From data on optimal admission pricing to marketing budgets to creating a welcoming guest experience, here are the most discussed and referenced articles from IMPACTS Experience in 2024.
It’s that time of year, folks! This annual countdown has been a pre-New Year’s tradition on Know Your Own Bone for thirteen years. (That’s bananas!) As we all get ready to put 2024 behind us and bring new hopes and plans into 2025, our team at IMPACTS Experience has stopped to take stock of the articles cultural executives found most valuable this year.
It’s been a big year over here! We’ve completed a trip and a half around the sun since we first launched KYOB+ in July 2023 – a resource which allows us to share even more in-depth and specialized research with individual subscribers and provide more strategic and specific guidance to our Premium and Premium Elite members. We look forward to continuing to be of service regarding the unique challenges and opportunities facing cultural organizations in 2025. In addition to keeping tabs on critical benchmarks, here’s a preview of some of the top trends we’ll be watching in the coming year.
We also look forward to another tradition: publishing our annual market potential (attendance) projections for eleven organization types as our first article of 2025. This research will be published on January 15. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out!
Before we dive into the top ten articles, I want to share the article that came in at number eleven: What Influences Visitor Satisfaction Most by Generation. While it’s technically not in the top ten, it was one of our first looks into large-scale data regarding Generation Z and their cultural experiences. This younger generation is bringing some different expectations to the table, and we wanted to wrap up 2024 and kick off 2025 with this look to our future audiences.
And now, without further ado, it’s time for our countdown of the top ten most viewed and referenced articles on this website in 2024. (A subscription is required to access most of the articles below. Not yet a subscriber? Sign up for KYOB+ here.)
10) What Factors Create a Welcoming Guest Experience? (DATA)
This article shares the top factors that make a guest experience welcoming at a museum or performing arts organization – in guests’ own words. At IMPACTS Experience, we collect a great deal of data on the importance of expanding audiences for the future of cultural organizations – and we also monitor welcoming perceptions concerning visitor-serving experiences.
As it turns out, it’s difficult to entice people to spend their precious time and money going to a place where they feel like they do not belong. After all, feeling that an organization is “welcoming to people like me” (however an individual defines “like me”) is important for actually getting potential visitors to come through our doors. So what does it mean to our audiences to provide a “welcoming experience?” Here’s the data.
9) More Than Souvenirs: The Overlooked Power of Museum Stores (DATA)
Think the museum shop is simply a place to “buy stuff” on the way out of a cultural organization? Think again. Research indicates that museum retail stores can impact perceptions of cultural organizations’ unique reputations and singular guest experiences in nuanced and powerful ways. Gift shops can play important motivational, experiential, and emotional roles for visitors when it comes to underscoring the uniqueness of your individual cultural organization – and here’s the data to show it.
8) Differentiated, Variable, and Dynamic Pricing? What Cultural Entities Need to Know
As exhibit-based and performing arts organizations level up their business practices, pricing structures have become among the most popular topics we’re asked about at IMPACTS Experience.
In conversations with the leaders of many cultural organizations, however, we’ve encountered general confusion about the various types of popular pricing structures. Seeking clarification yourself? Eager to learn more? We’ve got you. This article goes over the basics of static, differentiated, variable, and dynamic pricing, and what’s working – or isn’t – with each strategy.
7) Top Mistakes Cultural Entities Make When Commissioning a Pricing Study & How to Avoid Them
Did we mention that data-informed optimal pricing was a hot topic in 2024? Data-informed optimal pricing was a hot topic in 2024. And this article also falls into that category.
Few earned revenue categories impact the ability of our businesses to deliver on our missions more than admission and membership-related revenues. Optimally pricing these engagement products can be the difference between making reductions in programming and staff versus planning for growth and expansion. From the best time to roll out a pricing change to the top mistakes organizations make when contemplating price-related analyses, here’s what your cultural entity needs to know.
6) How Much Should You Spend on Marketing to Maximize Attendance? (DATA)
What percentage of revenues should a cultural organization invest in advertising to maximize its market potential? The science doesn’t necessarily say that more is better when it comes to spending. Instead, the data suggest there is a sweet spot for audience acquisition investments that supports attendance maximization without risking superfluous spending.
Nearly a decade after its initial publication, the original article on optimal audience acquisition investments remains one of our most cited publications. But a great deal has changed since 2015. So just how much should an organization spend on audience acquisition each year today? And how should that amount be broadly allocated within marketing and communication departments?
