Museum Strategy

Museum Strategy & Agenda wish you an exciting year 2011

Somewhere in between Christmas and New Year, Museum Strategy and Agenda agency for the Arts wish you a merry and rich year 2011.

This blog will continue dealing with branding, communication and marketing issues, making it a space for scholars, students, our conference's participants, professionals and all of our readers to discuss trends and bring your contribution to how the arts sector can be actively part of people's lives through communication and technological development.

It all starts with someone's amazement at an art somewhere in the world so as a window on year 2011, here is a quotation of actor, writer, blogger, TV host and film director Stephen Fry:

«To stand in front of an artwork can cause bursts of excitement and surges of pleasure and thumps of intense feeling that are not unlike those an adolescent experiences when glimpsing someone who stirs desire in them.»

 

Let's keep this never-fading feeling as a driving force to share the love with others.
Happy new year 2011!

(Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor)

CTM'11: Change of Dates and Call for Papers

Hi everyone,

Update to this post: You will be able to submit your papers for CTM'11 until 31 March 2011.
See contact details in this post and on our website.

Here is more information about CTM'11, the place, date alterations and call for papers if you want to help us build the programme. 

First of all, the conference dates have changed and CTM'11 will now take place next 6, 7, 8 July 2011. So take good note everyone! 

We are nevertheless still set to be in Düsseldorf, Germany. For the past 200 years, Düsseldorf has been made famous on the international arts scene - and used to be called the little Paris-  and has been continuously very dynamic artswise. It is a vibrant city which has a great cultural life to offer.

The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf is well-known for producing many famous artists, such as Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Thomas Demand, Udo Dziersk and Andreas Gursky. In the 1850s, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf became internationally-renowned, with many students coming from Scandinavia, Russia and the USA to study, amongst other things, the genre and landscape painting associated with the "Düsseldorf school".  The famous academy is now run by artist Tony Cragg.

During the conference we will also go contemporary and hit the Media Harbor designed by international architects such as Frank Gehry and to contemporary art venues such as Kunst Sammlung NRW (K20 and K21).  

During these three days, Agenda will organise training sessions on sponsorship, keynote speeches as well as workshops and case studies, success stories and open discussions, added with even more networking occasions - what about a business breakfast?. We will also have a business space booked for arts and business people wishing to present new technologies in their own fields.

Want to be part of the programme?

We will gladly review your applications provided they fit in the themes listed below, as established by CTM'11 Committee.
       

-            Visitor’s experience: Education, Entertainment or both  

-            Museums as communities: individual or group experience?

-            What happens inside the museum?

-            Building the visitor’s experience

-            Emotional, digital, social and intellectual experience

-            Is the museums experience about storytelling?

-            What is our role of communication in this experience?

-            How can we tailor offers for different visitors?

-            How to interact with the visitors before, during and after

-            What strategy to make visitors come back?

-            Keeping audiences: what comes after a visit, what makes visitors come back?            

-            How does the museum respond to different audiences?

-            How to communicate the experience in house: from security,

             shop, restaurant, finance to top management

-            More with less: how to communicate more with less money

-            How to work with creative industries to be more innovative?

-            Investing in services to get more money from the visitors

-            Sponsors that are not funding exhibitions but invest in creative experiences

-            The sponsor’s experience of how to partner with a museum

 Do send your ideas or presentation of a case study about any of the above subjects to cestrada@agendacom.com .  We’d like to have more input and share more experiences between museum professionals. 

See you in Düsseldorf !

CTM'11 Theme : The Museum and You

Hello everyone,

This is another post on Communicating the Museum to announce this year's theme:

'The Museum and You
Creating Multiple Adventures for Each Visitor'

Behind this title is a simple question: What happens when vistors storm past the doors of a museum? In other terms, what type of experience do they get to enjoy (or not) and what keeps them coming back for more?

We have consistently developped the idea that a museum brand is so much more than just four walls: online and printed publishing, events outside the museums, touring exhibitions, partnerships and retail are all part of the message an institution sends. To keep a clear identity for a museum while developping new branches can actually represent a significant challenge in itself.

While this is key in the development of cultural institutions today, they do remain physical places with a given identity and personality.

And inside the walls, as decades have passed by, visitors have been looking for  more diverse experiences that replicate what they encounter in other meeting places. No museum is an island, museums are platforms.

They are not for visitors to stand in awe and abide by vertical types of relations involving indisputable authority of scholars over the rest of the common folks anymore though this is quite a dated and simplistic assumption already. As the concept of communities and shared leadership are growing reference values in our society, there cannot be a discrepancy between how people interact in the real world and how they mirror these deep-set trends within an institution.

What type of richness are museums best fit to bring us: visual, social, technological, educational? How does one articulate all of these to create a moment for each and everyone as well as for groups and communities?

