Are We There Yet? Not really. Maybe halfway, at the best case scenario

A new data set shows that most of our museums are not ready for the new definition. Check the results of the 3rd Museums and Branding survey series.

Museum professionals have been dedicating a great deal of time and effort to redefining museums for the 21st century, from a conceptual perspective and through its practices.

From Argentina to Zambia, changemakers of all sorts are deeply engaged in making museums become audience-focused and community-oriented institutions: less authoritarian and welcoming concepts such as social change, diversity, and inclusiveness. However, it’s fair to ask ourselves how progressive we are in our daily activities.

A few months before the International Council of Museums (ICOM) community embraced a new and contemporary museum definition by a near-unanimous vote, I opened a fast-paced anonymous online survey to museum professionals and senior management. I was curious to understand if the museum’s mission and attitudes reflect those ideals. And if they believe the places they work should rewrite or redefine their mission statement after the new museum definition.

To my great surprise, 405 participants answered the call. The questionnaire was available in English (“Are we there yet?” with 230 respondents), Portuguese (“Já estamos lá?” with 89 respondents), and Spanish (“Estamos ahí?” with 86 respondents). Most of them are from Latin America (41%), followed by Europe (29%), and US/Canada (16%). It is necessary to clarify that as it is an open survey, I could not control who participated. And some surprises did occur, like significant participation from Mexico, Latvia, and Iran professionals, for instance.

The results were first presented at the 26th ICOM General Conference, and now I am sharing with you the report and the open data — so you can make new interpretations and exciting findings.

> Download the general reports in English, Portuguese or Spanish.
> Check the open data in this public Google Drive folder.

This post is the 1st about the survey. In the following weeks, I will analyze some branding and mission issues. You can also see an assemblage of future expectations from the participants and a list of 422 most admired museum brands worldwide. Your museum can be one of them.

Listening to the museum professionals

“Are we there yet?” is the 3rd study of a Museums and Branding series that started with Robert Jones, who informally surveyed 100 museum managers and senior leaders during the eighth annual Communicating the Museum conference, held in Venice, Italy, in 2008. The second one was developed by me in 2014, following Jones’ methodology, with the participation of 220 marketing, communications, audience development, and digital media museum professionals worldwide, published in “Museum Branding: Redefining Museums for the 21st Century” (MPR/Chinese Association of Museums).

Jones’s exercise opened a fruitful and exciting conversation on questioning authority, co-creation, public value, and engagement. It motivated me to recreate this experience in 2014 and, most recently, in June 2022, to constantly monitor the change in the value perception of strategic brand management among museum professionals.

I added a few crucial questions to the original survey script in this updated sector picture. Now it was urgent to understand the role of the mission statement in our museums, what’s currently in our mission statements, and what we would include in our mission statements if we had the chance.

The consistent results from the three surveys of its kind, made with different professionals sharing different local realities, give us much confidence to understand some recurrent issues from the past 14 years. For example, almost all the participants from the 2014 survey are no longer working in their roles or the museum sector. And yet many problems remained the same.

Back in the 2008 survey, Jones discovered that for 65% of museums, branding was merely a logo that identifies the institution, a tool for the marketing and communication departments. And as of 2022, we still identify 60% of institutions with brand issues: their values are unclear, not recognized, or not established at all.

With the generous support from ICOM MPR, several ICOM national committees, and museum activists such as Robert J Weisberg and Mike Murawski, the 2022 survey received 1807 views and 884 starts, generating a completion rate of 54% in the Spanish form, 46% in the English form, and 41% in the Portuguese form. An average time of 16 minutes to complete the survey.

We had impressive participation of senior managers: directors, curators, or communication and marketing managers (56% combined). That means most decision makers or influencers in our organizations. Most of them serve in medium-sized (41%) public museums (58%) from the post-war era (32%).

Typologically, the respondents work in art museums (27%), followed by museums dedicated to history or heritage(26%), science (10%), archaeology or Ethnographic (10%), city museums (5%); natural history (3%), virtual museums (3%), and open or ecomuseums (2%). Not surprisingly, the remaining 14% opted for “Other” (after all, museums are what they choose to be nowadays). Please check the general report for complete details. More data to come soon.

Do you want to open this conversation in your community?

If you want to invite Cultivia for a presentation or workshop, please get in touch. We are also available for short/medium-term onsite immersions to help museums and other cultural organizations listen to their audiences, generate institutional transformations, and build public trust.