Yes, it’s time to talk about change

A 300 year old institution, the Swedish Museum of Natural History has decided to champion change to find and engage new audiences online

Evolution is our primary theme, and in one way or the other, is part of all the stories we want to share. You could also say that the concept of change is represented in everything we offer at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. This is why we wanted to explore if talking about change could help us create a unique Digital Identity for the museum online as well as drive participation in the physical.

If change is constant, how can we relate to it?

We soon realised that change can be characterised in many different ways. After carefully reviewing different contexts, we decided to use urban gardening as a way to talk about change in a relatable way.

There are a number of reasons for this. Urban gardening is an on-going summer exhibition at the museum’s courtyard, so our activity on social media is connected to something we are doing in the physical. It allows to talk about relatively abstract concepts such as adaptation and evolution. And finally, it has a place in the contemporary narrative about our cities. What does it take to move from grey concrete streets with low biodiversity to green cultivated streets that are driven by active citizen involvement?

Reaching out, and letting go

Once we settled on the theme, context and narrative, we realised that if we wanted to invite participation, the first thing we had to do was learn to let go. We can’t go online and dictate the terms. We are there to set the agenda and inspire people to take action and collaborate with us. In order to understand how we could do this in practice, we carried out our first experiment on Instagram in the spring of 2015.

We realised that if we wanted to invite participation, the first thing we had to do was learn to let go.

We launched an Instagram account with the intention of engaging with a new kind of audience. We wanted to use this channel as a forum that enabled both internal and external guests to share their perspective on nature and change through strong visuals.

Our approach was based on the idea that smartphones have democratised nature photography and as a museum of natural history, we should connect with a new generation of creative minds and collaborate with them to create a stream of strong visuals that inspires people to care about our planet.

So far, this experiment has been a great opportunity to learn how we can let go of the need to control. We’ve had several positive side effects. Non-traditional partners have been invited in the process and the team has experienced the power of collaborative content generation and its impact on visibility and engagement. The team has also worked across-departments. The group currently working on the project consists of marketing and communication officers, project managers, educators and webmasters.

We want to use our social media narrative to try and narrow the physical-digital divide.

As we gain confidence and experience in this new way of working, we want to use our theme and social media narrative to try and narrow the physical-digital divide. With this in mind we plan to invite influencers in the area of urban gardening to share their stories on a blog set up by the museum. Later this year, we will organise a round-table talk on the subject, which will include some of the contributors to the blog.

Some of the influencers you will meet this year include Åsa Dry Larsson at the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, who will blog about an urban gardening project in Ethiopia. Malin Lobell, who is a visual artist, lecturer, graphic designer and gardener. Johan Orre at Plantagen, a Nordic company in the gardening industry. Dante Hellström at the urban gardening community Odla med solen.

It may very well be the case, that as a result of this project the museum becomes a forum for urban gardening enthusiasists. But we need to be mindful that this activity needs to connect to our core mission — which is to use change as a metaphor to talk about complex issues in a relatable way. And in the process empower urban citizens to make choices that can have a major impact on biodiversity.

The success we have achieved so far suggests that we are well on our way to achieve our objective. Or maybe we have just started.

This blog post has been written by the team from Naturhistoriska riksmuseet working on the Digital Identity Development programme in Sweden. It has been edited by Abhay Adhikari who is a consultant and facilitator on the programme. To find out more please click here.

The team includes Caroline Borgudd, Charlotte Ek, Sigrid Crafoord Dahlback, Tove Frambäck and Martin Testorf. Please use the firstname.lastname@nrm.se format to write to them.