Virtual culture is the pandemic’s lasting legacy

The economic, health, and climate crises that have marked the last years and are still ongoing have a drastic impact on the visitors and revenue global arts and cultural institutions. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) estimates that 30 percent of museums in the U.S. are in danger of closure if they do not receive financial support. And according to the German statistics company Statista, those museums in Germany already struggling are facing financial losses of 31 percent.

 

 

In Europe, museum visits have decreased in the years of the pandemic, as expected. In Germany, which has a high quantity of museums (the German Museums Association lists around 6,000 full-time and voluntary museums), almost 70 percent fewer museum visitors were recorded in 2020 than in 2019. Digital offerings were the only solution for many of them. In total, about 1,500 museums reported almost 3,600 special exhibitions to the Institute for Museum Research in 2020. Of these, 13.7 percent were presented digitally or hosted purely digitally. Around 36 percent of the 4,000 museums who answered the survey reported that they had expanded their digital activities. 

 

Overall, the level of digitization in German museums is still lower and less professional than in other countries, especially English-speaking countries, although the fact that digitization is necessary has long been clear to the German Museums Association. According to a survey, the country’s regional museum associations have faced many challenges in digitization. There is a lack of inventory, staff, training, and money. But only since the pandemic, has it become clear to many museum professionals that digitization is also a survival factor for museums - and many digital approaches were dropped after the museums opened their doors.

 

The situation is quite similar in other European countries. The 2021 annual report of Federculture - an Italian association focused on the promotion, production, and management of culture, tourism, services, sports, and entertainment - shows that Italian public museums experienced an decrease in visitors of 75.6 percent compared to the previous year. Italian museums are particularly dependent on international tourists. A lack of them has certainly made the situation more difficult.

 

In this context, many museums in Italy since 2020have adopted digital solutions to keep in touch with their audiences. There are, still, some resistances and structural problems in the sector, as Civita - an Italian non-profit organization of companies and research institutions which is a leader in the field of cultural promotion - pointed out in their 2021 report. The transition to digitization in many museums does not seem to have been clearly defined by a strategy and has not been prepared and implemented with the help of professionals with the relevant skills. Additionally, there are no obvious medium and long-term investment plans, especially in small and medium-sized museums, which, according to Civita, often do not have the economic resources to manage the transition to digitalization. These problems are similar to those also described by the German Museums Association since 2018, which stated that it makes it difficult to develop a long-term overall strategy if digitization is being seen as a business project.

 

The Observatory for Digital Innovation in Cultural Heritage and Activities of the Politecnico di Milano in the survey "Extended Experience: the challenge for the cultural ecosystem" has highlighted the fact that 51 percent of museums have no experts with digital skills, or do not implement them.

 

 

However, there are also positive examples where these problems are being tackled. In France, there are various measures to respond to the reduction of the museum sector's indicators of prosperity. The Louvre Museum, through the opening of virtual doors, has been able to boost daily visits on the internet from 40,000 to 400,000 during the period of closure. In one month, the Louvre received as many virtual visitors as it welcomed physically during the entire year of 2019. Paris Musées, a network of 14 museums in the capital, organized digital tours for children, online workshops for families, and opened its digital archive of more than 3,000 artworks during the closure. The Centre Pompidou created a web series for children, virtual tours of their exhibition, and streaming masterclasses with artists in response to the lack of visitors in 2020. Audience response to this new form of cultural entertainment was immediately positive.

 

The Corona pandemic has not only led museums in France to become more digital. A survey of 650 European museums by the European Network of Museum Organizations NEMO in early April 2020, found that more than 60 percent of museums have expanded their online offerings since the closure or plan to add them.

 

Some museums were even able to monetize digital tours and courses during the pandemic, especially if they were tailored to specific target groups. The German Neanderthal Museum, for example, offered group tours for school classes tailored to curriculum topics. The museum even had to set up its own online store and a connection to a ticket service provider to handle the high demand. In addition, there are guided tours for children, for families, on special topics, etc. Some museums, especially in Great Britain, even offered to design guided tours for groups on desired topics and charge higher prices accordingly. Additionally, museums around the world have developed paid online training and courses (e.g. the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Museum Barberini in Potsdam). Although the demand for this has decreased somewhat since the reopening of the museums, it is still there, especially due to the fact that the participants do not have to be on site and can therefore also discover distant museums.

 

Of course, the large museums have been able to provide digital content much more easily than the smaller ones. But based on these experiences, I believe that even small museums can be inspired to expand their audience, based on the principle that the strengths of the virtual, like in other sectors, are its independence of time and space as well as the ability to engage the audience and offer them content that is relevant to their consumer preferences.

 

 

The integration of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, for example, allows more offers to be made to virtual visitors: a loyalty card for access to digital content, "privileged" access to an exhibition location, or a discount for the next exhibition, up to an appetizer at the end of the next physical visit.

 

Cultural organizations also need good a management of the relationships with customers. I believe that this is the key to generating an important income from virtual culture in the near future. Visits to cultural institutions are far from being back to pre-pandemic levels, there are still complaints of decreasing numbers of visitors. As a result, cultural institutions must focus on developing tailored strategies to fit their needs or offer free access by adding other diversified fee-based offerings or focusing on donations. Strategies can have a different focus depending on whether to target local or foreign audiences; for example, language and cultural preferences need to be taken into account.

 

One particularly inspiring example is the National Gallery in London, which has committed to be heading into the future over the next five years, in response to the challenges and opportunities of the post-pandemic world. Inclusion, digital advancement and environmental responsibility are the key elements of this journey. By focusing on projects and experiences that might not have been implemented without the pandemic, the National Gallery could expand their digital reach by 50 percent from 2020 to 2021.

 

Looking at global indicators, and analyzing the different European experiences, SECUTIX suggests that museums are recovering more rapidly, thanks to digitization, and are returning to pre-pandemic revenue levels in half the time it would have taken without the technological advances.

 

We are only at the beginning of a transformation of the cultural sector. I am convinced that virtual culture is the great successor to the pandemic: it is certainly not fully developed yet, but we have had the opportunity to discover the potential it offers, and the public is already accepting it as a new way of consuming and entertaining. Physical and virtual cultural content are meant to coexist: the real challenge for modern culture is to use this trend to revitalize that and direct energies and resources into the transition to digitization.