From Tagging to Togetherness: How Art UK Turned a Digital Tool into Real-World Connection

A simple artwork-tagging tool has become the starting point for friendships, wellbeing and a renewed pride in place. At the Digital Collections Summit, Art UK’s Katey Goodwin and Natalie Willatt explained how.

Digital collections work is often measured in records, clicks and page views. But what happens when a national online platform is deliberately turned into something local, social and face-to-face?

That was the question behind a talk at the Digital Collections Summit by Katey Goodwin, Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Community Engagement at Art UK, and Natalie Willatt, the organisation’s Community Volunteer Manager. Using Art UK’s community volunteering programme in Stoke-on-Trent as a case study, they showed how a crowdsourcing tool called Tagger has sparked genuine human connection, reduced isolation and strengthened people’s relationship with art and place.

As Goodwin put it, Art UK’s mission is simple: to connect people with art. This programme set out to test whether art could also become a catalyst for connecting people with one another.

A national platform with a global audience

Art UK is the online home of the UK’s publicly owned art collections, along with its outdoor public sculptures and murals. Anyone, anywhere, can browse more than one million artworks from 3,500 collections held in museums, galleries, universities, hospitals, and in streets and parks. The site also hosts stories, art terms and resources for teachers.

The reach is considerable. In 2025, 5.6 million people used the site, making 7.2 million visits to 17 million web pages. Around 60% of that audience comes from outside the UK, with the USA the largest overseas market.

Alongside this digital access, Art UK’s community engagement team creates ways for people to contribute their own knowledge and experiences. The approach is people-centred, designed to support learning, wellbeing, confidence and connection.

What is Tagger?

Tagger is a crowdsourcing tool that lets anyone add descriptive keywords to artworks, making collections more searchable and accessible. Every tag improves public access to art.

Crucially, tagging requires close looking. To choose the right keywords, taggers have to slow down and really see an artwork. Volunteers can also make their accounts public and join a leaderboard to compare their progress with others, which, the speakers noted, can get quite competitive.

In short, Tagger is digital micro-volunteering with a lasting public benefit. The question Art UK wanted to answer was whether it could be something more.

Bringing a national platform home to Stoke-on-Trent

In May 2024, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Art UK launched a community volunteering programme built around Tagger. It set out to explore two questions:

• Could Tagger act as a starting point for in-person engagement, helping people connect more deeply with the art, stories and places around them?
• For existing online taggers, could Art UK build closer relationships and understand why they tag and what keeps them coming back?

The in-person work centred on Stoke-on-Trent. Although Art UK’s staff are distributed across the UK, its office is in the city, which has a rich industrial heritage of pottery making and coal mining.

Since launch, the team has delivered 68 activities across Stoke-on-Trent and the surrounding area, with nearly 1,500 participants. These have included tagathons, workshops, photo walks, creative challenges and community sessions, all held in accessible venues close to home and designed to be welcoming, inclusive and enjoyable.

What began as a digital volunteering programme quickly became something bigger. Looking closely at art sparked conversation. Participants shared stories, memories and local knowledge, and familiar landscapes prompted reminiscence. People began to see their city through fresh eyes, and art became a starting point for community building.

Reaching people who don’t usually visit museums

The programme has worked with people of all ages and backgrounds. Family drop-ins in local parks encouraged intergenerational participation, while partnerships with youth organisations in the city, including the Portland Inn Project and Urban Wilderness Art Club, brought young people into hands-on activities exploring local art and heritage. These partnerships helped reach audiences who may not traditionally engage with museums or galleries.

A giant guessing game

One of the most successful ideas has been a playful guessing game using artworks on a giant board. It encourages people to look closely and sparks curiosity, discussion and friendly competition. The team has taken it into parks and community spaces, and themed it to suit each setting:

• paintings of Stoke-on-Trent’s bottle ovens, marking the city’s centenary in 2025
• harvest artworks at a climate café
• portraits of writers at a family literacy festival

One participant summed it up by saying they could keep playing all day.

A collaborative textile banner

A more recent project has produced a large textile banner inspired by Tagger’s role in helping people discover artworks that move them. Workshops were promoted on social media, and two local groups took part in bespoke sessions.
Participants chose an artwork that had inspired or stayed with them, turned it into a small textile patch, and made a matching textile luggage tag explaining why it mattered to them. Local artist Siobhan McAleer is bringing the pieces together into a single banner. Artist John Paul Green has written a poem from words and phrases gathered during the workshops, printed on the banner’s reverse. The finished banner is being unveiled at a celebration event for everyone who took part.

Why continuity matters

Beyond one-off events, two regular Tagger groups were set up in Stoke-on-Trent. They provided something the speakers described as invaluable: continuity. Participants developed routines, friendships and a sense of belonging, and the groups offered a welcoming space to build digital confidence alongside social connection.

