How ZOOM Children's Museum is funded

Since ZOOM Children’s Museum reopened in September 2001, more than 100,000 visitors a year have been visiting Austria’s “most popular place of playful learning, exploration and discovery”. ZOOM Children’s Museum thus is not only among the leading, and most successful, institutions of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier but also enjoys an excellent reputation all over Europe as an outstandingly innovative cultural facility. 

A lion share of ZOOM’s funding is provided by the City of Vienna, which grants ZOOM Children’s Museum subsidies to the amount of approximately 64 per cent of its overall expenditure through its culture and youth departments, WienKultur and Landesjugendreferat Wien. Other public funding institutions include a number of Austrian ministries and their subsidising programmes as well as additional departments of the City of Vienna, which grant project-related subsidies on a case-by-case basis amounting to approx. 1 to 5 per cent of ZOOM’s total annual budget.

ZOOM Children’s Museum thus also depends on the additional support offered by private sponsors, which year after year provide ZOOM with generous financial support and contributions in kind. These include ZOOM’s key partners, Erste Group Bank, Wiener Städtische Versicherung and Borealis, as well as individual exhibition sponsors and a number of additional sponsors who provide material support and thus also make an important contribution to the success of exhibitions and workshops at ZOOM Children’s Museum.

Compared to other educational or cultural organisations, ZOOM Children’s Museum manages to generate a sizeable degree of the necessary financial resources itself. These amount to a total of ca. 26 per cent (2010), with 9 per cent generated by ticket sales, room rentals and sales of exhibitions and 17 per cent made up by sponsoring funds.