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Rosie Clarke - Answer me this!
The document discusses strategies for improving the Museums at Night festival and organization. It summarizes efforts to [1] streamline email newsletters and fundraising by consolidating mailing lists and donation links, [2] generate income through online crowdfunding campaigns, and [3] simplify responses to inquiries from the public through implementing a live chat function on their website. The results of these efforts included increased subscriber engagement, over £300 raised from individual donors, and the ability to answer visitor questions in a timely manner.
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Rosie Clarke - Answer me this!
- 1. Answer me this! Museumsat Night questions & experiments Rosie Clarke, Culture24
- 2. We bring arts andheritage organisations together to do amazing things they couldn’t do on their own. A small and dynamic team of writers, thinkers, producers and publishers who love arts and culture, understand digital and believe that cultural organisations have a vital place in a better world.
- 3. Museums at Night Thetwice-yearly UK festival of after hours events in museums & galleries
- 5. Our challenges • Improvehow we provide information to our network and the public • Save money • Generate income to support the festival • Use our time more productively
- 6. Streamlining our emailnewsletters - plus a handy tip
- 7. Multiple mailing lists •Mailchimp charges monthly based on total subscriber count • Lots of careful data work • One integrated list combining sector and public email addresses • Segmentation by interests and behaviour
- 8. Newsletter signup forms •One set of signup form questions • Following best practice: people add themselves, receive a double-opt-in email
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- 15. Simplifying data capture •Competitions and giveaways using online form-builder Wufoo.com
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- 19. Results so far •Smaller list with fewer people on it • More engaged: open and click rates up • Less time spent adding people to mailing lists • Continuing to research and analyse
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- 22. Lessons from ourfirst crowdfunder • Who might fund it? • Pick the right platform, where your audience already is • Articulate the NEED: core proposition should be easy to understand • Must be relevant to them • Very time-consuming
- 23. Museums at Nightcrowdfunder • Keen to tell a story, give people the chance to donate in order to make a difference • Suggested specific sum • In your area • Result: more events
- 24. Window of opportunity •Motivated Connect! voters • Set up organisation page and fundraiser on JustGiving
- 25. Integrating the Donatelink • Connect! voting widget • Museums at Night website • Email newsletters • Email signatures
- 26. Successes • Appealed tosense of community • Over £300 from individual donors • Museums at Night People’s Fund: invited museums to apply for £100 bursaries to support creative event programming – Surgeons Hall, Edinburgh – the Infirmary, Worcester – Geffrye Museum, London
- 27. Challenges • Not easytracking donations • Only get donor contact details if they supply: most are anonymous, so can’t build relationships • JustGiving monthly fee • A few people gave more than £3 – now we nudge higher
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- 30. Our challenge Could wesimplify our response to enquiries down to a single interaction?
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- 36. Connecting schools withlocal museums
- 37. Reassuring new visitors •If doors open at 6pm can I turn up later? • This event says Sold Out, how can I join a waiting list? • Is this venue accessible for someone partially sighted? • Can you recommend something in the East Midlands – the more unusual the better? “The T-Rex rampage is one you'll always remember!”
- 38. Dealing with technicalissues • Do you have any examples of previous events? • Difficulty with simple event searches: “I can’t see any events in the South East” • Where do I click to vote in your competition? • This is asking me to prove I’m not a robot? • “Why isn't the map on your first page clickable and scaleable? It's no use at all. It might be better to remove the map, rather than confuse people.”
- 39. Challenges – you’vegot to be online!
- 40. Benefits of livechat • Saves visitors time • Saves us time • Free • Improves conversion rates • Builds relationships “I was just wondering if you have posters I could print about Museums at Night to hang in my workplace. Not running an event, just want to inform staff about you guys on our noticeboard.”
- 41. Three experiments: whatnext? • Continue to develop our email newsletters • Fundraising: planning a new physical reward donors can own • Live chat is on now at museumsatnight.org.uk • Social media Thunderclap announcing Museums at Night festival launch
- 42. Thursday 27 –Saturday 29 October www.museumsatnight.org.uk
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Editor's Notes
- #3 8 people doing Let’s Get Real action research projects and conferences, publishing various cultural websites data sharing data from network of 6000+ UK cultural and heritage organisations, producing the twice-yearly Museums at Night festival.
