Museums are critical to their communities, serving as cultural institutions, archivists, and gathering places. Despite their societal importance, museums face significant challenges in maintaining operations and positioning themselves for longevity.

The American Alliance of Museums’ recent Annual National Snapshot of United States Museums, for example, noted declines in attendance, donorship, and sponsorships compared with before the pandemic. In recent years, museums have also lost funding due to federal cuts and cancelled programs. From practical issues such as competition for audiences to larger political and economic considerations, the scope of challenges facing museums today is broad.

While these challenges certainly create hurdles, the good news is that technology advances provide more tools than ever for museums to confront challenges head on—and in many ways, the latest museum accounting and museum ERP tools build new opportunities for sustainable success.

What Are the Challenges Facing Museums Today?

Challenges museums face today include a shifting financial landscape, the public’s fragmented attention span, and evolving support levels across governments and institutions. Because these challenges encompass everything from operational finances to geopolitical issues outside of the staff’s control, building strategies to address them is an “all hands on deck” situation across departments.

Moreover, many of these challenges, and their respective solutions, wind up being inexorably linked. For example, rising operational costs might tie into the need for upgrades for both back-office data management and brick-and-mortar facility maintenance. Addressing those costs requires a multifaceted approach between donor outreach, sponsor solicitation, and public patronage. The latter is critical, even in the face of stiff competition for entertainment and educational dollars at a time when households are tightening budgets.

The goal, then, is to have a clear understanding of challenges, along with paths towards both short-term and long-term solutions. This article covers the most relevant challenges for 2026 and beyond, along with some ways today’s IT solutions can help.

21 Challenges Museums Are Facing in 2026

Pandemic disruption, economic uncertainty, and the digital revolution all changed the way museums operate, but traditional needs, such as donor outreach and maintenance for aging facilities, still matter. How can museums solve today’s challenges while keeping an eye on the future?

We broke them down into 21 challenges across key categories, including ways that emerging technology such as ERP software with AI and AI agents can help.

Financial & Funding Pressures

Money worries are a harsh reality for museums. The types of expenses, as well as the sources of funding, are diverse and evolving, and navigating the tug of war between aspirations and practical realities often comes down to a fine balance. Consider the following elements:

  1. Overreliance on funding methods: Museums can fall into the trap of relying too much on one or two avenues for funding. Donations, grants, and endowments are critical for sustained operations but can often be unstable, especially in times of political and economic turmoil. In-depth data analysis can optimize each channel to identify strengths, weaknesses, and repeatability. AI agents sourcing from grant accounting data, finance software, and donor management platforms can connect these dots, often while taking in data points from external influences such as seasonality and discovering new grant possibilities.

  2. Rising operational costs: Facilities age, exhibitions require funds, insurance costs almost always go up, and conservation efforts require an investment of many different resources. All of this leads to rising operational costs. To stem them, or even strategically get ahead of them, management teams can examine the data beneath the costs. A cloud-based ERP system can connect financial data across groups for a unified look, and related AI-powered analytics tools can look for cost-savings patterns using both micro and macro contexts.

  3. Competition for attention: Fundraising is both more accessible and more fragmented thanks to online donations and social media outreach by smaller, grassroots-organized initiatives. For museums, that means that the strategy for winning funding—and attention—is twofold. First, museums must gain awareness among a public that’s dealing with a higher cost of living and an uncertain job market, along with more competition for attention. Second, known donors such as philanthropists and related organizations now have more options than ever before. Breaking through this noise requires a combination of smart outreach, innovative initiatives, and data-driven understanding of trends and opportunities.

Audience & Relevance

The entertainment and attention landscape are intensely competitive. How are museums supposed to stand out as competition gets fiercer and attention spans become shorter? While every case will vary based on factors such as topic, regional interests, and community history, key audience challenges remain constant.

  1. Struggling attendance numbers: Visits can plateau or even decline for a number of reasons, including ticket cost, community awareness, and seasonality. Overcoming these is vital to long-term sustainability, but the answers can require complex analysis of connecting factors like educational outreach, pricing, and marketing. Fortunately, cutting-edge technology allows for AI-powered analytics that identify patterns and opportunities in segments, such as variable ticket pricing or event scheduling, to maximize attendance.

  2. More competition for audience interest: Digital entertainment has led to a fragmented audience that engages in more ways over shorter durations with more customized choices. And digital technology has indirectly opened up other types of leisure activities, such as built-in GPS and map apps that enable more nature options. Museums must compete while staying true to their core missions, and strategies for achieving this will lean on embracing these same digital technologies to integrate into exhibits, engage audiences, and message the public.

  3. Staying culturally relevant: Museums are pillars of communities and culture, and in a perfect world, they always remain relevant. However, the reality is that digital technology creates more noise than ever before. Social media, streaming, and instant access to information can make museums feel quaint. Staying culturally relevant means adapting a museum’s mission to these avenues. For example, a smart social media strategy can bring the museum to a new audience while also strengthening its identity within the community.

