Museum Strategy

Podcast with Nicole Newman, Head of Development at Somerset House

Download Museum Strategy Podcasts - Nicole Newman, Head of Development at Somerset House

Click on the link above to listen to the first installment in our new series of Museum Strategy Podcasts. We recently travelled to London to talk to Nicole Newman, Head of Development at Somerset House. We started off by discussing how the search for sponsorship has changed in the last year for Somerset House and for other cultural institutions. It’s something we’re hearing time and time again from the leading professionals in cultural sponsorship; the crisis should be seen as an opportunity to improve current practice and find innovative new ways of building long-lasting and fruitful relationships. We also got onto the topic of the annual CultureBusiness Forum which Agenda organises and for which Nicole heads the organising committee. We hope you enjoy listening! Make sure you stay tuned, there’ll be more along soon. 

Bouncing back thanks to the crisis

You can read this post in French by clicking here

CultureBusiness is an international forum that brings together people from the cultural and the corporate world. It first took place last year and gathered 200 professionals from 10 different countries. Last year, the crisis was already in the back of everyone’s minds at the forum during which we were trying to draw the outlines of the future of cultural sponsorship. 

A few days before the recent committee meeting for this year’s CultureBusiness conference, I read the results of a survey conducted by Admical entitled “What is the impact of the Crisis on Sponsorship?” The survey discusses the French corporate response to the crisis and I have been fascinated to discover a lot of similarities between what was said during our committee meeting and what was said in the survey. It questioned 300 businesses of all sizes, whether they engage in sponsorship activity or not. Three points especially struck me as being central ones.

The first is that culture is being hit hard by the crisis, but now is an excellent opportunity to reshape its image. According to the figures published by the survey, 73% of sponsorship budgets remain the same. In 91% of cases where there is a reduction in sponsorship budget, the reason is the current financial context as opposed to a larger long-term sponsorship reorientation. But in theses cases, culture will definitely be the sector that will be the most affected by cuts, with a decrease of 22% in budget, compared to 4% for relief-related projects and 11% for environment. We can assume that this is partly due to the image of culture, linked, whether right or wrong, to prestige and luxury. But culture is definitely more than a simple added value; it is actually one of the main pillars of human development. Cultural sponsorship needs to be perceived as about more than just exclusive VIP events.

The second important point is that “transfer of skills” sponsorship will definitely grow much more important during and in the aftermath of the crisis. Transfer of skills mainly refers to partnerships based on the sharing of human resources and know-how rather than a simple financial arrangement. Last year at CultureBusiness, it was said that this mutation in sponsorship would be accelerated by the crisis. Those impressions were definitely proven correct by the figure provided by ADMICAL, stating that while only 37% of sponsorship activities can currently be considered as “transfer of skills”, this will increase by 37% in 2009, compared to just an 11% increase for classic logo and money-based sponsorship.

And last but not least, sponsorship represents a unique opportunity for corporate businesses during the crisis. It is perhaps a fact which is widely known but too often ignored that right now in France, 87% of businesses that have some sponsorship activities consider it to be an internal factor of cohesion and 83% believe that it creates meaning and added value for their corporate communication strategies. Those facts and figures, we believe, should dissuade the corporate world from cancelling partnerships with the cultural sphere, as businesses are at the heart of social development and this doesn’t stop in tough times but should be an ongoing process. Here in France, the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), we believe, is going to be as relevant and meaningful as ever in the months to come.

Picture: pbo31 (some rights reserved)

The Tate steps onto the iTunesU platform

The Tate has just become the first UK cultural institution to have its own page on iTunes U. This bit of iTunes was set up in May 2007 for educational institutions like universities and museums to publish their audio and video content on the iTunes platform. Some of the universities online include Stanford and Harvard. Museums include MoMA, Brooklyn Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

The wealth of information on the TATE iTunes U page is staggering. Users can download audio recordings of past lectures, talks, interviews and symposia which go back all the way to 2006. There are 670 files in total, so you can spend an hour in the bath listening to practically anything from “Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism” to “Contemporary Art in the Middle East: The Politics of Space” via an hour-long chat with Jarvis Cocker or Armando Iannucci.

