Transform your visitor experience with Bloomberg Connects

The leading edge (and free) museum app

For more than two decades, Bloomberg Philanthropies has been helping museums build digital tools to share their collections and exhibitions – creating meaningful museum experiences and increasing audience engagement around the world.

Our recently-launched app, Bloomberg Connects, renews this commitment, offering museums a free, cutting-edge digital platform. With multimedia content, way-finding, multilingual capabilities, and robust accessibility features, Connects allows you to tell your story your way.

With more than 2.3 million app users around the world, all Bloomberg Connects partners gain access to new audiences and become part of the worldwide Connects network. More than 300 international museums and cultural institutions are now participating, from intimate period homes to global art destinations. In the UK alone, there are more than 100 guides, including the Imperial War Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sir John Soanes Museum, St Ives Museum, the De Morgan Collection, and the Old Operating Theatre, and the impact is real.

“Integrating the Bloomberg Connects app into our visitor experience has been transformative,” explains a representative from the Sir John Soanes Museum. “We’ve been able to explore the use of audio guides and provide valuable supplementary information about our spaces, collections and exhibitions in an engaging and accessible way. Excitingly, it feels like we’re only just getting started!”

And a fruitful collaborations with partners like ArtUK have made it even easier for museums and collections to join, thanks to direct assistance in building their guides.

Bloomberg Connects is free for museums and their audiences and allows visitors – on-site or anywhere in the world – to experience art works, historical and newly-commissioned artist interviews, audio recordings, and even performances and festivals. In-app features and an intuitive, easy-to-use backend make for seamless customization for exhibitions, collections, and tours, with accompanying audio descriptions and accessibility tools providing analysis and contextualization for seasoned art audiences as well as first-time visitors.

The backend of the Bloomberg Connects app is designed with flexibility in mind, making it easy on you and your colleagues to upload and update your content. Beyond that, our in-house content specialists work alongside our partners offering best practices and advice to help you succeed. With technology that automatically offers your content in more than 30 languages, and tools that create transcripts and captions for your media, we’ve tried to maximize impact while minimizing the additional steps. In addition to offering the necessary technology, we also try to build institutional capacity through training sessions and help-desk services, while Bloomberg Connects marketing campaigns build awareness and exposure to new audiences.

Bloomberg Connects partners are at the forefront of digital developments in the museum world. Our engineers, researchers, and data analysts work closely with our content and outreach teams to ensure you have the tools needed to share your treasures with local visitors – and the real-time data to understand audiences and drive programming. As we continually update and enhance the app, we integrate user and partner feedback, continually evolving as technology allows and ensuring maximum ease of use for our partners. We create the technology so our partners can focus on what you do best, developing compelling and provocative exhibitions and programming.

Click here to find out more or email partners@bloombergconnects.org

Bloomberg Connects are Headline Sponsors of the AIM National Conference 2024.