(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Advising museums on audience development isn’t a scenario Nick Gray had in mind when he first turned his hobby—giving friends oddball tours of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—into a small business. An entrepreneurial type who founded a web-hosting service while in high school, he always found museums “cold, both emotionally and physically.” Then a date led him through the Met with an emphasis on her individual passions—and the museum became a favorite spot.
Gray perfected his tours by pestering friends with feedback forms. Thanks to attention online, he went pro in 2013, settling on a name, Museum Hack, hiring guides, and expanding. Tours of institutions in five cities, with titles such as “Un-Highlights” or “Badass Bitches,” soon captured the attention of museum professionals. “There was immediate intrigue with these renegade museum tours,” says Andrea Feller, the curator of education for the Arizona State University Art Museum.
The company’s seeming irreverence wasn’t off-putting to Feller and her colleagues at the ASU museum. In 2017 they hired Museum Hack to help create programming. The company developed an event modeled on the “escape room” trend—real-world adventure games that involve solving puzzles and challenges to “escape” a physical location—designed specifically to attract millennials who often ignored ASU’s museum. The free but ticketed event’s 150 slots filled up in 24 hours.
“The number of people who were interested just dumbfounded us,” Feller says. “It created a real buzz.” Best of all: 70 percent of participants had never been to the museum before.
Museum Hack’s core mission is to go after people who think museums aren’t for them, Gray says. “We’re not preaching to the choir, or trying to get someone who comes once a year to come three times a year. We’re trying to get somebody who would never go to the museum.”
So a tour tailored to “finance bros,” for example, will immediately take them to the most expensive object in the museum, with a blunt discussion of its worth—an entry point to engage the newbie audience. This builds word of mouth. Museum Hack charges $59 a person for Met tours, including the full admission fee. (The tours contributed $200,000 to the museum’s revenue last year.) Lately, Gray says, consulting for and working with cultural institutions has become the company’s fastest-growing line of business, rising from nothing two years ago to almost a quarter of its $2.7 million in revenue in 2017. (The company doesn’t consult for the Met.)
This new line of business started after an approach from Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. Ethan Angelica, a Museum Hack guide, adapted the company’s guide training program into a workshop for the National Museum’s 40 docents, pushing them to use more colloquial language, think about tours in storytelling terms, and quickly devise fresh, game-like approaches to familiar collections. “That became the foundation of a lot of the work we’ve done since then,” says Angelica, now Museum Hack’s director for creative and consulting. The company served about 50 such institutional clients last year.
“The core audience of museums is aging,” says Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums in Arlington, Va. A 2015 report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that from 2002 to 2012, the percentage of adults who’d visited an art museum fell from 26.5 percent to 21 percent, and those who did go visited less frequently on average. Some museums are laying off staff and reducing hours and programming, rejiggering admissions schemes, or relying on increasingly ambitious gift shops.
Meanwhile, younger museum visitors seem to seek a more personal experience, fashioned partly by their own interests and input, rather than simply absorbing and accepting an institution’s curated expertise. A cynic might say that means treating museums as little more than a collection of cool backdrops for selfie-taking.
Museum Hack is creating a midpoint: a creative approach to draw people to the institution that still remains “on mission,” as Merritt says. ASU followed its Escape the Museum experiment with another Museum Hack-devised tour dubbed Get Weird. Visitors engaged in figure drawing and danced the Macarena in multiple galleries to earn entrance to a “VIP chill space.” It was another hit, Feller says. ASU has made the escape-room event a recurring feature and is planning a Get Weird sequel. “There’s a lot of buzz about the programming,” she says. “People are asking us about our next events.”
For Gray, that’s the Museum Hack payoff: Maybe its strategies and events at first sound disconnected from traditional museum reverence, but they can bring in people who never would have guessed how much they might enjoy the museum context. Says Gray: “I don’t think anybody before Museum Hack has said, ‘We’re going to really intentionally go after people who think that they don’t like museums.’ ”
To contact the author of this story: Rob Walker in New York at rw@robwalker.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dimitra Kessenides at dkessenides1@bloomberg.net.
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