Walking into a museum, what is your likelihood to go straight to the console and make a donation? The chance is pretty slight. Research in museum fundraising studies has shown that donation does not come naturally, rather it needs to be nurtured. No matter how large or how small the donation is, it requires the institution’s long time commitment to building relationships with the donors. Museums around the world pull out all the stops to solicit donations, from holding fashion galas to special tours from curators and directors. For instance, Tate Modern the national modern art gallery in the U.K. has designed a multi-leveled annual membership program that provides a wide range of special activities for different levels, from special culture tours to artist studio visits. 

• Young Patron (aged 18-40) (It is interesting to call a 40 years old successful businessman “young”. I guess you can tell how the museum is facing the aging problem)  
  • Annual fee £1,200 (fully tax deductible)
  • being part of a sociable group with a contemporary focus
• Silver Patron 
  • Annual fee £1,500 (fully tax deductible)
  • explore the UK’s diverse cultural landscape from the historical to the contemporary
• Gold Patron
  • Annual fee £6,000 (fully tax deductible)
  • get to know the London and European art scenes with insights from Tate’s directors and curators
• Platinum Patron
  • Annual fee £12,000 (fully tax deductible)
  • premier access to Tate’s directors and curators, high-profile artists, leading collectors, and art specialists in the UK and internationally

According to the published list of patron names, the length of the list remains stable in the past decades. When the development of personal relationships is required in every case, the growth is strictly limited by the capacity of staff in the museum development department. Being one of the most reputable art museums in the world, Tate modern worries little about not attracting enough funds for operation. However, thousands of much smaller museum does. Many struggles to source locally and the donor groups are facing elderly problems. Solicitation donation is a social business and a patron base lie at the core of it. Many museum’s core donation groups are growing old with the museum and there’s no young blood flowing in. The entire art world is facing similar pressure. Strong art buyers are still real estate tycoons and rich bankers. However, technology companies are rising to become the most lucrative business and money flows to young tech start-up entrepreneurs. From historical data, we can tell they are not followers of the traditional art patron path. Museum’s traditional fundraising solicitation method is doing very little for the new middle class.

The digitalized platform can scale this social business with marginal costs lower than ever before. Experiences from the fast-growing gaming industry can be applied to museum patron programs as well. The young generation could find their sense of belonging, community, and accomplishment in a game. The museum can utilize their behavior habit to design patron experiences more appealing to the younger generation. Coachella and LV’s transformation to the gamified online rewarding programs are two successful examples of attracting young, rich, and vibrant audiences, those museums should target as well.  

Coachella, an annual music and arts festival held in Colorado Desert started in 1999, realized growth from 250,000 attendance in 2017 to 750,000 attendance in 2022. About 25% of attendees had a household income of $100,000 and 68% of them were aged between 15-29. The ticket price ranges from $400 to $9,800. Compared to the museum donors, the contributor group of Coachella is no less rich and much younger. One of the key elements of keeping vibrant is communicated in young people’s language, such as being a harbinger to adopt gamification interaction to boost engagement. In 2019, Coachella introduced Coachella Coin, an interactive game on the festival’s smartphone app. The game provides an in-depth scavenger hunt, a special world map, and virtual currencies that could be exchanged for a ride on the Ferris wheel, blankets, scarfs, pins, and drinks. By making the festival and video game experiences overlap, Coachella augmented reality into a real-life video game.

In 2022, Coachella leveled up and went all-in with augmented reality, gamification, and NFTs. The festival offered every paying attendee a free In Bloom NFT that will grow and unlock special benefits, such as VIP upgrades, 2023 weekend passes, Goldenvoice concert tickets, and Ferris wheel rides. Besides ticketing purposes, there are different collections of NFTs one can purchase to be redeemed for tangible items. The Sights and Sounds Collection featured 10 photos that came with exclusive soundscapes from the polo field and were limited to 10,000 NFTs that sold for $60 each. The Desert Reflections Collection created by artist Emek could be redeemed for a physical photo book of the festival and was limited to 1,000 NFT for $180 each. The most expensive NFTs were part of the Coachella Keys Collection grating lifetime passes to Coachella in April every year and were limited to 10 NFTs. Each sold in the six figures, with a total coming to $1,474,000. All of the NFTs were sold out shortly after going on sale. 

