Preparing the museum for restart

Four rules for dealing with “Phase Two” right away

From one day to the next you were faced with a situation you had never experienced before.

As a emergency and war surgeon, forced to prioritize intensity and speed, many times without much regard for quality, you tried to keep the “museum patient”:

• reluctantly cutting off vendors, openings, organized tours and on-site education;
• Completely rethinking the communication strategy;
• producing content for social media (many times from home, without the ability to be in the museum);
• Studying how to work synergistically with colleagues remotely;
• cursing.

You have done your best, and, with respect to all your staff, you should be proud of yourself and the activities you have set up in such a short time.

Unfortunately, however, the patient is not out of danger yet, quite the contrary.

Indeed, it is not easy to predict what will happen but one thing is certain: the cultural world will be changed and all those museums that do not adopt certain solutions will be overwhelmed.

Sylvain Bellenger, director general of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, and Sergio Risaliti, Artistic Director of the Novecento Museum in Florence, in a recent article in Artribune emphasize how

“crises are events that accelerate the course of history and divert its direction, influencing the evolution of the species.”

And in all times of crisis, history teaches that the market rewards only those realities that manage to meet their customers’ needs, anticipating them, providing a prompt and concrete response and, where possible, changing their essence.

How to do it? Let’s see it together.

(Warning. If you haven’t already done so, I recommend that you read this in-depth HERE. I wrote this in early March to help institutions deal with the proper management of the empty museum with the forced closure).

1. Act locally

L’OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) says the Covid-19 shock could cause a 45-70 percent contraction in the international tourism economy through 2020.

For Assoturismo, the Italian tourism federation, Italy will lose about 60 percent of its tourists.

According to the survey by Confturismo-Confcommercio, 57 percent of Italians say that even after the end of the emergency, they will not move to take a vacation; 32 percent that they will take vacations but of 2 or 3 days, without moving too far away.

Therefore, in the coming months, people will not be able/willing to move for:

• fear (diseases and infections);
• legislation (restrictive free movement laws);
• economic reasons (severe economic contraction will limit spending).

It will consequently be necessary to build aactivity of local marketing, which leverages your audience and the community surrounding your museum.

The purpose of the strategy to be put in place is to make people regain interest in local culture, motivate them to learn more about their local area, and thus build stronger and more lasting relationships.

Social (from the live streaming, to groups, to rooms newly born), in-depth blog activities, PR-anything that can stimulate a local person to listen to you and prompt them to take action.

Small notes: keep in mind that you will not have their attention as much as in the first few weeks of quarantine and especially you will have to think about deregulating your schedule probably.

2. Strategically allied

Many years ago, Jay Abraham (I also talked about it HERE) was interviewed by a reporter, who asked him: “If someone could follow only one of his ideas to create a business, which one should he choose and why?”.

Jay replied without even thinking about it:

“The joint venture-the strategic alliance-because it allows you to control the world.

You can have access to everything, and it costs you nothing.

The only limit is what you think is applicable to your case or feasible and constitutes a moral form of exploitation.”

Leveraging (in an ethical form) the resources of others’ businesses or institutions is the ultimate strategy for successfully maximizing and multiplying a business using third-party assets, distribution channels, access, or brand value.

Translated it means: working with other museums.

You need to reconnect with your local area, with local institutions in order to create a network between cultural heritage sites local enhancing the potential for economic development.

The benefits of this activity are many, but I will try to list the main ones:

• Increase market penetration;
• Reduce marketing costs;
• Increase the value added to the visitor;
• Collaborate in designing new offerings;
• You strengthen your brand.

You have to think about building the canvas of culture, so that a person is inclined to feed on three, four museums on the days they have available to them and that they organize their days based on your museum offerings.

Only then, if at all, expand it to third parties.

3. Trust

How do you maintain constant contact with your “cultural consumers”?

How do we weave an ever thicker and more robust thread that ensures an emotional continuity of relationships?

Why invest in acquiring new visitors when you don’t fully “squeeze out” the ones you have?

Okay, maybe you won’t like the “squeeze” metaphor, but in doing so I am sure I am making you realize the potential of keeping people inside your world without letting them out and allowing you to multiply the value of the individual visitor.

Activities such as the creation of membership, programs of referral, follow-up of privileged ongoing communication, produce a sense of belonging such that people are enticed to invest more time and money in your brand museum.

“We have implemented the Friends of the Museum card and I write emails to them once a month.” you’ll say.

Well, a good starting point but you’re missing one part: customers stay longer as they climb or move up from one level of benefits, engagement, recognition and status to another.

It is called retention by ascension and is one of the pillars in the field of information marketing.

You can plan to start building it now and, slowly as you have broken it in, implement it.

4. Think Digital

I reiterate.

We will have to live with the uncertainty of new infections and concern about hygiene standards.

How long this period will be I do not know but the diktat “no physical guides” imposes the need for the museum to have a digital solution for the purpose of:

• Continue to ensure cultural enjoyment;
• Make the museum accessible to everyone indiscriminately;
• Create more constructive experiences;
• Promote a personalization of pathways;
• Geolocating the visitor for marketing purposes;
• Offer the possibility of advance ticket booking;

… and actually I could go on.

For Sebastian Chan, one of the leading minds in the transition of museums into the digital age, former director of digital and emerging technologies at Cooper Hewitt and now chief experience officer at ACMI Melbourne:

“Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, and no museum can do without digital enhancement.

Museums are repositories of stories, exhibitions the way to tell them, and technology provides visitors with new tools with which to build their own itinerary, right down to the possibility of keeping track of them thanks to a personalized digital “guidebook.”

However, the need for a digital solution goes far beyond being the “replacement” for driving.

As we saw in the previous point, “tying” the tourist into a kind of spider web is the ultimate goal you have to aspire to in order to have a series of direct and steady revenue streams.

And the digital solution allows me to keep it anchored to me.

In the book Every Damn Museum you will find 60 pages of operational guidance on how to build a world around your museum for the purpose of retaining visitors inside it.

Why the need to act now

The consequences of crisis and change will be great.

Granted that at this time the opening of museums can only take place provided security measures and adequate economic supports are in place (I therefore find it impossible to arrange May 18 as an X date for most facilities), I disagree with those who would like to wait until the end of summer (even late fall-I hear talk of October 2020) to operate.

Not possible.

We both know very well that the “museum patient” will face intense months before recovering from this situation.

However, the choices made at this stage will be crucial to success or failure in the new market to be addressed.

Act locally

Allying strategically

Building public loyalty

Thinking Digital

Not acting on these points now and with effective tools could be detrimental.