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The Frick Collection: An early adopter

July 1, 2024

In this piece we hear from Sara Wowkowych, a Content Strategist and Data Analyst at The Frick Collection. She manages and maintains the content featured in the Frick’s Bloomberg Connects guide, as well as other digital platforms.

The Frick Collection was one of Bloomberg Connects’ early adopters, becoming the sixth institution to join during the beta-testing phase before the app officially launched in November 2019. To kick off our new series of Partner Pieces, we spoke with Sara Wowkowych from the Frick’s digital content team about their experience of being a Bloomberg Connects Cultural Partner. She joined the Frick in 2018, which coincided with the start of Bloomberg beta-testing, so is uniquely placed to reflect on how the guide has grown and adapted alongside the museum – especially during its temporary relocation to Frick Madison and the ongoing renovation of its East 70th Street home.

Photo of The Frick, courtesy of The Frick.

As Sara recalls, the Frick chose to trial Bloomberg Connects as a replacement for their custom, in-house app, which they found cumbersome and labor-intensive to maintain. From the start, the partnership has been collaborative, with Bloomberg Connects taking care of the technical aspects so that the Frick’s small team can focus on creating engaging content for the guide. This has encouraged them to expand their audio and video offerings, while also tailoring their content in response to visitor engagement. Responsiveness to feedback is key, as this has enabled the Frick team to adapt the ways in which they communicate to suit their audience, while the museum’s experience has helped shape the development of the app. “A lot of our initial requests have been incorporated into the app, and more seem to be on the way,” says Sara. These include a multilingual feature and a sharing feature that allows users to post their favorite artworks on social media.

When the institution moved into its temporary home at Frick Madison in March 2021, while the historic mansion closed for a three-year renovation project, Bloomberg Connects supported their transition into a new and unfamiliar environment. They were able to add content on the app beforehand, while “being onsite introduced the need for signage and marketing outreach, testing this with staff and eventually watching interactions increase as the public discovered the new space”, with almost 30% of visitors using the app and as many as 731,522 completed audio listens. Sara mentions feeling like partners in the truest sense: “While Bloomberg was building their brand and platform, we were building our presence at Frick Madison.”

Frick Madison was the first time that a substantial number of collection highlights were shown outside the Frick Mansion, marking a departure from its customary presentation style. With works arranged chronologically and geographically, this installation allowed for unexpected juxtapositions and fresh insights into familiar works. This is backed up by visitor feedback from the app, which Sara shares internally using a custom dashboard and hopes may inform ongoing curatorial approaches. “The metrics and the app stats have proven the effectiveness of contemporary artworks sharing the same space as our collection of Old Masters,” reports Sara. “That’s something our curators have experimented with while we’ve been in this different space and I’m hoping that seeing these metrics from the app will inspire the institution to continue this trend in our exhibitions and programming when we move back into the mansion.”

Frick Madison has now closed as the renovation project nears completion and the collection is being returned to the Frick Mansion for its reopening in late 2024. In the meantime, the Frick Collection is still accessible via the Bloomberg Connects guide, where you can peek behind the scenes to see how the renovation is progressing, or virtually explore their app-exclusive thematic galleries. As they return to the Gilded Age mansion that has housed the Frick Collection for nearly 90 years, Sara is most excited about the app’s tour feature, which will be “a great way to introduce visitors to our renovated space. We’re opening up the second floor, which used to be offices, so visitors who were familiar with the old Frick Collection will now have a way to navigate this new space that they’re excited to see.”

Visit The Frick Collection on Bloomberg Connects!