Organized by the Direction des patrimoines, de la mémoire et des archives of the Ministry of the Armed Forces and {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES]Our third Webinar took place on Thursday, December 3. The theme wasthe health crisis, an opportunity to monetize your digital activities. In this article, you’ll find all our discussions, with replays of the Webinar, a summary, additional resources and a graphic rendering by Emeline Parizel.
The French Ministry of the Armed Forces, via its Directorate of Heritage, Memory and Archives (DPMA), coordinates the network of museums and memorials of contemporary conflicts (RMMCC – to find out more, click HERE). This cycle of webinars is organized within the framework of this network.
This third event is part of a series of “Rencontres” which, in close collaboration with professionals from the museum and heritage world, aims to identify various avenues of innovation in the face of this crisis. As part of Public Innovation Month, these professionals are invited to take stock of the past year, and to draw out the dynamics of change for their cultural establishments:
- In the relationships that bind them to their audiences(see the REPLAY of the first Webinar);
- In their organizational models, and, potentially(see the REPLAY of the second Webinar);
- In their business models.
To address the economic and monetization issues raised by this crisis, this Webinar featured contributions from Aurélie Perreten (Director, Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux), Nicolas Czubak (Head of Educational Services, Mémorial de Verdun), Magali Mallet & Bruno de Sa Moreira (respectively, Director of the Airborne Museum and CEO of Histovery), Amélie de Ronseray (Director of Development and Partnerships, Artips) and Laure Bougon (Head of Partnerships, Artips). Bruno de Sa Moreira (respectively, Director of the Airborne Museum and CEO ofHistovery), Amélie de Ronseray (Director of Development and Partnerships, Artips) and Laure Bougon (Head of Remembrance Tourism, Heritage, Memory and Archives Department, French Ministry of Defence).Out of 442 registrants, 231 took part in the Webinar.
The meeting was hosted by Sarah Hugounenq.
The event was introduced by Sylvain Mattiucci, Director of the DPMA. He presented the role and actions implemented by his department, and how it is part of a public innovation approach. The floor was then opened to presentations, with a preamble putting things into perspective.
1 – A preamble to put the Webinar exchanges in perspective, as proposed by Sarah Hugounenq.
Watch the replay of the introduction
In this introduction, Sarah takes a historical approach, demonstrating that museums have been involved in digital technology for a relatively long time. This commitment has led to the digitization of their collections, the publication of multimedia and interactive resources, the development of digital mediation tools and their investment in the Web and social networks. By way of example, the first virtual tour, which is the subject of much discussion in this Rencontre, was launched over 25 years ago. For a detailed account of this history, see the article by Sébastien Magro.
To develop such digital resources, the investment costs borne by cultural institutions are particularly high. As an indication, here are some of the price brackets put forward by Sarah: from €200 to €500,000 for a virtual reality experience, around €50,000 for a MOOC… Faced with these expenses, the definition of a financing plan and the anticipation of a return on investment seem, therefore, to be of prime importance. Yet, paradoxically, the choice of offering these devices free of charge continues to take precedence over a more economical approach.
At a time when the French government was declaring cultural activities to be non-essential, the health crisis revealed the incredible value of such digital devices in meeting the French people’s thirst for online culture. A two-stage response was therefore provided by the heritage sites:
- Initially, during containment, to keep in touch with their audiences. As an example, between March and April, 8.4 million visits were counted on the Musée du Louvre website (see Newstank article from early May 2020).
- Secondly, when the plant reopens, it will meet health and safety requirements through the increased use of on-board technologies.
These different responses have focused on free access, but outside the field of heritage, a recent study by Hadopi shows that the French are naturally inclined to pay for cultural services. Nearly half of Internet users over the age of 15 are prepared to pay to listen to music, watch films or series… It should be noted that educational content is not included in this ranking. With the average monthly basket of dematerialized cultural goods consumed by Internet users at €11 in 2018, the potential for development therefore seems significant.
Faced with these different trends, many cultural heritage sites are considering monetizing some of their digital activities. A number of questions underlie these prospects:
- Can digital make money?
- Are all museums equal in the face of this financial prospect?