The page is pretty rudimentary but serves it purpose more than adequately, containing links to other sites, such as Tate Liverpool or Tate St Ives, which have more audio files of talks. The Tate logo currently sits proudly in the middle of the iTunesU homepage. It’s a great way for the Tate to increase its visibility as a dynamic and very active forum for some of the world’s leading academic discussion. This project is also a fine example of how cultural institutions should be looking beyond social networks and their own websites to other accessible interfaces such as iTunes or wikisites such as Wikipedia. You can find iTunesU in the lefthand column of the iTunes Music store once in the iTunes programme. 

Interview with Buzzeum's Diane Drubay: Blogging the Museum

Museum Strategy is happy to post its first guest interview with Diane Drubay, creator of the French reference blog Buzzeum. She will attend Communicating the Museum in June where Digital Networking will be the main theme. She took a bit of time to explain why blogs are essential in communication and digital networking today and to give some insight into the future of communication in museums…which is already here

Hello Diane and thanks for giving us this interview. Could you start by telling us a bit about your blogging activities?

Well, it all started when I specialised in marketing at my business school and concepts such as communication, advertising and target became part of my daily life. To me it was a whole new way of understanding interactions between people. I created Buzzeum as an experimenting tool for my jobs in communication and new media in museums. I could analyse the way bloggers responded to communication case studies I posted. Buzzeum quickly got to be an intelligence tool enabling me to stay updated with the latest trends, as well as for other experts to explore and learn from them.

Do you know the profile of Buzzeum readers?

Buzzeum is read by some art amateurs but mostly by museum professionals, in which term I include a wide range of jobs and areas of expertise: communication, visual- and digital-related work or heritage to give a few examples.

Is the blogosphere very active in those areas?

I would say that there are few real actors in the museums blogosphere  but that this small number is conversely very proactive and innovative. On a worldwide scale, there are about 50 truly influential bloggers if I include some museum webmasters who share ideas and experiences with us.

Your blog ranks incredibly well given its specificity (it is in the top 30 marketing blogs on Wikio). Where does all this interest come from?

The specificity of bloggers is that they are constantly looking for different types of information, other than that which they can find in newspapers, tv and the radio. Following a blog is a thrilling experience for a lot of different people, as it is a way of staying in touch with a museum’s activities, its evolution and daily life in a more fluid way than campaigns or cultural publications.

What constitutes successful buzz for a cultural institution?

Successful buzz is first and foremost about successfully targeting a specific audience, especially people not used to going to the museum. Buzz can be considered successful when a message is well defined and the means of communication used are the right ones at the right time.  There is an infinite flux of information today on the web, and using time and money-consuming strategies are not necessarily a good idea. Being simple, clear and efficient remains the best ingredients for creating a good buzz. Only once you have a clear message should buzz start to be entertaining or provocative.

Among the latest sites, blogs, online and offline campaigns you have blogged about, which are your favourites and why?

Cross-disciplinary projects which work at the same time on exhibition spaces, interactivity, innovative online tools and which are concerned with creating a community on the web truly bring something new to both blogging and the way an exhibition is conceived in the first place. Among my favourites in this area are The Black List Project at the Brooklyn Museum which puts emphasis on interactive visitors’ feedback, Click! by the Smithsonian which explores photography through the eyes of artists, thinkers and researchers, and My Yard Our Message, the Walker Art Center open source online gallery. The website created for the Bacon exhibition at the Tate is strikes me as a breakthrough in terms of online browsing, discovering an exhibition space through virtual experience.

Do you consider museum professionals today to be reasonably aware of new media and new technologies or on the contrary is there a real need for improvement for museums in this area?

I’ve had the opportunity to meet a growing number of professionals who are genuinely interested in developing new ways to reach new audiences. Having profiles that are not exclusively cultural anymore, they are the central actors of these processes. The opportunities are there to be taken, each museum has to find its own way now without blindly following the great digital trends at any cost.

Just to finish with, what do you expect from the Communicating the Museum "Making the most of the connected world" conference?