- #4 Museums at Night twice yearly
- #5 2 of us, myself and Campaigns Manager Nick Stockman
- #6 Goals
- #8 One person could sign up to receive news about several projects: Culture24 maintained separate lists by interest The same email address could be listed multiple times – subscriber count inflated Concerns about loss of history about individual subscriber behaviour when moving them into new list – but we never really referenced this data anyway, also mitigated by recording what lists they’d originally signed up for.
- #10 Also ask where they live so that some day we can do geographic segmentation
- #11 M at N signup – same form, auto-ticked to M at N – compulsory “work in sector” question shows whether you’ll receive our public-facing newsletters saying go to a festival event, or our sector-facing newsletters saying run an event.
- #12 Asked people to tell us what they liked and wanted to hear about
- #15 People who can’t be bothered to unsubscribe nevertheless were able to click No Thanks.
- #16 Before we did this, I’d have to extract a spreadsheet of comp entrants, clean the data, order it, then paste this spreadsheet data into Mailchimp – where I usually found that many people who entered our comps were already on our mailing list. Now, this is handled automatically.
- #18 From the Form Manager page, select your form, click Add Integrations – can connect with different CRM systems and even accept payments
- #19 Before we did this, I’d have to extract a spreadsheet of comp entrants, clean the data, order it, then paste this spreadsheet data into Mailchimp – where I usually found that many people who entered our comps were already on our mailing list. Now, this is handled automatically.
- #20 Lower costs
- #21 We need to find new models of income generation for Museums at Night.
- #22 Culture24’s previous experience of crowdfunding for our online art-selfie game VanGoYourself.com was very challenging but we learned a lot.
- #23 64 people donated. Our CEO knew 62 personally.
- #25 Around the time of the Connect! vote in May we knew we’d get a big spike in website visitors – a critical mass of people who had already taken the step of voting. Justgiving already popular donation platform but there is a monthly fee to keep a campaign open, you must be confident you’ll cover it. Inspiring copywriting, giving examples of highlight events
- #27 Completely unexpected
- #29 Slower now but gearing up for spike – donate £3, £10 for 1 event ticket, £20 for name on site & 2 event tickets
- #30 Live chat is a platform you use on your website to communicate with site visitors
- #31 2 person team and around festival time every May & Oct, volume of incoming enquiries gets exponentially higher. Phonecalls from the public – often talking them through website journey, then emailing them follow-up links. Very difficult to scale.
- #32 Click Start Chat and a small window pops up. As seen on websites for Glyndebourne, Edinburgh Fringe, Brighton Fringe
- #33 We decided to go with a free service called Zopim, easy to integrate with our WordPress website. Here it is on our site – quite unobtrusive down in the bottom right corner. It allows you some basic customisation of colours.
- #34 If you click the button to start a conversation, here’s what you see
- #35 Here’s what we can see from our dashboard – not much analytics but not much is needed. You can see we have some international visitors – one thing that surprised us.
- #36 People who wouldn’t phone us, and are less likely to email with a query – in this case I’m providing tourist information for three Belgian visitors planning trip to the North West
- #37 Unexpected use case, once I realised she was a teacher planning a Nottingham museum trip for a group of sixth formers, I offered to send an email introducing her directly to a couple of local museum event coordinators.
- #38 Never heard of the venue before, potential physical barriers, seeking personal recommendations
- #39 In between festivals, we’re contacted by venues – resource needs to be made more obvious. During festivals, mostly members of the public. We’re on the inside, and think things like captcha codes are obvious, but this helps us understand pain points for users – and solve their problems live. Voting widget was unavoidable on mobile, but could be missed on the website. My idea of showing a map with pins on the homepage as a visual representation demonstrating that there were events all over the UK was swiftly pulled.
- #40 Here’s an example from yesterday where somebody came to the LiveChat and wrote out their query. We didn’t respond within 60 seconds, so they left – and chose not to give us their email address, so we can’t tell them that their nearest festival event is Ghostly Gressenhall. In this case, they’d have been better off emailing or phoning!
- #41 We are friendly, supportive and helpful, and now we can scale this to serve more people more effectively. Improves conversion – people want personalised guidance and encouragement. We provide direct links and can watch them clicking through to book their tickets. Builds relationships with the sector in between festivals, and the public during festivals – print poster.
- #42 https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/47159-museums-at-night-is-here?locale=en
- #43 Come to an event next week! www.museumsatnight.org.uk