- Isn’t there a risk of going against the principles of cultural democratization? Isn’t there a paradox between the desire to open up data ever more widely and free of charge, and the need to think about new pricing models?
Once the scene was set, our speakers took the floor.
2 – Concrete feedback and avenues to explore.
Watch the replay of the speeches
- Developing distance-guided tours for schools and the general public: Aurélie Perreten (Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux).
In her talk, Aurélie talked about the remote tours offered by her museum.
The Musée de la Grande Guerre in Meaux was opened in 2011 with a major sponsorship campaign (10% of funds raised in financial and skills sponsorship). Orange was one of the sponsors, providing €50,000 in skills sponsorship.
Shortly after the opening, the museum decided to take advantage of this Orange sponsorship to develop remote tours and introduce schoolchildren to Musée de la Grande Guerre. After 15 months of development, this device comprising a tablet, a webcam, a camera and a fixed camera has been launched.
As part of his or her visit, the mediator is responsible for animating and activating this device. The 1-hour visit is easy to use, and allows you to interact with one of the museum’s five mediators in charge of the tour. Given its format, it is not intended as a substitute for a physical visit, but rather as an initial introduction to the museum and its collections.
Since February 2015, this offer has been marketed to school audiences at €100 per visit (by way of comparison, the on-site school visit or workshop service is offered at €80 + €5 per pupil + bus transport – the main cost factor). Since this launch, 100 to 150 remote visits have been carried out, compared with around 40,000 school visitors per year who are physically welcomed at the museum*. In view of this attendance gap, the relevance of the system was questioned in 2019.
*In the chat, some international figures were given for comparison. The British Museum, in partnership with Samsung, offers online tours of the museum from the confines of the building. They welcomed around 900 pupils last term: 93 classes a week, compared with the previous rate of 6 classes a week. For the MET, the cost of a one-hour remote visit for a class of 40 students is $200, i.e. a cost of $5/student.
- Offer a premium-access online tour: Nicolas Czubak (Mémorial de Verdun).
Opened in 1967, under the aegis of the recently “pantheonized” Maurice Genevoix, the Verdun Memorial welcomes an average of 150,000 visitors a year.
As a preamble to his talk, Nicolas presents a brief overview of the digital projects developed by the Memorial:
- A mobile application was developed for primary school pupils in collaboration with Réseau Canopé. This application is available on a tablet, free of charge, and is also available as part of a paying tour.
- Between 2015 and 2018, 3 MOOCs were produced with the Université de Lorraine(more information on this project on the memorial website). On this occasion, 69 videos and around a hundred accompanying documents were produced. They are aimed primarily at third- and first-year students studying the Battle of Verdun, but also at teachers, parents and other enthusiasts of this period of history. These MOOCs had totaled around 18,000 registrants between 2015 and 2018. During the lockdown, these videos were broadcast on the Memorial’s Youtube channel (and generated 7,233 views and 100 subscribers) and the accompanying documents were published on the Memorial’s website.
- Based on these accompanying documents, a virtual tour of the Memorial was designed in collaboration with Helix Solutions, the cultural programming department and the head of the educational service (budget of around €8,000). The tour was launched in May 2020.
This virtual tour, the main focus of Nicolas’ presentation, features :
- A free partial tour. It gives access to a first immersion in the museum through 5 panoramas made up of archive films, photos, audio commentaries, sound recordings and explanations.
- An in-depth tour of 20 panoramas. It is available for one week for €3. Like Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux, it is not intended to replace a physical visit to the site.
The free version of this virtual tour was particularly popular, while the pay version was much less so. By the end of November 2020 (after 7 months of operation), the virtual tour had attracted a total of 8,554 visitors (mainly French-speaking), including 50 for the full, paying tour. Visitor numbers peaked during the November 11th commemorations, with 720 people logged on. The use of paid tours is still in its infancy, and should therefore be seen as a tool for preparing visits for teachers and professionals, rather than as a means of disseminating information to the general public.
In addition to the first two “off-site” models mentioned by our speakers, the Airborne Museum and Histovery have opted for an “off-site” approach, with physical travelling exhibitions based on digital content.
- Launch a traveling digital exhibition, the fruit of public/private partnerships: Bruno de Sa Moreira (Histovery) and Magali Mallet, (Airborne Museum).
