Connecting Local and National Culture:
How a niche cultural museum uses VAMONDE to promote their new exhibit and events
The Chinese American Museum of Chicago is dedicated to telling the stories of the Chinese American experience in Chicago and across the United States. At the heart of Chicago’s Chinatown, this museum features local and national exhibitions dedicated to understanding the contributions of Chinese Americans to the Midwest through lectures, panels, exhibits, and community events. The Director of the Board and Interim Museum Director, Mabel Menard, confirmed a new exhibit for the museum which would be opening in four weeks. Given the short time frame, she wanted to create publicity around the new exhibit, “The Chinese Built the Railroad. The Railroad Helped Build America.”
This new exhibit was a major acquisition for the museum since it was a nationally known show that had been curated and presented at Stanford. Since this would be their first new exhibit in over a year, Mabel was keen to promote the exhibit opening across many channels, especially ones that had been previously untapped.
For previous exhibitions, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago had only used the Chicago Cultural Alliance and the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce for promotion. Given the important nature of this new acquisition, Mabel turned to VAMONDE, the cultural network she had heard about through one of her partners, to help her promote the exhibit opening. She knew that VAMONDE shared exciting places and stories with many different audiences and was excited to reach more people by sharing stories from the exhibit on how Chinese Americans built the Central Pacific Railroad.
VAMONDE’s Support & Services helped the Chinese American Museum reach new, untapped audiences
Mabel began with a 30-minute demo that allowed her to learn how to share the stories from her museum and the new exhibit on the platform. After this training, she was able to quickly assemble narratives, images, video, and links to the exhibit into content that featured the new exhibit and the other experiences available at the museum.
Through this process, Mabel liked the way she could control how the message was being presented through VAMONDE. In the past, when she had used organizations to promote the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, it had been through listings and simple text. With VAMONDE, she is able to create engaging content that is focused not just on basic information about her exhibit, but the narratives and content that made the show about Chinese Railroad Workers unique as well.
After publishing their content, the museum shared organically via social media and enlisted VAMONDE to share their content through organic and paid posts. With VAMONDE’s experience and knowledge of managing paid social sharing, Mabel could focus on setting up the museum for a great exhibition opening, knowing that VAMONDE was available to support her through this process. She said:
“With VAMONDE, I feel like I have a support system that I don’t find with many other products. The team helped me every step of the way and really cared about helping me accomplish my goal.”
Chinese American Museum of Chicago can continue to share their stories by promoting their events on VAMONDE
Using VAMONDE as part of their marketing strategy helped the museum expand its audience and led to a successful opening. The paid and organic posts run by VAMONDE led to over 4,000 people reached and over 100 people engaged with the content in two weeks. Mabel was excited about these results since past campaigns had not achieved this level of success.
With the launch of the exhibit complete, the museum is focused on its next step, creating and promoting events surrounding the exhibit. Given their success using VAMONDE to share information on the exhibit, Mabel will be posting content on VAMONDE about the various upcoming events that are connected to the exhibit. The Chinese-American Museum of Chicago uses VAMONDE to connect their nationally renowned exhibits with Chicago locals and tourists.
We’d love to hear about your experience! Let us know in the comments below— what methods have you tried to raise awareness for new exhibits?
Learn more about VAMONDE, a digital experience platform for cultural tourism. Visit info.vamonde.com/museums or contact kartik@vamonde.com for more information.