Workforce Challenges

Many of the above challenges focus on factors external to the museum, such as the visiting public, potential donors, and competition for attention. But museums face challenges internally as well, from operations to data management. The following list examines some of those difficulties:

  1. Staff burnout and retention: Any operation can have issues with staff burnout and retention, but museums face unique circumstances. As most museums are established as nonprofits, they often struggle to compete with corporate and private-sector wages and benefits. Community and mission are often the drivers for nonprofit staff, but those factors must be weighed against an employee’s practical needs. Thus, encouraging retention and avoiding burnout requires careful navigation with a soft touch, such as offering flexible work arrangements for computer-based tasks and periodic closures for staff development.

  2. Need for new skill sets: The mission of museums is to preserve the past, even when faced with forward-looking technology. The digital era provides a unique way to handle both exhibits and internal operations. Documenting exhibits for social media and consolidating operational data are both examples of technology driving staff upskilling. Modern management platforms can accelerate this by unifying data across finance, supply chain, sales, and other areas, along with providing analytics and AI tools to staff. These tools and features can open new avenues for staff to operate, saving time and generating creative solutions.

Digital Transformation

As mentioned above, the digital era is both enticing and challenging for museums. Technology offers new ways to reach audiences and manage operations, but getting there requires modernizing outdated systems, processes, and mindsets. Here are some common ways museums can embrace a digital transformation:

  1. Operational and donor management integration: The latest museum management tools can unify data across groups such as donor relations, finance, and exhibit programming for consolidated workflows and easier collaboration. This feeds into decisions and workflows for outreach messaging, ticketing, and inventory management. Analytics and AI-powered tools can deliver forward-thinking analysis, even with the greater context of outside factors such as seasonality and changes in audience demographics.

  2. Social media outreach: Social media has provided a dynamic new way to connect with audiences. Short-form videos can showcase special moments about exhibits, while other social media platforms can promote flash sales for tickets and invite influencers for behind-the-scenes experiences. Taking advantage of these capabilities, however, requires a thorough understanding of what works and what doesn’t on social media, as well as keeping a pulse on trends.

  3. Digitizing collections and experiences: Digital technology can expand access to collections and exhibits, and while part of that is driven by archival needs, the process also opens the door to new revenue streams. For example, livestream tours can be offered to schools and groups around the world, while digitized collections can be promoted via emails and social media as ways to reconnect with previous visitors and established donors. Sales data can show how to optimize all these while adding an understanding of how guest speakers and weather affect virtual tour attendance.

Governance & Public Scrutiny

Museum governance fundamentally differs from that of for-profits in everything from nonprofit accounting to fundraising needs to community placement. Stakeholders, exhibition status, perception, and finances all intertwine to create a unique governance structure that must appeal to both the museum’s non-profit mission and its place within the community. The following are some of the most common governance challenges involved with operating a museum:

  1. Increased scrutiny from boards, donors, and the public: Operating a museum means building certain levels of trust with key stakeholders. The public must feel comfortable with the museum being the steward of exhibit materials and the cultural topic at large. Donors must feel like their money is being used effectively to promote a mission or cause they believe in. And the board of trustees must feel those are being achieved while the museum’s nonprofit accounting data shows that it operates in a sensible, cost-appropriate way. Transparency, strong messaging, engaging exhibits, and attractive facilities all contribute to maintaining a strong sense of value under scrutiny.

  2. Ethical considerations: The public looks to museums to be both experts and leaders regarding its mission and associated topics. Upholding those standards requires that teams must take extra care to respect the ethical guidelines overseeing conservation, communication, and operation. The how and why behind a collection become just as important as a collection’s exhibition, and museums must demonstrate the sensitivity and transparency necessary to be stewards of treasured pieces in a collection. This also extends to messaging, where extra care must be taken when assessing speakers for events, writing donation solicitations, and crafting tour materials.

  3. Aligning mission with stakeholder expectations: A museum's mission is only successful if all of its stakeholders feel that their expectations are met. Finances are important for sure, but museums deal with community factors that heighten the perception of public value. Does the museum preserve pieces in a safe, sustainable way? Do exhibits and speakers reflect the values of the community? Do donors and visitors feel the museum offers effective value for its exhibits and events? The way museums navigate these questions helps to define the execution and outcome of their mission—but if a gap builds between that and stakeholder expectations, cracks can form in community support. Transparency, communication, and feedback can provide appropriate constraints to make sure museums stay on mission.

Facilities & Infrastructure

Museum facilities vary widely in size, scope, and history, but they all carry certain requirements for allowing public access, safely presenting exhibitions, and running operations. The larger the museum, the more factors involved with facility management and infrastructure requirements, including building age, environmental control, and data management. The following reviews important topics that factor into facility logistics:

  1. Facility upgrade and maintenance costs: Every building requires maintenance, even if they were constructed recently. Everyday maintenance comes with expected costs and resources, but repairs and upgrades can lead to significant investments. New exhibits may require lighting, data connectivity, or structural changes, while markedly aging facilities may appeal less to certain audiences. Achieving maintenance needs while thinking about bigger and better things is a balancing act, though financial, attendance, and facility data can help teams make smart decisions about when to execute tasks and which provide the best return on investment.