The Airborne Museum, located in Sainte-Mère-Eglise in Normandy is dedicated to the landing of Allied forces in 1944 at the end of the Second World War. In 2018, the Museum, in collaboration with the Histovery company, launched its Histopad, a mobile and individual extension integrated into the museum’s scenography.
Using a touch-sensitive tablet, visitors can access 8 immersive scenes through 360° reconstructions accessible throughout the museum’s museographic tour, closely linked to the objects on display and the emblematic sites of the battle of Sainte-Mère-Eglise.
As soon as the Histopad was launched, the Museum began thinking about how to monetize the digital content offered as part of this augmented visit. It was decided to include the Histopad in the museum ticket as part of a universal pricing policy (the ticket was raised from €8.50 to €9.90 for adults).
Histovery pays itself a fixed fee per paying visitor. In return, the company covers all initial investments (scientific validation of content, content modeling and editorialization, IT developments, etc.), maintenance and updating costs (hardware/software) and associated services (data, e-marketing).
To discover the range of business models that can be envisaged between private companies and heritage sites, please refer to this article published by Correspondances earlier this year.
In 2019, to mark the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, we thought it would be a good idea to offer this augmented-visit experience outside the museum walls, in other locations, in the form of a traveling exhibition: Expopad.
The first edition of this traveling exhibition was hosted in 2019 by the world’s largest military aviation museum (around 1 million visitors a year), the National Museum of the US Air Force (Dayton, Ohio). Covering 400 m², this exhibition recreates the spaces of the Airborne Museum using backlit panels and visuals. Visitors are invited to wander through the reconstructed exhibition with their Histopad, to gain interactive access to the immersive scenes originally developed for the Airborne Museum.
In 2020, two museums in Florida and North Carolina were scheduled to host the exhibition. In view of the health crisis, it has been rescheduled for 2021. This exhibition format is offered as a service to American museums.
In addition to generating resources and awareness for the museum, other initiatives can also be envisaged in other formats. This is what Artips, for example, offers through its newsletter.
- Monetizing content and resources, the Artips example: Amélie de Ronseray (Artips).
Amélie begins with a brief presentation of Artips. A young, innovative company in the Social and Solidarity Economy, Artips now has around thirty employees. Since 2013, the company has been developing a newsletter that offers subscribers the chance to decipher art history through anecdotes. Free of charge, it is sent 3 times a week. Following this launch, other initiatives were launched such as Musiktips, Sciencetips, Economitips… Together, these newsletters represent around 1 million subscribers.
Building on this success, Artips has capitalized on the strengths of its editorial positioning (in terms of storytelling and short formats) to develop e-learning tools and offer them to companies, institutions and schools. These “micro-learning” tools can be used to decipher complex knowledge, offering general culture courses as well as more entrepreneurial, environmental or societal themes. Access to this platform is subject to a fee.
During the lockdown, Artips made its general knowledge platform available free of charge to companies (115) and schools and universities (115) that had requested it. 300,000 hours of cultural content were consumed and 10 million video capsules were learned during the confinement.
During this period, Artips also supported the launch of 10 online educational systems with 10 partner cultural establishments: Domaine de Chantilly, Palais des Beaux-arts de Lille, Philharmonie, Cité du Vin in Bordeaux…
Finally, satisfaction and evaluation questionnaires were sent to the various cultural structures to identify new solutions to offer them.
Following the example of other initiatives proposed in this Rencontre, Artips has chosen to offer a free “B to C” model and a paid “B to B” model. Artips thus exceptionally redefined the balance of its offerings during the health crisis. This period also opened up potential for the longer-term redefinition of such offers.
To the panel of cultural institutions and private companies invited to the meeting, it also seemed worthwhile to highlight the role of “network heads” in leading and supporting the digital and economic transformation of the heritage field. A fortuitous opportunity to welcome the head of the Remembrance Tourism section of the French Ministry of Defence’s Heritage, Memory and Archives Directorate.
- The call for projects as a tool for detecting and developing new services, an update on DPMA’s actions: Laure Bougon (DPMA).
