Visit Virtually: Scalable content creation for museums and culture

**Context**: The UK's estimated 2,500 museums have all had to close due to COVID-19\. For the average museum, over 75-80% of annual revenue comes from visitors stepping through their doors (NEMO survey 2020) and with spring and summer peak time for tourism, a cultural financial crisis looms. Museums will also likely see a drop in donations and government support as funding is redirected. Meanwhile, many museum staff have been furloughed or laid off and a recent sector review by Artnet estimated at least 20% of museums globally may not survive the COVID-19 crisis.

**Opportunity**: Museums are now looking for new ways to engage their audiences, support wellbeing and generate donations. Over the past decade museums have made huge strides in digitising collections and 60% of museums are increasing their digital reach (Artnet 2020). However, business models which leverage these assets are not yet established and many digital collections go unused. The tools needed to put these assets to good use in generating engagement and revenue are either prohibitively expensive or are part of oversaturated platforms. Museums currently rely on social media or Google Arts and Culture to create and share content. These platforms have clear failings: 1) User experience is poor; clicking around an exhibition with Street View is a frustrating interface and results in 'serious tradeoffs in how the art _and_ the building are communicated' (FRAME, April 2020). 2) They are competitive , saturated and promote paid content. 3) They lack appropriate tools to export media without platform branded logos. 4) Copyright images shared become public domain and museums are unable to develop bespoke rights agreements. 5) The time and effort needed is beyond staff capacity: 'facilitating access... cannot be delivered at the detriment of the sector's already stretched workforce' (Museums and Heritage, 2020).


**Innovation**: With over 1 million users Smartify is the world's most downloaded museum app and has seen a 30% user increase in engagement since March 2020\. Smartify will build a smart multimedia tour authoring tool that is semi-automated and repurposes existing museum assets. This will include text-to-voice; transcription; translation; predictive content generation, editing and publishing. The tool will enable museums to create, develop and disseminate content, and will analyse online audiences for conversion into membership or donation. It will also create an opportunity to retrain furloughed staff; and will offer distance learning opportunity and alleviation of boredom for audiences at home.