Co-producing digital museum experiences
by Jim Richardson on Jan 28, 2011
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A presentation given at the 'Surfing & Walking Conference' in Turin, Italy in 2010....
A presentation given at the 'Surfing & Walking Conference' in Turin, Italy in 2010.
This presentation looks at two museum marketing campaign's which invite the public to engage with them through digital media.
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We work with some of the largest institutions in the UK, like our National Gallery and Natural History Museum, through to smaller arts venues and heritage sites. Last year we estimate that over 40 million people visited cultural destinations that we help to promote.
The most important things that we have learn in the past decade of working with cultural organisations have all been about their audiences. In the UK there is often a tendency to categorise people by their ages and income and not to look at what is really important, what drives them to visit or not to visit.
One of the big changes which we’ve seen in the past decade has been shift in expectations caused by web 2.0. The internet is no longer seen as just a place to find information; it is now a forum for collaboration, a place to create, curate and share content online. This has changed the way we work, influenced the way we think and adjusted our individual place in society forever.
The most popular places on the internet are now mostly web 2.0 sites and as mobile technology gives us always-on access to information, the internet is changing the way that we live.
This technological shift has placed power into the hands of the masses as never before; I can access countless books at the touch of a button, find thousands of pictures of the Parthanon in Athens with a quick search, create web pages, publish books, organise events and connect with niche groups with the same interest as me. Information is power and this power is shifting.
The explosion in web 2.0 has created a socio-cultural shift; the way that people act is changing and audience expectations are snowballing both online and offline, but well as engaging with audiences through web 2.0 because they are demanding it, I think museums can benefit from this greatly as well, for me creating a more participatory experience fits perfectly with the core values of what a museum should be about.
Today I am going to talk about two projects, the first I like museums was something which we developed in 2007. To put how old this project is in web time in to context, when I was looking back through our files on I like museums I couldn’t understand why their was no Facebook element to the project, and then I realized that this launched in June 2007, one month before Facebook’s launch.
So I am going to tell you a bit about I like museums and then compare this with a project that we are currently working on, to highlight that while technology and the websites that we use may change, some fundimentals are consistant between both.
So ‘I like… museums’ is a project that we really learnt a lot from. This was a campaign to promote museums and galleries in North East England, it had to bring together over 80 venues, which were really diverse.
We had art galleries, science museums, museums on heritage sites like Hadrian’s Wall or on former industrial sites about heavy industries such as coal mining, we even had a bagpipe museum.
We were brought in to help these museums to develop a promotional strategy, something that would raise the profile of museums in the region, something that could change perceptions of museums and something that would encourage people to step out of their comfort zone and maybe visit a museum that they haven’t tried before.
I know that personally, I am someone who does this. Every time I go to London I end up visiting the same handful of museums and there are probably a hundred that I’ve never visited, but it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and to think well, I know I like this place.
So for this project we had a working group of twelve people who represented about 25 of the 80 institutions who were taking part in the campaign and our starting point was to brainstorm how we could tie together these very different museums, and we quickly came to the conclusion that it was the differences that would make the campaign work, each institution was very different, but ‘whatever you like, museums have it’.
Rather than this being some kind of boring directory of museums, we decided to link the museums through a series of trails, we felt that this would be more appealing to the pubic to than having to scan a list of attractions that they might not be familiar with, instead they could browse things that interested them.
There are trails like I like keeping the kids happy, which frame the museums in a context which is helpful to a particular audience. This means that the visitor doesn’t need to consume lots of content that isn’t relevant to them, but instead can pick what interests them and ignore the rest.
I think that what is really important here is that we are trying to see the museum from the audience’s point of view, and acknowledging that we have a broad audience who will all approach the institution from different points of view. Too often museums and galleries talk at their audiences and don’t think about what’s in it for the visitor.
The development group decided that the audiences who we were trying to reach with I like museums fell in to three main camps, they were :Families, which was the broad description we gave to those who were motivated to visit a museum because of children, they tend to visit the same museums time and time again.