I‘m looking forward to it in so far as it will enable everyone to share their experiences and to make them part of their future plans and visions for their museums. Hopefully we can begin to connect museums so that they can be better connected to the world.

If your French is up to it, you can see a pdf file of the original uncut version of the interview with Diane here.

Get a degree in Social Media

It has hit friends, families, museums, businesses, celebrities. Now Social Media is to be part of a university syllabus. From next year, Birmingham City University in the UK is going to offer a £4,400 Masters Degree in Social Media. The course will show students how to set up blogs, podcasts and how to use sites like Facebook and Twitter effectively. You can watch the video designed to entice potential students here. 

 

The big question remains who will enter this programme. As many students have already remarked, getting a proper education in social networks as more than just a leisure-oriented experience is worth a try but, the contents of the one-year course, as analysed by some, may be largely achieved by some good self-teaching.

 

So who would really benefit from the programme? In addition to young postgraduates willing to enhance their resume without going out of their comfort zone too much, we can safely bet on established professionals willing to upgrade their skills as they did not experience constant exposure to Web 2.0 in its early days.

 

On the whole this initiative raises the issue of actually educating people to deal with the net, as new media are taking over and the need to learn and understand is becoming more and more important. Hopefully this programme will bring some real added value to people and eventually to businesses.

In praise of…Museum 3.0

Just wanted to write a quick post to heap praise on Museum 3.0, a social network set up by Lynda Kelly (using Ning). The site works kind of like Facebook – you can set up a profile, add pictures, create events, publish blogposts – but it is exclusively focused on discussing museums and social media. With about 700 users and a number of dynamic threads discussing topics such as “Twitter as a business tool” and “Museums and Wikipedia”, it’s an excellent resource and friendly community for anyone interested in this area who wants to meet like-minded people online and switch ideas. Visit the site at www.museum30.ning.com (Get yourself a profile and befriend Claire and myself!)

 

Top Twittering Institutions

For your inspiration: a sample of cultural institutions using Twitter in different ways...

The Natural History Whale - @NatHistoryWhale – 10,855 followers

New York’s Natural History Museum twitters via the life-size blue whale on its ceiling. It’s a great approach; the whale gives information about exhibitions but also makes funny remarks about visitors below and the existential trials of being a whale stuck on a ceiling. He also provides links to poems he has written and whale-related news stories. An amazing balance of information and whale-style wit. 

"Everyone’s talking about how it’s snowing outside. Hello? Why isn’t anyone talking about the 21,000-pound whale in the room? 10:37 AM Feb 18th from web"

Maryland Zoo - @marylandzoo – 1,074 followers

Maryland Zoo’s Twitterfeed is everything a Twitterfeed should be – informative, funny and not just a series of posts about exhibition times which, let’s face it, are easily the lowest common denominator of Twitter post. Exhibition info is interspersed with bite-sized information about the zoo’s many species of animal with links to further information and the feed is updated several times a day.

"Rock hyraxes look like oversized guinea pigs but actually are most closely related to elephants! http://ow.ly/qQz 7:35 AM Mar 28th from HootSuite"

Brooklyn Museum - @brooklynmuseum – 21,650 followers

Widely regarded as one of the best museums using social media today, Brooklyn Museum is also one of the first institutions to monetize their Twitterfeed. @BrooklynMuseum provides a dynamic feed with exhibition info and constant dialogue between the museum and its followers. However, for a paltry sum of $20 a year, visitors gain access to an exclusive feed called @1stfans where they can talk directly to artists and get invitations to special events. The mastermind behind this scheme, Shelley Bernstein will be speaking at Communicating the Museum. It’s definitely going to be a highlight. 

"Lovely visitor response on the last day of The Black List Project http://bit.ly/2nDnxf (love that this was the last video recorded) 2:23 PM Mar 29^th from Tweetdeck"

The Imperial War Museum - @IMWF – 48 followers

The Imperial War Museum is comparatively new to Twitter but in a month it has already found a way to communicate something interesting to its followers with regular “On this day in...” posts. A simple but effective way to give a Twitterfeed another dimension beyond institutional information.  

