Italian museums, uncompetitive on digital despite huge potential. What they need to do

Italian museums have enormous untapped digital potential, which if exploited, for example by digitizing the visitor experience, optimizing fees and expanding the range of services, their revenues could mark a double-digit increase, estimated at between 44 percent and 66 percent. That’s at least according to the study Public Museums, a strategic asset for the Italian system, presented the day before yesterday at Palazzo Rospigliosi in Rome during the first edition of the Culture Italy Forum organized by The European House - Ambrosetti (a professional group composed of about 300 professional experts in integrated management) in collaboration with Aditus.

The study started with data for 2019, the record year before the drop recorded during the pandemic, when state museums have 242.4 million euros in admission revenues. A figure up 10.8 percent year-on-year since 2012, but which, The European House - Ambrosetti calculates, is equivalent to the sum of revenues from just five of Europe’s most visited museums and monuments (Musée du Louvre, Tour Eiffel and Musee d’Orsay in France and Museo Nacional del Prado and Museo Reina Sofia in Spain). The sector, however, has an economic and employment multiplier effect that would, according to the study, enable 237 euros distributed across all economic sectors for every 100 euros invested in museum and cultural activities, and 1.5 employed outside the sector for every job created within it.

How can this be achieved? In order to strengthen the competitiveness of public museums and sustain their development, it is necessary to restore the centrality of the visitor and to invest in expanding the range of museum and cultural services, integrating additional products and the digital channel into the museum visit experience, monitoring visitor enjoyment over time, introducing new management logics and digital communication and marketing methods, new skills and dynamic pricing.

In fact, Italian museums still appear to be lagging behind in the adoption of digital technologies. Less than a third of museums in Italy (31.2%) offer visitors videos and/or touch screens to describe and explore the works; only 27.5% are equipped with QR codes and/or Wi-Fi in the facilities; less than 1 in 5 museums provide applications for tablets and smartphones; and slightly more than 1 in 5 (22.4%) are equipped with multimedia supports (e.g., interactive displays, virtual reconstructions, augmented reality). 34.8% of museums have not yet digitized their public exhibits and 37.8% have not yet digitized their archival holdings. Slightly more than 1 in 5 museums organize online conferences, lectures and seminars or online virtual tours. Thirty-seven percent of cultural institutions in Italy still do not have a web presence with their own dedicated website, while online ticketing is present in only 1 in 5 institutions. Finally, half of cultural institutions do not have any dedicated digital resources.

According to the study, a large number of visitors in Italy enter museums for free: 37 percent of state and 45 percent of non-state public institutions have completely free admission (average 44 percent), and 51 percent of visitors in state and non-state public institutions are free, with particularly high values in state institutions (58 percent).

Again, the museum heritage in Italy is distributed over the territory, but the performance of attraction is very differentiated. Latium, for example, with 7 percent of the national heritage attracts a quarter of the total annual visitors in Italy, and the vast majority of revenues are concentrated in only three regions (Latium with 87.3 million, Campania with 60.2 million, and Tuscany with 55.2 million), while few regions have increased both visitors and revenues (Campania, Marche, and Basilicata). Tuscany (54 percent of the regional total), Veneto (52 percent) and Lazio (50 percent) are the regions with the highest incidence of foreign visitors to cultural institutions.

So what to do? Five proposals for more competitive Italian public museums come from the study by The European House - Ambrosetti, which identifies five lines of action to strengthen the competitiveness of the Italian museum system and support its development: offer a minimum number of additional services (bookshops, cafeteria/restaurant services, interactive visit services, educational classrooms, educational initiatives for children); adapt the layout of museums and places of culture to the purpose of the visit, both in terms of physical infrastructure, such as leisure, entertainment and relaxation areas, and digital; asking visitors to rate the experience of discovering the museum and what gravitates around it, introducing a nationwide satisfaction monitoring and evaluation system based on uniform criteria and quantitative indicators to feed a centralized database accessible to P.A. and evaluate the performance of concessionaires; reducing the number of interlocutors in order to simplify relations between private entities and local governments for the management of museum and cultural entities; providing for tenders to overcome parcelization on a regional basis; and introducing new forms of contracts for the management of ancillary services of state-owned public museums that allow for better planning capabilities and greater flexibility for private operators.

“Museums,” argues Lorenzo Tavazzi, Partner and Head of the Scenarios and Intelligence Area of The European House - Ambrosetti, “represent a widespread asset of the country on which to build a flywheel for the creation of skilled employment, with economic spin-offs that benefit Italy. Museums are evolving in their function, increasingly integrating territorial and social dimensions for local communities. There are opportunities for development in intercepting the new demand for culture through multichannel ways of relating to visitors, digitization, and increased experiential offerings and services. Enabling this vision requires action through the completion of the path to autonomy and the enhancement of public-private collaboration.”

“More prominence in the digital world is needed,” commented the minister of culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, in a message delivered to participants in the forum proceedings. “This is where the needs, passions and emotions of the new generations are intercepted, and they need to be cultivated to a greater awareness of their surroundings. This has an educational, identity and economic value, as well highlighted in the study’s introduction, that cannot be overlooked.”

“We need a new relationship between public and private,” said Federico Mollicone (Chairman of the 7th Committee on Culture, Science and Education of the Chamber of Deputies), speaking at the close of the proceedings. “You say it clearly in your study: from the tendering of additional services to simplification, economic and productive energies can be unlocked, with broad spillovers of up to 66 percent more profit. The creation of a competitive cultural system is what we are pursuing. We are presenting a bill to regulate the relationship between the public and private sectors in cultural heritage by establishing a circuit - ’Italia in Scena’ - so as to ensure not only more qualitative management, but also more effective, efficient and sustainable from an economic-financial point of view of the institutes, places of culture and cultural assets of public relevance and to promote the participation of private entities, whether individual or associated, in the enhancement of cultural heritage according to the principle of subsidiarity, with wide use of public-private partnership tools, especially to make active situations of insufficient use or enhancement of small villages, inland areas, mountain municipalities and cultural assets that are not adequately managed.”

“In a scenario that is increasingly evolving and accelerating, public-private partnership is essential for an expansion of services and greater flexibility focused on the visitor’s user experience, to accompany the evolution of Museums in a 4.0 key,” stresses Riccardo Ercoli, president of Aditus. “In the ’museum of the future,’ the role of the virtuous concessionaire will increasingly translate into the ability to develop, offer and manage integrated services (such as guided tours, workshops, temporary exhibitions and displays, and online activities) and make available experiential services that can meet the new needs of Italian and foreign visitors, fostering the full enjoyment of cultural heritage even at smaller and lesser-known museum entities. This will have to be done by paying special attention to the technological and digital dimensions, sustainability and training of museum staff.”

Italian museums, uncompetitive on digital despite huge potential. What they need to do

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