Lazy Socials, these are people aged 18 – 30 who would like to participate in culture more, but who just don’t have the time. They don’t visit museums.
and Finally, Interested Adults, these tend to be people who’s children have left home, giving them more time to pursue their interests. Again they tend to stay within their comfort zone and visit the same museum every time.
This is of course not the entire spectrum of museum attendees, our current set of what we call ‘audience drivers’ has six segments and doesn’t rely so much on the age of the individuals, but these three groups were our focus on I like museums.
Once we had these three audience segments in mind we ran workshops to find out more about what each group liked about museums, and what stopped them from attending.
We found for example that that the family centric group were drawn to museums because they see them as a low cost day out, so added the general theme ‘I like free stuff’ as a trail, we found that an outdoor space was a really appealing, so we added ‘I like getting mucky’ and the workshops highlighted themes in collections that would appeal for example ‘I like dinosaurs’.
We shortlisted a large number of trails and also looked for ‘star trails’ those which would be the headline trails used in advertising.
In the advertising we used pictures of individuals rather than museums, this again put the focus on the audiences, and our focus groups told us that they felt that the message came from the person on the poster. This is quite a step away from most museum marketing.
These are the headlines which we decided to use in advertising for the each of the three target groups.
The advertising campaign was extensive, we had around £------ to spend on outdoor advertising and adverts in newspapers and we used our three target groups to help us to decide where to place the media. For example, for the lazy socials group, we placed beer mats in pubs across the region and advertised in sports centres and cinemas. All of this advertising was aiming to drive people to ilikemuseums.com.
The website is where the trails really came to life, while offline we were limited by budget and practicalities as to how many trails we could publicise, online we could appeal to a really diverse audience with trails to suit everybody.
These trails on the homepage are randomly generated to give the user the impression that there are countless trails, if they aren’t sure what to pick, they can either ask the website to surprise them, or click through to more trails.
Here are some of the trails, and you’ll see that we have really tried to steer away from too much museum speak, there is no Neolithic or ethnographic, instead we have ‘big stuff’ or even a trail which has all the museums with tea shops in a ‘nice cuppa’ trail.
That might seem like a really flippant trails, but right now my wife and I have a baby who is three months old and a café where we can feed the baby is essential to any place we visit, so this trail can be really helpful.
You might have noticed that every trail had a star next to it and this is so users can score the trails that the find useful, so that they can show their approval or disapproval of any trail.
The other really important way in which visitors could get involved was through submitting their own ‘visitor trails’, and to provide an incentive to get involved we offered a prize for the best trail. One of my favorite ‘visitor trails’ was ‘I like… things to do with a hangover’ which offers art to take your mind off the pain, religious memorials for divine intervention, and seaside castles for a blast of fresh air. I can’t imagine any museum being prepared to publises itself as a place to go with a hangover, but a third party submitting a visitor trail can get away with it.
Each trail has a page, which lists the museums which are on that particular trail and explains why they deserve to be on this trail, and though our researcher did a great job, I think that the comments on each museum written by members of the public for the visitor trails are some of the best on the website.
Those submitting trials to the website really made an effort, and if someone has taken the time to create a trail, then I would hope that this was a sign that they had a genuine affinity with the museums, and by giving them a chance to tell us what they thought and sharing it with others, the institutions seemed even more relevant to them and their friends.
Each museum also has a profile page, which shows which trails they belong to and also which museums are nearby.
The thing that I really love about I like museums is that it puts the focus on the individual as much as it does on the museums, it is about what they like and the museums were willing to be seen through that lens.
We also found that visitors to the website liked the themes, given the choice of browsing museums through an A – Z directory or through themes, 9 out of 10 users picked themes.
Over the eight weeks of the campaign, the website attracted 48,000 unique visitors and over 160,000 trail views during the same period. Nine participating museums ran a visitor survey during this same period and they found that 36% of visitors cited the campaign as influencing their decision to visit.
