We know how many cultural organization boardrooms have come to rely on this benchmark research. This article provides a midyear update on our most requested, discussed, and referenced topic each year: Market potential. Here are the expected attendance levels for the balance of 2024 through 2025, quantified individually by organization type for aquariums, art museums, botanical gardens, children’s museums, history museums, natural history museums, science museums, zoos, orchestras, theaters, and other performance entities. We’re officially in the second half of 2024! And that means it’s time fo ..read more

Here are the percentage of people who describe various cultural experiences as expensive – and how much these perceptions matter. The research is segmented individually for art museums, aquariums, botanic gardens, children’s museums, history museums and sites, natural history museums, science museums and centers, zoos, live theater, orchestras, and other live performing arts. Hold on to your data-loving seats, folks, because we are publishing a full batch of new research today on a particularly popular topic: the perceived value of admission to museums and performing arts organizations. Making ..read more

How trusted are museums and performing arts organizations? Are they viewed as credible sources of information? Are some organization types perceived as more trustworthy than others? Here’s a data update.   We’re almost halfway through 2024 and election season in the United States is in full swing. At IMPACTS Experience, this means we’re entering a unique season of our own as we watch trends in perceptions and behaviors surrounding cultural institutions considering the coming elections. It may come as no surprise that the noise and rhetoric of an election cycle can affect national conditio ..read more

Research shows that gift shops can play important motivational, experiential, and emotional roles for visitors when it comes to underscoring the uniqueness of your individual cultural organization. Here’s the data. If you think that the museum shop is simply a place to “buy stuff” on the way out of a cultural organization, you may want to think again. The unique reputation of an organization plays an important role as a differentiator between attending a cultural organization and taking part in a different out-of-home activity such as going to see a movie or enjoying a picnic in the park. An o ..read more

People relocating to the suburbs, vacant offices and storefronts, and increases in urban crime perceptions have leaders worried about the implications for their museums and performing arts organizations.  We’re watching the data on intentions to visit urban cultural entities. Here’s what we’re seeing…and what it means for cultural executives. As we’re entering 2024, there has been plenty of talk about the “urban doom loop” and how it has threatened American cities in the wake of the pandemic. The urban doom loop is a condition wherein a city’s financial health spirals downward in a domino ..read more

Here are the top factors that make a guest experience welcoming at a museum or performing arts organization – in guests’ own words.  At IMPACTS Experience, we collect a great deal of data on the importance of expanding audiences for the future of cultural organizations – and we also monitor welcoming perceptions concerning visitor-serving experiences. As it turns out, it’s difficult to entice people to spend their precious time and money going to a place where they feel like they do not belong. After all, feeling that an organization is “welcoming to people like me” (however an individual ..read more

We’re excited to connect with our KYOB+ subscribers to answer your questions on recent articles and trends in our next virtual Q&A session. Can you believe it’s already May? It’s been a busy year at IMPACTS Experience! Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to keep our amazing community of KYOB+ subscribers informed about the trends affecting cultural organizations, from insights into differentiated, variable, and dynamic pricing strategies to spring break travel plans. Our subscribers are a curious, thoughtful bunch, and we’ve loved getting your questions and comments on our la ..read more

A helpful hint for cultivating a more diverse base of members and subscribers? Know what they value most in memberships. Excitingly, it’s a bit different than the top benefits identified by more traditional members and subscribers. As we outlined in our last article, research shows that members and subscribers to cultural organizations are generally not diverse in terms of age and race, and not (yet) representative of the communities cultural organizations aim to serve. This said, cultivating new guests is a strategic – and often lengthy – process. And it stands to reason that cultivating new ..read more

Many cultural organizations may have a hunch that their members and subscribers may be older and less diverse than non-members. But just how far are these programs from achieving representative participation? Here are the numbers for eleven organization types. Though real progress has been made in recent years, exhibit-based and performing arts cultural organizations in the United States still have a ways to go when it comes to representative visitor participation. But what about their members and subscribers – their more closely held and presumably most engaged constituencies? How closely do ..read more

How much should an organization spend on audience acquisition each year? And how should that amount be broadly allocated within marketing and communication departments? Here’s the data-informed answer for both exhibit and performance-based organizations. Back in 2015, IMPACTS Experience published a data-informed equation informed by analysis of actual visitor-serving spending for audience acquisition relative to realized market potential. The goal of this analysis was to generate an advisable investment benchmark for organizations to contemplate in the context of maximizing opportunities for a ..read more