Museum Hack Featured In Bloomberg Businessweek

Last updated: September 13, 2024

My company Museum Hack is featured in Bloomberg Businessweek!

This article is a big deal. It is the first national coverage we’ve gotten about our work directly with museums to help grow their visitors, members, and donors.

Bloomberg Businessweek article about Museum Hack — I’m so exited about this article that I had to wear a safety helmet. Also Hi from Monaco!

Table of Contents

The Article

Renegade Museum Tours Lure Newbies, Bros, and the Easily Bored

By Rob Walker, Bloomberg Business Week, April 16, 2018

Advising museums on audience development isn’t a scenario Nick Gray had in mind when he first turned his hobby—giving friends oddball tours of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—into a small business. An entrepreneurial type who founded a web-hosting service while in high school, he always found museums “cold, both emotionally and physically.” Then a date led him through the Met with an emphasis on her individual passions—and the museum became a favorite spot.

Gray perfected his tours by pestering friends with feedback forms. Thanks to attention online, he went pro in 2013, settling on a name, Museum Hack, hiring guides, and expanding. Tours of institutions in five cities, with titles such as “Un-Highlights” or “Badass Bitches,” soon captured the attention of museum professionals. “There was immediate intrigue with these renegade museum tours,” says Andrea Feller, the curator of education for the Arizona State University Art Museum.

idiosyncratic themes in tour culture — Nick Gray is hacking tour culture with idiosyncratic themes.

The company’s seeming irreverence wasn’t off-putting to Feller and her colleagues at the ASU museum. In 2017 they hired Museum Hack to help create programming. The company developed an event modeled on the “escape room” trend—real-world adventure games that involve solving puzzles and challenges to “escape” a physical location—designed specifically to attract millennials who often ignored ASU’s museum. The free but ticketed event’s 150 slots filled up in 24 hours.