Another case is LV’s 2 million downloads NFT Game, celebrating its 200 year anniversary. The game starts with the Louis Vuitton family story and introduces participants to the legend and history of the brand. The avatar character, Vivienne, gives the audience a request to collect NFT postcards and travel to different locations in glamorous cities such as Paris, London, Los Angeles, and more. The game has stirred a lot of response and community engagement all over the world, especially with the brand followers and customers. This experiential digital game differentiates from traditional magazine advertisements in ways that it tells the story in young consumers’ language. LV is not the only luxury brand adopting gamified digital experience. Italian label Cucci embedded its iconography into consumers’ memories through a gamification effort found within its mobile application. Players were tasked with memorizing new brand motifs as they customized a digital Dionysus handbag, spurring product awareness. Teaching heritage through gaming is effective and can apply to museum studies. 

Here I present a new business model for gamified patron program for museums: 

Customer Segments

This program is designed for museums to target individual donors. So the two customer segments are museums and donors. Target museums are those willing to gain more funding from individual donors, expand their donor pool to the younger generation, and boost the efficiency of their marketing effort. Donors are entirely attached to institutions and managed by the museum.

Value Proposition

1. Donors: By establishing clear goals and quests, gamified patron programs can help donors gain a sense of accomplishment throw contributing to the museum. Secondly, a reward system can create a positive feedback loop to allow donors to take more initiatives in being part of the museum community and make themselves widely known to the art world. Thirdly, the community created by the online system can give non-local donors into the same conversation and take a more active part and more sense of ownership over the money they donated. Fourthly, information could be tailored to be more exclusive and direct than monthly donor emails. More diverse community special benefits could be executed as well. 
2. Museum: Applying a digitalized patron system could reduce the average cost of soliciting each donation, especially for small donors. Currently, staff in the development team could hardly focus a lot of time on small donors. 80% of the donation very likely comes from 20% of the top donors. It is a good strategy to give up the 80% small donors and more on the 20% big donors, because no matter the size, the effort to solicit each donation has no big difference. By embracing gamified patron program, staff can still focus on building a personal relationship with the big donor and let the digitalized system works with the small donors. This digital system could help museums gain more behavioral data on their targets and apply machine learning models to predict and more accurate response to their needs. This decentralization of data empowers museums with more control of ver their targets and improves performance. Thus, a larger customer group can be reached and more funding to gain. 

Key activities

Moving hierarchy of different levels of donation online with addition to quest, points, reward, and community. Setting a goal and a storyline that ties to the interest of donors and museum exhibitions. This could make boring knowledge fun to learn. Moreover, introduce players to customized avatars and encourage them to present themselves in the community. Different levels of customers will have different activity loops. One of the most important elements is the sense of community. Through learning the behavior of donors should the system classify them into different groups and feel they are surrounded by those they respect and feel comfortable talking to. Inside the community, museums can insert evaluative tools to gain more feedback and give patrons more sense of participation. Moreover, user-generated content can free conversation between artists and the market as well. This sense of community can only be established through a digitalized and gamified patron program and machine learning of data. 

Conclusion

It is urgent for museums to seize those opportunities and kick start a double growth curve in the art market. Online exhibitions attract little audience due to the lack of special occasions. Currently, most patron connection starts locally. One finds information about an interesting exhibition and walks into the museum, leaving your email address when buying a ticket online. Several days later, one receives an email about the new exhibition and another one. And the next year, one receives a solicitation email asking for a donation for a special program and that email goes straight to the trash bin. The experience and the return of donation are not very appealing. Through a gamified membership program, the museum can build a community through much richer interaction.

