The Challenge

Successfully planning operations, budgets and programming to welcome an unknown quantity of visitors into a major London gallery is difficult to say the least.

That’s why the National Gallery decided to invest in a piece of work to more accurately predict future footfall to its site in Trafalgar Square. This was a forecasting tool that could predict future profile and volume of visitors to help decision making around strategy and budgets, lead to more efficient staff resourcing and processes, help with capacity management, optimise the commercial offering, as well as informing product and programme development.

The Approach

DJS developed a fully bespoke model, fed by internal data from the National Gallery, alongside publicly available and long-standing datasets, meaning the model is grounded in the Gallery’s context and easy to maintain, with the Gallery able to continually ‘feed’ the model new data.

Our process involved a rigorous data review, collating and analysing hundreds of potential variables to pinpoint those with predictive power. We then applied a range of statistical techniques to enhance the accuracy of the model, before handing the work over to the client team where it is now fully delivered and managed in-house at the Gallery.

The Results

The finished model exceeded its original ambition of +90% weekly accuracy. As well as overall volume, it predicts family, international and exhibition audiences.  Because it draws on wide-ranging external data, The National Gallery can predict the impact of planned strikes, inclement weather and even reported changes in visitor experience on future attendance. The forecasts have enabled more confident long-term planning, with the outputs embedded in the budgeting cycles for all departments across the organisation.

Testimonial

"It was a real pleasure working with DJS. Their enthusiasm and deep knowledge of the museums and galleries sector stood out from the start and made them the obvious choice for this project. The team brought a collaborative spirit and real rigour to the work, and their insights during the early data review phase sparked some genuinely useful internal conversations. The forecasting model they delivered not only exceeded expectations for accuracy—it’s now an integral part of how we plan across the Gallery."

Senior Data & Insight Manager, The National Gallery