Due to the spread of coronavirus, museums and cultural organizations across the country are extending their expected lockdown periods and bracing for prolonged closures. As they remain physically closed to visitors, many museums are encountering new challenges around communicating and engaging their audiences. What outreach channels should you use? How do you overhaul your content calendar? And perhaps, most importantly, what kinds of content will resonate with your audiences?
This week, over 3,000 museum professionals joined Brendan Ciecko (CEO & Founder @ Cuseum), Ryan Dodge (Head of Digital Experiences @ Canadian Museum of History), and Kat Harding (Public Relations & Social Media Manager @ North Carolina Museum of Art) as they discussed how to develop effective content and messaging that aligns with your organization’s mission while resonating in the hearts and minds of audiences.
Watch the full video recording.
View the top takeaways below!
1. Recognize the Importance of your Digital Visitors
As museums and institutions remain physically closed, it’s more important than ever before that museums remove the barriers between who is considered and counted as a “visitor” from a philosophical and metrics perspective. Digital visitors are the only types of visitors being currently served and the same level of attention, which was previously dedicated to on-site visits, should go into digital experience and communication.
“Digital visitors are visitors, too.”
– Ryan Dodge
Many museums have already been closed for nearly a month, and are expected to be closed for several months longer. As a result, 2020 is the year that digital engagement numbers will be emphasized as key performance indicators (KPI) and will likely find their way into this year’s annual reports as a measure of success and audience reach. Additionally, measuring digital engagement will be essential to ensuring ongoing fundraising and donor support.
It’s also important to assess the impact of your content on the audiences you’re reaching. To help out with that, Ryan recommended following the work of Adrian Kingston at Te Papa, who goes beyond basic metrics in his “Audience Impact Model,” which can be a useful jumping-off point for many organizations.
Further Reading: Ryan recommended books, like “Delivering Impact with Digital Resources” by Simon Tanner to help guide content strategy, while Brendan recommended Max Anderson’s “Metrics of Success in Art Museums” for a deep-dive into understanding and evaluating metrics.
2. Think About Why You’re Doing What You’re Doing
As organizations strive to produce high-quality content at a rapid pace, it’s important to keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing: to further your mission and drive audience impact.
Years ago, Ryan created a useful checklist that allows folks to make sure their content is focusing on what matters most. This can still be a relevant tool to ensure you’re staying on track and on target during this crisis.
This kind of checklist can be a great starting point to iterate from, and also encourages you to return to key questions and focus on “the why” for every piece of content you put out.
Further Reading: Check out Ryan’s “EPIC Content: How to build high impact content.”
3. Focus on Connecting with Your Audience, Not Bombarding Them
During this time, when digital communications might seem like your lifeline to your audience, it might be tempting to constantly update social media and to send emails every day of the week. It’s important to assess if this communication is necessary and well-received by your audience. Kat pointed out,
“We're trying to connect, we're not trying to bombard people with our communications. We want to be a solace and an escape, and we also have urgent information to communicate with people.”
– Kat Harding
Focus on quality over quantity. Craft each message and communication with the intention of connecting to your audience, rather than overloading their email inboxes.
4. Only Communicate What You Know
As our audiences seek immediate answers and reassurances, we may feel compelled to offer up more information than we feel we’re able. This is something to avoid. At this point, there are many unknowns and to build trust with our constituents, it’s important to be honest about this uncertainty. Kat emphasized:
“We're only communicating what we know. So we're not making any promises. We're not talking about future events and exhibitions. We have a summer concert series. All of that is obviously on hold, and I think that helps be consistent and compassionate because we're not making any promises that we're gonna go breaking.”
– Kat Harding
In other words, practice kindness and honesty with your audience, and don’t pretend to know all the answers.
Note: Don’t assume the role of public health experts! Rather, use your platform to point folks to trustworthy public health information, like the CDC.
As estimates on the expected duration of museum closures continue to lengthen, museums must work harder than ever to engage their audiences, further their missions, and drive community impact. Through all of this, it’s important to stay mindful and honest and to communicate kindly and intentionally with their constituents. We’ll get through this together!
Looking for more information? Check out our Coronavirus Resources page.