 Museums have developed their offers way beyond the realm of art for art's sake: they are educational places, social places and in short communities in their own right. But they have also become businesses and have to seriously think about what they have to offer to their visitors who are also customers. How do you improve access and services to not disrupt visiting experience but to magnify it?

 Finally how does team work help to produce a global experience? In recent years, museums have experienced more holistic approaches to the way they work, with cross department projects as opposed to a silo model where everyone in the marketing department will think about marketing, and so on and so forth.

Speaking about which, the conference will have -as announced- a special format for professionals within the museum. It is not strictly reserved to people working on the web, but the level in presentations will qualify the event as quite specialised. During this session, we will try to achieve two goals which we think are key:

>> To provide a platform for specialists to discuss their own problems in a more official way

>> To articulate these practices with the concerns of other departments within the museum, especially marketing and communication, so that a set of best practices can be established to embrace a more holistic attitude between services.

Note: This project is still underway as to its format and duration, place etc. We are thinking about how it should look like to fulfill our objectives and are open to suggestions.

Quite an ambitious and diverse programme on the whole then. If you feel you can relate to some of these issues, want to exchange or present, let us know so that we can discuss.

Warning: this is NOT a conference on augmented reality, we also want to speak about seemingly less glamourous subjects like access and retail so we are waiting for your feedback on everything a museum has to offer.

(Image: Warm Up at MoMA PS1)

 

At the Beginning is the Message -again

Hello everyone

As you know we had our yearly Communicating the Museum conference last July in Vienna on Audiences.Following the conference, I wrote an article for JAM, the publication of the Arts Marketing Association, which conducts a wide range of events and programmes for arts marketing professionals to upgrade their skills throughout the UK. As JAM's October issue was about arts organisations and the press, I chose to write the thoughts I had collected during the conference on sending the world a message about one's institution: Who are you? What do you stand for?

In my view, one of the key-teachings of this year's conference was that the more diverse the world grows around museums - producing fragmented audiences- then the more important it is for them to have a strong sense of identity that means both defining a clear message and getting everyone in the museum across departments onboard to define that message.

Once you have the bigger picture, then you know where you are going, roughly. And you can be bold as well, nothing bad in this.

You can take a look at it here
You can also contact me for more info about the presentations and speakers I am referring to in the article.

 

Upcoming Glam-Wiki and Rencontres Wikimedia on Arts and Shared Knowledge

Dear All,

Here is a post to inform you of two conferences that will take place at the end of November and beginning of December, one in London, one in Paris. Both are organised by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with arts institutions who will be presenting and discussing their experiences on knowledge sharing and partnerships with Wikimedia in that regard.

Behind the Wikimedia Foundation are Wikipedia as well as most notable wiki-something projects that have developped and made popular the idea and practice of sharing information freely, and making knowledge and culture an experience that is done in common, valuing everyone's voice. As structured organisations with a deep sense of hierarchy and copyright protection of their pieces and collections,  arts organisations tend to present themselves as essentially resisting these notions, although avid readers of Museum 2.0, Museum 3.0, and French speaking readers of Mixeum are fully aware that the picture of museums today on these issues is a fragmented one.

Discussing how institutions envision their strategies in that matter goes further than a mere internal/external policy issue, it tackles subjects such as the digital divide, how one sees information in our societies and the part visitors should take in the museum experience. So let's discuss.

Interestingly, GlamWiki 2010, the British leg of the conference will be a two day format divided into a "policy" and a "practice" part which given the importance of filling some  blanks in the understanding of both arts organisations constraints and free information sharing implications, as well as in "just doing it" seems quite valuable to me. The French leg - 2 days too-  offers for its part a very rich and interesting programme of return on experiences mixed with some debates and technical updates. If combined, the outcome of both appears quite wholesome.

See you in London next 26-27 November or/and in Paris next 3-4 December.
Common hasthag #GLAMWIKI

Support I Value the Arts

As arts lovers reading this blog you may have heard of the budget cuts that threaten the British arts sector since the annoucement of a 25% - £61 Billion / 74,4 Billion euros- spending cut spanning a 4 year period until 2015. It is 15 billion more than previously announced and right now a lot of state subisdised arts organisations in the UK are waiting for the cuts to come into effect  this October.

Whatever is everyone's opinion on subsidised art, whether it is crucial for art to blossom or whether it hinders raw creativity, I think the campaign "I Value the Arts", launched by the National Campaign for the Arts and which has gone viral in the past days will appeal to the sensitivity of each and every person whose life are made better by a museum, a gallery; a concert hall, a theater and many other institutions. It is about showing that you are not only attached to the arts but to the real richness they bring to your life as opposed to being a mere occasional diversion from the stresses of everyday life.

