Museum Strategy

The CultureBusiness aftermath

Hello everyone!

I am taking a minute to post on our forum CultureBusiness which took place last Thursday 10 December at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine in Paris. 130 participants from 12 different countries took part in a full day of questioning the future of the funding of culture in light of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the making of budgets today. Don't do cocktail parties for your launchings anymore, bring in some meaning for your communities, the message seems to be as from now.

But what exactly is CSR? Is it unavoidable today and how can it really make a difference in your communication strategy? In building CSR-based projects, how do you gain world exposure but also get in competition with sports, environment or social solidarity organisations? Can culture compete and show it is as much a part of basic human development as any other area?

These are the questions which were raised during two fantastic keynote speeches,"CSR and Social Solidarity: the Next Positioning of culture"by Michelle Wright, Head of Culture at Four Communications and "The Changing face of Sponsorship: a Return to the Core Values of Brand and Social Responsibility" by Jane Marriott, Director of Development at the Royal Academy of Arts and Head of the RA Trust. Of course there will be blogposts  about these talks soon.

At  Culture Business we also debated along with sponsors and cultural organisations on what are the difficulties of as well as the ingredients for a successful partnership. There was also a workshop on how to negotiate a partnership  by Danish coach Malene Rix and it all ended with a "Speed-meeting" session, a succession of appointments between sponsors and arts organisations to build fruitful partnerships at the beautiful venue that is the Conciergerie in the heart of Paris. Here are some pictures of the day sessions, to show you what intense brainstorming we have been at! See you in a few days for more in depth analysis.  

Photos of CultureBusiness will be online on Flickr soon. Thank you to the people who followed us on Twitter on #culturebusiness, discussion continues on sponsorship issues anyway. The conference package, synthesis and presentations will be available soon and free for participants. For those of you who did not attend the conference, please contact me.

Talk to you soon.

Being a French Webmaster - and Making it Happen- A Crossed Interview

Hello everyone! After a long time of technical difficulties of all sorts, I am more than glad to announce that Museum Strategy is alive and running! It was a long-time wish to be able to give our readers a taste of how it is about working online for a French museum. You would think that to get there we had to go interview the staff of the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay or the Centre Pompidou. Well whatever your expectations were if you had some, you probably did not think two of the most active webmasters in France are to be found in the beautiful and thriving southern city of Toulouse. Samuel Bausson - The Museum de Toulouse, second biggest natural history museum in France - and Alain Romang, - Les Abattoirs, a leading contemporary art museum - are some of  the people you want to talk to to get valuable insights. Discover their impressions on being proactive in the French museum world, committing oneself to a public institution and dealing with your private/public persona online. French version available very soon!

1. Where are you from initially and how did you come to be museum webmasters? 

 Samuel: I am originally from Brittany and came to Toulouse to take part in the grand reopening of the Museum de Toulouse. The museum had been fully refurbished and its direction entirely rethought, putting the focus on visitor experience. The museum’s approach was fresh and new, implementing a non-centralised managing pattern and expressing the desire to give audiences a more proactive role, which in turn was very much in tune with  how one works online. This was an opportunity that allowed me to continue working as a cultural editorial  webmaster as well as to get back in touch with a line of work that really matters to me : I majored in  Cultural Anthropology -Grinnell College- where I originally studied ethnology.

Alain: I have lived in Toulouse for fifteen years and thanks to les Abattoirs I have had the opportunity to put my technical skills in website management and DTP into practice, as well as new technologies and contemporary art, at the service of a wider audience.

2. You work for two regional institutions that do not rank among the most important French museums. However, you remain as a major presence on the web. How can you explain this?

Alain: Both our institutions recognised, from a pretty early stage, the importance of exploiting online social networks as they have proved to be very time-effective in circulating information and creating interactivity with audiences. Given that larger museums do not tend to venture into these unchartered waters, our own initiatives naturally draw attention in the same way that some Anglo-Saxon institutions do.

Samuel: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about us, except that perhaps we were able to migrate and articulate the museum’s offers to differents platforms and online services quite early on. When major French museums decide to invest in a real presence and strategy online, they will no doubt take over with their wider-reaching influence. It also has to be said that in comparison to the larger Anglo-Saxon museums -The MoMa, the Brooklyn Museum or the Tate-, our presence online remains relatively insignificant. Those museums lead the way and I'm very impressed by their online offers.

Alain: We are also in the habit of thinking globally, keeping an open mind and constantly looking to build closer ties between the museum’s website, blog and social networks. This has probably had a lot to do with our relatively significant online influence.

