Marketing, Fundraising, Branding, and Social Media in Italian Museums: The Impact on Earned Income Before, During, and After the Turbulence!

Due to turbulent times, museums have strategically matured both with respect to marketing and fundraising. They are aware of powerful new tools for engaging stakeholders and connecting with the real world, with the result that they are moving towards communicating with any audience and target through a versatile range of social media. Social media marketing and social media fundraising are therefore leading strategies to create, nurture and maintain relationships, making it possible to increase earnings and diversify the earned income. Starting from these premises, this paper will explore the extent to which earned income and revenue diversification are both facilitated by marketing, fundraising, social media management with stakeholders, who can be engaged with versatile and innovative media. Branding can support communication for both marketing and fundraising purposes, too. It therefore represents a challenging strategy for the future of museums and their earned revenue. The paper will focus on a sample of 113 out of 235 Italian museums, whose accounting rows are extracted by repository AIDA (Activity Code 9102 – Museums) for 2022 (after the pandemic), 2021 (pandemic) and 2019 (before the pandemic). A stepwise regression of their accounting of program service revenues; contributions, grants, sponsorships; public grants; marketing and IT (Information Technology) cost, as the comprehensive cost for marketing, fundraising and branding with social media; personnel cost and number of employees, it will allow to explore different trends as concern economic performances and will lead to a post-pandemic behaviour which encompasses matching strategies to enable sustainability during and after crisis.