Hi MZATUG!
I'm curious how everyone is handling attendance for digital programs or virtual tours, in particular those programs that don't require registration like Facebook live, Premiere videos, or virtual gallery/site tours. Do you count views that just come in the day of the "live" event? All views within 1 week? 1 month? In perpetuity? And are you entering those numbers into Tessitura somehow?
We currently have a handful of small, controlled on-site art classes and a number of virtual events/programs, most of which require a registration so we're able to get good attendance data. But content that's just out there for open viewing has us scratching our heads. We want to count something but also need the ability to clearly define what we're entering since attendance data is used extensively on grant applications.
Thanks in advance!
Jeff
Hi,
Not sure if this is helpful but a few months ago we put together an internal team to document, define, and report on our "virtual visitors". We could not find any standards out there so we developed our own. We call it the Virtual Visitor Report and publish monthly. Our Marketing and Education team collaborated to lead the charge on this. Some data is tracked in Tessitura through performances and the rest is pulled through either web or social analytics.
Here are few notes from our internal documentation:
A virtual visitor is a person who engages with the museum by consuming digital content created in support of the educational mission and published via a museum-affiliated website, social channel, or digital content distribution partner. Driven by an educational goal or curiosity, a virtual visitor may read text, watch a video, search the digital archive, listen to a podcast or participate in a virtual program. Museum-generated content for virtual visitors is delivered by the following platforms: (list of platforms).
Virtual Visitor Reporting Method
Virtual visitors fall into two categories: Asynchronous digital content consumer and synchronous education program attendee.
Asynchronous digital content consumer: defined as virtual visitors who visit webpages and social channels for content. These visitors are reported by unique pageviews for a minimum of one-minute.
In instances where time spent on the webpage is unavailable, unique page views is reported (IGTV). For the podcast, the monthly total pageviews over one minute are reported*
Synchronous educational program attendee: defined as virtual visitors who engage with the museum through participating in a synchronous (live) program delivered via technology (livestream or Zoom). These visitors are counted for the live program as well as the 24-hour views, when applicable.
Per the same strategy as asynchronous digital content consumers, reporting represents visitors who watched or experienced a program for a minimum of one-minute.** (Virtual program attendance is saved in the performance record in Tessitura.)
Views of live content and premier content will generally be considered “synchronous” for the first 24 hours, and then “asynchronous” if the content remains available on-demand beyond that period.***
Internal publishing of results: Results on Virtual Visitors will be published on the last Tuesday of each month.
* We are unable to gather unique page views over one minute for Google Arts & Culture
** For Instagram, we are unable to ascertain viewers over one minute. InstagramLive participation reported represents total unique views. As of Oct 6, viewership for LIVE or PREMIER Songwriter Sessions is calculated by adding YouTube Live playbacks (total views during live), Total Views from YouTube in a 24-hour window (post-live), Total Views from Livestream (including embed), and total views from Facebook over a 1:00 threshold. Unfortunately, due to platform analytics, Facebook is the only platform where we can isolate consumer behavior on a minimum time viewed basis; all other metrics are a 1:1 ratio.
***Reporting process for synchronous content that is initially distributed as LIVE or PREMIER which then becomes ON-DEMAND. As of January 25, 2021.
Asynchronous reporting continues as previously defined. Data from the platforms will include TOTAL views, so synchronous viewers will be subtracted to prevent double reporting.
Hope that is somewhat helpful!
This is considerably more than somewhat helpful! Thank you for sharing, Kaley. This confirms a lot of our initial feelings and I love the idea of putting it into a well defined document.