Here’s the data-informed answer for both exhibit and performance-based organizations.
5) Difficult, Time-Consuming, Confusing? Ticketing Issues are Deterring Visitors (DATA)
There’s no doubt about it: Digital and online purchasing expectations have increased. People are used to spending less time navigating and completing the online transaction experience, with companies from Amazon to Uber working to make the purchase pathway as easy and simple as possible.
What does this mean for cultural organizations? While we may internally attempt to rationalize and justify complicated purchasing processes that require multiple levels of user inputs and a confusing menu of options as acceptable, the evidence is compelling that our audiences are becoming increasingly less tolerant of these transactional inefficiencies than some cultural executives might assume. So how big of a barrier to attendance are ticket purchasing challenges? What is the redemption timeframe for tickets to cultural organizations? What methods are people using to purchase tickets (e.g., mobile, web, etc.)? Here are the answers for exhibit and performance-based organizations.
Heads up: Another hot topic! We will be publishing an update to this research in the first quarter of 2025 as well.
4) 2024 & 2025 Market Potential: Expected Attendance for Eleven Cultural Organization Types (DATA) & 2024 & 2025 Midyear Market Potential (DATA)
We publish expected attendance twice a year for cultural organization subsets including aquariums, art museums, botanical gardens, children’s museums, history museums, natural history museums, science museums, zoos, orchestras, theaters, and other performance entities. In this countdown, we’ve combined our EOY and midyear reports, which both made the top ten list for 2024.
We know how many board rooms have come to rely on this benchmark research each year, and we are glad to provide helpful context for cultural organizations in this capacity.
In 2025, expect this article published on January 15th with projected baseline attendance for the sector for 2025 & 2026.
3) Do School Group Visits Correlate with Adulthood Attendance to Cultural Entities? It’s Not What You Think. (DATA)
Did you know that over 62% of adult visitors to exhibit-based organizations first attended them as children? The percentage is even greater for adult visitors to performing arts organizations, with over 70% of adult guests reporting having attended when they were kids.
But research shows that cultivating cultural supporters is not as straightforward as simply getting kids in the door. It depends on how and with whom they visit. For adults who reported visiting cultural entities as children, their visits generally fell within one of two categories: with groups (such as school field trip or social group) and/or with family. How do children in these visitation categories feel about cultural organizations now that they are adults? Does one method of engagement yield more likely adult cultural visitors? And how do childhood visitors compare to folks who didn’t visit cultural organizations as children at all? See the data here.
2) Trust in Cultural Organizations by Generation (DATA)
Do different generations have different levels of trust in museums? Does it change by museum type? What about performing arts organizations? The research in this article contemplates Americans from four different generational cohorts: Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. Interestingly, there are notable differences and expectations. Here are the answers and their implications for cultural organizations.
I was personally excited to see that this article made it so high on our list of top ten articles this year. Not only does it include data newly segmented for Generation Z, but it also underscores the reputation of museums and performing arts organizations as trusted sources of information in our divided country. We look forward to continuing to track these metrics in 2025 and beyond.
1) Optimal Admission Pricing is Especially Important Post-Pandemic – What You Need to Know to Do It Right (DATA)
Are we surprised that the data roundup on why optimal admission pricing is especially important right now and findings to inform these conversations came in at the top spot? Not really.
This article complements others on this list surrounding data-informed optimal pricing. It discussed why optimal pricing is particularly important post-pandemic, debunks the most common concerns related to pricing considerations, and reminds readers of best practices related to understanding optimal pricing.
I end this annual round-up each year by thanking you all for being here. I thank you for reading, sharing, citing, referencing, watching, and discussing Know Your Own Bone and the research shared by IMPACTS Experience. We’re especially grateful to you as subscribers for enabling this ongoing research, and to our fantastic Premium and Premium Elite partners. We frequently pinch ourselves that we get to work with such incredible institutions and market leaders.
I especially want to thank you for counting on us. We’re grateful for the opportunity to support your important work. And we have a great deal of new data, analysis, and research updates coming your way in 2025. So, here’s to a brand new year!
Thank you for your hard work this year – and every year – to inspire, educate, and make the world a more meaningful and connected place.
We’ll see you in 2025, and we have so much more to come!
Yours in expert analysis, real-time trends, and high-confidence research,
IMPACTS Experience
