Cultural Mediation for Museums. Driving Audience Engagement

The most relevant resource for museums is their audience. The new definition of museums released in August 2022 by ICOM, the International Council of Museums, puts at the core their activities “in the service of society” through the offering of “varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing”. The audience actively contributes to creating experiences, but their engagement remains a difficult challenge for museums. Especially the recent pandemic has shown that museums face multiple difficulties in reaching and engaging their visitors, making their engagement a top priority. To that end, cultural mediation is a key driver to make arts accessible even to the most distant visitors. Thus, cultural mediation has raised the interest of many museums. Traditionally cultural organizations design mediation in accord with “the one-best solution” principle, providing one single concept of cultural mediation to the entire audience. However, this model does not work out, and better cultural mediation services can be designed to increase audience engagement. But how? To solve this issue, as marketing management teaches, museums should segment their visitors’ market, and design accordingly cultural mediation. This book explains how to adopt this customizing strategy. Based on a multi-method research project run in 2021 by the University of Roma Tre for (and in collaboration with) the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Arts in Rome, this book presents a marketing management model to tailor cultural mediation according to visitors’ profiles for the benefits of museums’ educational services offices. Chapter 1 focuses on the processes of cultural mediation adopted at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. Isabella de Stefano, Head of Communication and Education at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, presents the challenges that the Gallery has to deal with and how cultural mediation helps the museum in engaging visitors. Chapter 2 presents the state of the art of studies related to audience engagement in the arts. After providing the definition, Michela Addis identifies the drivers of audience engagement. Among them, the visitor's ability to fully immerse in the experience is a key driver that cultural organizations must leverage. By providing visitors with useful, enriched, and customized information, museums design labels, apps, and cultural mediation to engage them. Thus, audience engagement emerges as the ultimate goal of museum cultural mediation. After the setting of the goal of museum cultural mediation, Chapter 3 presents the state of the art of this service for the benefit of visitors. Starting with the results of a multidisciplinary literature review about museum cultural mediation, Zoe Giannotti focuses on managerial practices. By discussing the findings of two benchmarking analyses run on 33 educational programmes worldwide and 68 worldwide examples of museum cultural mediation, a list of the competencies and skills needed for cultural mediation emerges. Although knowing the state of the art about museum cultural mediation is important, certainly it is not enough to design more engaging experiences. Towards that goal, a comprehensive understanding of the visitors’ point of view is needed. Chapter 4 addresses this topic. By leveraging in-depth interviews with visitors who experience museum cultural mediation for the first time, Rosina Baldo and Anna Minici identify the visitors’ value chains regarding the museum cultural mediation, depicting four different visitor profiles. The following Chapter 5 builds on the full set of findings presented and proposes an innovative model. Different cultural mediators target different visitors’ profiles. Walter Altamirano Aguilar and Valeria Bellusci suggest a customized model of museum cultural mediation able to satisfy both the needs of the museum and visitors and achieve audience engagement. Four kinds of the cultural mediator – namely, the Guide, the Educator, the Designer, and the Manager Mediators – differ regarding their education, key skills, communication abilities, and target audience; each of them satisfies the need of a specific target profile. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on the organizational structures that sustain cultural mediation. As Valeria Guerrisi explains, this educational service can be fully explored only if the museums (1) set up a clear audience development strategy; (2) design a proper organizational structure; (3) know their visitors; and (4) customize their cultural mediation offerings. Together, the six chapters contribute to better designing museum cultural mediation. However, each of them is self-standing, addressing a specific step of this strategy making cultural mediation easier and more effective from the managerial, organizational, and operational points of view.