What 10,000 Visitors Taught Us About Attracting an Audience

2026-09-03 / Kat Hunt / Live Programming / Blog

The Choice at the Door

A family of four, on holiday at the beach, is taking a much-needed break from the sun and sand. They decide to make a trip to the planetarium, a few miles over the bridge on the mainland. Entering the lobby, they are immediately greeted by the warm voice of a volunteer at the front desk. They also see a sign with this season's show schedule. There are a few time blocks available for the remainder of the day: in one, a film about Mars is playing; in another, a show about Aurora; and in the last spot of the day, The Sky Tonight. They ask the volunteer for a brief summary of each. All of them sound interesting, but one sticks out above the rest: The Sky Tonight is completely live. Not only that, but it covers a more relevant and real-time topic; it is right there in the title. Despite the wait, they opt to grab ice cream and come back for The Sky Tonight. A live tour of the local night highlights is exactly what they want to kick off the evenings they have at one of the area's darkest beaches.

Five Years of Data at Ingram Planetarium

When I began managing Ingram Planetarium in Sunset Beach, NC, detailed attendance tracking wasn't something that was fully established. Leadership at the time focused on metrics for public visitors versus school group attendance. For a planetarium manager, there was far more worth measuring. At the time, I was also working toward my Master's degree, investigating how engagement influences learning outcomes in STEM education. It was a natural pivot to start asking the same question of my own programs: not just what visitors were learning, but what was pulling them through the door in the first place? The data I began collecting wasn't only about designing better programming for Ingram; it was about whether the style of a program could change who chooses to attend.

I would end up collecting over five years of attendance data before moving into my role with Digitalis, and what the records showed was consistent enough to be convincing. At a facility drawing roughly 10,000 public visitors annually, our fully live sky program kept appearing near the top of the attendance rankings, season after season. The moment that observation evolved into a conviction was when we moved it into an otherwise struggling time slot. Every other film offered in that slot suffered an attendance dip, and every instinct said The Sky Tonight would too. Instead, the program pulled the timeslot up with it. Audiences weren't responding to when it ran. The public was actually looking for the live program. It didn't matter what time it was offered. If it was on the schedule, they would come.

What the Research Confirms

Later, as I was digging deeper into this phenomenon, I found a more formalized study that described the same trend from the other side of the world. When I read it, the data felt immediately familiar. In 2019, ʻImiloa Astronomy Center planetarium educator Emily Peavy published research in Planetarian: Journal of the International Planetarium Society comparing audience perceptions of a fully live planetarium program and a pre-recorded fulldome program at ʻImiloa. Like me, Peavy was an informal science educator pursuing graduate research into how programmatic choices shape audience experience; they were asking the same question from a different dome. My attendance data spoke to what got people through the door. What it couldn't tell me was how audiences experienced the program once they were inside. That's where Emily's research picks up.

Over eight months, Peavy surveyed 627 visitors. They rated both programs on educational and entertainment value and answered open-ended questions about what they learned and what they enjoyed. Across nearly every demographic measured, the live program consistently scored higher. Nearly a quarter of live program attendees gave it the highest possible score in both education and entertainment.

One of the most telling findings was in what visitors wrote when asked what they found entertaining. Almost a third of live program respondents mentioned the presenter, completely unprompted. It was not the dome or the visuals. It was the person. They described someone who made jokes, who asked what the audience wanted to explore, who made them feel like their curiosity was the entire point of the room. That kind of experience doesn't just satisfy a visitor; it gives them something to talk about on the drive home, in a climate where word of mouth is one of the most reliable and affordable attendance drivers any institution has.

Why a Planetarium Beats the Couch

This connects to a broader question worth asking: why does someone choose a planetarium over watching a documentary at home? The screen-to-ceiling ratio alone doesn't answer it. A live educator does. They read the room, and then they respond to it. The experience can shift mid-show based on who's in the seats. A question from the back row can change the direction of the whole tour. That kind of responsiveness is something no pre-produced film can offer, and it's increasingly what distinguishes a planetarium visit from passive media consumption. You're not just watching the sky. You're part of what happens under it.

The Front-of-Room Finding

Peavy's research reinforced this with a finding that is small in scale but clear in signal. Midway through the study, a remote operating station was installed at the front of the planetarium, placing the educator in the audience's sightline rather than hidden behind them. Entertainment scores for the live program rose. Same content, same dome, same exact presenter: the simple fact of being seen, of the audience watching a human being actively guide the experience, shifted how people felt about it. Presence, it turns out, is not a soft variable.

Films Are Remarkable, But People Are Irreplaceable

To be sure, fulldome films are an amazing feat of creativity and specialized production skill. Many take years to polish and often take viewers on adventures they could hardly imagine experiencing in the real world. Between a film and a live presentation, however, which one fills seats most consistently? The answer, it turns out, is the one with a live human as the star of the show. Crucially, that choice happens before anyone has met the presenter. The live format itself is the draw: the promise of a real person, responding to a real audience, in real time. Whether the educator is brilliant or simply competent, the audience has already voted with their feet.

The Case for Investing in Live

Live programming also changes in a way that a fixed film cannot. A new presenter, a seasonal sky, a recent astronomical discovery woven into a sky tour; these are reasons to return that pre-recorded content simply cannot offer. The visitor who comes back in March for a different sky than they saw in October is a visitor your fulldome library cannot retain on its own. Only the live program can earn them back.

The case for investing in live programming is ultimately a case for institutional resilience. Live programs build regulars. They build school groups who request specific presenters by name. They build the kind of community that shows up even when the exhibit hall has been the same for two years. For facilities weighing staffing decisions, training investments, or programming calendars, the data is worth taking seriously: the draw is the content, and the most flexible content is a person.

This orientation, where the live educator is the center of the experience, is foundational to how Digitalis designs its systems, even from day one. Every design decision is oriented around a single question: does this help the person in front of the audience do their job better? It's part of why joining the Digitalis team was an easy call. The best technology for a live program stays out of the way, and my hope is to help every planetarium presenter be the thing their audience remembers most.

References

• Daut, M. (2019). Planetariums need to build and engage audiences to survive. Planetarian: Journal of the International Planetarium Society, 48(1), 8–10.
• Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. (1998). Free-choice learning: An alternative term to informal learning? Informal Learning Environment Research.
• Falk, J. H. (2005). Free-choice environmental learning: Framing the discussion. Environmental Education Research, 11(3), 265–280.
• Peavy, E. (2019). Live and pre-recorded planetarium programs comparing perceived education and entertainment value. Planetarian: Journal of the International Planetarium Society, 48(4).