2015 NMC Horizon Report

Introduction

The 2015 NMC Horizon Report indicated key trends and significant challenges that are plausible to impact museums across the world over the next five years. One of these trends was titled “Rise of Private Companies in Museum Education.” This trend is characterized by relationship shifts between the private sector and the museum. In recent years, a number of companies and startups have been working directly with or alongside museums on education-centric goals. One popularized example of this trend is Museum Hack, a private business opened in 2011 that engages with audiences contrasted to traditional museum methods. Through their programs they state that they can reach and attract new audiences, especially Millennials, by providing

We also have specialized tours including VIP Nights, Bachelorette Parties, Marriage Proposals and Team Building Tours.

Team Building is a large part of our business. We host teams for excursions through the museum that offer the same, fun and fast-paced approach as our public tours, but optimized for bringing a team closer together and fostering a great company culture. Some companies do a scavenger hunt where their team works together to follow clues in the museum. Our team building clients include Google, Facebook, Spotify, Etsy, KPMG, Lego, Adobe, ESPN, and the New Yorker — but you don’t have to be a big company to invest in team building, our minimum group size is two

Nick lives in NYC, and like many locals thought of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as just another tourist place — somewhere you take your friends and family when they visit the city. Then a friend invited him on a “museum date”, where she showed him the art pieces she was passionate about. That passion was contagious! Nick went back to the museum dozens of times, iPad in hand, doing a deep dive into the pieces he found most interesting. Then he started inviting friends to come tour with him, which was pretty informal and essentially a focus on the Un-Highlights, i.e., art that isn’t necessarily the most famous or most expensive, but instead the pieces that have really cool backstories. When a popular blog wrote about the “friend tours”, over 1000 people joined a wait list for the tours. That’s when Museum Hack became a business, with the early hires, charging for tours, etc. While most museum tours focus on facts, and showing off the most famous pieces, Museum Hack tours are different because we tell stories about the art and artists, do fun activities in the galleries, take selfies with the art, and generally have a great