Museums losses since Covid are estimated to be over £743M, with 4,000 jobs lost (Oxford Economics, 2020). Although museums have reopened, the sector needs to rethink sustainability. Scribeasy's Ai and analytics platform enables an imaginative exchange of two-way information with child audiences helping the UK's 2,500 museums create exhibitions and utilise the 200 million objects in their collections. Promoting literacy and interest in museum collections Scribeasy is also a research tool, collecting and analysing data about what interests customers/visitors (including emotional responses to objects)— helping museums tailor exhibitions to optimise interests and 'visits' to buildings and remotely.
In addition, Scribeasy enables broader audiences to discover and re-imagine collections in new and personalised story writing contexts that offer a strategy for sustainability, protecting and creating jobs, including youth work experience and creative assignments.
Scribeasy limited was founded in 2018 by Amanda Duncan. The female founder is an award-winning artist with a first-class BA Hons and Masters from the Royal College of Art. After many years of teaching ( SEN to degree and further education levels), she moved into advertising, art direction and executive producing at a large, Soho based VFX company, Smoke and Mirrors. Her formation of Scribeasy Ltd in 2018 was to provide affordable, inclusive and compelling learning tools that can reboot education, engaging children with culture, creativity and writing, alongside helping close the achievement gaps. To date, Scribeasy has a core and stable team of five highly experienced technologists and creatives and around 7,000 users UK-wide, and users reached organically in over 72 countries. Customers are primarily family and home education users and primary schools.
A successful grant funding application from Innovate UK, completed in May 2021, allowed the company to expand its technology and commercial potential and social impact. Building upon the app's framework, Scribeasy's data warehousing and robust architecture mean it can deliver data at the regional (national or borough) and local level (museum/ brand partner). In addition, the project's investment has resulted in technology that can fastrack its end-user partners, risk-free into the realms of the commercial exploitation of buoyant educational technology (ed-tech) and data analytics/customer analytics markets.
About the edtech market: The UK's worth is £3.4bn, with the global market worth £128bn (ET,2019), of which the UK has only 2.6% share. The growth reflects a surge of recent investments in emerging technologies such as virtual reality, coding and augmented reality. Edtech company investments stood at £90.9m distributed over 50 investments in 2018. This number marks a 140% increase in the total amount invested in the market in 2016, highlighting that the sector is booming and shows no signs of slowing down. While the US and China still dominate the field in terms of edtech research and development, the UK, France, Germany and other European nations are beginning to cement their position as worthy competitors on the international stage (sic, 2019).
About the data analytics market: The global data analytics market is set to exhibit a CAGR of 30.08% during the forecast period (2017-2023) to surpass a valuation of USD 77.64 billion (Market Research Future, 2018). This includes Customer Analytics market (as a specific segment) valued at USD 3.74 billion in 2019 and expected to reach USD 10.2 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 18.2% over the forecast period 2020 - 2025 (Mordor intelligence, 2019).
We regard Scribeasy as a company to watch for these reasons: By 2026, we aim to create 20 high-end jobs related to marketing and technology. We will have initiated youth work-schemes as content creators working with a target of 104 museums (4.1% of 2500 museums in the UK (source: UK Govt, 2019). And, our algorithms will be providing an Ai user experience with artefact recommendations. The proposed yearly license service price-point of £600 per museum will generate £62,400 in revenue to Scribeasy and be helping partners earn income through app subscriptions. E.g. a 1% share of a large museum's annual visitors of c.5 million would raise c. £1.5 million in family app subscriptions, of which the museum's share (30%) would be c.£450,000. Not least, we will be shining a light on a community of young talent: more than one million young, e-book authors inspired by the Scribeasy story creation platform.
