Can digital publishing change the way people experience museums and their collections?
At Culture24 conferences we always have a Crit Room - a session where a group of industry experts offer a live critique of museum websites and where delegates introduce their sites and talk about what they’re trying to do online.
These sessions take a directly practical approach which is all about being open, honest and willing to share/improve what we do by learning from colleagues and experts.
We also try and deploy this kind of thinking in the development of all our own online products and this post is all about sharing the thinking behind an exciting new thing we are developing. There is also an open invitation for up to 30 of you to sign up and help us as we move forward with some exciting and ambitious plans (details at the end).
So, maybe you know this site we publish — www.culture24.org.uk?
If you’ve seen it recently you will know that it looks like this…
Like a lot of us in the public sector, the site has been much the same for the last eight years. The content is pretty good but it was designed before social media sharing and it is fundamentally more of a broadcast model than a dialogue.
We want to change this and are working on a new offer that will be mobile first, fully integrated with key social media platforms and fundamentally more visually driven.
To build our new thing we will be (as they say), eating our own dog food.
This means that we are developing on top of our own API of cultural venues and their listings but also (and this is the crucial bit), taking our own advice from years of Let’s Get Real action research, about putting audience behaviours at the heart of all our decision making.
We also decided we wanted the new thing to have museum collections and objects at its centre and for it to be for people who love museums and what’s in them, but also for people who WILL love museums, even if they don’t know it yet!
My colleague Kate McNab came up with this lovely sentence, that felt just right to us and we are using it as our starting point.
The new thing will be all about objects and their stories. Objects like this postcard sent by Eric Ravilious to Eric Bawden and his wife in the 1930s.
or these Golden torcs from the Winchester Hoard.
To try and understand how these kinds of objects might work on a platform like Twitter we started experimenting. We took singular objects of fascination and tried to make them popular. Tried to see if people would share them and react.
This is what happened…
What we saw was high numbers of shares, likes and RT (some very good in relation to the number of followers). We then looked to see how others were treating individual collection items and found similar patterns of engagement at Tate and Retronaut.
We did similar experiments on Facebook where posts about objects attracted consistently much higher numbers of reach when more general posts about ourselves or our events.
We knew at this point that we were onto something.
Next, we wanted to better understand user behaviours, so we drafted basic user profiles that fitted the kind of people we wanted to target with the new offer. Next we went out through Twitter and personal contacts to look for a small group of volunteers who broadly matched the profiles and would be willing to help us with an experiment.
We then asked each of the 14 people who signed up to answer one question a day for two weeks but they had to answer with a photograph. This gave us a visual map of all the different answers and user behaviours which we could literally see in the photos. You can see all the photos pinned on the wall, the individual submission are shown horizontally and the questions vertically. You can also see the drop off in the response rate as the two weeks passed.
Examples of the kind of questions we asked are …
There was a lot for us to discover about behaviours but what was also interesting was that there was a real shared aesthetic amongst the submissions.
We also found some great user curation going on with these wonderful #bookshelfie submissions.
So, I can’t show you what our new product is going to look like yet as we are still building it (its due to go live in early 2017), but I can tell you what its going to be called — MUSEUM CRUSH.
Museum Crush will be an online publisher of museum stories. We will curate a design-centric regular email digest drawing its content from museums and galleries and published on museumcrush.com
We are designing Museum Crush in response to the fact that there is all this new and interesting stuff coming out of the museums sector every week, but much of it is only being communicated to audiences in the silos of their individual institutions and it fails to reach a wider general audience. This means there is a missed opportunity to engage a much broader constituency. Museum Crush will join up networks to bring these audiences together.
The word Crush has a lot of really nice connotations for us, like being loved or things mashed together. You can have a crush, I can have a crush etc…
Everyone at Culture24 is really excited about Museum Crush but we know that its ultimate success depends on the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (the GLAM world) to value our approach and we need you to share your collections with us so that we can develop our audiences together.
So if you would like to volunteer to help us, get a sneak peak of what’s coming and be one of 30 people to help shape its future, email our Editor on richard@culture24.org.uk
You can also sign up to receive the Museum Crush email here.