It’s time to move. 

Bibliography

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What is NFT?

“A unique digital certificate, registered in a blockchain, that is used to record the ownership of an asset such as an artwork or a collectible,” —— NFT’s definition by Collins Dictionary.

NFT = data + blockchain + smart contract

Data: a piece of digital information going to be turned into NFT asset

It can be a piece of music, a video, an in-game item, an image, a voice message, or even a tweet. The unlimited plasticity on the format itself gives everyone opportunities to turn anything into NFT. But minting into NFT doesn’t mean it can sell. The price of the data asset is determined by many other factors, such as its collectability, functionality, scarcity, and more. 

Blockchain: a chain of blocks recording data in ways that make the data difficult to change, hack, or cheat

It is achieved by duplicating and distributing one piece of data across over 50% of the chain. If the data on one block was changed, it would be immediately apparent it had been tampered with. If hackers wanted to corrupt a blockchain system, they would have to change every block in the chain, across all of the distributed versions of the chain. 

Smart Contract: the way data is recorded on the blockchain and it is programmable to define NFT’s time, organization, number of editions, which blockchain, initial price, transaction methods, previous owners, etc.

There are many proposed smart contracts commanding blockchain to store data differently and the one that successfully tracks distinguishable asset’s ownership individually and automatically is called ERC721, created in January 2018. Creator of ERC-721 on Ethereum, a decentralized and open-source blockchain, coined the word NFT to describe the broad universe of distinguishable digital assets. Since then, ERC-721 has had wider use on other blockchain platforms, but Ethereum remains to be the most popular one, where 83% of NFT transactions are happening. 

In summary, NFT is about representing anything unique as a digital asset.

The Magic of NFT Profile Picture Art? 

Among the earliest NFTs ever made, there emerges a series of profile picture art designed to be used as avatars for social media accounts, such as CryptoPunks, MoonCatResure, and CryptoCats. And it quickly takes over the market to become the one of most popular NFT art collectables types. In the last 7 days, the world’s first and largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles, OpenSea shows that 17 out of the 20 top NFTs ranked by trading volume are profile picture art projects. 

One of the mega-successful profile picture art hits is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), with total sales now standing at $1.03 billion according to data from CryptoSlam. Launched in April 2021 by Yuga Labs with a floor price of 0.8 ETH, BAYC reaches this milestone in just 8 months, comparing the most expensive artwork sold in history is a piece of 500 years old Leonardo da Vinci for 475.4 million in 2017. 

BAYC is a collection of 10,000 unique ape NFTs on Ethereum. Ownership grants access to members-only benefits, the first of which is THE BATHROOM, a collaborative graffiti board. Currently, the average sale price for BAYC is over $200,000 and has exploded into other corners of the world, from Rolling Stone magazine covers to physical art galleries globally. 

What makes profile picture art projects different from most other NFTs? On the creative side, unlike many other one-off digital artworks, profile picture art initiatives usually are a series of thousands, each one in the collection with unique rarity and features. Because of the way NFTs are generated, it is the potential to gather a relatively larger group of local buyers. On the distribution side, the collection of profile picture art usually is airdropped randomly at a very low price, or even for free, to collectors. It is not only accessible but also comes with a thrill of gambling. 

But most importantly is the social value of profile picture art making them better performing than other NFT artworks. Member club model is exclusive to BAYC, but shared among many other profile picture art projects. According to the experience shared by owners of ape avatars, the top three drivers includes:

We love the look, it matches our digital personality

We are rich enough to buy such high valued asset, we are golden

We are true believers of NFTs, we are in the same community

On the practical side, profile picture art are one the most functional kinds of digital assets in the markets now. While owner of the most expensive NFT artwork ever the Everyday: The First 5000 Days can hardly show his treasure to the world, profile picture art can be used as avatars across all social media platforms, from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, even WeChat, where people can use to establish their identity. Questmobile data shows young people, especially Gen Z, on average, spend half of their time in the digital world and they care about their virtual identities. Claiming profile picture art equals telling the rest of the world who they are, helping them find their own kind and make friends. 

