Balboa Park Visitor Survey -- Volunteers Needed!

Contact: Katherine Sanford
Program Coordinator
Balboa Park Cultural Partnership
learning@bpcp.org
P: 619.232.7502

Be a part of Balboa Park! The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership (www.bpcp.org) has a special summer volunteer opportunity for outgoing individuals (from high school students to seniors) who enjoy spending time in Balboa Park museums and interacting with the public. Twelve Balboa Park museums are collaborating on a professional evaluation study to better understand and improve the experiences they provide for visitors individually and as a park. Working with a professional evaluator, museum staff have developed a one-page written survey that asks visitors about the benefits they feel they get from their museum experiences. Volunteers are needed to distribute (and re-collect) the surveys at participating museums.

Balboa Park Visitor Survey volunteers will distribute a short survey to museum visitors as they exit participating museums. Data collection sessions can be scheduled as 3-hour shifts anytime between 10:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on weekdays and weekends, from now through September 6, 2010. Volunteers for weekends are especially needed.  Volunteers may begin volunteering at any time. Specialized training will be provided for all volunteers on a rolling basis.

Balboa Park Visitor Survey volunteers should be able to commit to one or more data collecting sessions approximately 3 hours in length. Volunteers may have access to a chair or bench, and should feel comfortable actively approaching visitors for 3 hours if necessary. Volunteers need to be comfortable interacting with people they don’t know and asking them to complete a survey. They also need to be able to follow the survey and volunteer instructions.

A collaborative visitor study of this kind has not been done previously in Balboa Park or across the country. In fact, many of the Park's museums have not had the resources to do formal visitor evaluation at all. By working together, we are changing this. Volunteers are playing an instrumental role in this opportunity by conducting the data collection. The data gathered by the volunteers will be analyzed and used to enrich the Balboa Park experience for visitors in the short- and long-term. Our goal is a total of 12,000 surveys for all the participating museums, across the 16-weeks of the study. We simply cannot accomplish this without volunteer assistance!

To learn more or get involved, contact:
Katherine Sanford, Program Coordinator, Balboa Park Cultural Partnership
learning@bpcp.org
P: 619.232.7502