About the Annual Museum Survey

We devised a system to analyse baseline data on museums and present this in the form of our Annual Museum Survey. Until 2023 we were commissioned to provide the Annual Museum Survey across the country, providing consistent data sets.

Each year we launched a survey, asking museums within the Accreditation scheme to provide core data on:

• Workforce
• Finance
• Audiences
• Insights related to the governance type and scale of museum

This data helped to prove the social and economic value of museums, both locally and nationally. It also helped museums to benchmark their work.

By encouraging museums and heritage organisations to adopt a simple and uniform way of reporting their headline operational data, we collated a dataset that enabled museums to compare and benchmark themselves anonymously and confidentially to others in the museum sector.

Our surveys allow us to understand the impact of the museum and heritage sector across England and to advocate to funding bodies and government to sustain investment in the sector.