Regularly mentioned at the opening of each of the Rencontres in this cycle, the French Ministry of Defence’s Heritage, Memory and Archives Department is leading a series of initiatives to structure and encourage innovation in the field of remembrance tourism. The “Innovative digital services for remembrance tourism” call for projects is one such initiative(find out more about the3rd edition).
Laure introduces her talk by presenting this call for projects. Launched in 2016, it is one of the major axes of the policy of structuring remembrance and history tourism carried by the Ministry of the Armed Forces to :
- Support the creation of innovative new tools;
- Meet the expectations of increasingly demanding, informed and mobile visitors…
- Diversifying the tourism offer ;
- Supporting changes in visitor patterns to enhance and sustain the appeal of memorial sites;
- Position France as an innovative and attractive destination on the international stage through the spectrum of remembrance tourism.
The first two editions (in 2016 and 2018) were under the joint aegis of the Direction des patrimoines, de la mémoire et des archives and the Direction générale des entreprises, with a budget of €100,000. This3rd edition, launched in October, is supported directly by the Ministry of the Armed Forces. It has a budget of €80,000.
The call for projects is open to local authorities, laboratories (public or private), private companies or associations wishing to develop a project in association with a place of remembrance. Projects are selected on the basis of their innovative dimension, their relevance to remembrance tourism policy, the quality of the partners and content proposed, and the coherence of the proposed budget and schedule.
Each winning project is eligible for a grant of up to €20,000, not exceeding 50% of the total project cost.
In 2016 and 2018, 72 applications were registered and 15 winners nominated. The project sponsors (territorial networks, start-ups, Centre des monuments nationaux, local authorities) were as varied as the projects submitted (3D room, immersive trails, chatbot, web-applications, virtual or superimposed reality).
Budgets for such projects averaged around €15,000 (the highest being estimated at €80,000, the lowest at €20,000). The subsidy awarded under the call for projects ranged from €10 to €20,000 (with 8 projects at around €10,000).
All projects were therefore co-financed by self-financing, sponsorship or other subsidies (CNC, innovative digital services from the French Ministry of Culture, regional or departmental funding).
Of these, 7 are free to the public, 4 are included in the admission price, and 3 are partially chargeable. This is the case, for example, with Skyboy’s app for visiting the Maison Clemenceau in Saint-Vincent-sur-Jard. It’s free on smartphones, but a tablet can be rented on the site for 3 euros.
In terms of return on investment, the various winners mention :
- A benefit for the site’s younger, more modern image;
- Greater appeal to the general public, especially families, but also schoolchildren;
- Collective, unifying projects that create new synergies between companies, laboratories, places of remembrance and associative networks;
- Increased visitor numbers for certain venues ;
- A showcase for know-how (especially for start-ups);
- Unanimously, a zero financial return but not expected.
This call for projects is therefore aimed at a wide range of players (including small structures) with a strong territorial base. A shared approach seems particularly central to this type of project, in terms of both production and communication. The added value of these projects is not necessarily economic, but rather promotes the accessibility and democratization of resources to a wider public.
In view of this wide range of contributions, the evaluation of these projects remains a major challenge, in order to gain a better understanding of what already exists and encourage the sharing of experience. With this in mind, the Ministry of the Armed Forces will shortly be launching a campaign to identify and evaluate the innovative schemes recently created with its support.
3 – A few cross-cutting questions for more in-depth analysis.
Question replay
In connection with these various presentations, Sarah addressed a few questions to our panel of speakers:
Sarah: Why have you chosen to charge for access to your digital services? What do you see as the virtues of this pricing (even though the profitability of these digital activities seems rather limited)?
Aurélie (Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux):
For school groups, it’s a way of enhancing the quality of the experience on offer. By paying, the class has access to a direct and privileged exchange with a mediator. However, the price is not a barrier to the booking of remote visits (the barrier is in fact more technological and in the apprehension that teachers may have of such a device).
For the general public, in a context of confinement, pricing would have been an additional barrier to remote access. What’s more, the experience is collective, and therefore different from that offered to schoolchildren. On the other hand, if “one-to-one” visits were to be offered to families, the question might arise.
Magali (Airborne Museum) and Bruno (Histovery):
As previously mentioned, the Histopad is offered to all visitors as part of their admission ticket. Pricing for paying visitors has been revised slightly upwards to reflect the enhanced visitor experience offered by the Histopad.
