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Can You Name #5WomenArtists? A Viral Campaign for Women's History Month
- 1. CanYou Name #5WomenArtists? AViral Campaign forWomen’s History Month Emily Haight, Digital Editorial Assistant Mara Kurlandsky, Project Coordinator for Digital Engagement
- 2. NMWA is the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to recognizing women’s creative contributions. Mission
- 3. Women’s History Month Every March the museum has an opportunity to catch the attention of a wider audience to celebrate women artists—this year we wanted to do something fun and engaging Social media + the original question = #5womenartists
- 4. How Did We Do It? • Cross-departmental brainstorming • Marketing & Communications • Digital Engagement • Created a fact sheet & press release • Partner outreach • Early press coverage • Shared an introductory blog post
- 5. The Campaign • Day 1: We didn’t know what to expect! • Published our first posts • Noticed lots of engagement right away • Day 2: Played catch-up… • Added Hashtracking Analytics • Published a home-page graphic • Printed takeaways • Added gallery signage
- 8. Tracking • Big Spikes: Mar 1, Mar 8 (InternationalWomen’s Day), Mar 31 • The Work: • Scouring articles & blogs • Tracking spreadsheets • Twitter list of participating organizations • Milestones: Hitting 10,000 Instagram followers! Crossing 20,000Twitter followers Some of our favorite museums started following us…
- 10. Additional Opportunities • International Women’s Day Instameet • Museum program on women in science/tech • @52Museums • #MuseumWeek • Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon
- 11. Other Museums
- 14. The NMWA Recipe • Simple, mission- driven idea • Ask a question • Issue a shareable challenge • Low-to-no barrier to participation • Plan in advance • Partner up! • Get some press • Plan for success • Be flexible • Fan the flames • Share your results
- 15. Help us break the internet! 015 • We’re planning for next year’s campaign already—it’ll be bigger and better! • Contact us to let us know if you’ll be joining or have ideas • Looking forward to seeing your #5womenartists posts!
Editor's Notes
- EMILY NMWA was founded by Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and her husband, who set out to collect artwork exclusively by women When asked why women artists need their own museum, she would ask “Can you name 5 women artists?” Most couldn’t. This question has been part of NMWA’s lore since the beginning
- EMILY Women’s History Month is complicated for us—after all, celebrating women’s achievements is what we do every day of the year But it is a time of increased awareness, and the time that the museum gets a lot of program inquiries/increased interest We wanted to capitalize on this attention to advance our mission in a fun and engaging way…without a dedicated budget, of course. Insert the magical tools of social media! We could social media to pose the founder’s question to our growing followers, and encourage them to challenge others in a fun way that would also bring awareness to the fact that the question isn’t as easy to answer as it seems
- EMILY The idea for the hashtag came from a member of the Marketing team, who pulled in the Digital Engagement team, and we brainstormed with our cross-departmental social media group Our marketing team drafted a fact sheet that described what we were trying to do, and each person reached out to other museum colleagues. We started local, with museums like the Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, but then branched out and cold-pitched the idea to some bigger museums outside D.C., like LACMA, the Hammer Museum, and the Jewish Museum, which led us to even more contacts (thanks JiaJia) Once we had a few museums on board to participate in the campaign, and use it to share work by women artists in their collections, we were able to get some traction in the press We wrote up a blog post introducing the campaign, shared it from our social media, and encouraged our partners to do the same. [NOTE: this slide has animations. Keep clicking for images to appear when in slideshow mode]
- MARA We had done our preparations: reminded our partners that the campaign was starting, teased the campaign for weeks on our social media, shared and promoted as many mentions as we could get. The morning of March 1, we published our first posts across our most active social channels: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We noticed a LOT of engagement, right away, both from museums sharing artworks, and individuals naming artists and talking about what it was like to be a woman artist themselves. By the end of the day we had a Storify of hundreds of posts using the hashtag, more press from both local and national outlets like New York Magazine, heavyweight museums like MoMA linking to our blog post, and skyrocketing social media follower counts (especially Instagram) We hadn’t anticipated such a response! On day 2, we scrambled to sign up for a service that could help us track all of the social media sharing, created graphics for our own website and in the galleries and created takeaway cards about the campaign
- EMILY/MARA These are some of our favorite reactions—both heartfelt & hilarious
- MARA Besides keeping track of our partner contacts, we truly started tracking the campaign on Day 2 when we realized how big it was becoming. Why track at all? Just like any museum, we want to be able to report on & quantify our successes. Being able to tout the numbers we were getting helped compel other institutions to join and other museum staff to appreciate what was happening. We’re always thinking of how to communicate successes to our board and potential funders as well. We ended up paying extra money for our Hashtracking service to capture back-tweets We don’t have sophisticated social media tracking—most of the data collection was done by employees by hand, at all hours of the day: Scouring google for press and mentions of the hashtag Scrolling through Twitter, Instagram & Facebook to pick out really great shares to retweet/regram/repost to keep the conversation going and stoke more participation Mara started adding new institutions to a Twitter list of participants by hand and then eventually by putting them into a spreadsheet since Twitter can’t identify the difference between and institution and an individual [Note: Slide contains 1 animation]
- EMILY Screenshots of staff celebrating reaching 5,000 Instagram followers…imagine our excitement when we hit 10,000! Instagram was our greatest growth area
- MARA March is usually our busiest month and this one even more so! Having other social-media friendly events and participating in other museum social media initiatives that we could work the hashtag into was a great way to keep excitement going and leverage buzz.
- EMILY Other museums came up with some fantastically creative programming of their own: Columbus Museum of Art created a brochure guide to women artists in their collection Decker Library at MICA & Torpedo Factory challenged library visitors to write out their favorites RISD pledged to feature art by diverse artists all months of the year, not just specially designated ones
- MARA When all was said and done: More than 370 art museums, libraries, and galleries from 20 countries More than 11,000 individuals joined the campaign to promote women artists. participants shared more than 3,300 Instagram posts and more than 23,000 tweets using the hashtag #5womenartists. 40 different articles in News outlets like the Huffington Post, artnet, and the Atlantic helped spread the challenge 60 different blog posts from museums and individuals were published
- MARA
- EMILY What made #5womenartists successful beyond our wildest dreams was that the concept was simple, the participation easy, and we banded together with other museums to amplify the message. One thing that’s discussed a lot at MCN is the power of collaboration. Museums need not compete with each other! Never underestimate how much colleagues outside your institution are eager to collaborate and create content around a shared strategy.
- EMILY Please contact us if you’re planning on participating! We hope increase the number of participating institutions to 500