Deadline: Wednesday, March 31 – 2021 National Visitation Survey for History Organizations

Thank you for your interest in the third annual “National Visitation Survey for History Organizations,” a project of the American Association for State and Local History’s (AASLH) Public History Research Lab. AASLH uses the data collected through this survey to produce the National Visitation Report, the field’s only national effort to monitor and report on in-person visitation trends at historical organizations in the United States. Through this annual research effort, AASLH strives to provide the history community with high-quality data and insights on the public’s engagement with our institutions. Your response is critically important to this effort. Read our reports from 2019 and 2020 here.

In order to complete this survey, you will need on-hand your visitation data for 2019 and 2020, as well as additional information about your institution’s budget and staffing for 2020. The survey should take approximately 10 minutes to complete.

Please note that we are only collecting data on in-person visitation. Please do not include any virtual “visitation” or engagement metrics. In order to aid our analysis and understand the effect of COVID-19 on historical organizations, we have also added a special section this year about the impact of the pandemic on your institution’s operations.

Responses to this survey are reported only in aggregate; individual responses will be kept confidential and categories with fewer than 10 responses will be excluded from public reports. AASLH staff may contact you if we have questions about your response. All respondents to the survey will receive free access to a report of our findings.

Thank you for participating. If you have any questions, please contact John Marks, Director of the AASLH Public History Research Lab (marks@aaslh.org).

Important! If your organization has multiple sites or locations to which there are visitors, please complete one questionnaire for each entity. For example, we ask that you report visitation for each individual historic site, not for an entire site system. Finally, the exact method for calculating in-person visitation varies slightly between various institutions. Please report the visitation numbers in whatever form you track them; if you changed your method of calculation between 2019 and 2020, please note that in a comment.