Museums Failing to Attract Younger Donors, Report Finds

Museums seeking to gather support from a new generation of patrons must focus less on traditional memberships and more on digital outreach, community and transparency, a new report into the cultural habits of young art collectors has found. 

The Avant Arte New Generation Survey gathered data more than 2,000 collectors, enthusiasts and art professionals across 62 countries in March 2026, including around 50 percent aged under 45. The report found that younger collectors are deeply engaged with cultural institutions—and have the funds to support them—but opportunities to secure their patronage are being missed.

“They want connection and they want a feeling of alignment in ethos,” co-founder and chief executive of Avant Arte, Mazdak Sanii, said of the report’s respondents. “Their level of appetite for donating, and for increasing their donations when they do donate, was really high, and yet they didn’t feel like they were being asked.”

The report found that nearly two-thirds or respondents had donated to museums or galleries within the year to March, while seven in 10 said they want to increase their financial support over the next 12 months. 

However, more than half of respondents said they had either never been asked to donate or could not remember the last time they were asked, and a similar number said they would be more likely to donate if institutions clearly explained how funds would be used.

Sanii explained: “There’s such a significant opportunity in terms of how museums can encourage their support, but the reasons that that hasn’t happened obviously include huge funding cuts and museums being massively stretched.

“But, particularly in a couple of different areas, the community that we surveyed was certainly flagging a mismatch between what they care about and the ways in which they interact, and what museums are currently offering.”

Among the young, affluent collectors surveyed, enthusiasm for both the market and institutions was high. They were 65 percent more likely than over-45s to plan an increase in art spending in the coming year, and 44 percent reported visiting a museum or gallery monthly—almost identical to older generations.

However, both their market ventures and their museum visits were driven more by emotion than their older counterparts. Seven in 10 reported buying art specifically to support artists, as opposed to merely as an investment, while social impact and community engagement were key drivers for museum giving. 

According to Sanii, the rate at which younger collectors visit museums shows that in-person curation and wider storytelling around institutional missions is “robust”, but oft-overlooked opportunities to convert them into regular donors lie in two areas: digital connection and the modernisation of memberships.

On social media, only 29 percent of collectors said museums understand how to engage people like them, and fewer than one in 10 are on more than 10 museums’ mailing lists—a key space for converting support into action. Meanwhile, younger collectors were found to be 30 percent less likely to hold active museum memberships than older generations, describing existing schemes as outdated and lacking emotional or social value.

Despite this, Sanii told Ocula that he feels positive about the up-and-coming generation of collectors and prospective patrons, although he sees the need to further their engagement with museum giving as “urgent”. “If we’re still surveying the same group of people in 15 years, and we’re asking them about membership programmes that haven’t changed, then we will lose them,” he said.

“Part of the ethos of these surveys is to ask: ‘How do we close the gap of understanding between our institutions, the traditional art world, and this new generation?’ And my reflection on these findings is that that gap has intensified, meaning the opportunity has got larger, but we’re not capitalising on it.”