I could not exhaust the subject of how art and arts organisations matter in people's lives even more in times of crisis in one very short blog post. But I will also add that art is not only about personal richness but about a country's wealth and prestige. Quote from the  Arts Council England website

" the art budget is tiny, it costs 17p a week per person- less than half the price of a pint of milk. In return we have world-class artists; a sector that gives Britain an international edge as a dynamic place to live, work and do business; a sector which fuels the creative industries and generate future jobs in one of the fastest growing parts of the economy; and a sector with a proven track record of regenerating towns and cities and contributing to a cohesive and engaged society."

You have many ways to show your support ; by adding the I Value the Arts visual identity on your website, email and social media accounts. This is a swift yet efficient way of showing you do care and that arts are part of your life. We send regard and support from France. 

How potential audiences are out of our reckoning

Hello, I’m Richard, writing my first blog from the 2010 Communicating The Museum conference in Vienna. We have come to the end of the first day, except for dinner at the Albertina Palace (imagine I am typing this blog with the vigour of a hundred-metre runner, in an effort to build up an appetite). Apart from the stifling heat in the conference room – unofficially the subject of the day – we saw many interesting speakers, new approaches and a healthy divergence of opinion. 

From my perspective (attribute it to the cold-hard-stats Anglo-Saxon that I am), I was particularly interested in Andrew McIntyre’s discussion of inherent flaws in our attempts to profile and segment audiences. The way we have been concentrating on number of visits to the museum, rather than the visitor – whether current, past, or present – is, Andrew argued, misguided.

In the methodology employed by leading surveyors, such as the Target Group Index, numbers are calculated on a year-on-year basis, measuring visitors in the last twelve months. To label these people ‘regular visitors’ and to hold them central to our thinking, to the exclusion of all irregulars, is a skewed way of thinking and produces an inaccurate profile of an institution’s audience. According to both the TGI and the UK government’s own Taking Part survey, ‘regular visitors’ to museums and art galleries comprise some 47% of the population. However, as Andrew said, this adherence to quantitative data gathered in an economic-based time frame contains many pitfalls. Of course, such statistics are vital for budgeting: for a true understanding of the potential audience, though, we must let go of this economic-centred approach and put a qualitative approach to the visitor at the centre of our thinking. 

The TGI approach assumes that visitors whose visiting cycles are longer than one year do not count as ‘regular visitors’: they are, conventionally, thought of as ‘non-visitors’ (part of the 53%). As research shows that museum visiting cycles are often longer than twelve months, this is clearly not the case. What is more, from Andrew’s qualitative research, these ‘longer cycle’ visitors still consider themselves regulars.

When those who either have visited a museum or art gallery, or those who describe themselves as potential visitors, are taken into account, the percentage of ‘arts participants’ in the UK rises to over 90%. If marketing strategies, audience profiling and segmentation ignore almost half of an institution’s individual visitors, evidently we are missing opportunities.

This twelve-month approach to audience profiling can equally produce a skew in the opposite direction: large ‘blockbuster’ events, one-off exhibitions in the past twelve months which receive great publicity and therefore a bump in the number of visitors will give an inflated number of ‘regular visitors’, if measured year-by-year. A long-term approach, combined with qualitative surveying, irons out these inflated periods and gives a much more accurate audience profile.

I really liked the implications of what Andrew was saying, and, though it was very heavy on statistics, its theme of focusing our attention on the audience resonated with much of the conference. By counselling what is in effect less reliance on economic statistics and instead gathering qualitative data, we are redefining the entire concept of the audience. They are not simply those who visit regularly, as a purely economic picture would show.

As Damien Whitmore said of the V&A in his opening speech, the visitor is everyone who interacts with the museum, whether on location or on the opposite side of the world through web content. In the future, therefore, a more open approach – and an open mind – is clearly required.

Richard Hadden

Announcing Communicating the Museum '10 in Vienna

Hello everyone!

Last post considered how to engage audiences and this one will as well, though in a different manner, as audiences are going to be the main Focus of our Communicating the Museum conference this year.

Having initially cancelled the Conference, we received so many messages that we decided our 10th anniversary would definitely be celebrated in the beautiful city of Vienna next 1-2 July.

This years theme is as we previously announced "Audiences: Keeping the Old, Finding the New" and we will greet both museums professionals, as well as cutting-edge experts to discuss how to retain and reach out to new audiences today and tomorrow. New types of audiences are emerging and being singled out but also new ways of dialoguing with them are becoming part of the arts organisations' communication strategy. Is it all about attendance figures? What does this shift mean for the structure of the museums in terms of philosophy and teamwork? 

Here are some of the issues we are going to be working on

>> What attracts audiences, what do they like, what do they want?

