Author: sabine.doolin

When people enjoy their museum experience, they often want to hold on to it and an item from the museum shop can do just that. Museum shops are part of the experience – I think we have all been there making impulse purchases of exhibition catalogues, postcards or another mementos. 

But it is not easy for museum shops to navigate the current retail environment. In this article a retail and catering designer talks about his experience and recent work for M+, Hong Kong’s newly opened Museum of Visual Culture. He thinks that the survival of museum shops relies on unique, specific experiences that blend seamlessly from exhibitions.

“You should be walking into the shop and not necessarily understanding that you’re in it or that it’s a separate entity.”

Callum Lumsden, Founder and Creative Director at retail and catering designer Lumsden

The opportunity is to create a brand experience – as distinct from branded products – and taking fewer cues from the high street. Local museums might even have an advantage over city or national organisations – “the local museums are the ones that can really reach out to communities” by working with local artists or makers.

Efforts to diversify audiences have increased in recent years and new programming during the pandemic has led to more diverse audiences trialling arts activities. The challenge is to turn the increased trial into durable conversion and a more diverse visitor profile in the long-term.

However, audience development can be a ‘leaky bucket.’ If the loss of existing audiences is faster than we can gain new audiences, then negative substitution takes place. Audiences are not necessarily only lost due to the pandemic, but this occurs on a going basis due to ageing or relocation. Importantly it also happens because the market is growing more diverse, while perceptions of cultural organisations as places for more diverse people are not evolving fast enough.

This analysis of US audience data by Impacts shows substitution ratios for different organisation types. 

Rebuilding audiences is an obvious concern for arts and culture organisations in current times. The missing audiences are, of course, a major challenge in relation to revenue and sustainability of organisations.

Live cultural events in particular have been suffering. New UK research suggests that “up to 14% of regular arts attendees may not return to venues until Covid-19 is history”. 

In a recent CreativeNZ webinar Andrew McIntyre (one of the Ms in MHM, the cultural insight consultancy) suggested that organisations with deeper audience roots, i.e. those who have built a community around their organisation, got support from their audience and found it easier to weather the storm than those with a more transactional relationship with their audience. Data also suggests that people are craving experiences with others after long lockdown periods, so wrapping the cultural offer around social experiences can be a way to re-attract visitors.

On the positive side – some cultural organisations have become more welcoming and are attracting new and different audiences, which helps with efforts to make audiences more diverse. 

Who are you thinking of as competition?

Often fellow cultural organisations come to mind first, but more likely it is other leisure pursuits. And increasingly – the couch.

People are spending less time outside the home, a trend that has already developed before the pandemic. However, when at home, they are still out-of-home as they spend time on the web.

This data from the US shows the growth of the proportion of people who prefer to stay home and finds that “the preference to stay home over the weekend has grown a staggering 60%” among high-propensity culture visitors in the last 10 years. Leaving the question – how to engage people on the couch or tempt them off the couch into arts venues once in a while?

Turning audiences into ticket buyers is crucial for many organisations and their revenue. And we buy tickets online for all sorts of services all the time.

“Considering how business critical the website is for doing this job, it’s surprising how many people report feeling frustrated by poor experiences that can leave them irritated enough to abandon their ticket buying journey altogether.”

This article by a digital agency asks should buying a ticket really be this hard? and finds 4 main frustrations and ways to solve them:

• Frustration 1: Seat selection
• Frustration 2: Cross-selling add-ons
• Frustration 3: Logins and passwords
• Frustration 4: Relevant information about the venue

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Studying people over a period of 14 years, researchers in London found evidence that being exposed to the arts may help people live longer, writes the NYT.

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I found this review of research done in 2019 for the WHO.

It concludes that “results from over 3000 studies identified a major role for the arts in the prevention of ill health, promotion of health, and management and treatment of illness across the lifespan.”

And further suggests that “the beneficial impact of the arts could be furthered through acknowledging and acting on the growing evidence base; promoting arts engagement at the individual, local and national levels; and supporting cross-sectoral collaboration.

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Research with 300+ UK museum directors by the Art Fund (the UK charity that secures works of art for public collections) found that a new model for museums is emerging post Covid:

In this model, the physical space of the museum is no longer dominant and instead the museum is divided into three: on-site, online, and out in the community with each equally important and informed by the other two.

The research also found that health and wellbeing, digital engagement and relevance are central to museums’ ambitions and that these are increasingly delivered through partnerships. 

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There are many public assets in our communities but we don’t always realise how much they contribute to our health and wellbeing. Assets such as arts and culture venues, libraries, green spaces, community centres, social clubs, community associations or volunteer groups. The MARCH Network set out to transform the understanding of how social, cultural and community assets enhance public mental health, wellbeing and resilience. The network finished its activities in Nov 2021 after three years, but made its reports, case studies and resources available on its legacy website.

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Relevance is critical for the future of cultural organisations. Microsoft’s Strategy Leader for Libraries and Museums suggests harnessing data to underpin this relevance. In a MuseumNext article about the opportunities and challenges presented by big data, she argues that:

“Big data in and of itself doesn’t benefit museums, but having mechanisms in place to analyse and gain insights really does”.

Artificial intelligence can help with that, but there is also a need for more data specialists in the museum sector. And finally (and importantly I may add), it requires to determine how to act on those insights. 

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The Southbank Centre is committed to showing how arts and creativity can improve health and wellbeing. It is now the home of the new National Academy for Social Prescribing in the UK. 

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We are delighted that with QWB Lab we are a recipient of the Te Urungi: Innovating Aotearoa Fund by the Ministry for Culture & Heritage that supports innovative projects that improve the sustainability and resilience of the sector, provide commercial opportunities, and improve access and participation.