For arts and culture organizations committed to access, education, and long-term impact, digital exhibitions hold enormous, untapped potential. This article makes the case for why they should be a core part of museum outreach and introduces a new way to create and share them without straining already-stretched teams and budgets.
Exhibitions for Everyone
Most people will never see your museum’s latest exhibition. Not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. Time constraints, costs, geographic distance, health or mobility challenges… these are real-life barriers.
Exhibitions should be for everyone, not just those who can make it through the door before closing day. A digital version gives more people a way in.
Evergreen, not Ephemeral
Years of teamwork go into planning and presenting an experience that audiences can only see in one place, on specific days, during specific hours. Then after three or four months, it all vanishes. That’s the reality of most exhibitions. Ephemerality is a given.
When object labels and text panels come off the wall, all the scholarship and creativity behind them disappears into the archive folder, and the project becomes just another institutional memory.
But it doesn’t have to. The research, storytelling, visual language, connections, and explorations don’t have to disappear. They can live on in a digital version that anyone can access.
Rethinking What Digital Exhibitions Can Be
Let’s be honest: there aren’t many inspiring digital exhibitions out there. Too often, they get stuck in two limiting patterns:
They’re underwhelming. Most are either lackluster presentations that force you to scroll through stripped-down content or clunky displays with the look and feel of web pages from the early 2000s.
They’re treated as lesser versions of on-site presentations. That’s the wrong framing. An online exhibition should be a meaningful, visually compelling, and accessible experience in its own right.
It's time to expand our view of what online exhibitions can be and do, and to approach them with imagination, creativity, and an openness to new technologies.
Another Project to Manage?
So you’re convinced, digital exhibitions have tremendous value. But actually producing one? That’s where things can get complicated quickly.
Whether you're juggling multiple high-priority initiatives at a large institution or wearing every hat at a small-but-mighty museum, the thing that’s always in the shortest supply is time. Digital projects translate into emails, meetings, cross-departmental working groups, and months of discussion for incremental progress. And when there’s no in-house capacity, turning to contractors isn’t just expensive, it still requires a ton of time and effort.
That’s why online exhibitions can feel like a heavy lift. Even though they provide the opportunity to extend access and reach, they’re often discussed but rarely attempted. It shouldn’t take 15 meetings, 15 departments, or 15 months to put together a fantastic exhibition.
The Good News: You’ve Already Done the Hard Part
The reality is that most of the work is already done. When an arts and culture organization presents an exhibition in its galleries, it has:
- A thoughtfully crafted narrative
- Professionally edited section texts and object labels
- A unique visual identity (graphics, palette, etc.)
- Public domain or rights-cleared collection images
- Educational and promotional videos and audio
What’s been missing is a way to bring it all together, without enduring months of meetings and milestones.
A New Way to Create and Share
We’re launching a new way to turn the dedication, creativity, time, and expertise that you’ve already invested into an outstanding digital exhibition.
You’ll be able to take the existing didactics, collection images, videos, audio files, and visual identity and transform them into an online exhibition in less time than it takes to draft and circulate a meeting agenda.
Best of all, you won’t have to reconceive or abbreviate your exhibition narrative, or rewrite texts as tiny, bite-sized chunks of information for ever-scrolling presentations.
Ready to Explore Digital Exhibitions?
This summer, we’re expanding our system to help museum teams create outstanding digital exhibitions, so they can reach audiences anywhere.
If you have a current, upcoming, or past exhibition that’s a strong candidate for a digital version, we’d love to hear from you.