The Role of Museum Night Amsterdam in the Dutch Museum Industry

Museums are facing challenging times due to modern-day developments. The rise of digital technologies and the growing leisure market creates a highly competitive environment with which museums must compete. Because of these developments, there is still a considerable age gap among museum visitors causing museums to explore audience development strategies to promote the collective and regain their social significance. These strategies aim to attract new visitors to museums and increase retention rates through sustained relationships with museum visitors. Therefore, museums offer special programs and set up memberships themselves. However, new actors are also entering the museum industry intending to close the visitor gap and increase the perceived value of museums by society. This research uses Museum Night Amsterdam (MNA) as a case study to research the effect of this audience development strategy. MNA is an event organised by N8, which is a foundation that aims to introduce and engage a wide and varied young audience to museums with this annual event, MNA. Through a mixed methods study effectiveness in attracting and retaining museum visitors of MNA is examined from multiple angles. The semi-structured interviews with N8 and participating museums and questionnaires distributed among event visitors provide this research with the necessary data. The results indicate that MNA successfully attracts and retains new museum visitors, yet the results highlight a huge potency to increase retention rates through aftercare strategies by museums. Furthermore, MNA does encourage collaborations and fosters a sense of cohesion within the industry, providing a good basis for expanding its effects and focus throughout the year through a platform. The findings of this research have important implications for the Dutch museum industry, benefiting museums, the foundation, and society at large.