Communications

The year 2023 brought a high number of organized media events at the National Museum related to the opening of new exhibitions, the Children’s Museum exhibition and the celebration of the 205th anniversary of the National Museum. The Department of External Relations of the National Museum organised 4 press conferences and 6 guided tours for the media, as well as many live entries and interviews for TV, print and online media. The press conferences and guided tours for the newly opened Children’s Museum exhibition and several major exhibitions, especially the Baroque in Bavaria and Bohemia and the First Ladies – Fashion and Style exhibition, had a significant media impact. Some of the guided tours took place directly in the context of the exhibition openings themselves, of which the External Relations Department organised a total of 12 last year. The project of the 205th anniversary of the founding of the National Museum, which was accompanied by a festive assembly attended by the President of the Republic and broadcast by Czech Television, also had a significant media impact. The media received a total of 23 press releases and announcements. According to regular media monitoring, the National Museum recorded approximately 12,000 outputs (including duplicates) every month.

Also in 2023, the National Museum’s website provided information important for visiting its buildings, exhibitions and events. It recorded 1,613,824 visits. In addition to an overview and changes to opening hours, admission fees and other practical information, the website also published press releases and news about what is happening at the National Museum. The website served as an important source for ticket purchases. The Virtual to the Museum section regularly featured ongoing and digitised National Museum exhibitions. The most visited site was the National Museum Complex, and the Children’s Museum site was the most visited among the exhibitions.

As in previous years, in 2023 the National Museum used social networks as one of its official communication channels. The focus was mainly on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn accounts. For security reasons, the National Museum followed the recommendation of the National Office of Cyber and Information Security and closed its TikTok social network account in 2023.

Communication on these channels focused on promoting new exhibitions and events of the National Museum, explaining the Museum’s work and collection items in more detail, and promoting existing exhibitions. As part of the 205th anniversary of the founding of the National Museum, attention was focused on introducing individual professions and museum staff.

Also in 2023, the traffic numbers of the primarily used Facebook and Instagram channels achieved very positive results. This year, despite minimal financial support, National Museum posts were viewed by almost 856,264 people on Facebook and 59,627 people on Instagram. The number of followers also increased significantly, by 2,342 on Facebook and by 1,233 on Instagram. The most successful post achieved a unique result of 286,500 views.

In 2023, the number of Twitter followers increased by 358 to a total of 7,607 followers among journalists and the general public.

Furthermore, the number of views on the National Museum official profile on YouTube continuously increased. The videos on our YouTube channel received a total of 148,500 views in 2023.

Users watched our videos for a total of 4,900 hours. We acquired a total of 388 new subscribers for the Museum profile in 2023. In 2023, we continued to connect the Museum's YouTube profile with our website and Facebook page.

On LinkedIn, the number of followers rose to 1,671.

In 2023, a unique exhibition project, the Children’s Museum, complemented the exhibitions in the National Museum Complex. The main aim of this exhibition is to enable children to learn through playful interaction. Also, when it comes to communication, the Museum has tried to keep it playful and fun. However, given the assumption of high visitor numbers and the capacity of the space, we did not run a massive campaign but added the communicated topics to this unique educational space in the centre of Prague. One of the significant elements of the new museum’s communication, colourful stickers on the outside, are supposed to draw attention from the street to what is in the new building of the National Museum. At the same time, in order to reach other potential visitors, we participated in the Metronome Prague international music festival, where we informed children through creative activities and their parents with interviews about the already open exhibitions suitable for children as well as about the new project.

Apart from the exhibition projects, the celebration of 205 years of the National Museum was a key communication topic for us. The clear task was to get this message across in all our channels, for which we chose a special logo used in that year. We celebrated this birthday along two lines: with the public on 15. 4. 2023 with a day of free admission to our buildings, where an interesting accompanying programme was held under the claim “You have been creating our museum for 205 years”. We also engaged visitors through a social media competition, asking them to submit historic photos of the museum until it closed for renovation. The second line was a gala evening on 14. 6. 2023 with the participation of the President of the Republic. At this event, we introduced a new tradition of awarding the František Palacký Medal.

This year, the National Museum also welcomed one of the unique items of Czech archaeology, the so-called Venus of Věstonice, after many years. This statue was part of the exhibition The Oldest Jewellery and Body Ornaments on loan from the Moravian Museum. We decided to use the extraordinary potential of the Venus as a promotional line and, after an agreement with the Moravian Museum, we used it as a motif both on a banner on the Historical Building of the National Museum and in an online campaign running on the Seznam network.

The largest and most extensive promotional project of 2023 was the exhibition Baroque in Bavaria and Bohemia, which first appeared in Regensburg, Bavaria, and then in the autumn was presented with additional objects in the Historical Building of the National Museum. The German version of the exhibition was promoted by the co-organiser. To communicate the Czech version, we placed a wide range of banner advertisements in physical and digital space through public procurement. We mainly targeted tourists from the Czech Republic and selected foreign areas – Dresden, Nuremberg, Linz, and Bratislava. We supplemented all of this with content marketing on social media, a radio ad on Czech Radio and, at the end of the exhibition (2024), a TV ad as well. For this exhibition, we also chose to reach out to a few influencers dedicated to historical topics.

Among the other exhibitions, we focused on communication for the exhibitions On Tour and Emil Holub, mainly through PR articles and content marketing.

In 2023, the new Visitor Care Department faced its biggest challenge yet. We successfully launched a tender for the provision of information, animation and reception services, which was won by AGP. In June, animators were trained and started working in the new Children’s Museum. In July, they were joined by assistants and receptionists. Nine assistants, one receptionist and four animators were placed throughout the Museum complex. Our goal is to significantly improve visitor services with the help of friendly staff able to communicate in both English and Czech and provide information about exhibitions, displays, the mobile app, special events, the National Museum, and who help navigate the complex. Each staff member receives a thorough full-day training which is regularly repeated. Direct daily communication with individual assistants and animators and regular Tuesday briefings have proven successful.

The Department continues to proactively communicate with visitors via email and phone, manage reviews on review portals, and work with other departments to improve the visitor experience based on the feedback received. In 2023, this has meant, for example, the provision of shelving in the cloakrooms, children’s facilities in the toilets at the Children’s Museum, improving website visitor information, the introduction of a new lost and found system and a plan to make the entrance areas in the New Building more efficient. With each new exhibition, we update the Museum Complex navigation system and work with the Commercial Department to create new price lists and visitor schedules for all National Museum buildings, accompanied by information signs in a consistent graphic style.

In a year-on-year comparison, the number of visitors to all the buildings of the National Museum in 2023 increased by almost 170,000. The attendance of the Museum Complex itself has already reached the total attendance numbers that the Historic and New Buildings of the National Museum showed in 2019. Attendance was positively influenced by several factors. Most importantly, with the gradual opening of the natural science and historical permanent exhibitions within the Museum Complex, attendance grew despite austerity measures, when selected buildings were partially or completely closed during the winter months. In addition, 2022 was the first year in a number of years to be completely unrestricted in terms of Covid measures. At the same time, the growing trend of contactless ticket purchases continued, especially via websites and the mobile app. Automatic checkout kiosks are also a very popular method of contactless sales. Revenue from entrance fees exceeded the sales recorded in 2019 by almost CZK 40 million, which is the last year comparable to 2022 in terms of the lack of forced restrictions on opening hours.

The activity of the Centre for the Presentation of Cultural Heritage in 2023 was marked by the development of long-term continuous and new activities that integrate the expanded use of digital technologies and social and ecological aspects into the operation of museums and the field of museology. In the area of making museum collections and exhibitions accessible to a wide group of visitors, the Centre continued projects from the previous period, especially in the management and development of the National Museum Without Barriers model project, which makes digital museum content accessible to users with sensory disabilities. During the year, a series of guided tours of the museum’s exhibitions and displays with sign language interpretation was held again, which was accompanied in 2023 by the International Day of Archaeology for the Deaf, Czech Sign Language Day at the Ethnographic Museum and Making Advent Wreaths for the Deaf and Decorating a Christmas Tree for the Deaf workshops.

The Centre implemented a training session in communication competences for frontline staff at the National Museum of Ethnography, a one-day workshop on How to Exhibit Environmental Topics in Memory Institutions, and a seminar on Digitisation in Memory Institutions within the framework of the subsidy call Digitisation of Cultural Assets and National Cultural Monuments II from the National Restoration Plan in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

In 2023, the Centre participated as one of the co-researchers in the research project National and Cultural Identity of Czech Communities in Ukraine in the 19th-21st Century in the Movable Cultural Heritage of the Czech Republic within the NAKI III programme. The museologicalization of migration is researched within the project.

Furthermore, the Centre’s activities continued to focus on continuously solving essential tasks associated with the site’s activities: the operation, updating and further development of the www.emuzeum.cz information portal, the operation and updating of the do-muzea.cz portal, the administration and development of the Centre’s specialized museological library and the editing of Muzeum magazine: Museum and National History Activities. Through these activities, the site contributes to raising awareness of important issues of Czech and world museums among the target group of museum experts and the general public, thus fulfilling its educational and communication function. In the course of 2023, the Centre’s staff published a number of peer-reviewed studies and other texts in Czech and foreign periodicals and presented their research and activities at domestic and international conferences.

The volunteer programme at the National Museum is now in its ninth year. Volunteers actively help with a variety of activities across the structure of the National Museum and have become an integral part of it. In 2023, over 62 volunteers were involved. As in the previous year, they were mainly students (54%), but the middle-aged (38%) and seniors (11%) were also represented. Traditionally, the greatest interest has been shown in working at the Historical Museum (28), where the volunteers also worked almost 2,000 hours, which is almost half of the hours worked by all volunteers. Many of them (24) were in their fifth year of volunteering, and three of them helped in multiple departments.