Improving attendance is hardly a new concept, but the effort has accelerated since the pandemic reduced museum hours and kept visitors away. “It’s harder for museums to keep reinventing reasons for local people to come back,” Ms. Lott said. “But it does allow them to dig deeper on their exhibitions and push the envelope a bit more to continuously stay relevant.”And it’s not just smaller museums that are digging deeper. The same social and economic pressures are pushing some of the nation’s destination museums to change, mindful that new strategies are essential to return visitation to pre-Covid levels. “Through the pandemic, we’ve all learned how important they are.

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