Museums White Paper: The Very Serious Business Of Having Fun In Museums

About this white paper

This white paper, produced in 2024, is about creating a stand-out museum visitor experience . It comprises new research statistics on consumer preferences based on feedback from 2,000 UK full-time or part-time adult workers.

The result is an in-depth guide that highlights the approach to technology that museum and visitor attraction operators should adopt to stay appealing to modern visitors.

Download White Paper

Key takeaways

In this white paper you will learn:

• People will spend more time and money in leisure spaces when they’re having fun
• People are more likely to return to ‘fun’ places multiple times a year.
• People’s attention spans are shortening
• Nearly half of people consider an experience without engaging activities to be ‘boring’
• One in five people (21%) perceive museums as being dull and avoid spending time in them

The Very Serious Business Of Having Fun In Museums – Overview

Identifying the problems

There are four key factors that are creating a ‘perfect storm’ for UK museums.

Problem 1. Local authority funding for museums is harder to come by. According to the Arts Council’s research report released in January 2024, Local authorities in England invested 23% less per capita in museums and galleries in 2022-23 than they did in 2009-10. This amounts to a real-terms decrease of 42.1% when inflation is taken into account.

Problem 2. Visitor numbers are still down. On average, museum visits in 2023 were 13% lower than in 2019 – prior to the pandemic. According to research by Saturn, one in five people (21%) think museums are boring and avoid spending time in them.
The reducing volume of visitors is affecting the number of potential donors, and sales of merchandise.

Problem 3. The cost of living has increased. Inflation rates and energy prices have increased. As a result, the potential donors that do visit museums have less disposable cash to donate.

Problem 4. Technology is advancing fast and people’s expectations are changing. Through streaming platforms like Netflix, entertainment is more accessible, plentiful and sophisticated than ever before. Computer graphics and capabilities are becoming more advanced. Virtual reality environments are becoming more commonplace, either via headsets bought for home use or at VR arcade experiences.
The more advanced technology becomes, the greater the divide between it and the experience of looking at artefacts in glass cases. People increasingly expect information to be better presented and to have engaging multi-media experience within museums.

Problem 5. People get bored faster. As people are now used to being stimulated with information via mobile phones multiple times a day, their perception of boredom has changed.

According to research by Saturn, a quarter of people (25%) feel bored after less than one minute if they aren’t stimulated, and will subsequently pick up their mobile phone to amuse themselves. As such, people are more likely to be lose interest faster in a museum experience without some sort of stimulation – and to leave negative reviews about a museum being boring if it can’t sufficiently engage its visitors.

Finding the solutions

Museums must think more commercially than ever before, and focus more on their visitors’ experience and how much fun they have, rather than focussing primarily on curating and storytelling.

Reason 1. People are more pre-disposed to spend more on having fun than on learning. According to 2023 research by VISA, there has been a steady rise in leisure spending, especially on gaming and socialising, despite the increased cost of living.

Research by Saturn found that more than a third of people (37%) would be willing to spend an additional £15-£40 more than they’d planned to at a leisure venue/visitor attraction, if they were having fun.

It found that more than a quarter of people would spend an additional 45 minutes to two hours at a leisure venue/visitor attraction if they felt like they were having fun. Visitors spending additional time at a museum are substantially more likely to result in café purchases, buy merchandise, and to write more detailed/positive reviews on online sites.
The research asked respondents about how often they would be likely to return a leisure venue if they thought it was a fun place to be and more than two thirds (67%) of respondents said they would return at least three times a year, if not more.

Reason 2. Reviews matter. People decide where they’re going to go and how they’re going to spend the little leisure time and money they have available using online review sites. Tripadvisor, for example, continues to increase in popularity with the site getting roughly 192 million visits in June 2024 – a 1.9% increase from the same period in the previous year.

What people write in their reviews matters, and can drive visitors to your museum in droves without you having to spend a penny. Or it can drive them away. If your museum doesn’t have a ‘highpoint’ that visitors are likely to talk about, your reviews will inevitably use generic and unenticing language like ‘an interesting way to spend a day’ ‘good’, as opposed to describing what the highlight of their visit was.

Reason 3. How you ask people to donate, matters. A museum that Saturn has worked with to make donation requests more prominent, substantially increased the volume of people donating, and the average donation value.

Using digital signage technology cleverly to make museums more fun and financially secure.

There’s no doubting that creating a multi-media experience akin to something out of DisneyWorld would be expensive. But thankfully that isn’t necessarily what’s required to make a visitor’s experience more engaging and interactive. A small, well-thought out display can go a long way.

The PDF of of our museums white paper gives a snapshot of just some of the tech that’s available to museums/visitor attraction and how it can be used to deliver an improved visitor experience and is free to download now.

If you have a project you want to discuss or you want to learn more about using digital signage to enhance the visitor experience, call our team now on 0161 222 0706 or email us at info@saturnvisual.com.