John Swettenham

John leads marketing, communications and external relations for the Canadian Museum of Nature – Canada’s national museum of natural history and natural sciences. The role is integral to transitioning the museum from a public service orientation to a customer-focused enterprise model within an increasingly competitive entertainment and leisure market, and to defining and expanding the museum’s research role in informing responses to global challenges of changing climate and biodiversity loss.

Previously John led marketing for Canada Post, a $6B Crown Corporation, and also worked as a Management Consultant in Marketing with Woods Gordon (now Ernst and Young) in Toronto.  John has a BA Economics from McGill University and an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.

As a volunteer, John serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Ottawa Tourism, Ottawa’s Destination Marketing Organization.

MuseumNext Digital Marketing Summit
Tuesday, 23rd November 2021

Flavours of Virtual Tours to Build Engagement

Museum visits are all about touring the galleries. So when the pandemic closed our physical doors, many of us explored ways to keep virtual doors open. Once open, these are unlikely to shut. Virtual tours can be done in many ways, and at the Canadian Museum of Nature we tried a few, including: hosted video tours; concert video tours; 360o self-guided 3D tours; and a video-interpreted guided 360o school tour mash-up. As tours and events are museum DNA, we found we were camera and studio ready to make these efficiently – meaning quickly at low cost. In this presentation I will share what we did, where these assets have taken us, and where they may take us further.

Find the full schedule here