CBA Conference

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Culture Online
How Do Audiences Discover Museums Online? Culture
Online Partnerships, Participation, Outreach
Mike Greenwood Commissioning Executive, Culture
Online Katie Streten Editor, Factual, New Media
Channel 4
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The next 20 minutes

• Three themes
• Three case studies

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Partnerships

• access to audiences
• access across media
• access across region
• lending expertise and authority
• bridging the real and the virtual

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Participation

• uses the medium interactively
• puts the user at the heart of the experience
• encourages creativity and collaboration
• overcomes some of the barriers to museum visits

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Outreach

• Finds imaginative ways of touching the
  hard-to-reach
• Helps reposition a museum in the community
• Builds relationships with an audience
• Adds to the perceived value of a museum

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Case Study

• A creative project that allows people to
  contribute, share and comment on collections of
  stories and objects

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Partners

• A partnership led by the VA
• Technology partner Ultralab
• Media partner Channel 4
• Three regional museum partners
• Tyne and Wear
• Brighton and Hove
• Birmingham

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Partnerships

• Media partnerships enabled project to reach a
  very wide audience

On-air
Online
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Partnerships
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Participate

• Highly participative
• User can browse
• Create a story
• Share a story

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Outreach

• Goes on road to find new audiences literally

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Outreach
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Outreach

• Project attracts people into the gallery in new
  ways

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• blogs
• Competitions
• Podcasts
• Online communities

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Case Study 2

• Building a portrait of England today
• A chance for people to nominate, comment upon,
  vote for and argue about their own icons
• An opportunity to explore deeper content

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Partnerships

• Led by not-for-profit organisation
• Partnerships with Museums, heritage sites,
  charities, education, sport, tourism

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Participation

• Created a sense of national event.
• Media partnerships led to wide spread coverage
• Large numbers of site visitors
• Lively debate

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Bringing audiences to museums online

• Close relationships with museums creates a
  virtuous circle

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Case Study 3

• Targeted hard-to-reach audiences from diverse
  ethnic and cultural backgrounds
• Enabled them to tell their stories online
• Opened up museum collections to new audiences via
  the web

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Why?

• Research tells us museums and galleries are for
• school trips, history lessons and formal
  learning
• white middle classes
• They dont
• reflect or acknowledge BME groups
• They need to
• highlight ways that different cultures have
  contributed to modern British society
• Promote greater understanding of Britain's
  multicultural roots.

• Tissier and Singh Nathoo (2004)

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Partnership

• Channel 4 with museums and galleries in four
  regions

• _at_Bristol Science centre
• NMPFT
• Wolverhampton Art Gallery
• Rugby Library and Museums service
• Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms (part of
  IWM)

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Participation

• Channel 4 call to action
• Online
• on-air
• Print
• Poster campaign

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People can participate

• Online
• Via an intensive workshop program run through
  partner museums

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Participation

• People given training tools and opportunity to
  create their own websites
• And to tell their own stories

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Outreach

• Museums showcased elements of their collections
  to new audiences

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Outreach

• Projects involved intensive outreach work
  through
• local co-ordinators
• local media
• community groups
• and the odd football club!

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What weve gained is

• A large collection of great websites
• A strengthened relationship between museums and
  audiences

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What weve gained is

• A large collection of great websites
• A strengthened relationship between museums and
  audiences
• Lots of learning

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Some ideas

• Exploit the media
• Partner with organisations that own an audience
  or control distribution
• Create a sense of event
• Devise a call-to-action
• Be opportunistic
• Celebs have their uses

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Some ideas

• Exploit the medium
• Create an experience that leads to personal
  engagement
• Encourage communities of users to form and grow
• Create virtuous circles of content
• Exploit techniques for search engine optimisation

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Some ideas

• Integrate online and outreach
• Think about the missing-link to an audience
• Think of museum website as a place to show as
  well as see
• Make sure your web team meets your audience