Museums that face difficulties establishing an effective digital strategy are likely to find that their struggle is indicative of a need for wider organisational change.
This is because successful digital approaches can only be developed if there the opportunity for experimentation and collaboration, says Jane Finnis, the chief executive of Culture 24.
“It comes down to having a supply-based approach, rather than a demand-based approach. This is when you don’t put the audience’s needs at the heart of your thinking and don’t design programmes collaboratively or embrace a culture of experimentation,” explains Finnis.
One of the major challenges, adds Finnis, is a lack of digital literacy and “apprehension” towards social media use among museum staff who don’t work in digital roles.
Culture 24 works with a number of cultural organisations to develop digital strategies, including Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales). The museum’s digital team was overwhelmed by a large amount of digital requests, so took a number of steps to give staff the skills to manage their own social media posts.
Graham Davies, the digital programmes manager at Amgueddfa Cymru, says: “Until not so long ago every digital request was coming through our department. We are trying to increase people’s knowledge and embed the skills within the teams across the museum. We are an enabling department now.”
A review of the museum’s social media accounts showed that there were lots of different accounts that had been set up on an ad hoc basis and some of these were not being used effectively. It was discovered, however, that accounts set up by individual curators were particularly content rich and gained more traction when the posts were shared by accounts that were more corporate and institutional in nature.
“This is a system we are trying to look at and spread out – a satellite model whereby everything can feed everything else in the right way. That way no one just speaks into a room by themselves,” says Davies.
Museum employees who want to set up new accounts or change social media platforms have to justify the reasons for doing so. “They have to tell us what their key success factors are and how that is different from anything else we do,” says Davies.
Work was also done to enable the marketing department to develop a series of measurable goals and objectives for the visiting section of the website. The marketing staff were given training in Google Analytics so that for the first time they could track their own goals against their objectives and experiment with text and copy to effect change themselves. Historically this was done by the digital media department.
Summarising the project in an article for Culture 24’s Let’s Get Real report, Davies wrote: “This was important because we have undergone a large website redesign project, which has led to the realisation that the success factors and goals need to be owned by those departments that create content, rather than owned by digital departments. Content creators will therefore understand and have a responsibility for the success of their online content.”
Graham Davies will be sharing his thoughts on evaluating the success of digital strategies at the MA's one-day seminar On Message: Effective Strategies for Marketing and PR, which will take place on 6 December at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
This is because successful digital approaches can only be developed if there the opportunity for experimentation and collaboration, says Jane Finnis, the chief executive of Culture 24.
“It comes down to having a supply-based approach, rather than a demand-based approach. This is when you don’t put the audience’s needs at the heart of your thinking and don’t design programmes collaboratively or embrace a culture of experimentation,” explains Finnis.
One of the major challenges, adds Finnis, is a lack of digital literacy and “apprehension” towards social media use among museum staff who don’t work in digital roles.
Culture 24 works with a number of cultural organisations to develop digital strategies, including Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales). The museum’s digital team was overwhelmed by a large amount of digital requests, so took a number of steps to give staff the skills to manage their own social media posts.
Graham Davies, the digital programmes manager at Amgueddfa Cymru, says: “Until not so long ago every digital request was coming through our department. We are trying to increase people’s knowledge and embed the skills within the teams across the museum. We are an enabling department now.”
A review of the museum’s social media accounts showed that there were lots of different accounts that had been set up on an ad hoc basis and some of these were not being used effectively. It was discovered, however, that accounts set up by individual curators were particularly content rich and gained more traction when the posts were shared by accounts that were more corporate and institutional in nature.
“This is a system we are trying to look at and spread out – a satellite model whereby everything can feed everything else in the right way. That way no one just speaks into a room by themselves,” says Davies.
Museum employees who want to set up new accounts or change social media platforms have to justify the reasons for doing so. “They have to tell us what their key success factors are and how that is different from anything else we do,” says Davies.
Work was also done to enable the marketing department to develop a series of measurable goals and objectives for the visiting section of the website. The marketing staff were given training in Google Analytics so that for the first time they could track their own goals against their objectives and experiment with text and copy to effect change themselves. Historically this was done by the digital media department.
Summarising the project in an article for Culture 24’s Let’s Get Real report, Davies wrote: “This was important because we have undergone a large website redesign project, which has led to the realisation that the success factors and goals need to be owned by those departments that create content, rather than owned by digital departments. Content creators will therefore understand and have a responsibility for the success of their online content.”
Graham Davies will be sharing his thoughts on evaluating the success of digital strategies at the MA's one-day seminar On Message: Effective Strategies for Marketing and PR, which will take place on 6 December at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
