Schedule

The traditional model of the museum/heritage site gift shop doesn’t work online. There’s no point trying to replicate it. It requires a complete rethink. Luckily, there are plenty of ecommerce business models that do work and would be much better suited to cultural organisations. Let’s have a look at what we can steal from those that are doing well.

Red T Multiples was created in order make fine art customisation easier for consumers and for artists. Applied to museums, this innovation offers increased engagement and commercial potential for collections across both physical and virtual exhibitions.

Hear how putting the eye of the beholder first and allowing a personal touch can elevate visitor experience and convert your audiences into joyful art consumers.

In 2020 UK online retail increased by 46.1% compared with 2019, forming new habits that look set to endure.

For museum shops, the increased importance of online shopping has meant a renewed focus on delivering a user-friendly online shopping experience. Historically museums have been slow to embrace e-commerce and typically only 7% of total sales in the sector come from online.

In this context Smartify worked with the National Gallery and the StoryFutures Lab based as Royal Holloway to design and deliver a customer-centric shopping experience that could act as an aggregator across museums. The objective was to deliver a reliable and customer-centric shopping experience to maximise museum revenue.

We were particularly interested to learn whether audiences are more inclined to buy merchandise if it is linked to collection items, digital tours and narrative experiences, rather than in a separate e-shop. This presentation shares the results.

How can cultural organisations maximise commercial income? What happens when the community comes together to share that expertise?

Tom Dykes, Director of Digital of the Association for Cultural Enterprises, shares exclusive results of their eCommerce Benchmarking survey, providing a valuable insight into how the last year has affected sales and key KPIs. A great example of what the sector can do when the community comes together to share knowledge and best practice.

Tom will also introduce the wider role of the Association, a UK-based membership organisation with hundreds of members from around the world. Their primary purpose is to help equip people and organisations with the skills and tools to maximise commercial income in the arts and heritage world. Encompassing free and paid training, unrivalled networking, and best-practice learning across a whole range of revenue streams.

Since the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital programming has taken on new importance and prominence across museums and cultural institutions. Many organizations have begun to monetize these digital programs, through fixed-fees, suggested donations, or including them as membership benefits. With the rise of digital programs, there are many new questions: how many organizations are monetizing digital programs? What types of virtual initiatives are bringing in the most revenue? What is the return on investment for digital programs? To understand how museums are generating revenue through virtual programs and the long-term outlook of digital, this session will share the results of a 2021 study of 500+ cultural professionals.

What do you get if you cross a BAFTA-winning wildlife presenter, an empty, dark Museum and a captive (online) audience in lockdown? Throw in a quirky crowd funding campaign, and a LOT of dinosaurs, and you get Mystery at the Museum! This live, interactive, online event presented by CBBC’s Steve Backshall invited viewers at home to participate in a night-time puzzle-solving adventure around the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, learning about natural history through objects along the way. Find out more about how the Museum team and Steve put this innovative fundraising event together, and the fantastic audience response!

While we all want to get back to a world where in-person gatherings are the norm, it’s critical to continue investing in your online audience. Your organization’s future success will be based on your ability to deepen connections both within and beyond your museum’s walls. By using digital platforms effectively, you have the opportunity to inform, educate and inspire this impressionable group. After all, the next generation of donors, tourists and museum explorers are out there, they’re digital natives, and they value emotional connections. It’s time to speak their language.

Last year, as the pandemic hit and we saw cultural organisations struggling to square the twin demands of more online content and financial sustainability, we asked the question ‘What would it take to make online content and experiences genuinely sustainable?’

At the time we suggested that perhaps the sector had ‘problem blindness’ – a belief that offering online content and experiences was critical to ensuring equitable access – that closed down exploration of other opportunities. We set out to test whether access and income really were a zero-sum game.

Six months on we will share the results from our research programme involving many thousands of online and social audience members around the world. The data presents a fascinating picture of our current situation and suggests some rich opportunities for the future.

Senior Relationship Manager Corporate Partnerships: Partners, sponsors and Global Circle Van Gogh Museum

Urita Mual will share the Van Gogh Museum’s bold new strategy that has seen them double their fundraising income over the last 4 years. How did the museum attract big sponsors donors for multiple years? How did they grow their online donations? What did the museum grow their geographic reach with offers for donors in Asia and USA?

When your customers are used to walking past Rodins to get to their seats, how do you bring them with you when you pivot to online? That was the killer question when V&A Academy decided to launch online art history courses during summer 2020. What we didn’t expect was that V&A Academy Online would provide a richer, deeper learning experience, with greater reach and accessibility to boot and that maybe those Rodins… Were just getting in the way.

Painshill is know as ‘Where the Walk is a Work of Art’ but when a global pandemic struck in 2020, there was a real chance the the Charity which manages this historic garden would not survive – learn about what the team at Painshill did to not just survive but thrive.

The average number of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2007 to 2019 was 6 million. Guess how many people visited the museum in 2020 – a paltry 1 million.

There’s no doubt the pandemic has disrupted businesses all over the world in the last eighteen months. With their doors firmly closed to visitors, museums too have witnessed their fair share of challenges in this time period. For most, generating a steady stream of revenue has been a major cause for concern.

codemantra’s AI-powered digital asset & distribution management platform handles everything from storing digital assets, structuring of content to transforming content into various digital formats including making the content WCAG compliant, support with digital rights management (DRM), and distribution of e-books to various e-commerce and e-library platforms across the globe. With codemantra, museums & art galleries can bring their massive collections of books and catalogs to living rooms and classrooms across the globe.

This presentation will address the ins and outs of content transformation and how museums can leverage it to boost their revenue.

NFTs are the latest thing to hit the art market with some earning millions. But does this cryptocurrency phenomenon have potential to bring museums revenue and what are the challenges of the technology?

As museums and cultural institutions open their doors again, new restrictions weigh heavily on organizations with a long history of welcoming public crowds.

They are now faced with the task of formulating their operations to limit the number of individuals into their facility and configure their experience to allow visitors to maintain social distancing standards.

To scale their operation, institutions have been forced to implement a timed departure structure.

Using my commercial distribution experience for many high-volume reservation-based attractions, I have developed a how-to program including fundamentals to help your team strategize and implement.

Find out how Cultural Attractions ranging from some of the world’s greatest museums to tiny, volunteer-led historic sites have managed to weather the Covid19 pandemic by embracing digital experiences.

Whether that be by creating global outreach during lockdown to sustain audiences, donors, friends and supporters, to actual online retailing of experiences; to translating the learnings of BYOD in lockdown to maximise engagement in remobilisation, this session gives insight into the best of more than 80 brand new experiences launched since the beginning of the pandemic.