Following William Blake through Longton

One project that particularly resonated centred on William Blake, a Stoke-on-Trent photographer active in the first half of the 20th century who extensively documented the area’s people, industry and landscapes. (He is not to be confused with the poet and painter of the same name.)

A group of local photographers tagged a selection of Blake’s images. The close looking that tagging demands revealed small but significant details in the historic scenes. The following week, the group set out on a photo walk in Longton to find Blake’s landscapes in the present day. Gateposts, church spires and chimneys became clues for navigating a townscape that had changed dramatically over the decades.

What started as a digital cataloguing task became a way of connecting with the city’s past and seeing familiar streets anew.

Curations as a prompt for reminiscence

Art UK’s Curations feature, which lets users select, arrange and publish groups of artworks, has also been put to work. Curations can be kept private or published on the Art UK website, and used to share discoveries, tell stories, explain ideas or simply for fun.

In December 2025, volunteers from Appetite, a Creative People and Places programme working across Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme, explored Art UK’s Christmas and winter artworks. Each chose up to four favourites. Art UK then published an online curation of their picks, alongside the memories and feelings each work brought to mind. It showed how a digital catalogue can become a springboard for conversation and reminiscence.

In participants’ own words

Participants report increased confidence, improved wellbeing and a renewed sense of purpose. Many have gained digital skills, a greater appreciation of local heritage, and new opportunities for learning.

For some, the programme has transformed how they see their own surroundings. One long-standing resident described a Tagger group photo walk to look at the city’s murals:

“I have lived in Stoke for about 20-something years, and I didn’t know anything about the murals or the street art until we went on a photo walk… I saw things that I have been passing every day for umpteen years. I never even noticed it.”

But the benefit participants mention most is the relationships. People who might never have met have formed friendships and support networks around a shared purpose.

“It has been a really great lifeline for lots of us… You socialise with the group, and when you don’t notice things, members of the group will say to you, ‘Did you see this?'”

“That social interaction, that face-to-face contact is really important. It helps to eliminate isolation. They’re friends that you can actually sort of talk to. If you have a problem, there’s always someone who can assist you.”

One regular volunteer captured the spirit of the groups: “There’s a great bond that’s been formed within the group. I leave every session fired up.”

Not forgetting the online taggers

The programme has also deepened Art UK’s relationship with its remote micro-volunteers around the world. Collectively, online taggers have added more than 600,000 tags to over 73,000 artworks.

Surveys and feedback show they tag to see artworks they might not otherwise encounter and to learn more about art. Some pick works at random, enjoying the serendipity of discovery. Others seek out subjects of personal interest, such as works from military museums or collections near where they live.

The skills gained go well beyond using the tool itself. Art UK’s research points to closer looking, visual literacy, research skills, digital confidence and a broader understanding of art. For some regular taggers, the programme has changed how they look at artworks and led them towards artists, collections and art forms they would not previously have chosen.

Campaigns and sector webinars

Tagging campaigns tied to national moments have kept the activity fresh. For World Bee Day, people were invited to tag artworks featuring bees. For Railway 200 in 2025, marking two centuries since the beginning of the railways, taggers focused on railway art.

Art UK has also run webinars for museums and galleries in Cardiff, Pontypridd, Merseyside, Southampton and London, helping them engage their own volunteers in tagging works from their collections. It’s an effective way to share digital skills across the sector while enriching collection data.

Lessons for museums and galleries

Art UK’s experience offers several transferable ideas for anyone working with digital collections:

• Treat digital tools as a doorway, not a destination. A simple task like tagging can anchor in-person sessions where conversation, memory and friendship do the real work.
• Go to where people are. Parks, community spaces and familiar local venues lowered barriers for participants who might never walk into a gallery.
• Build in continuity. Regular groups created routines and belonging that one-off events alone could not.
• Connect collections to place. Linking historic images and local artworks to streets people walk every day, as with the Blake photo walk, made heritage personal.
• Partner with community organisations. Youth groups and Creative People and Places programmes opened doors to new audiences.
• Make it playful. Games, themed challenges, leaderboards and national campaigns kept people curious and coming back.
• Value the social outcomes. Reduced isolation and improved wellbeing are as significant as the data volunteers create.

More than metadata

The Stoke-on-Trent programme shows that digital volunteering can drive real-world impact. Participants are enriching a national cultural resource, making art more discoverable for future generations. At the same time, they are developing skills, strengthening their communities and improving their own wellbeing.

By combining digital innovation with local engagement, and placing people at the centre, Art UK has turned a tagging tool into a community built on shared curiosity, creativity and pride in place.

As Goodwin and Willatt concluded, the programme helps people connect with art. More importantly, it helps them connect with one another.

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Katey Goodwin and Natalie Willatt spoke at the Digital Collections Summit 2026.