Museums have always been as concerned with a prediction as with preservation. Museums are uniquely positioned to blend education and recreation. They have contributed to society in many ways and continue to do so.
As a society, we are using technology in some or another way in our day-to-day life. It’s now a part of our behavior and we should include the same in museums for a seamless experience.
As there is the advancement of technology in various sectors. Museums are now much more concerned and are using the technology for advancements, better customer engagement, visitation, and their social media presence.
The most challenging part for museums is to meet their visitors where they are. Initially, when social media technology came the museums get benefited by engaging their audiences globally in various ways. Now through technology museums can also connect with their visitors, take their reviews, target their market, and much more. They are now trying to understand how visitors are engaging with the museum to improve guest satisfaction and fuel the future.
Recent innovations in technology enable new ways to connect. The Internet of Things, an inter-networking of physical devices currently including smartphones, vehicles, and buildings, is growing exponentially, with experts predicting the introduction of 50 billion objects by 2020. For the smartphone-owning 81% of adults, there’s no better time to be exploring the ways museums communicate information. This simple use of IoT marks a breakthrough in how museums connect, for the first time able to display digital content and then react based on real-time visitor analytics.
The Museums can now understand, the amount of time a visitor spends, the most/least popular art, and demographic details allowing the museum to understand the physical location data in the same way as web analytics. The combination of popular technology, visitors being motivated to download the app for useful information and real-time analytics is a potential game changer for museums. For a relatively small investment, they can connect, enhance, personalize and understand more about their visitors – at least 81% of them.
There are some awesome facts about the Museums which we should know.
- Worldwide museums see ~850 million visitors each year, more than all major league sporting events and theme parks combined.
- Museums return $5 in tax revenue for every $1 they receive in government funding.
- Museums spend more than $2 billion a year on educational activities, and the average museum devotes 75% of its education budget to k-12 students.
- Museums employ > 400,000 Americans and directly contribute $21 billion to the economy.
- Museum volunteers are awesome, they contribute 1 million hours of service every single week.
Hope the technology will entice and amaze the audience by giving them seamless experiences in some or another way that they audience remember and cherish forever making the future of the Museum brighter.