  2. Environmental control: Museums have industry standards for environmental control regarding humidity and air quality to preserve collections. Modern sensor technology can track real-time data for these crucial factors, and for some environmental controls, make real-time HVAC adjustments as needed. However, the cost for that data infrastructure and its related tracking systems requires its own budget.

  3. Sustainability and climate resilience requirements: Beyond general environmental control, museums are often looked to as leaders in the sustainability space given their focus on community and preservation. This can lead to changes in practical facility management, from installing solar panels to stocking locally grown ingredients for cafes and restaurants. From a climate resilience aspect, facility management also involves disaster-preparedness and climate-resilience measures. These tie together, as weather and conditions become more volatile and concerns overlap, such as hurricane-related flood protections or HVAC filtration concerns for regions with wildfire seasons.

Measurement & Impact

Museums live in a unique space between cultural archive, community gathering arena, and business operation. So how do management teams gauge their overall impact? Gathering this data is a multifaceted effort, and the most successful museums are able to observe metrics for each context, then make appropriate decisions to sustain or improve them. Here are some key metrics that require monitoring by museum teams:

  1. Visitor engagement: The most straightforward and perhaps expected metric for a museum’s success may be visitor engagement. In general, this focuses on attendance figures and associated revenue. However, within that data, teams can use connected management platforms to factor in additional contextual data, such as revenue from merchandise or food, upgrade conversion rates for special experiences, dwell time at exhibits, visitor satisfaction scores from post-visit surveys, and more.

  2. Membership engagement: While members and visitors often overlap, people can support via membership without actively attending the museum. Thus, engagement metrics should analyze a spectrum of actions. Membership revenue and renewal rate are critical, of course, but so are data points such as membership email openings and attendance to members-only events. These additional data points can both assess satisfaction with the value of membership and provide insight into what makes for popular exhibits and experiences, which can then drive strategy. Similarly, AI agents tied into membership and sales systems can analyze this data to spot opportunities for flash sales and other one-off initiatives.

  3. Donor engagement: Museum donors can be sourced from any location without the need for physical attendance; in most cases, donors' engagement shows how well they think the museum is representing the mission rather than a specific exhibit or visit. Because of varying gift size, donor data comes with a different set of metrics than members or visitors, and rates of acquisition, retention, and donation frequency reflect on a museum’s successful engagement. Maximizing that data is an important part of any museum management platform, and AI-powered analytics can uncover hidden insights and patterns so donor outreach is positioned to succeed.

  4. Community impact: A museum’s community impact can be measured in both tangible and intangible ways. Hard data can come from marketing outreach and conversion, including email and social media. Demographic analysis from visitors, members, and donors can show a museum’s footprint on a cultural level. Sponsors can come from different industries with varying sponsorship sizes, and those specifics can show the museum’s perceived value in the community. Finally, data from community programs can provide deep insights from participant demographic, attendance levels, school interest, and engagement at outreach events such as community gatherings. All of this information provides a cross-sectional view of the “how and why” behind a museum’s success.

Fix Real-World Museum Challenges with NetSuite

Powered by AI, NetSuite Museum ERP connects accounting, procurement, project tracking, HR, and other operations to unify data and functions under a single platform. From grant compliance to donor stewardship, NetSuite's cloud-based platform allows museum teams to enjoy greater collaboration, audit-ready compliance, and AI tools for forecasting and scenario modeling—and NetSuite Museum Accounting takes this further by connecting fund accounting, grant tracking, and other diverse revenue streams. With NetSuite, data becomes a real-time advantage, allowing museums to operate with complete transparency that satisfies boards, donors, and other stakeholders.

Today's museums face cultural, political, and economic challenges. By understanding the specifics, museum management teams can take these moments and turn them into new opportunities. Using AI-powered management systems, new levels of data connectivity and collaboration can power ticket sales, donor drives, and community engagement in new and powerful ways. In turn, this technology can reinforce a museum's place as a leader in culture and education in a community.

Museum Challenges FAQs

Why are museums struggling?

Museums are currently struggling because of a wide range of economic and cultural issues. Economic volatility means that households may have less discretionary income and donors may be more selective of where their money goes. Combined with greater digital entertainment options, shorter attention spans, and shifting cultural expectations, museums need new ways to engage the public while also activating an existing donor and member base.

What are the challenges facing museums today?

Museums face a number of challenges across operations, marketing, finance, and fundraising. Finances rely on a combination of attendance, memberships, and donors, which is challenging in a fragmented media and attention landscape. Because of this, museums may need new types of outreach, such as focusing on social media, and that often requires upskilling staff. Technology also provides new opportunities to build exhibits, examine operational data, and even track facility environments to preserve collections, but integrating that technology requires infrastructure investments.

What are some of the museum leadership challenges?

Museum leadership faces challenges around the need to appease numerous stakeholders. Boards must feel confident in the direction of the museum, along with the way finances are used. Donors must feel like money is being well spent to fulfill the museum’s stated mission and cause. The public must enjoy their visits to exhibits and events. Staff need nurturing. It’s a big but rewarding job.