From attendance projections to welcoming perceptions to what makes employees happy, here are the most discussed and referenced articles from IMPACTS Experience in 2023.
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It’s that time of year, folks! As we all get ready to put 2023 behind us and bring new hopes and plans into 2024, our team at IMPACTS Experience has stopped to take stock of the articles cultural executives found most valuable this year.
This annual wrap up has been a pre-New Year’s tradition on Know Your Own Bone for twelve years, which feels unbelievable to me. And this year was a particularly important one for us! In July, we launched KYOB+, which allows us to share even more in-depth and specialized research with individual subscribers and provide more strategic and specific guidance to Premium and Premium Elite members. In the six months since we launched KYOB+, we’ve already learned a great deal about our readers and their unique challenges and data desires. We look forward to continuing to be of service in 2024 as we navigate some unique conditions in the year ahead.
Here is a countdown of the top ten most referenced articles on this website in 2023, with consideration to their posting date and the rollout of KYOB+:
10) Which Social Media Channels Maximize Engagement and Conversions for Cultural Organizations? (DATA)
Social media and digital engagement are critical for a cultural organization’s success. Gone are the days of social media being a tacked-on strategy led by a single intern. Instead, effective social media and digital engagement strategies are woven into the entirety of a cultural organization’s audience experience – both onsite and offsite – and extend far beyond the purview of marketing or public relations departments alone.
But what may be surprising is just how much more important social media and digital engagement are today when compared to before the pandemic. This article explores important information for all departments to know as we enter 2024. It shows research in the top sources of information for likely guests and how much the pandemic accelerated the importance of social media. This article created a buzz by also sharing the top social media channels for engagement (likes, shares, and comments), and conversions (buying a ticket, signing up for a program, or acting in the interests of an organization’s mission).
9) Marketing or Curating: Which is More Important for Museums?
It’s a trick question. Cultural organizations need them both in equal measure. This article aims to succinctly explain why.
We have the great pleasure of working directly with board members and executive leadership within cultural organizations throughout the world. In the United States, it is not uncommon to encounter tension between the relative importance of curation and the “onsite experience,” and marketing and the digital “offsite experience.” These discussions are as if one of these departments is necessarily more important than the other and worthy of more consideration or prioritization. (At your own organization, you may feel that, indeed, one department is held more sacred than the other.)
This is a false dichotomy. And the tension can be toxic given the roles that these departments play within the overall experience. The research is clear: Successful organizations need them both not only for their own sake but because they both work together to support your raison d’être – your mission.
8) Data on Why Being Entertaining Matters for Cultural Entities (And Why It’s Not a Dirty Word)
This article received a notable amount of attention considering it was only published in November!
How the public defines “entertaining” in the context of cultural entities isn’t what some leaders may think. Consider this: Memorial sites in the US generally have high “entertainment” ratings. These ratings aren’t necessarily because people are dark or misguided in their sensibilities, or because they are missing the point of these memorials. If memorial sites having high entertainment ratings surprises you, it may be because the cultural industry holds some unfounded ideas about what “entertainment” really means to their audiences.
Providing an entertaining experience is critical for museums and performing arts organizations alike, but we still see some leaders – particularly within museums – recoil at the notion of providing “entertainment.” It seems as if some folks believe that being entertaining is the opposite of being educational. In fact, it’s critical for an organization’s success to be perceived as being both entertaining and educational. For those leaders thinking “entertainment” is a dirty word, we encourage an especially close read-through of the article and examination of the data. Please stay curious – even if you experience discomfort. You may find yourself realizing that in the context of cultural organizations, “entertainment” doesn’t mean what some insider experts think it means.
7) Are Employees of Cultural Organizations Happy? (DATA)
How satisfied are staff members with their workplace, and do these sentiments vary by leadership level?
Workplace happiness is an increasingly critical consideration. As museum employees contemplated unionization throughout the United States in 2023, we observed increasing attention paid to workplace happiness within the board rooms of the organizations with which we work. Candidly, several executive leaders reached out to us this year asking if we have any insight into what’s happening in the industry: Are staff members at museums and performing arts organizations happy? Do they hate their jobs? Is the whole thing broken? Many executive leaders had conducted surveys within their own institutions but were unsure how their own findings could be contextualized within broader industry sentiments.
Spoiler alert: This is a data-based article, not a doom scroll. In fact, nearly three quarters of non-leadership employees in the cultural industry describe themselves as generally satisfied. This article features the hard data on where things stand and where there are opportunities for improvement. This article also set the stage for another one we published in 2023 on how employees feel about unionizing.
6) The Pandemic Has STILL Shifted The Types of Cultural Entities People Prefer to Visit (DATA)
Even though Americans are living alongside the pandemic with the closures of 2020 well behind them, they continue to prefer some cultural activities over others when compared to life before the pandemic.
We refer to this important metric as the “redistribution of demand.” By this time – nearly three years after the start of the pandemic – institutions may expect the demand for different cultural experiences to return to pre-pandemic levels. In other words, one might think that the folks who once enjoyed going to the theater over the zoo would by now have returned to preferring the theater. However, people have not returned to their previous activities in the same way. The demand for onsite cultural engagement remains distributed away from some organization types and towards others. This article shows the data through the end of year 2022, and you can look forward to new data on this in the first quarter of 2024.
