Stafford Air & Space Museum Research Report

At the beginning of my senior year at the University of Oklahoma, I took a public relations research class where we had the exciting opportunity to work with real-life clients to try our hand at research to help meet future goals for the company. My professor placed us into teams of six to research and gather data for the Stafford Air & Space Museum based in Weatherford, Oklahoma. We got to host zoom meetings with the museum's executive team and learn more about Stafford's mission and objectives, focusing mainly on increasing museum attendance.

While my team spent the entire fall 2020 semester working with the Stafford Air & Space Museum, gathering research from our audience of mothers with young children through surveys and in-depth interviews. My team condensed the entirety of a semester of research and writing into a 50-page report that was completed on December 13th, 2020.

While we all took part in creating and crafting the report, I took point on writing the executive summary of the report, which is listed below for you to read. I enjoyed the challenge of utilizing my writing skills, learning how to find the most important research and data to put into the report, fine-tuning the data and making it easy for the reader to interpret. I thoroughly enjoyed learning how to create a draft based on research, and it was really rewarding to be able to send in the completed project to our client to use to better their organization.

Please take a read below at the Stafford Air & Space Museum Report: Executive Summary below, and enjoy!

Executive Summary

To learn how to improve the Stafford Air & Space Museum’s attendance, our team completed research of several methods through a survey, in-depth interviews, a social media audit and additional research on the museum’s past performance, its competitors, its publics and more. This report is the compiled findings of valuable information for the museum on how to better the museum's already enjoyable presence in the community, and experience for those who may attend.

Through secondary research, we determined the museum’s internal and external situation, including strengths, weaknesses and key publics. We found that the Stafford Air and Space museum is unique to the central United States and provides a space where people can learn about some of the best aerospace artifacts. The museum is affiliated by the Smithsonian, which we believe adds credibility and creates opportunities for the museum that other museums might not have. The pandemic has created a disadvantage for the museum, due to the fact that Americans aren’t traveling as much as they did before the pandemic. We believe the current budget the museum has does not accurately represent the type of advertisements that capture the average American’s eye. The museum has many opportunities to grow and expand, especially the museum’s online presence. There are many opportunities to connect with the younger generation through technology and social media. We also completed an analysis of the museum’s publics. We determined its limiters, customers, producers and enablers, then from this, narrowed it down to who we presume to be the museum’s key publics. Some members of this key public category may include families with young children, teenagers, college students, military members and those with an interest in the air and space industry. Considering the majority of this public falls under the age of 40, new communication methods may be necessary to increase museum awareness. Research has proven social media communication will increase the museum’s connection with this young generation, in turn connecting it to its key publics.

Based on results, we found that many respondents learned about the museum through word of mouth recommendations from friends and family. 36.75% of respondents learned from word of mouth recommendations as opposed to 3% who had heard about it through physical media like brochures. We believe that Stafford Air & Space Museum could save funds and effort that are spent on physical media and put them towards creating a more engaging and interactive social media presence. Having multiple places offer entertaining and engaging information about the museum will help boost its online standing amongst its competitors. Respondents indicated wanting to make their travel times worthwhile, so having an online presence that makes sure of this will help as well.

Many of the museum’s competitors post multiple times a week, with branded content. This means that they are staying relevant on peoples’ social media and illustrating what their brand is all about. Creating a content calendar will help plan what to create and when to post it. People are on their phones more than ever, so it is important to make content that they will see at home. Additionally, SEO, or search engine optimization can help the museum. Creating new, relevant content, links, keywords on the website will help search engines like Google to find and place the museum higher in search results.