At the i.d.e.a. Museum, the information I need for my research is starting to fall into place!

I'll soon have access to the results for web traffic and the user survey, both from the i.d.e.a. Museum website. I'm also looking into all the schools and student groups that have visited the museum in the past year, and hopefully I can find patterns in that data in terms of school district, area, etc. In addition, I've continued to track activity on the Young Authors of Arizona Tumblr and the i.d.e.a. Museum Facebook page. Finally, I have data for the number of visitors who attend the i.d.e.a. Museum each week with coupons received at outreach events, which should give some indication of any patterns in the return on outreach. This is about six different sources of information to synthesize, so it should take some time, but I'm really excited.

In the next week or two, I'm hoping to hand out surveys for both the i.d.e.a. Museum and Young Authors of Arizona to collect more information about the current visitors/audience for their programs. But as of now, I'm not sure how large a sample size I'm going to be able to achieve for my surveys, which is a little worrying.

In addition, I would like to supplement this data using interviews with individuals who develop and use outreach programs, like the marketing director at the i.d.e.a. Museum or those involved in its partner programs.

I love a lot of the work I do at the i.d.e.a. Museum and with YAA that isn't directly connected with my project, so I do talk about that stuff quite a bit on this blog. I hope this post gives you all a better indication of where I am with my project and what exactly it entails!

Meanwhile, I'm preparing for Young Author's of Arizona's Publication Day event tomorrow, and it's gonna be a lot of fun. Because of that this update is brief, but I'll have a blog post up soon to let you know how the event goes!