3. What are some of the common difficulties that you have to deal with on a daily basis?  How do you feel about your role within the museum?

Alain: The museum places a lot of trust in me and so I have a lot of freedom. I need to take great care in my daily organisation as I am also in charge of printed communication media - leaflets, banners and so on.

Samuel: It’s certainly true that we have a lot of freedom and I appreciate the fact that the museum trusts us. This being said, I don’t think that we are integrated enough into the structure of the institution. Being cut off from the rest of the staff is pretty normal for a lot of webmasters, who tend to end up doing their own onlin e strategy rather than that of the museum.

 

Over time I have met with other museum staff who were willing to work with me and I was able to translate many of their job experiences online, such as the records department on Netvibes and Twitter and the museum’s conferences on Facebook.

 

I think that it is important to add that I’m not working alone: Maud Dahlem, a sciences mediator at the museums, works with me and is in charge of the contents. This has enabled us to delve into a lot of other areas, especially FlickR.

 

The museum’s organisation is currently in the process of being completely restructured and this will change the way in which we work. For the moment, the plan is to work closely with the department dealing with audiences which is a rather positive step, in view of the work we have accomplished so far. Ideally, I would like to form a real team of people committed online. 

5. You both have Twitter accounts. What are they about and what do they say about you? Do you run them alongside your Museums' Twitter accounts? Do you think more generally that you have to devote your entire self online when you’re a webmaster?

Alain : @alainromang, I take information that might potentially regard my job as a webmaster and circulate it. Twitter has proved to be a very useful daily tool to both monitor and share information. Thanks to ‘direct messages’ I can also send and receive message through another account other than just my job email address. Last but not least, @alainromang allows me to focus on and clarify any details or requests originally coming from the official museum’s Twitter @lesabattoirs so as to avoid disrupting its coherence.  

Samuel : On @samuelbausson, I tweet almost exclusively on museums and the web. I do a considerable amount of monitoring and find the platform quite a pleasant way to get to know people and engage in conversations with them.  On the museums account, I tweet about the life of the museums and more generally, I take part in the museum ‘conversations’. Elodie Guiraud, who works as an archivist, is my ‘ally’ on the board: she enriches the museum’s threads with a daily scientific monitoring. Sometimes our paths cross but not too often fortunately.

I personally think that you should never devote yourself one hundred percent to an online persona. I use my real name because it is far simpler for professional contacts to find me if needed though I think that it’s understandable to have different pseudonyms online. The frontiers between professional and private life are becoming more and more blurred, as they are inscribed in a conversation flux and so it’s difficult to completely separate things, places and time. Perhaps, my point is best exemplified by the fact that I am answering your questions on a Saturday afternoon!

Alain : That is a tricky question and I don’t really have a proper answer. One part of the solution lies in creating an online identity which is halfway between your work-self and your private persona. This way, you can really give as much of yourself as you want online, with due protection. However, the question of what one can and cannot say remains a burning issue, especially when one works for a public service. In some cases, this seems quite incompatible with personalising your interactions online. 

6. In terms of the museum’s image, what real changes have you brought about through your work? Did your work create bonds between the two institutions?

Samuel: I really have trouble perceiving the museum’s image from an outsider’s perspective and I am well aware that the internet users who follow us closely form a very minor part of the museum’s audience. I have bonded with fellow webmasters and people in charge of media in museums but at the institutional level these relationships prove harder to establish, as institutions are rarely able to concretise bonds made online. Despite very tough conditions, the institution’s online presence as I know it owes its success to the small few who are willing to work on it.

Alain: I have had a lot of positive feedback but I agree that it’s hard to measure the real impact of our work on the web without resorting say, to an in-depth survey of a large population sample. But we can safely assume that these new ways of informing and interacting with people contribute to creating a positive image of the museums. As regards the bonding with the institutions, I would agree with Samuel.

7. So, what’s on the cards for the near future?

Alain: Well, we started dabbling in social networks in 2007 and 2008. Ideally, we would like to take the work that we’ve already started and make it durable, before moving on to the refurbishing of the new website and the circulation of information through mobile phone devices. We need to attract a greater audience in our communities and improve the quality of our interactions with them, drawing inspiration from the Museum on Flickr. We will continue to closely monitor what we are doing because in this relatively new arena, you never know where the work is going to take you. The constant evolution in this field of work means that we need to think of new approaches all the time.

 

Samuel: As far as we -the museum- are concerned, our main goal is to continue strengthening the museum’s online community. I am also working hard on a project for mobile phone apps that for accompanying museum visits. But it’s still early days….

Interview by Claire Solery