Other than its usability as a social media personality statement, most profile picture art projects allow collectors to spark their own creativity, by giving the full commercial rights to the NFT, and building their own community within the group on messaging channels like Discord. The popularity of profile picture art projects indicates the germination of such social value. 

Who are the collectors?

Although blockchain technology is designed to ensure privacy and anonymity of creator and collector information, the identity of some big NFT influencers is revealed in the media. NFT has become a global dream and the demand for highly valued profile picture art apes is increasing day by day. 

Top 30 Influential People

Last December, ARTNET released an annual report, THE ARTNET NFT 30, giving a summary of the 30 most influential people who are shaping the field of NFTs. This group of new content creators, manipulators, and collectors shares a common background in crossing the field of technology and creativity before getting into NFTs. 50% of the NFT artists were hackers and others are illustrators and animators. And ⅓ are self-taught. 

Geographically, this group of influencers spreads from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Canada, US, Singapore, China, and all over the world. Statistics from Finder shows that 32% Philippines own NFT (thanks to a Philippines Play-to-Earn NFT Game Axie Infinity), 27% of Thailands, 24% of Malaysians, 23% of UAE, and 17% of Vietnam.

Celebrity and Influencer

Besides the contribution of hardcore hackers, NFT walks into the public by celebrities effect. From singers like Justin Bieber and Eminem, NBA stars like Stephen Curry and Shaquille O’Neal, to other celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, all of them bragging about their millions dollar profile picture art triggers public’s curiosity.

In January, Twitter introduced a feature that allows users to use NFT as their profile pictures. “The NFT conversation on Twitter is thriving with 255.6 million tweets globally and continues to rapidly grow. Authenticity around NFT ownership is important to the crypto community and with the profile picture art, we are providing a way for people to prove ownership of their NFTs and support those making this art,” Twitter said in the announcement. It is foreseeable that this function will make the identity of community members more transparent.

NFT = Rich People’s Game?

Skyrocketed NFTs surely cuts off some investors.

News about stunning high valued profile picture art projects give an impression of all NFTs are high-priced and it’s a game for the rich only. Is it true? Of course not. Among the thousands of profile picture art projects, BYAC is the only one with sales over 1 billion. 95% has a floor price of around 0.02ETH (around $50 or less). 

Speculators

Market analysis by Chainalysis, a crypto-focus analysis platform, reveals that there are much fewer players in NFTs than previously thought. With the market size approaching 41 billion, there are only 800,000 unique buyers. Some of the most active NFT traders are speculators. Many of them constantly seek newly released profile picture art to buy low and sell high. Many of them are speculators in wish to drive up prices to pay rent. So in many cases, the fundamental value behind profile picture art as collectibles is neglected.

Companies

Another type of player in the market is companies, adapting NFT as part of their media strategy. Besides launching their own NFT projects like Nike and LV, other companies, like Timberland and Adidas, purchase profile picture art projects to convey the message of “speaking the same language” as their target audience. Companies are seeking a deeper relationship with consumers to establish brand trustability. For instance, limited editions are utilized widely to build a sense of brand uniqueness. However, before the NFT model, companies can hardly make a direct connection to the secondary market or community beyond marketing and transactions. This is where NFT steps in. Former Chief Digital Officer at LVMH recognized the value of NFT as a bridge between real consumers and brands to accumulate first-hand real consumer information and extend brand influence to younger generations. 

When everyone sees chance to win, game goes on

Thanks to the open-ended nature of NFT asset types, there remain many undiscovered business models to be explored and value touchpoints to be built. NFT art intersecting movies, music, real estate, gamification, blockchain, entertainment, and metaverse keeps pushing the limit of imagination. Besides technology advancement, how to deepen and broaden the scope of NFT applications depends heavily on the fundamental social value it brings. Who can resist living a happy and prosperous life?

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