Bloomberg Connects

Bloomberg Connects is a free mobile app that offers digital guides to thousands of museums, galleries, sculpture parks, gardens, historic sites, and other cultural spaces in one easy-to-use platform. Available on Google Play and the App Store, it lets users engage with arts and culture from anywhere, serving both as a digital accompaniment to enhance in-person visits—with audio guides, wayfinding maps, and article search—and as a "passport to culture" offering exclusive digital content anytime, anywhere. Guides feature audio, video, photography, and text, and the app includes built-in accessibility features such as voice over, captions and audio transcripts, image zoom, and font size adjustment.

The app was created by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael (Mike) Bloomberg, and was launched in November 2019. For more than two decades, Bloomberg Philanthropies has helped cultural institutions transform their visitor experience using new and emerging technology.

For cultural institutions, Bloomberg Connects offers a pre-built, customizable app interface that is free both for partners to join and for visitors to use. Partners are supported through training, marketing, and technical support, and gain access to real-time data to better understand their audiences and inform operational decisions. As an innovation in cultural-sector technology, the app lowers barriers to digital engagement for institutions of all sizes.

The platform supports a global community of over 1,500 cultural partners and reports a user base of more than 9.2 million app users. Note that Bloomberg Connects is a philanthropic initiative of Bloomberg Philanthropies rather than a standalone commercial company, and partner and user figures grow over time.