Wendy’s expertise allowed her to design evaluation methods that helped us to better understand a complex and somewhat delicate subject here at the Center. ... Wendy is knowledgeable and wonderful to work with.  She put both our visitors and staff at ease with her pleasant and confident manner.

Working with Wendy Meluch has been great! She asks insightful questions, communicates clearly and often, and develops strong methods for studying our museum visitors. And the results of her summative evaluation of our Science of Sharing exhibition were interesting and comprehensive.

Working with Wendy over the past ten+ years has been incredibly rewarding – both personally and professionally. In addition to being an absolute pro at finding ways to affordably gather and crunch data to shape my visitor experience and interpretive plans, she always takes time to educate me...

Wendy’s leadership on front-end research for a major exhibition provided us with a “how-to” learning model for staff. Her organized, personable manner and insight into team dynamics helped our development team define workable objectives for the inquiry. Visitor preferences and assumptions revealed in the findings have helped direct an approach to sensitive topics that encourages deeper connection to community stake-holders.

Oakland Zoo has relied on Visitor Studies Services for the past several years. Principal, Wendy Meluch, has great insight and experience coupled with her analytical findings.  Wendy contributed greatly to the development of Oakland Zoo’s Wayne and Gladys Children’s Zoo.

Wendy is a consummate professional who can turn ever present museum chaos into order and half-ideas into reality. As if that weren’t enough, she’s really fun to work with on visitor studies.

Wendy’s work with Chabot has helped articulate good questions and yielded thoughtful and productive insights into how our exhibitions and programs serve our visitors, where we are meeting our educational objectives, and where we can improve. And she is consistently a pleasure to work with.

Wendy is my go-to person for evaluation questions. Her calm, business-like approach helps me make sense of tough client questions. I have recommended her services countless times and will continue to do so.

Wendy seems to have an intuitive ability in working with clients. Early in our project she sensed what we needed to do to plan for a new Alaska History Gallery and went right to work. Good results in a timely fashion.

Wendy is not only a delight to work with, her professionalism and experience have been invaluable in developing our surveys, facilitating focus groups and providing objective and fresh perspectives to results. I wouldn’t plan a big project without her!

You are remarkable at quantifying our successes while still capturing the truly important issues we need to deal with to make our museum even better. You’re the best. Let me know if you ever need a referral and I will give you a five-star endorsement.

Wendy’s grasp of informal learning theory makes working with her a joy – she understands implicitly what visitor information is necessary to inform decision making. I highly value her work and recommendations.

I want to thank you for the excellent work you did on the Front-end Evaluation Report for the Tech’s National Medal of Technology Exhibit. Your research was thorough in targeting the issues and your report was clear, accurate and insightful. I have seldom received such a professional response from a contractor.

Through Wendy’s work, we gained important insights into program strengths and needs, providing a meaningful basis for planning the coming two years. Until Wendy summarized her methodology and findings for the staff, I don’t think most of us realized how much program assessment can help us avoid ‘spinning our wheels’. Wendy is competent, creative, and flexible — a joy to work with.

You rock!

Over the past few years, I have had the pleasure of working with Wendy on a variety of projects including front-end evaluation studies and focus groups. Wendy provided experience and enthusiasm for each project and produced final reports that answered our questions and assumptions for each project. I look forward to working with Wendy again in the future.

With her breadth of experience, Wendy knew how to meet our visitor evaluation needs, package them, and consequently keep us moving towards our goal of implementing an interpretive master plan. She was efficient, effective and perhaps most importantly, enjoyable to work with.

Wendy’s experience in museum development and public relations as well as statistics and computer software enabled her to work comprehensively while analyzing survey data. She provided the museum with a well-organized, objective analysis of the survey results, helpful insights, and a clear concept of how to utilize surveys as a means to ascertain who our audience is, whether we are attracting the audience we want and how our audience is evaluating us. Wendy’s friendly, professional manner makes her a pleasure to work with.”

The Bishop Museum has been fortunate enough to work with Wendy on a number of both cultural and natural science informal education projects. For over a decade Wendy has conducted herself with the sensitivity and professionalism required in such a multifaceted institution. In light of unexpected changes in funding and scope, Wendy has shown flexibility working with all involved to ensure the best possible outcome in doing formative and summative evaluations. She is a pleasure to work with and her sense of humor is always appreciated!

I am always excited to work with Wendy on projects. She is professional, well organized, presents clearly, and excites you about evaluation/audience research. Wendy led an audience research training session for Arizona State Museum exhibits and education staff and volunteers and helped us set up a small project. Her knowledge, humor, and belief that we could do it, as well as how she modeled implementation, ensured our success. In addition, Wendy is generous with her knowledge and contacts. She has helped students of mine with evaluation questions, and she has collaborated with me in planning conference sessions.

We recently contracted with Wendy Meluch of VisitorStudies.Com to develop a survey tool for our park visitors at Big Basin Redwoods State Park.  We were in the early phases of the project and wanted to learn what potential features of the newly renovated visitor center would be interesting to park visitors.  We had a conceptual design/plan and wanted to test if our ideas would meet the needs of the visitors.  Wendy was a pleasure to work with and extremely knowledgeable in the field of visitor studies.  We plan to contract with her again on future projects.

What happens when you create a huge, messy museum project that involves artists, open space environments, STEAM, and a two-institution collaboration? A need for an evaluator! Thankfully Wendy Meluch stepped in to save the day for the Creative Ecology project, an Institute of Museum and Library Services funded project that involved a collaboration between the Palo Alto and Junior Museum & Zoo. Wendy’s thoughtful evaluation plan was instrumental to our receiving the grant, and helped us provide valuable reports to our funder as we moved through the project. She created smart and easy-to-implement survey instruments for the project, designed specifically for different ages of participants. Her reports from the data were timely, compelling, and insightful. Perhaps most meaningfully, Wendy provided a passionate and engaged participant in our planning process, working with us to develop the program, then creating a meaningful evaluation around it. She retains a passion for people and evaluating museum experiences that engages everyone with whom she works.

Wendy Meluch tackles her work with integrity, sensitivity, thoroughness, and unwavering professionalism.  She has a depth and fundamental understanding of audience research and its inherent value.  In addition to this wonderful mix of talent and knowledge, Wendy brings an adaptable and inventive spirit to all that she does.

I have worked with Wendy on multiple evaluation projects at Bishop Museum and most recently on a Hawaii Tourism Authority grant to create a uniform visitor evaluation survey.  Throughout these projects, I have found Wendy to be very personable, enthusiastic and a highly collaborative team player with a strong work ethic. She truly has a gift for demystifying the evaluation process and making large tasks seem infinitely accomplishable.”

I have had the pleasure of working with Wendy over the years on a number of outreach and educational programs, from public exhibitions to teacher professional development curricula and workshops. Wendy has been a great partner in all of them, from contributing to grant proposals to end-to-end evaluation of the programs we have delivered. Great to work with!