In light of the rapid spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and social distancing recommendations from public health officials, many visitor-serving cultural organizations have made the decision to temporarily close their doors to the public. As a result, these organizations face great uncertainty about what the next days and weeks hold for them during this unusual time.
This past Wednesday, over 3,000 people from the global museum community, joined Cuseum's Brendan Ciecko, with special guests Seema Rao (Deputy Director & Chief Experience Officer @ Akron Art Museum), and Scott Stulen (Director & President @ Philbrook Museum of Art), to discuss steps cultural organizations can take to engage their audiences digitally and continue their important work as trusted community resources during this public health and economic crisis, even when physical sites remain in lockdown.
View the full webinar recording online.
Our goal for this session was to bring the museum and cultural community together to provide practical and foundational advice, as well as share examples of the types of initiatives that museums can quickly and easily put into place.
Here are a few tips and takeaways from the discussion. We hope it’s helpful!
Develop a Task Force to Empower your Team
To address the rapid changes and unprecedented challenges faced by museums and cultural organizations, Scott Stulen recommended forming an internal task force, which was one of the first things he did as the outbreak made its way to his region.
“We took a small team internally here and got everybody together within a couple of hours. We basically tasked them with the idea to find things that are quick, things that are cheap, things that can help our community, and things that we can really keep the museum on people's minds when we're going to be closed physically.”
– Scott Stulen
The possibility of closures required rapid response and a dedicated team to brainstorm and produce new ideas. This measure ensured that The Philbrook had a robust foundation and team dynamic to adapt, plan, and deliver effectively.
Trust Your Social Media Managers and Follow the Hashtags
While museums may feel unprepared for these circumstances, many organization are fortunate to have their own digitally-savvy experts on hand: your social media managers, and the entire #musesocial community at-large. You can look towards these members of your team to generate creative ideas that flow through different channels and into the smartphones and browsers of your audiences, especially when they can’t come through your doors.
“For all the people who don't know who's going to help you get this through this, the #musesocial people are going to! They had been spending all of their time, all the time, looking at what people who don't come to museums do.”
– Seema Rao
The #musesocial community has already quickly responded to the current situation with creative hashtags and social media campaigns that are facilitating engagement at home. They include #MuseumFromHome and #MuseumMomentofZen.
Within the past few days, content from the Shedd Aquarium has made its way into the lives of millions of people stuck at home during this time of lockdown. One of the more recent videos to go viral involves penguins taking a “field trip” through the empty aquarium, which proved to be a smashing success!
To no surprise, many museums quickly followed suit.
Embrace Cross-Institutional Collaboration
One of the quick and free engagement strategies that The Philbrook’s task force put into place was a social media swap with peer museums across the country. Like-minded institutions can take over each other’s Instagram accounts and do a reciprocal “show and tell” - a longer-term #MuseumInstaSwap.
128 Likes, 1 Comments - Chillbrook Museum (stay home!) (@philbrookmuseum) on Instagram: "For our next #museumfromhome social swap, our pals at @akronartmuseum will do an #instatakeover..."
94 Likes, 1 Comments - Chillbrook Museum (stay home!) (@philbrookmuseum) on Instagram: "Jenny Holzer ⠀ ⠀ "All Fall Text: Selections from Truisms, (1977-79), Living, (1980-82) and..."
By collaborating with fellow members of the cultural sector community, the entire sector benefits through the sharing of resources to create interesting and exciting content for their local followers.
Reduce Barriers and Get Creative
One challenge that museums and cultural organizations often face is long, rigid workflows and drawn-out timelines, meaning many creative projects and campaigns can take months or years to execute. Right now, as information and restrictions related to COVID-19 can change minutes-by-minute and organizations need to adapt more quickly, this issue has become magnified.
To overcome this challenge, Scott recommended simplifying procedures and encouraging thinking outside the traditional manner.
“We need to make things move much faster so you can go from idea to approval to execution within days, if not hours rather than weeks or months like we normally run. That's not how museums normally operate. Our risk tolerance needs to go way up and we need to be able to reward things that do work and learn from it as we go forward.”
– Scott Stulen
If there was ever a time to reduce barriers and look outside of the field for new ideas and approaches – now is that time. It was small, experimental ideas that led to big results such as the Internet Cat Video Festival from the Walker Art Center, and Send Me SFMOMA from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
One of the ideas that Scott’s museum quickly rolled out is “cabin fever concerts.” Using a log cabin on the grounds of the museum, The Philbrook has invited local musicians to perform live streamed concerts, which generates new opportunities to engage their audience as well as supports local artists
Scott and Seema both shared plans to use social media to open up the private collections of art that artists, members, and staff have in their homes.
These sorts of projects, which normally might involve long timelines and layers of approval, are starting to come together quickly and this new pace and process is very positive for museums and cultural organizations of all kinds.
Be Adaptive and Cater to Different Demographics
During this uncertain time, when producing content and communicating with your audience, it’s important to offer something for everyone — kids home from school, frazzled parents working from home, tech-savvy millennials, senior citizens, and more.
The Philbrook implemented “curbside pickup” of activity kits to cater to his younger audience and also emphasized how podcasts and audio content can be customized for children. Children’s museums and science museums, in particular, have many opportunities now to create videos or virtual guides to performing activities and science experiments at home. Art and history museums have the opportunity to create downloadable coloring books of art and artifacts, and other family-friendly activities.
At Akron Art Museum, Seema has spearheaded creating museum games, like crossword puzzles, based on the museum collections, with a big boost from social media guru Mar Dixon. These types of games have broad appeal and can help keep your institution active in the lives of the public. Interested in launching #MuseumGames for your museums? Instructions are publicly available!
Prepare for the “New Normal”
We are in the midst of an unusual and unpredictable historical moment, which is transforming the way we interact, communicate, work, socialize, and more. Different experts have different predictions on how long the Coronavirus pandemic and it’s impact will last, ranging from a few months to an upwards of eighteen months. Not knowing what the future may hold makes planning for the future difficult for us all.
In a time like this, it is tempting to focus on “seeing the other side” of the crisis and assuming things will return to normal. However, as we adapt to the circumstances, Scott urged us to keep our minds open and prepare for a “new normal,” even when this crisis recedes: “What's going to be really critical right now is that people understand what's it going to be in the future rather than protecting what it was in the past. And it's being able to move forward and see this as an opportunity — a way of really anticipating what things might be.” Scott urged the museum community to “see this as an opportunity to experiment.”
“Are we going to change the paradigm of what is shared, included, and permissible in our spaces digitally? I think so.”
– Seema Rao
We couldn’t agree more.
In this time of uncertainty, it’s important to turn to your staff and the larger museum community to find support. Your peers in the industry are asking many of the same questions, experimenting with new ideas and approaches, and are ready to collaborate. Now more than ever is a time to share ideas and support each other! We’re all in this together.
Many cultural organizations are adapting to the COVID era by launching Digital Membership Cards. Download our Guide: How to Launch & Succeed with Digital Membership Cards to get started!