"On this day in... 1943: assassination attempt made on Hitler in Smolensk, Russia 6:53 AM Mar 13^thfrom web"

The New Museum - @the_new_museum – 229 followers

The New Museum is a museum currently being built on Liverpool’s waterfront, due for opening in 2010. The museum twitters from the perspective of the actual building, which discusses its new roof, the view from its new windows etc. Hearing the thoughts of a building is a strange existential experience at first but then becomes quite entertaining. The New Museum shows that Twitter needn’t include any exhibition info at all and will still appeal to followers who feel involved in the museum’s ongoing development.

"I love a good sunset. Here's some new pics of me enjoying one on Friday - with the obligatory seagull of course! http://twurl.nl/vz74dz 1:36 AM Mar 24th from web"

NB. We enjoyed this yesterday (Apr 1st)... Britain's The Guardian announced that it would be the only newspaper in the world to transmit news solely via Twitter. You can read all about it here. (And be sure to read the comments at the bottom.)

The Great Sponsorship Makeover

Here is the first of our posts on sponsorship for cultural institutions and how the financial crisis is affecting the search. Claire analyses a very French point of view…

As France has responded better than a lot of other countries to the crisis, I find it relevant to look for what the cultural leaders here have to say about art, culture and how we can overcome financial hardships in terms of finding sponsorship. This is how I came across a column written by Alain Seban, Head of the Pompidou Center in Paris in Les Echos, a notable Economics newspaper. In it, he discusses how the financial crisis will consolidate the need to look at sponsorship in very new ways.

The article clearly takes a very French attitude. Seban is extremely quick to denounce “the excesses of unleashed capitalism” and the era “of easy money-making and the frenzy for contemporary art.” He keenly advocates the neccessity of shoring up “ public power, as well as  businesses taking into account new types of logics and ethics other than sheer profit-seeking.” Public power is the good alternative and business is implicitly unethical. This attitude is perhaps a little radical but on the whole he makes some really interesting points.

First of all I am thankful to Seban for not speculating once again as to whether culture will suffer a hard blow from the crisis. The crisis is global; it’s clear by now that no one is escaping. Instead, he offers a long-term analysis which, as Head of France’s greatest contemporary Arts Center, he is bound to be concerned with. I appreciate the way that he has injected substance and meaning into a debate which currently seems to simply panic about financial cuts and a shortage of money.

Seban believes that the crisis does not hinder the search for sponsorship but rather gives an opportunity for a total change of the system, with an emphasis on social responsibility which should benefit cultural institutions: “We are not considering a ‘crisis-driven sponsorship’, funded on a small scale – which we believe to be superficial and inefficient – but a full sponsorship makeover, sealing a true socially-driven partnership between cultural institutions and firms.”

His discussion about how you can, and must, work with other sponsorship fields to create partnerships is particularly thought-provoking. According to him, cultural institutions should by now have stopped ranking relief-related projects, environment, sports and culture on a scale of 1 to 4 and getting depressed because they are languishing at the bottom of the competition.

I can only recognise that the new trends he mentions – such as the necessity of creatively merging culture and art with environement, aid projects or sports instead of letting them stay in their golden towers – already exist and are more under the spotlight than ever in this climate. Working on renewed and more integrated partnerships was the way forward before the crisis, and I think still is. In this respect, Alain Seban definitely has a point.

Yet the article gives way to new questions: if we are to consider a merging of social, environmental and relief-related projects, what forms are they to take, concretely speaking? Can charity trusts or fondations support museums? For an organisation such as the Fondation de l’Abbé Pierre, funding cultural institutions would be inconceivable because it falls outside of its legal remit. But what about the relationship between relief organisations and culture for example? Yann Arthus Bertrand’s recent exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, 1 Billion Others, enjoyed a very successful partnership with Médecins du Monde, who provided financial aid and fascinating speakers throughout the exhibition.

If museums allow themselves to think outside the proverbial box and look to new socially-driven sponsorship relationships, they will inject more and more diveristy into their programmes and visions. As Seban says, “a society open to the questions raised by its artist is more dynamic and likely to evolve, to challenge itself and to face the future.”