

 68% of respondents said that they would prefer to find out information about What’s On at the museums on their websites, and 56% said that they would like to hear about things via social media ‐ As this was an online survey, these figures may be artificially inflated  The news (paper, radio and television), leaflets and posters were also considered popular sources of information.

Find out more about museums in Oxfordshire:

Oxfordshire Museums Council website

Oxford University Museums

Oxfordshire County Council Museums Service

Response key words: