The list of CloudGuide partner museums is growing with the Medinaceli Foundation!

BY Alexandra Hégo

Discover the Medinaceli Foundation and its four monuments that will make you travel through time and space. On the way to Seville to admire the Casa de Pilatos, an Andalusian palace built following the rules of the Italian Renaissance. Enjoy the memory and history of the San Juan Bautista Hospital, "the first totally classical building of Castile" in Toledo, before discovering the Palace of Oca, also known as the "Galician Versailles". You will love the Sacra Capilla del Salvador del Mundo, built in 1559 under the patronage of Francisco de los Cobos.

Do not miss this opportunity to discover those historic and artistic properties scattered across nearly all Spain! Available in three languages (Spanish, English, French), our guides will reveal all the secrets of these Medinaceli Foundation’s monuments.

New guide for the exhibition "Alice Boner in India - A Life for Art" at Museum Rietberg!

BY Alexandra Hégo

Discover the incredible life of one of the most unusual Swiss artists of the twentieth century, Alice Boner. This exhibition offers you a detailed view of the many facets of this unique woman's life shared between two cultures. After having spent more than forty years of her life in the Indian city of Varanasi, Boner came into light as a working artist, patron of the arts and art historian.

Thanks to her interest, publications and cooperation with many local artists, Alice Boner has profoundly changed the vision of Indian art - not only in Switzerland but around the world. It was her commitment to the art and culture of a country that she considered as her second home that changed the way we look at it today. This exhibition ends a seven-year project paying tribute to her at Museum Rietberg: "Alice Boner Archives".

Convinced? Explore the life of this extraordinary artist with our guide available in English and German.

Cristobal Balenciaga’s museum has officially joined CloudGuide!

BY Alexandra Hégo

“Elegance is purity” he claimed. You have probably already heard about this famous Spanish couturier, Cristobal Balenciaga. Considered as a designer par excellence, he possessed a precise technical knowledge and a unique and outstanding rigor. The Balenciaga Museum of Getaria is recognized as the first museum in the world dedicated to a designer. Situated in the city of the couturier’s birthplace, it is said, that it proposes one of the most exhaustive precious collection in the world.

Let yourself be taken away in the elegant fashion world through a guided visit with your mobile app CloudGuide! We offer two different guides for this museum. “A timeless legacy” is an audioguide that aims to provide visitors with an insight in the principal characteristics of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s work and demonstrate his crucial contribution to the history of fashion and design. Then, you can discover Rachel L. Mellon’s collection through the guide to the essentials, that will give you further information on the exhibition’s most representative spaces and pieces.

CloudGuide at the Museum of America in Madrid!

BY Alexandra Hégo

Created in 1941 by decree, the Museum of America aims to bring together collections of American archeology and ethnology to make them more attractive, understandable, known and admired by the public. Collaborating with CloudGuide, you can find, up to November 15th, on the museum’s profile a guide for the temporary exhibition "Trans. Diversity of identities and gender roles". The exhibition deals with transsexuality in an anthropological, historical and artistic perspective through works of painting, ethnography, archeology or contemporary photography selected by the museum itself.

Do not waste a second and download our app and guide to find out everything about the genre, going far beyond "male" and "female"!

Digitizing? 2 Things To Consider Before You Do

Are you considering digitizing your institution? If so, then you've come to the right place!

There are 2 concerns that we encounter nearly every time we meet with an institution considering digitization (namely mobile apps, multimedia guides, and interactive games).
Today, we woud like to to share both of these concerns with you, as well as how we solve these problems and add good value to institutions like yours.
 

1. Need for a flexible, easy-to-use content system

Whether your institution deals with content rotation every few years, or every month, if you are seriously considering digitization then one of the most pressing questions you have when assessing providers is, ‘can they accommodate my institution's content needs?'

Delivery: Content can be texts and videos, all the way to visitor-device delivery -- it's very important to know if the platform you are assessing is really the best fit for your institution.

For example, if your institution has bad or spotty reception: a mobile app with an uncompressed, forced 300mb download is going to cause a lot of headache for your staff and visitors. However, a mobile application that compresses that 300mb of content down to 12mb and gives visitors the option of streaming or downloading it will make for a much better experience (shameless plug: CloudGuide does this).

Content Management System (CMS): The next thing to consider is that your provider's CMS needs to be easy-to-use and responsive, with the ability for advanced users to take greater creative control. Whether it be texts, images, audios, or videos (or a combination of all 4) that you want to share with visitors, your CMS must offer intuitive controls that allow staff to easily manage all of your content easily. This is important because, if your institution is like most others, your staff are already loaded down, and the last thing that they need is to spend several hours fumbling through a wonky CMS while trying to set up your mobile application. 

With CloudGuide, an entire exhibition with texts, images, audios, videos, and games can be uploaded, configured and made public to your visitors in 1 hour.

2. Retention & Full Integration

Retention: The average retention rate for a culture & heritage mobile application is about 17% after 3 days. That’s 5% less than the average for all mobile applications.

You’re paying for a mobile application that visitors can use on-site, but your expectation is that visitors have a use for it off-site as well, after all, you’re not paying thousands of dollars for people to download your app and then delete it immediately after leaving...but, that’s what happens.

By and large, this retention rate is due to your institution's application being completely worthless outside of your institution. Completely. Worthless. There's nothing in it that would be useful outside of your institution, yet you are spending thousands of dollars a year to offer it. 

Full Integration: Your mobile app should have all the information that a visitor would expect to find on your website (in addition to the added benefit of them being able to immediately thumb through your multimedia guides and games):

Hours, ticketing (with ability to purchase), agenda/events calendar, donation, location, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, newsletter and website links, directions, and even accessibility information.

CloudGuide offers all of the above, in addition to your mobile app being listed alongside 400+ institutions spanning 13 countries.

Visitors don’t just download and then delete your mobile app, they always have it on their device. When they want to buy tickets: they open it, check your institution hours + agenda/events, and then tap ‘Buy Tickets’. All right from your app.

By the numbers: Our data shows that visitors spend 3x longer in our app than they do on your website -- if you give your visitors what they want it shows: you’ll have a mobile application with a retention rate that is 60%. That's 3.5x the industry average.