Who comes to the Canoe Museum? Well, that’s a great question!Our amazing (Young Canada Works funded) summer students surveyed 100 Canoe Museum visitors this summer in order for us to learn more about who comes here, and what they think of our Museum.
Out of all the questions we asked I’ve picked out some of the more interesting results to share with you (by the way, I usually try and ‘write’ blogs that are mostly photos, I certainly didn’t think I’d be writing a blog of full of graphs and pie charts, so I’ve added some images in to break up the math-y-ness of this post!).
We gathered postal codes from the visitors we surveyed and found out that out of our sample of 100 people we had just as many International visitors as we did visitors from the United States. Of our visitors from Ontario most are from the GTA, and we had almost as many visitors from Ottawa as we did from Peterborough!
We found out that 78% of those that did the survey were 40 or older (keep in mind that we have lots of young visitors, but they usually come with their parents or grandparents, so this reflects the ages of those who filled out the survey!).
Here are some people (who are 40 years or older!) from the Guelph-Wellington Seniors Association paddling:
We found out that 73% of our visitors are coming here for the first time
Here’s a photo of puppies in a canoe (to break up the graphs a bit) from Help is a Four Legged Word:
We found out that a lot of our visitors hear about about the Museum from other visitors.
If you’re more of a kitty person than a puppy person (or a graph person) here’s one for you:
We found out that only 30% of our visitors stopped by our website before coming here.
Here’s a link to Trail Swag who featured our website re-launch:
We often tell people that it takes about an hour and a half to go through the Museum, but we’ve learned that we’re wrong! Most people spend two hours or more here at the Museum.
Here’s a funny canoe building cartoon you may have seen before:
We also were ranked as ‘excellent’ by our visitors in 10 different categories including parking, our temporary exhibit (Canoes To Go) and the following four categories:
We love hearing from you! Hopefully there were enough images breaking up the graphs in this post to keep your interest. I’ll leave you with just a few of the answers we received to the question; What did you like most about your visit?
• The building of a birch bark canoe movie and finding a chestnut prospector • Canoe building with tools, weaving, and the snowshoe hands-on exhibit and the wigwam was an excellent real life experience • The details about people and quotes brings it alive, the level of detail is awesome • Excellent, friendly knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff, quality of exhibits, lighting and atmosphere • Peaceful and educational. Scavenger hunt was excellent for our son • Exhibits are well laid out and engaging – in fact we missed the wedding service we came to Peterborough for! • The Gift Shop because we found real Canadian things • The history of canoes and kayaks because I didn’t know the difference before • Interactive activities for kids, kept them busy • Learning of the construction techniques used throughout the years • My sons love it here, all the hands on exhibits are the best • Seeing the loving care for artifacts, attention to detail in interpretation and research for captions, balanced inclusion of all players, respect for aboriginal partners • So much to learn, great layout, we’ll be back •