US Museums: Digitization, Social Media Engagement, and Revenue Diversification in the Pandemic

During the pandemic, US museums had to cope with stringency and lockdown. The impact of the pandemic was very different in the US states as for timing and policies, and the cultural and creative industries were tremendously affected. The sustainability of museums was granted by their digitization as for contents, communication, social media marketing, and fundraising. Digitization became a crucial factor in the development of activities inside and outside museums. Information Technology (IT) was accentuated, and the effort was reinforced to adapt and advance offline collections and exhibitions to virtual audiences, whose profiling can today better framed thanks to big data and artificial intelligence. Accounting of expenses and revenues changed, as well as the approach to bidirectional and social media networking and engagement. Considering a very deep analysis of the academic literature about digitization in museums, the aim of the paper is the regression of accounting data of 2020s 990 Forms for revenues (contributions and program service), advertising expense, fundraising, and IT ones, so that, thanks a stepwise, multiple, and linear regression, it can be detected how much communication efforts and concerning expenses impacted on revenues in such an extraordinary contingency. Results provide evidence of the highest and positive correlation between contributions and IT expense as well as program service revenues. With the approach of behavioral economics, the focus on some case histories will disclose how much the digitization changed relationships with visitors thanks to edutainment and social media.