Jo Duggan

Jo Duggan is a seasoned producer with nearly 20 years’ experience across multiple digital disciplines, with a focus on kids’ industries for more than 10 years. She has helped companies like Disney, Legoland and eOne/Hasbro reach digital goals, with successful, award-winning AR experiences, increased engagement, growth, and revenue across various platforms. Now Senior Producer at the V&A she leads on mused, a new platform for 11–14-year-olds.

Jo Duggan will be speaking at the Digital Learning Summit 2026:

How engaging younger audiences might involve challenging prevailing wisdom 

For a while, the prevailing wisdom was that there was no point in building new platforms to entice audiences to. Instead, for the most impact, we should take our content to the few trusted platforms that people visit daily. But what if – given how younger people now find and consume content and the growing and deep concerns around their social media use – ‘build it and they will come’ has a new lease of life?

In this presentation we will explore mused, the V&A’s new site for 11–14-year-olds, and how taking an audience-first, search optimised approach to our content has brought a new, younger audience to our own (owned) website, most of whom have never heard of the V&A.

mused has proved that young people (traditionally perceived as a ‘hard to reach’ audience for museums) who are just beginning their own internet journeys are drawn to high-quality, entertaining content that speaks clearly and respectfully to their interests, no matter the site.

We will explain our innovative audience research panels, how they influenced our aims and content treatments and how our search engine optimisation research and implementation has driven impressive results in traffic and engagement.