Towards a Valid Measure of the Economic Value of Museum Experiences: An example from Finland

Abstract

AbstractThis article describes an effort to calculate the public and economic value of museum experiences. A significant feature of the research was its use of outcome metrics grounded in decades of visitor research on the perceived value of visiting a museum. The article lays out the underlying theoretical approach and presents data from a year-long study of visitors to eight Finnish museums. Results showed that museum users perceived that their visit experience resulted in enhanced, durable feelings of personal, intellectual, social and physical well-being, with valuations of the economic benefits of these enhanced feelings of well-being equivalent to €864/visit. As was the case of the eight museums in the study, most museums annually serve tens to hundreds of thousands of visitors, thus annually individual museums create on the order of hundreds of millions of Euros of value for their communities and collectively provide value in the billions of Euros. The findings from this research make it possible for museums to make a more valid and credible case for the significant value they create and for the vital role they play in supporting the public’s well-being.