Sessions

Knowing and understanding your audiences is an integral part of exhibition and experience development. In the past, audience research methods relied on speaking with visitors face-to-face, particularly onsite. But the pandemic has shifted this online. Over the past two years, the Museum Victoria Audience Insights Team has explored different methods for collecting qualitative data including online focus groups, telephone interviews and an online discussion board. This paper will present our methods, materials and outcomes, including broader implications for future research.

The arts and cultural sector can learn and take inspiration from commercial and charitable organisations in how they invest in marketing and communications to build financially sustainable business models. Adele is a marketer and communicator from the commercial and charitable sectors, now using her skills and experience for museums and galleries. She knows how to engage audiences so they regularly fund and support initiatives that they never knew they needed to.

As a result of the pandemic, consumers are increasingly digital in the way they behave. But, the vast, fragmented nature of the online landscape and the information available to users means that we’re all competing more than ever for their attention. At LEWIS, we’ve developed an approach that allows you to identify who your audiences really are (what topics are of interest to them, what drives their decision making, how do they want to interact with museums?) and develop content and digital tools that will help grow existing audiences, attract new ones and perhaps even develop partnership opportunities.

Reaching new audiences begins with the embodiment of your brand. As a window to the world and their publics, a museum’s online presence should be fully reflective of their voice and identity. Hear from AREA 17 Senior Strategy Director Carolyn Centeno Milton who will present the example of the National Museum of Mexican Art, one of the only first-voice institutions in the U.S. Learn what it means to embody your brand and how you can harness digital systems to ensure your museum brand is elevated, resonates and is deeply connected to how you show up online.

In this talk Maurice Seleky, head of Communications & Marketing at the Amsterdam Museum, will give a presentation about the rebranding of the museum. He’ll dive into the new brand story, the new visual identity and the new digital platform of the Amsterdam Museum and how these efforts match the museum’s ambition to become a ‘museum of the future’.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) recently opened their expanded flagship campus on the Pacific coast in La Jolla. With one museum with two locations, one coastal and one urban, MCASD’s brand and audience engagement strategy was due for an expansion of sorts as well.

During this talk, you’ll hear from their past Director of Communications and Marketing (now at MCA Chicago), MCASD’s web development partner Perry Garvin Studio, and MCASD’s graphic design partner Happening Studio on how they collaborated on co-developing an Audience-forward brand in a new era of museums.

TikTok trends, brands with purpose, experiences over things – finding what resonates with Gen-Z and making it work for your brand is easier said than done. Dive into the data and learn 10 tips for capturing and capitalising on your Gen-Z audience today.

When we design and build a website, we make a series of decisions about how users will interact with it and what will keep them coming back. Now, with the complexity and continuous innovation of the digital world, there is so much more that we need to account for to create responsible website experiences for everyone.

We took the time to discuss what mattered to us, what mattered to our clients and what we thought was important to grow and respect audience needs. Plank’s “Ethical Web Design Framework” is a set of user-centric principles that ensure that a website meets our five core goals:

1. Accessibility & Inclusion
2. Privacy and Security
3. Device First-Design
4. Platform Best Practices & Sustainability
5. Environmental Considerations

With this framework, we are setting website design and development principles that make sense to us as a team and benefit our clients, prospective clients, and their customers and communities. It gives us a benchmark for how we develop web projects and a point of discussion and consideration for UI/UX design principles. It provides our prospective clients an even clearer view as to they should engage with their community.

Some experts know much more than us about each individual topic, so it’s a journey to keep improving and challenging our efforts to become the most responsible digital citizens that can better serve and grow your audience.

Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities account for 8% of the UK child population, but so few museums welcome them. Their access and enjoyment to culture is protected by human rights and equality acts yet too few cultural venues adapt to their needs.

Join me to find out the importance of engaging with this hidden audience and how your museums can not only benefit them but benefit from them.

In a future where ‘welbeing’, cultural capital and placemaking are all terms museums are learning to embrace, SEND children, young people and their families play an important part in this jigsaw.

At the moment, the cultural sector, and specifically museums, struggles to understand what neurodiversity is and what it means. There are attempts to develop specific programming for autistic audiences, but these are generally exclusive rather than inclusive (such as quiet hours) and are formulated through providing for the parents of autistic children, rather than through consultation with autistic adults – those with lived experience – and providing an inclusive approach to not only accessibility to museums, but to creating more relevant and representative collecting and display policies, and providing clear routes into and through the workforce. I want to speak about our project, currently underway, which is addressing all of these issues, and led by #ActuallyAutistic people at its heart.

As the world rediscovers and recreates their cultural habits, presenting a compelling and attractive membership offer is critical to cultivate and (re)grow your membership base. This presentation will discuss data-based research methodologies for optimising your membership offerings—from small tweaks to benefits to a complete restructure of the membership program. We’ll include a case study from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science that recently went through this research and restructure process.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, museum membership has undergone a profound evolution. In the early months of the pandemic, cultural organisations were forced by necessity to rethink their approaches to audience activation and delivering value to members. Over the past two years, circumstances have spurred an even greater range of invention, innovation, and imagination in membership. In particular, membership professionals have spearheaded new digital approaches to audience development, programming, engagement, and communications.

However, in this later stage of the pandemic, the term “hybrid” has become increasingly common in museum vernacular, reflecting the important discussions taking place about how to accommodate the demands for both onsite and online engagement in the arts and cultural space. How can museums adapt to the new hybrid reality? And what do hybrid approaches look like in membership? This session will address these questions, sharing 2022 insights from a new Cuseum report on navigating digital and hybrid initiatives in museum membership.

Join in to hear about how a fun proposal reached a new audience by targeting a much-loved part of people’s lives…their dogs! Using the USP of the outdoor site, reacting to covid restrictions and guidelines, connecting to the people, places and stories in our collections – a new event was created. Hear about the event, creating SGI, the social media impact and of course, lots of cute photos of dogs! You may even meet our four legged unofficial face of the event.

Why it’s not scary to join TikTok. This platform can provide a whole new audience for your museum that you might never reach on the other social media platforms. It’s the quickest growing social media app engagement-wise and you can be successful by following some tried and true strategies. If you’re already on TikTok — are you taking full advantage?

Back in October 2021 when Sydney was first due to reopen after extensive COVID lockdowns, a short conversation inspired an ambition to unite a group of Sydney’s key cultural institutions to encourage visitors back to arts and culture in real life. As we know, cultural institutions around the world suffered from sudden loss of visitors enjoying their spaces, shuttered exhibitions and understandable apprehension amongst audiences about visiting in public spaces again. Find out about the (longish) journey from the spark of an idea to fully realised campaign and the challenges and wins the cultural institutions faced along the way to re-building audiences.