Hello from the Cuseum team! We are a Boston-based startup using beacon technology to bridge the physical and digital worlds of art and culture. Today we are excited to share with you why beacons are transforming the experience at museums and beyond.
In recent years, museum attendance has decreased, leaving institutions scrambling for ways to increase visitor engagement. While museums try to draw patrons in with compelling exhibitions, they are also looking to add another dimension of learning with mobile technology. Beacons amplify this mobile offering, and create exciting engagement opportunities for visitors of all types.
At Cuseum, we have created a mobile app platform that is proximity-aware and seamlessly delivers content using beacons. This form of active engagement, improves the museum going experience and activates the interactions between visitors and works of art. Cuseum apps enable seamless, on demand tours, gamification of the experience, proximity based social interactions, and new analytics and visitor insights for museums and cultural institutions.
On Demand Tours
The traditional audio guides are a thing of the past! On demand tours, brought straight to your mobile device will provide a fantastic experience for museum goers around the world. Imagine an app directing you to the Mona Lisa, and when you are within 10 feet of the painting, a multimedia experience is automatically delivered to your phone. This is no longer only a dream, with beacons and Cuseum, this is easy to create. Visitors are able to customize tours for themselves and receive compelling multimedia content all along the way.
Gamification
We are particularly excited about the potential of beacon-activated gamification of the visitor experience to make exploring museums more fun and interactive. Active engagement is the number one reason museums say they are exploring mobile technology. Cuseum makes it simple to create scavenger hunts around a museum, with location base triggers along the way. Beacons allow the app to track game participants and know when they have reached new locations. Relying on QR codes or paper print outs is not a seamless experience, beacons are changing the playing field!
Social Engagement
The next generation of museum-goers are – surprise, surprise – highly social. Gen Y and Millennials are obsessed with commenting, liking, and sharing their experiences with the world. Cuseum makes it easy for visitors to share and comment on works of art as well as see what their friends have liked and said. With beacons, you even get a step-by-step path to each piece of art your friends have liked in the museum! Consider the success of location-based social apps, combined with the visual and educational context of artwork, it’s exciting to consider the social experience Cuseum offers the arts.
Analytics and Notifications
One of the most exciting features that beacons enable for museums is enhanced analytics. With Cuseum’s platform, museums can see the path their visitors have traveled, how long visitors have spent in front of works of art, and if the museum goer has engaged actively or socially with the collection. Like in retail, museums are able to provide special offers at their stores and cafes based on visitor preferences, and have the ability to increase membership with just in time exclusive offers. The opportunities for better insights into the visitor experience are endless with the use of Cuseum’s beacon-enabled features. And as we know from retail, people who receive beacon triggered messages are 6.4x more likely to keep a branded app on their mobile device and 16.5x more likely to engage with the app!
Cuseum uses beacons to create fantastic visitor journeys at museums and beyond! The future of the museum experience is mobile, proximity-aware, engaging and social. Contact Cuseum to learn more about museum mobile and beacons at hello@cuseum.com or find us on Twitter @Cuseum.