I'm not going to name this museum - but my experience is that it is a very good example of this type of institution, and so is useful for this kind-of case study. Suffice to say that it is an old engineering building and contents which is open only two days a week, seven months per year. I have given advice [some might call it consultancy] to a large number of similar organizations. This post includes some of the issues I would raise with the relevant folk [one of the problems is that museums is that they are run by well-meaning volunteers who form a committee].
My issue is with this message on the website ...
Yep ... to access the website I have to agree to accept the organization's cookies onto my device.
The website is mainly informative rather than commercial, although the museum's grounds are rented out for weddings, so there is limited business content.
The website's privacy policy is pretty much standard legalese, and includes the following: [my questions follow each point]
'If you do not agree to the following policy you may wish to cease viewing / using this website'
Would you have someone at the museums door insisting on information about every visitor before you let them in? [see the title of this post].
'We also use cookies to log your IP address location. (A rough geographic location to help us establish where our website audience is located)'
If you knew which part of the UK - or even which country - website visitors are from how can you use that information in your marketing efforts? NB a common answer to this is that 'we can do marketing in that area' ... errr, people in that area already know about you [they've visited your website], shouldn't you be advertising in areas from where no one visits the website? Oh, and how much advertising do you actually do? And do you know where visitors to the actual museum come from? Do you ask them? Although I find the content of the museum interesting, would I travel the 120-ish miles from my home to visit it? [probably not]. Might I drop in if I'm in the area? Yes, I'm in the area quite often - but not on the two days of the week it is open [it's another issue, but I would be interested to know why those two days of the week have been chosen, I assume there are logistical reasons]. And all this is without considering the technical issues such as the online visitor using a VPN - meaning that many geographical locations are either inaccurate or missing.
'We also use cookies to see which pages of our website are viewed the most and at what time of the day. This helps us establish which of our pages are the most popular'
What might you do with this information? Serious question. What - other than general interest? OK, so the wedding page might have some value, but it would have to be analysed with other - offline - data; eg page visits vs bookings ... but what if the majority of the page visits are from invited guests of a future wedding checking on the venue?
'We also use cookies to log how long a user spends on specific pages of our website'
Why? There might be some value, but does anyone analyse this? For example; a long time on the wedding information page might indicate interest by the visitor - or it could mean the content isn't clear, so it is being re-read to find relevant details. Does it really matter if the page on engineering data is the one visited longest? [let's not even ask about folk leaving their browser open on the page while they make a cup of tea].
'The cookies used are considered ‘essential cookies’ and are required for our website to work correctly'
Really? What are they? [it's a fairly basic website]. A catchall sentence [from designers/lawyers] to cover all eventualities that they might happen?
However, there is some relevant stuff in the policy about data that might be entered on one of the contact form on the site ... but there could be a 'privacy policy' link on each form's page.
Oh, and by the way - as a footnote - on the day I'm writing this post, all the 'events' listed on the site are for dates in 2025, that is, they're in the past. Given that the website is obviously[?] not regularly maintained ... I wonder if anyone ever looks at the data that is gathered. If this is the case, why insist that every visitor has to agree to have their data collected?
Note that I've used this post as an exercise on my book's website, see chapter 11.
