PART 2 of 2: The Cultural Intimacy Gap and Our Millennial Misunderstanding

This is part two of a two-part article on how our cultural institutions are fighting for their future relevance via analytics and intimacy. If you haven’t yet read part 1, you can find it here.

Intimacy over Impressions

We are at an inflection point in the cultural industry. I doubt there are many institutions out there that believes what got them here will get them to the next 10, 20, or 100 years? Remaining relevant requires we have deep-rooted relationships with visitors. Changes in visitor demographics, preferences, and accompanying technologies have put most organizations on our heels or worse — our butts.

In Part One of this article, I introduced the Cultural Institution Intimacy Gap. Closing this intimacy gap at our museums and cultural centers requires new thinking. Remaining relevant requires bending the intimacy curve back up. To do this, institutions need better information and new means of communicating with its visitors to create the foundations that real relationships can be built on. Relationships fill long-term revenue and membership goals.

This brings us face to face with the elephant in the room or the millennial misunderstanding which I introduced in part 1. We’ve all read plenty of research on millennials, yet we’ve only made incremental progress in the eyes of this transformative generation. And here’s the big secret…the big misunderstanding. It’s not them that’s changing. It is simply the times that are changing. Millennials just happen to be the early adopters of the ways of the future. It is us that are being left behind.

Don’t take it from me, read this article by Colleen Dilenschneider, a millennial cultural institution thought leader, about her first-hand account of the challenges she experiences as an invested yet still misunderstood millennial visitor and donor. Unless we can bridge the gap between how we understand and serve our largest member and donor base, we will be the creatures on display in someone else’s’ museum.

Houston. We have a problem.

I’ll save you the time. Stop here if you don’t think you have a problem. We can’t resolve our intimacy gap and millennial misunderstanding if we don’t believe there is a major problem and we’re prepared to mobilize mindshare and resources to correct it. Oddly enough, future-proofing our organizations is often easier than recognizing that our future relevance is threatened.

There’s this old business school case study that asks ‘where is the best place to put the ice cream stand on the beach?’ Whether you’re a student of game theory or just astute to why birds of a feather tend to fly together, you realize that the answer is; you should put the ice cream stand next to the other ice cream stands. This TedED video explains why.

Like Ed and Ted in the video, cultural institutions, while not as competitive aren’t really collaborative. Visitors and locals alike are making their off-line decisions of what attractions to visit, when they are browsing online. And cultural institutions are getting their digital butt kicked.

Here’s an exercise I do with every organization I visit. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of visitors that will walk through your doors in 30 days. Today, we’re planning next months trip online. And, let’s say we’re going to visit my hometown, Chicago. It’s pretty safe to assume we might Google “What to do in Chicago?” If we did that, here’s what we’d see. Not counting ads, the first result is TripAdvisor (no surprise) the second is Choose Chicago (our DMO). Then runs a constant stream, seven pages deep, of ratings, review sites, ticket companies and travel blogs. The very first cultural institution to appear is The Chicago History Museum at #67! Who is going to dig seven pages deep to find your content?

We live in a world where real authority is diminished by a search engines’ algorithm. As a result, our cultural institutions’ perceived authority is far less than their real authority. And if all our key messages are found seven pages deep on Google, do we really have a dog in the fight?

To find a winning edge, we need new thinking that can create competitive advantages. We need to find ways to get found digitally, to improve the visitor experience, to reduce our technology costs, AND to cull better data to inform our decision making. And the only way I see this happening is to collaborate and leverage shared institutional assets that span non-differentiating marketing, communications, and technology.

Collaboration on Non-Core Items

For the first two years of our company’s existence, we had more lessons learned than paying customers. These lessons forced our company to make hard decisions: follow the well-trodden path the industry knows (agencies and outsourcing) or to follow our head (and a lot of gut) to blaze our own path.

Our biggest challenge was engineering a new model that would address the cultural macro-challenge of sharing non-differentiating resources and assets. We knew that if city and cultural organizations could do collaborate on three things that it would unlock huge opportunities for growth for all who participated.

Sharing of non-core assets (especially technology)

We’re all are literally spent on building proprietary technologies (unless it is a core differentiator). Once we build it, it is out of date or too expensive to maintain. In order to afford the continuous innovation required to be competitive today it would require us to build the tech once so it can be shared with other institutions. This will also greatly improve the consumer experience.

Collective marketing of our stories

Solving the Google SEO problem I state above would require us to go to market together creating one marketplace where visitors know where to find the real voices of cultural authority.

Collection and sharing of data

We all talk a big data game, but few actually have it. We shouldn’t settle for counting turnstile spins when we can have detailed demographic data on who is it that turns the turnstile and who read about us but didn’t visit. Demographics data and win-loss analytics will drive continual improvements.

The intimacy gap is a result of our millennial misunderstanding. The millennial misunderstanding is a leading indicator of the massive shifts in socio-economic behaviors. The core missions of our storied institutions are not being questioned. Yet, our missions’ relevance is in jeopardy because we are struggling to communicate the meaning of why we are relevant and amazing in a modern manner.

Our stories will never change, its how we tell them and how people consume them that does. Change, while inevitable, I view as a good thing. I hope you do to.