Jurassic Lounge: A Case Study

The Jurassic Lounge event can be seen as an ideal model for successfully attracting the young adult audience to museums. A case study was conducted on the event for the audience research study "Engaging Young Adults in Museums".

Jurassic Lounge is an evening event run seasonally at the Australian Museum on Tuesdays from 5:30pm to 9:30pm. The aim of the event is to get younger “museum-shy” audiences into the museum and engage them in ways that are suitable and appealing to their age group. The entire museum is open for visitors to explore, whilst consuming alcohol, with extra activities including live bands, performers, artists, DJs and vintage games.

Jurassic Lounge is a prime example of a successful program aimed at engaging young adults in a museum environment. 100% of respondents to their survey at the end of the second season stated they would return to Jurassic Lounge, 93.9% stating they would recommend it to a friend and 87.5% agreeing that it has changed the way they viewed the Australian Museum.

The keys to the program’s success comes from the cluster of pop culture it provides, the notion of the unexpected – with activities changing every week and the special, edgy and ‘underground’ image that the event has created for itself. This image has been created through only offering the program seasonally to maintain its ‘specialness’ and refusing advertising through mainstream media outlets such as mainstream radio stations, and instead using lesser known, ‘trendy’ radio stations such as FBI Radio.

For the full research paper, "Engaging Young Adults in Museums"

References

The Australian Museum, Jurassic Lounge - About Us, The Jurassic Lounge Website http://www.jurassiclounge.com/about-us/
Lang, C. Australian Museum: Jurassic Lounge Season 2 Online Survey Results, Australian Museum, 2011.