>> Segmentation, niche audiences, non visitors, the old and the new : who are they?

>> How to reach audiences : what communication do they use?

>> How do we retain them? What works? What are the efficient tools?

>> What is the future of the relationships with our audiences?

>> How can we work together with our audiences to produce content?

>> How is the role of marketing and communication changing? 

The pink Lady you can see above, fresh as well as a classic, embodies these questions. Maybe she is a symbol of the multiplicity of audiences who enter arts organisations nowadays, or maybe she represents the multiplicity in one single person/visitor, how complex they have become and how crucial they are in the communication process. 

Can you guess who she is?

Our line-up is being finalised at the moment and is looking fantastic. We will keep you posted on the several speakers we will have on this blog.

This year our president Damien Whitmore, head of Public Programmes at the Victoria & Albert Museum will start the conference by delivering an inspiring speech about the fundamentals of developing audiences drawing from his experience as directing the complete rebranding of the Tate including the hugely successful launch of the Tate Modern.

At the V&A, He oversees the museum's exhibition programme and has rebranded the organisation, launched the widely acclaimed V&A magazine and more than doubled attendance figures.   

This will be the starting point for a row of discussions, masterclasses and return on experiences by arts organisations middle-size and big, local and international, mature as well as new. 

The conference takes on a shorter and more dynamic format, but stays true to its style, with great venues, such as the Kunsthistoriches Museum, the Albertina and the Mumok, and remainining a unique occasion for Museum and arts professionals to network.

We also felt that this theme was the unique occasion to discuss how arts organisations can work and come together as teams to achieve a common goal and have set up a special fee for museums curators.

All arts organisations are welcome.

Stay tuned and hope to see you in Vienna this summer!

Visit our website for more information.

Sponsorship Debate: Venice's "The Bridge of Sisley"

After quite a bit of social media in museums coverage on the blog lately after the recent Communicating the Museum conference, today we are turning our attention to cultural sponsorship and partnerships.

Corinne Estrada, founder and director of Agenda, was recently in Venice and took some interesting photos of the Doge’s Palace and the Bridge of Sighs. They are not your average tourist photos though, as large parts of the sights are currently covered by enormous Sisley billboards advertising their latest collections. These type of billboards are becoming more and more common in European capitals; recently an enormous H&M advertising campaign adorned one entire side of the Palais de Justice in Paris and a Veolia campaign has covered a prominent tower in Prague for several months now.

This is a type of cultural sponsorship where companies pay for this priviledged visibility and the money goes towards renovating these important cultural monuments, many of which need expensive and vital repair work. The projects are always controversial; tourists do not expect to visit a renowned monument such as the Bridge of Sighs and instead be confronted with a thirty foot model adorning every available surface. Just take a look at a couple of quotes I found on some online forums:

>> “I hate this company for the offensive advertising in venice on doges palace. i decided never to buy products of this company. signed, angry customer”

>> “If you think those ads look dreadful during the day, you should see them lit up after dark - absolutely heart-breaking.”

>> “It would be more heartbreaking to see the buildings crumble.”

While some rage against these kinds of adverts, The Art Newspaper recently recommended a huge billboard for the Wladimir Klitschko Curator exhibition on the facade of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice as the "best advertisement of the entire Venice Biennale". Nicole Newman who is Head of Development at Somerset House (and President of the upcoming CultureBusiness forum) was impressed by the Sisley campaign and Michelle Wright, Head of Arts at London-based PR firm Four Communications thought it was “great”.

We’re going to have an on-going poll in the right-hand column of the blog to see what you all think about this issue, feel free to cast your vote! The Sisley advertising campaign in Venice: an unwanted eyesore which is ruining the city’s cultural beauty? Or a clever sponsorhip project which can facilitate much-needed renovations? Is it polluting the landscape? Or is it an inspired method of communicating a brand's message? This will hopefully form the basis for a debate we conduct at the CultureBusiness forum in Paris in December. So, over to you! We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Podcast with Molly Flatt, Word of Mouth Evangelist with 1000heads

Download Museum Strategy Podcasts - Molly Flatt, Word of Mouth Evangelist with 1000heads

Click above to listen to the second installment in our new series of Museum Strategy Podcasts. A couple of weeks ago we met up with Molly Flatt, a Word of Mouth Evangelist with 1000heads. Our questions came pretty easily. What is word of mouth marketing? What exactly is a "word of mouth evangelist"? Why and how should museums be using word of mouth marketing? In a fascinating interview, Molly answered all these questions and discussed an amazing word of mouth campaign 1000heads recently conducted for the Cold War Modern exhibition at the V&A. Molly is going to be one of the keynote speakers at Communicating the Museum, so if you like what you hear and want more, head over to the site and book your place for Malaga 2009.