The role of Social Report for performance measurement of museums: an Italian survey from the web

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the concept of performance in the museum field, in particular whether and how it could find an adequate representation through social reporting tools. The social reports, indeed, in non-profit and public sector organisations are typically considered the main tools for institutional communication. To investigate on this topic, we analyse the social reports of some Italian museums using the content analysis in order to understand how the performance is evaluated and communicated. The empirical findings show how the reports are not fully able to represent the performance of the museums.