For museums hosting the Expopad, Bruno reminds us that the traveling exhibition is offered as a fixed-price service. It is up to the American museum foundations to finance the project by mobilizing donors.
Sarah: Have many of the projects you’ve developed opted for a B-to-B model? Why or why not?
Aurélie (Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux):
In situ school visits are subject to a fee, so it seemed natural to charge for remote visits, since they involve the museum’s mediators and are rich in content. Other projects, such asAskMarion, are offered free of charge to all Museum visitors.
Amélie (Artips):
Artips has always wanted its newsletters to be free of charge. The company’s original aim is to get people talking about culture in a different way, and to reach audiences who aren’t used to seeing it, so free access is essential. What’s more, none of the paid newsletters seem to work fundamentally well.
Our newsletter is financed by partner organizations such as the CNRS for Sciencetips, the Cour des Comptes for Economitips or Musée du Louvre, the Musée de l’Armée or the Philharmonie for Artips. In return, our partners have access to the subscriber base to communicate on their activities.
E-learning courses are commissioned by an institution and are free of charge for the user.
Sarah: Nicolas, why did the Verdun Memorial opt for B-to-C monetization?
Nicolas (Verdun Memorial) :
The monetization of the virtual tour makes it possible to enhance the value of a new approach to in situ visits (it could have replaced them during periods of confinement), as well as the technical and scientific expertise of the project’s partners.
However, few are prepared to pay for this visit, and it should be seen more as a useful tool for teaching colleagues. It can help them learn more about the museum’s museography and prepare for the visit with their students (in other words, the paid use of this device would become B-to-B).
Sarah: Can the pricing of a digital activity have an impact on the role of the mediator?
Aurélie (Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux):
Monetization is a way of valorizing the work of the museum’s 5 mediators. Hosting a remote visit is a new profession: visit times are shorter, the technology has to be mastered, and such visits require real re-editorialization (interaction time, addition of live multimedia content, etc.).
Sarah: How do you deal with competition from free content platforms (FacebookLive, InstaLive, AirBnB experiences…)?
Aurélie (Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux):
Unlike the GAFAMs, we have a museum. We therefore have a strong local presence and the challenge of transforming online visitors into physical visitors.
Magali (Airborne Museum) and Bruno (Histovery):
Histovery’s augmented visit to the Airborne Museum rewards the physical visitor, and serves to enhance the actual visit. The ephemeral traveling exhibition, for its part, projects the visitor’s experience beyond the walls of other museums. This benefits both visitors and the museum itself, helping to develop its international legitimacy and encourage American visitors to discover the museum during their stay in France.
Laure (DPMA):
Our local presence and proximity to the public is a major strength in relation to these major platforms. This proximity is particularly asserted and valued by the winners of the calls for projects run by the DPMA.
In connection with this question, a particularly interesting France Inter column on the subject was shared in the chat.
4 – To conclude, a graphic presentation by Emeline Parizel.
Graphics replay
The diversity of our panel of speakers demonstrates the wealth of approaches to audiences that can be envisaged with digital technology: remote guided tours, virtual tours, traveling digital exhibitions, online educational activities, digital mediation devices accessible in situ… The particularly exceptional period of health crisis we are experiencing has highlighted, on the one hand, these audiences’ thirst for culture, and on the other, the wealth of proposals from cultural institutions. Faced with the economic tensions accentuated in the cultural sector by the crisis, there is a strong temptation to succumb to “digital solutionism”.
However, the models put forward by our speakers are varied in terms of both their profitability and their formats: paid access for the general public (physical or online visitors)? Monetization of services with partners (companies, national education/universities, other cultural institutions, etc.)? Co-production and/or mutualization?
An experimental and evaluative approach therefore seems essential to identify the challenges of a new offer in terms of access (including pricing), content (and, by implication, in terms of the skills to be mobilized for the teams and audiences these offers are aimed at), communication, and economic and non-economic returns on investment.
To view and zoom the graphical representation, click HERE
To find out more about the network of museums and memorials of contemporary conflicts (RMMCC), you can contact them via the following e-mail address(dpma-mmcc.anm.fct@intradef.gouv.fr) or consult the brochure presenting their activities.
