The Challenge

Wellcome Collection believes everyone’s experience of health matters. Through its free museum, library and events, Wellcome Collection strives to be as inclusive and accessible as possible to all, with a particular focus on welcoming and providing for d/Deaf, disabled, neurodivergent and racially minoritised people. This underlying ambition was at the heart of Wellcome Collection’s intent for developing a whole market segmentation, which could support the organisation reach its accessibility goals.

The Approach

An important consideration for our approach was a segmentation that could articulate the needs and priorities of marginalized groups without tokenizing them or reducing them to a particular “characteristic”. We met this challenge by ensuring that priority communities were adequately represented through purposeful over-sampling throughout the research process.

We also worked hard to ensure that diverse and marginalised voices were properly heard, employing accessible data collection modes for both quantitative and qualitative research, including speech-to-text and BSL-interpreted depth interviews, as well as working closely with Wellcome Collection’s Access and Inclusion leads and specialist external consultants to scrutinise every aspect of our design and recruitment. We looked for opportunities to de-bias the language used throughout the research tools and sought critical feedback on our interpretations of data, validating findings with the Wellcome Collection team throughout the analysis process.

The resulting segments aren’t defined by their demographics (so aren’t reductive or tokenistic) but there are differences in profile across segments, and these are driven by needs.

The project engaged with over 5,000 people from a range of genders, ages, ethnicities and life circumstances. The sample included current and potential audiences and ensured a mix of those vocationally connected to health alongside general audiences to deliver a comprehensive and inclusive view of Wellcome Collection’s market. We delivered a bespoke algorithm, a set of interactive pen portraits and a series of embedding workshops.

The Results

Since adopting the segmentation system, Wellcome Collection’s audience development has gone from strength to strength with growth in visits by their priority groups. Wellcome Collection is significantly ahead of the sector in terms of its engagement with disabled audiences.

The project has also had a broader impact. Wellcome Collection and its sector peers were keen to move away from historic standardised measures of demographics which reinforce existing disadvantage and “othering” of minoritised groups. We collaborated with Wellcome Collection and external consultants to develop more inclusive alternatives; these have now been adopted into ongoing tracking research by Wellcome Collection and a consortium of National Museums and Galleries.   

Wellcome Collection is leading the sector in this space and advocating for inclusive practice by sharing learnings. This included DJS and Wellcome Collection co-presenting this study at the Visitor Studies Group annual conference in 2023.

Wellcome Collection