Using Digital Technology to Transform the Museum Experience and Deepen Audience Engagement

The Challenge

A national non-profit organization provided grants to eight museums with the goal of amplifying their digital strategies to create new customer experiences and connect with a wider audience. In support of this mission to invest in museum digital capabilities, BCG Platinion led a year-long initiative leveraging a human-centered design (HCD) approach to define, develop, and implement digital solutions for the participating cultural institutions.

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The Approach

Digital Readiness Assessment

Baselining to understand current internal digital capabilities and form a strategic direction going forward

Discovery & Design

Customer research and co-design to test and evaluate initial ideas and hypotheses

Product Development & Implementation

Planning, development, and implementation of digital pilot programs with tech vendors using customer validated research

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The Impact

The HCD process equipped museums with new digital strategies and tools to implement organizational change across customer experience, product development and internal operations channels resulting in both ongoing enhancement and expansion of the pilots as well as scaled and commercialized results.

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Looking into the Future

Participating institutions, with otherwise limited staff and budget, were able to engage in digital experience work otherwise inaccessible to them. The project equipped these museums to more intentionally utilize technology to expand reach and audience engagement, and to become more agile in curating experiences leveraging rich customer data. This generated a deeper familiarity with museum audiences and the capacity to more readily produce exhibits with the goals and needs of their visitors in mind.