Open Forum

Hi all!

I'm the Visitor Services Coordinator at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and I am looking into what other museums/institutions currently have in place for their visitor intake. If anyone has any info for my following questions, it would be most appreciated!

• Do you check-in visitors and ask for any demographic information? (i.e. zip codes, affiliation to a university/city, anything else that is needed for museum data?)
• If you use stanchions, do you find they help with directing visitors to where they need to go?
• For reporting, what programs do you use and how often to you run reports on visitor attendance? We currently use Airtable to check-in guests and get both hourly and daily attendance numbers.
• If you have a volunteer program, do you utilize them for visitor services or for other departments? And how many volunteers do you have active in your roster?

I am happy to connect and discuss more about what we do at the Cantor as well as just talk about museum life in general! Thanks so much!

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Kelsey Chung
Visitor Services Coordinator
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
kdchung@stanford.edu
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Hi! Glad you've brought this up. I work at a relatively small museum, so we can use a simple form for each visitor/group of visitors.

We count them, ask whether they've been in before, and try to see if they're local to our area, from Colorado, the US, or elsewhere.

Looking to change to a good way/program/website to keep track of daily numbers somewhere for end-of-year reviews for 2026. Any suggestions?  
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Megan Rusby
Community Engagement Manager
Powers Art Center
Carbondale CO
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Hi Kelsey, 

I'd be happy to talk with you more about what I've done and am doing in my role. I've worked in visitor services for the past 15 or so years in arts, science, and natural history museums. I've used a number of programs, including Survey Sparrow, Survey Monkey, Microsoft Forms, and Google Forms, to track attendance, and all have their positives and negatives. Grants tend to drive the data collected as part of our reporting process; I'd be interested to learn more about how you use the data you're collecting. 

Please feel free to reach out!

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Sarah Graves PhD
Curator of Academic Learning and Engagement
Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts
Birmingham AL
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