Survey of passersby downtown Nuenen

The renovated Van Gogh Village Museum in Nuenen opened in May 2023. The museum has seen an upward trend in the number of visitors for years and, thanks to the expansion, can now facilitate them better. Interested visitors often combine a visit to the museum with a walk through the center of Nuenen along Van Gogh Monuments. Visitors to the village center also regularly drop in at the museum spontaneously. Reason enough for the Municipality of Nuenen to launch a study on passers-by in the center. Thanks to a contribution from NBTC Holland Marketing and the efforts of Van Gogh Brabant the monitoring has recently started. The first results are expected soon.

Directed

The Municipality of Nuenen values cultural heritage and the Van Gogh Monuments are an important part of this. Together with Van Gogh Village Nuenen, Stichting Centrummanagement Nuenen and Van Gogh Brabant the municipality encourages visits to the Van Gogh heritage. Central to this is maintaining the desired balance between increasing visitor numbers and the attractiveness and livability of the center. Thanks to the data from monitoring, the cooperating partners can keep control of visits to the center and steer them where desired. After all, Van Goghliefhebbers regard Nuenen as an open-air museum for Van Gog heritage and often combine their visit to the museum with a walk through the village.

Impulse budget

The Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions has provided an impulse budget to measure visits to Nuenen's village center. This can be used to study the effect of a museum facility on visits to a village center. For Van Gogh Brabant , such research provides valuable information for investment in heritage sites in Etten-Leur and Zundert.

Sensors

Never before has the exact number of passers-by in the center of the village and around the museum been measured. Monitoring gives a picture of the number of passers-by, locations and times in the center. For this purpose, remote sensors are mounted that record the numbers of passers-by for a year. Via a dashboard, this data is consulted by a visitor management team in which all parties involved are delegated. Moreover, it is being investigated whether and how the information can be linked to other data sources, such as the museum's cash register system and regional traffic measurements. More information about the census locations: https://www.nuenen.nl/pilot-bezoekersmonitoring.