Digital technologies provide an excellent leverage of innovation in the cultural sector, as they can provide unprecedented opportunities for audience development and engagement. The Covid-19 pandemic emergency has exacerbated these opportunities, as digital tools allowed to break down physical, cognitive and economic access barriers,reaching out to isolated communities, and to provide a tailor-made cultural offer for people with special needs. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of the business model of most small and medium-sized museums and cultural organisations (SMMs). Against this background, the present study is aimed at unveiling how digital transformation could act as a strategic shift and profound organisational change for SMMs: rather than focusing on a single digital cultural initiative, it is strategic to assume a broader perspective that includes the organisations but also spreads beyond to include their cultural ecosystem. The study relies on a qualitative approach, and it offers an in-depth case study of the digital participatory storytelling platform #iziTRAVELSicilia and of a selected SMM that initiated a digital storytelling project as a part of a broader digital strategy. Through personal interviews with the stakeholders that compose the ecosystem of #iziTRAVELSicilia and of the International Puppet Museum, the paper reveals how new technologies and global free platforms can help small museums to fill their gap in digital communication by engaging local communities, provided that a proper process of digital transformation is conceived and enacted. By emotionally engaging people in the co-creation of app content, the #iziTRAVELSicilia project highlights the strategic importance of innovative free tools in promoting cultural heritage and it clearly offers insights to policy makers on the possibility for defining territorial promotion strategies. These results show that, although some museums have been able to invest resources to increase and improve their online activity, small and medium-sized museums have small teams, often with limited knowledge, skills and capacities to use innovative digital tools, and limited financial resources; consequently, they have many difficulties to put in place specific online services and/or activities (e.g. virtual tours, streaming activities or searchable catalogues, AV/VR experiences, or use of social media), unless they are for free and simply to create. Our discussion of the results underlines those digital technologies are an opportunity not only to manage the core activities of museums and cultural organizations in an innovative and more effective way with positive effects on their performance and on the impact generated on society; they can also allow to regenerate and rethink their service / business models and new public engagement proposals.
Digital for real: how digital technologies contribute to real audience engagement and participation
Bonacini E;
2022-01-01
Abstract
Digital technologies provide an excellent leverage of innovation in the cultural sector, as they can provide unprecedented opportunities for audience development and engagement. The Covid-19 pandemic emergency has exacerbated these opportunities, as digital tools allowed to break down physical, cognitive and economic access barriers,reaching out to isolated communities, and to provide a tailor-made cultural offer for people with special needs. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of the business model of most small and medium-sized museums and cultural organisations (SMMs). Against this background, the present study is aimed at unveiling how digital transformation could act as a strategic shift and profound organisational change for SMMs: rather than focusing on a single digital cultural initiative, it is strategic to assume a broader perspective that includes the organisations but also spreads beyond to include their cultural ecosystem. The study relies on a qualitative approach, and it offers an in-depth case study of the digital participatory storytelling platform #iziTRAVELSicilia and of a selected SMM that initiated a digital storytelling project as a part of a broader digital strategy. Through personal interviews with the stakeholders that compose the ecosystem of #iziTRAVELSicilia and of the International Puppet Museum, the paper reveals how new technologies and global free platforms can help small museums to fill their gap in digital communication by engaging local communities, provided that a proper process of digital transformation is conceived and enacted. By emotionally engaging people in the co-creation of app content, the #iziTRAVELSicilia project highlights the strategic importance of innovative free tools in promoting cultural heritage and it clearly offers insights to policy makers on the possibility for defining territorial promotion strategies. These results show that, although some museums have been able to invest resources to increase and improve their online activity, small and medium-sized museums have small teams, often with limited knowledge, skills and capacities to use innovative digital tools, and limited financial resources; consequently, they have many difficulties to put in place specific online services and/or activities (e.g. virtual tours, streaming activities or searchable catalogues, AV/VR experiences, or use of social media), unless they are for free and simply to create. Our discussion of the results underlines those digital technologies are an opportunity not only to manage the core activities of museums and cultural organizations in an innovative and more effective way with positive effects on their performance and on the impact generated on society; they can also allow to regenerate and rethink their service / business models and new public engagement proposals.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