5) People Trust Museums Now More Than Before The Pandemic (DATA)
Museums were more trusted than the daily newspaper before the pandemic – and they’re even more trusted now. During the pandemic, we watched as trust in cultural organizations increased in the United States and throughout the world. This dramatic rise in trust perceptions remains one of the biggest and arguably most impactful findings from the last three years.
There were several reasons for elevated trust perceptions when the pandemic began. Critically, many cultural organizations changed up their messaging during coronavirus closures and began proving their relevance beyond their walls. They posted on social media about how they were continuing to execute their missions (missions that have become increasingly important over the past few years); published educational resources for parents who were suddenly leading educational activities from home; and provided virtual opportunities for tours, curator talks, expert insights, animal feedings, and other engaging content that underscored the inspirational and educational benefits of these institutions.
Exciting, right? Here’s the most exciting part: Elevated trust perceptions secured during the pandemic have held up.
4) How Welcoming Are Cultural Organizations According to BIPOC, Millennial, and Child-Free Guests? (DATA)
Cultural organizations are perceived as more welcoming than they were before the pandemic, but there’s still important work to do.
Expanding audience profiles is critical to maximizing market potential. At IMPACTS Experience, we consistently monitor perceptions surrounding attitude affinities, or how much people feel that certain organizations are “places for people like me” or are “welcoming to people like me.” This article starts by looking at overall welcoming perceptions of cultural organizations, and then drills down into perceptions held by self-identified BIPOC audiences, individuals without children in the household, and millennials.
Cultural organizations are seen as more welcoming than before the pandemic…but there is important work yet to be done. This research may be best used to continue to fuel the fires of change and inclusion. It’s positive reinforcement on a pathway to expanding audiences. Check out the article to get the data on the percentage of people who really feel welcome coming through our doors.
3) What Population Shifts Mean for Long-Term Attendance to Cultural Organization Types (DATA)
How can we spot a KYOB reader in the wild? They already know about negative substitution! Considering this, it’s no surprise this article was referenced and discussed so often in 2023.
Negative substitution is the rate at which organizations are engaging new audiences compared to the rate at which these same organizations are losing their historic visitors. In other words, it’s a measure of how quickly the market is shrinking for cultural organizations…unless we actively work to expand audience profiles to reach more diverse audiences. This article shows the current visitation cycle lengths and negative substitution ratios for eleven organization types, including both exhibit-based and performing arts organizations.
Spoiler alert: Expanding audiences isn’t only a diversity and inclusion action item – it’s a business imperative.
2) What Do America’s Wealthiest Donors Consider Before Making a Gift Over One Million Dollars? (DATA)
This article shows the data on what Americans with individual net worth greater than $50 million consider before making a major gift to a cultural organization.
To get to the bottom of this million-dollar question, we’ve been asking these individuals themselves. We define an “Ultra High Net Worth Individual” as someone with net assets greater than $50 million. 141,000 such individuals reside in the US, the greatest concentration of these folks in the world by substantial measure. This most recent update of the study collected responses from 102 Ultra High Net Worth Individuals. IMPACTS Experience asked these respondents open-ended questions to identify their most important considerations with regard to making a gift greater than $1 million to a cultural organization. They were then asked to rank the importance of these considerations from 1-10.
Are you considering a major project requiring significant funds? You’ll want to read this article. It was one of our most read and discussed articles of 2023.
1) 2023 & 2024 Expected Attendance: Data for Eleven Cultural Organization Types
It’s no surprise to us that our market potential analyses (attendance projections) are often the most popular articles on Know Your Own Bone. We’re grateful to be well aware of how frequently this research is used in board rooms and at executive leadership tables throughout the nation. And it didn’t hurt that this year was the first in which we showed projected attendance levels by individual organization type for aquariums, art museums, botanic gardens, children’s museums, history museums, natural history museums, science museums, orchestras, theaters, other performance entities, and zoos.
It’s a good time to revisit this article as the calendar year ends so that you may get an early sense of how your annual attendance stacked up compared to like organization types this year. But don’t forget to keep reading, we’ll be publishing a fresh update on data projections for 2024 with 2023 end-of-year actuals on January 17th!
I end this annual round-up each year by thanking you all for being here. I thank you for reading, sharing, citing, referencing, watching, and discussing Know Your Own Bone and the research shared by IMPACTS Experience. We’re especially grateful to you as subscribers for enabling this ongoing research, and to our fantastic Premium and Premium Elite partners. We frequently pinch ourselves that we get to work with such incredible market leaders.
I especially want to thank you for counting on us. We’re grateful for the opportunity to support your important work. And we have a great deal of new data, analysis, and research updates coming your way in 2024. So, here’s to a brand-new year!
Thank you for your hard work this year – and every year – to inspire, educate, and make the world a more meaningful and connected place.
We’ll see you in the new year!
Yours in expert analysis, real-time trends, and high-confidence research,
IMPACTS Experience
