James Chung at the ICOM AGM - demographics, challenges and bright spots for museums during the crisis

Last week a couple of us from AGENDA helped with ICOM’s (the International Council of Museum’s) Annual General Meeting in Paris. It was a four-day event during which ICOM delegates bashed out new resolutions, voted on the location for future meetings and played host to some fascinating speakers. 

My job was to take notes during the sessions and write up a synthèse later. I was lucky enough to be designated the conference’s best session – a panel debate between James Chung, Jacques Attali and Alan Riding entitled “What is the global economic crisis changing for museums?”

James Chung’s presentation was especially interesting. Introduced as a “futurologist” from Reach Advisors, he was pretty quick to dismiss this title. His talk focused on concrete social and demographic trends developing around the financial crisis and what they mean for museums.

Chung described the financial crisis as a “cyclical external shift” but said that museums are currently undergoing a “fundamental shift” in terms of visitor engagement. His outlook for museum funding was pretty bleak. He drew a comparison between the current crisis in the US and the situation in the 1990s in Japan where, after huge museum expansion in the 80s, the 90s saw a drastic drop in governmental and corporate support with budget cuts of up to 40% and widespread closures as Japan entered a 10 year deflationary economy. 

According to Chung, US museums are currently facing a huge number of challenges, the biggest being that museums rely heavily on corporate and individual philanthropy with 40% of all contributions coming from the (collapsing) financial and real estate industries. The days of extraordinary windfall are over and there is no doubt that museums will suffer as a result.

However, he found a surprising number of positives in the current situation. The first bright spot was that admissions and membership revenue are still mostly holding up, especially for “hyper-local” museums, children’s museums and science centres. On the other hand, larger art and history museums are struggling more because of their higher reliance on endowement.

The second was the opportunity that current demographic changes can give to museums in terms of attracting visitors:

1. Women – Women are now more likely to earn college degrees by 1.5% and are already out-earning men in the USA (due to male income growth being heavily reliant on the financial industries). This generation of women will be the key economic driver in reshaping consumer markets in the 2010s   
2. Age Shift – One eighth of the current US population is over 65 but within 25 years this figure will rise to one fifth in the USA (and one quarter in France, UK, Canada and one third in Italy, Germany, Japan and Hong Kong). Older visitors means more visitors. And these older visitors will be baby boomers, a demographic which has changed every era it’s moved through fairly dramatically – now is the chance for museums to change their approach to this group.      

In fact, this was the key message of Chung’s lecture and one we’ve seen over and over since we started blogging (in our podcast with Nicole Newman for example) – the USA is currently in a “jump-ball economy” (great basketball analogy, everything is up in the air) which makes this a really good time to shake things up and change exsiting practices and patterns. 

Alan Riding made quite a thought-provoking comment in his closing remarks – during the Great Depression, governments across the board imagined culture to be part of the solution to the economic problems and many funded cultural programmes. This is not the case anymore, there is hardly anyone advocating for museums, and cultural institutions were all but shut out from the recent US stimulus package. He said that in Britain there has always been a distracting belief that culture must have some “social engineering” aspect or economic reward whereas in fact we should all really be enjoying “culture just as culture”.

You can read more of James Chung’s findings through his work at Reach Advisors on his blog, Museum Audience Insight, definitely worth a read.

Image: Jumpball by bsheets