Museums around the world are working hard to find ways to overcome challenges related to audience growth and engagement, and the strategies they’re landing on are diverse: creating new people-focused missions, launching institutional partnerships that enhance programming, undertaking renovations and expansions, exploring collection diversification and even ‘flipping’ museums for social impact. High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk is something of a star in this space for not only reducing the institution’s admission fees and implementing hyper-local marketing campaigns but also increasing the High’s acquisition and exhibition of artworks by women, LGBTQ and BIPOC artists.
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To some degree, arts institutions are racing the clock, as many haven’t fully recovered after Covid tanked admissions and membership revenues and, as Observer correspondent Daniel Grant so aptly put it, “people lost the habit of going to museums.” Financial woes aside, there’s an argument to be made that museums need people as much as people need museums. A well-endowed institution without visitors is more mausoleum than museum, which means the effects of depressed attendance numbers can be seen outside of an institution’s balance sheet. Some museums are doing great—the Met just announced that the number of out-of-state visitors reached pre-pandemic levels while local visitors exceeded pre-pandemic figures in the previous fiscal year—but many others, not so much.
Audience growth and engagement initiatives are often focused on attracting first-time visitors, repeat visitors or both—what Suffolk has succeeded in doing in Atlanta. But what if there was a way to boost attendance and financial........