One of the nice things about a website where content is being produced by the public is that the website has continued to grow, with trails being added to I like museums every month, without ongoing content production costs.
Since 2007, the website has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors and has had an events section added to it.
As I said earlier, three years on the internet is a very long time and I want to talk about a similar project which we are currently developing to point out some of the differences and similarities between I like museums and this project, ‘Yorkshires’ Favourite Painting’.
As with I like museums, this project brings together a large number of museums across an English county. In this case it is a group of fifty galleries who came to us with a brief to promote the breadth and quality of paintings on display across Yorkshire.
We felt that this was the perfect project to get the public involved in. At first we wanted to ask the people to create trails of paintings in a similar way to I like museums, but the feedback that we got from speaking to museum visitors about the project was that this was to complicated. So instead we simplified the campaign down to asking people to tell us which painting was their favorite and why, but we felt that we needed an incentive to grab peoples attention.
The solution came from speaking to the public about what would make them take notice, as the campaign strapline explains ‘Tell us about your favorite painting and you could take it home with you’.
You’ll notice that as with ‘I like museums’ we have involved the public in the development of the campaign. As someone who believes in co-producing museum experiences I think it’s vital that we have the public, the museum and us as consultants all inputting into the development process.
A large media campaign will be used to promote the Yorkshires Favorite Painting website, where the public will be asked to contribute their opinion about which painting held in museums and galleries in the county is their favorite.
The individual is asked to select a painting and tell us why it is their favorite and where they would like to hang it. This could be a husband who writes to tell us that his wife adores a painting and that he would love to have it on their dining room wall when he cooks her an anniversary dinner or it could be a school girl who wants her favorite Picasso in her classroom for art class, we don’t know what we’ll get. But in my experience the public always surprise!
This may seem incredibly brave to share great works of art with the public, in fact most people seem to stare in disbelief when I tell them about the project, but, after all, these are public collections and what better way to create a buzz around this art than to take it out of the museum and share it with art lovers.
I also see these stories being a great draw to the website, these will give the website visitor a different take on what a painting means, not the official curatorial explanation, but something just as valid and perhaps more accessible.
While the concept of inviting comment is similar to that of I like museums, the website differs in it’s integration with Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare (because of course, they didn’t exist when we created I like museums).To submit a story about your favorite painting you will log in to the Yorkshires Favorite Painting website, either with your email address or with your Facebook or Twitter username and password. If you choose to log in with your Facebook or Twitter profiles then when you have finished your post about your favourite painting you will be given the choice of automatically sharing that with your friends on your chosen social network. You can call for people to vote for your entry, thereby spreading the word about the project without us needing to get involved.
This is something which we have used on similar projects and we find that Facebook and Twitter can virally drive a huge amount of traffic to a website through peer to peer posts.
We will also be active on Twitter and Facebook ourselves with a Yorkshires Favorite Painting profile, and all fifty partner museums will also be promoting the iniative through their own social media profiles.
While on I like museums we used Google maps to show where each museum was, with Yorkshires Favorite Painting, each artwork has a FourSquare location and we are hoping to be able to award a badge to anyone who visits all 100 artworks.
But while integration with other social media websites is a difference between I like museums and Yorkshires Favorite Painting, the fundamental idea behind both projects remains the same, let the public approach the museum from a different perspective, one where they are invited to contribute as partners.
And I think looking to the future this pattern will continue, websites like Facebook and Twitter may come and go, but the we must continue to look to the public as a partner, valuing their contribution and benefiting from sharing this with others.
I think that people increasingly expect this, and that it has great benefits to turn passive museum visitors in to active advocates for your institution.
With the funding of museums and galleries across Europe facing cuts, I think that relationship building, conversations and connections are going to become increasingly important. We need now more then ever to build communities around our museums and web 2.0. has an crucial role to play in building this support and strengthening these relationships.
Thank you 1 year ago Reply