Non-Profit Foundation
Echo Room is operated by Stichting Echo Room*, a Dutch non-profit foundation established to support independent empirical research into the long-term cultural impact of museum visits. As a foundation, Echo Room has no shareholders and no profit objective. Every euro received goes toward the research, the instrument, and the people who make both possible.
* Will be incorporated in Q4 2026
Echo Room is funded through public and private grants, founding museum partnerships, and individual patrons. Each source is independent of the others. None of them influence what the research finds.
Funding
Echo Room is funded through public and private grants, founding museum partnerships, and individual patrons. Our funding is structured like this to ensure sustainable long-term research funding. Each source is independent of the others. None of them influence what the research finds.
Public and private grants provide the research infrastructure — covering instrument development, academic collaboration, and the costs of running the study at scale. Echo Room actively pursues funding from cultural foundations, arts research funds, and European research programmes whose missions align with the project's goals.
Founding museums fund the first phase of the research in exchange for permanent free access to the aggregate insight reports and founding partner recognition across all publications. Museums contribute to the research because the findings are directly useful to them — not because they have influence over what those findings say. Do you want your museum to be amongst the founding museums?
Museums can pay for access to live dashboards to gain insight in their visitor data. The monthly fee for access will self-fund the majority of the research project in the long run. Echo Room insight reports are priced by the number of annual visitor logs rather than institution size. More logs mean richer data and deeper insight — so pricing reflects the value the dataset delivers. Access will be available from 2027 onwards.
Individual patrons who believe that how art makes you feel matters more than what you know about it can support the research directly through our crowdfunding campaign. Patron contributions are tax deductible for Dutch taxpayers through Echo Room's prospective ANBI status. Do you want to become a patron?
Echo Room is built around a simple principle: your experience belongs to you. Your profile is set to private by default — you choose what to share, with whom, and when. Nothing is public unless you make it public. Privacy is the architecture, not the settings menu.
Data Policy
What we collect and why
Echo Room collects two things: your immediate response to an exhibition — effect tags, a rating, and an optional note — and your echo check responses eight weeks later. We don't track your location, your browsing behaviour, your device contacts, or anything beyond what you explicitly log in the app.
How your data is used
Your individual responses are never shared, sold, or used for any commercial purpose. When findings are published — in academic journals, sector reports, or the annual Echo Report — all data is anonymised and aggregated before analysis. What gets published is patterns across thousands of visits, not anything traceable to you as an individual. No researcher, museum, or partner ever sees your personal responses. They see what the dataset, taken as a whole, reveals.
Who has access
Access to the raw dataset is restricted to the Echo Room research team and named academic collaborators working under formal data sharing agreements and ethical research protocols. Museums receive aggregate insight reports about their own visitors only — anonymised, benchmarked against sector averages, and never traceable to individual participants. No third party, advertiser, or commercial partner has access to any participant data under any circumstances.
No data selling. Ever.
Echo Room has no advertising model and no commercial interest in your data. We will never sell participant data to third parties, use it to build advertising profiles, or share it with any organisation outside the research partnership for commercial purposes. The research exists to answer a question about art and human experience. That is the only thing your data is used for.
Your rights
You can request to see your data, correct it, or delete it at any time. Deleting your account removes your personal data from the dataset permanently. If you have questions about how your data is handled, contact us at info@echoroomproject.com.
Echo Room values transparency, in funding, in expenditure, in research considerations and will therefore report every contract in its reporting.
Transparency
Echo Room publishes an annual transparency report covering income by source, expenditure by category, research progress, and the names of all institutional partners and funders. We do this because the credibility of the research depends on the credibility of the institution behind it. Anyone who wants to understand where Echo Room's money comes from and where it goes can find out.
The first transparency report will be published twelve months after the foundation's incorporation.