Evaluation report published on Museums at Night 2009 national campaign

Download the full report here.

Culture24 took on the challenge of co-ordinating the Museums at Night campaign in January 2009 with a mission for museums and galleries to attract new audiences into venues simply by staying open late and putting on a special event.

Despite a timeframe of only 16 weeks, the sector responded with an enthusiasm and creativity that was remarkable. By the time the weekend arrived in May, 157 events were taking place with an audience of over 34,000 people attending across the UK. Events ranged from torchlit tours, battleship boogies, museum sleepovers and powered up steam engines to hip-hop crews, Tudor dancing, speed dating, interactive sound installations and more.

The weekend received overwhelmingly positive feedback from visitors, with over 80% rating their experience as eight or above out of ten. Over 60% were new to the venue, having heard about the event through national press, the Culture24 site, word of mouth, local press, radio or Twitter. Thanks to an effective and inventive PR campaign, regional and national coverage appeared in over 150 publications and a host of websites securing an equivalent advertising value of over £40,000. All of this should be viewed in the context of extremely tight timescales and a total expenditure of only £23,000.

Co-ordinating a national marketing campaign is a complex initiative. Budgets for such projects are often hundreds of thousands of pounds and can involve creating a new brand and identity from scratch. But Museums at Night was different.

The campaign’s success is a clear example of how the existing assets of Culture24 can be exploited and used to get added value from public sector investment. Culture24 are uniquely positioned as online publishers with the largest database of cultural venues in the UK and a publishing infrastructure that supports several established websites with excellent search engine optimisation. Crucially, they also have an established network of thousands of venues which are actively updating their information into the Culture24 database themselves and who are in regular contact with the editorial team about their activities.

Culture24 were able to bring into play from their existing infrastructure many of the tools that are needed to support an online national campaign. In particular, their editorial skills allowed the richness of the stories, curiosities and happenings across the museum and gallery sector to speak for itself.

Organisationally, the campaign took over Culture24 in the final eight weeks of the project and an exceptional amount of effort went into securing its success. Thanks are due to the Cuture24 team for this but also to the many curators, museum staff and volunteers who made the weekend itself so magical.

Next year the campaign has the potential to double or perhaps triple in size. There could be more regional and city clusters of activity, more strands specifically targeted at different audiences, better tourism tie-ins and a real level of general public awareness.

The Museums at Night story is a great example of what can be achieved by the cultural sector through an integrated approach to online marketing and PR that is both rooted in the sector itself and informed by an understanding of audience needs and online behaviour.

Goodbye 24 Hour Museum (forever) and hello to the new Culture24 BETA site

We went live with the new BETA version of the Culture24 website today which has replaced the original 24 Hour Museum site forever … so long, farewell auf wiedersehen, goodbye …

www.culture24.org.uk

The experience is both electrifying and terrifying and has been the result of a very intense six months of hard work by the new Culture24 team, preceded by at least of year of thinking, planning and fundraising, preceded by eight years of learning on the job with the old site.

Like all BETA sites, it is not finished, in fact it has just begun, but it is already better than its predecessor. Ironically most of the content on the new BETA site is the same as the old 24 Hour Museum (with the exception of the editorial in the new Teachers section) but the difference is in the way that it is displayed and categorised. It is like building a new gallery for your old collection that you used to only be able to find by rummaging around in a storeroom.

The new site brings our content forwards and shows it off. Stuff is grouped by subject or region and you can drill down into your area of interest to a deep level. The search is faceted like ebay, so in the same way as on ebay a search for ‘shoes’ offers you a breakdown by size, colour, make etc, a search on the new site for ‘trains’ gives you a breakdown by subjects, region, curriculum, and time.

This means that you can explore the different articles, venues, events, resources and websites by switching on and off these different facets. Very cool and very useful. It means you can sort through the thousands of venues, listings and articles to find things that suit your interests. Of course, anyone who knows anything about databases knows that this only works if things are well classified and that is what this next few months of testing is all about.

The clever stuff behind the scenes that makes it all work is largely credit to my colleague Anra Kennedy who sorted out all the classification issues, writing bridging taxonomies between the kind of worlds people use to search (our navigation) and the formal classifications such as curriculum, artists names etc.
Plus of course the very talented Sacha Varma at SSL who has built the database and publishing system. And the really, really clever bit is that the taxonomy has been built as a living thing that we can change, update, refine as we learn to live with the site.

The plans we have for the site are ambitious. We want to get it known and we want to broker the data behind the site with new partners, both inside and outside the sector. We also want to share our experience about what works and what doesn’t with others.

This is the best moment in any project, the calm before the storm – and I know that there will be lots of stuff over the next few months that is bound to go wrong and need fixing. But right now, everyone at Culture24 is really proud of what we have done and rightly so I think.

Experimenting with iGoogle

Before Christmas we went live with a simple iGoogle gadget full of stories from the 24 Hour Museum website. The first cultural iGoogle gadget of its kind (correct me if I am wrong).

It looks like this (below) and will change branding as the new Culture24 site goes live (next week, 11th Feb, yes really …).

Am interested in how this kind of ubiquitous gadget might help to get the message about great culture being free and a good idea in planning what you might do if you are skint.

On that theme, loved the Science Museum recent late night ‘adult only’ opening. Read more from the Evening Standard here.

Working internatioanally with other non-profit cultural publishers: Culturemondo 4th Roundtable

This December will be the 4th international roundtable I have been involved in initiating and delivering as part of our rather romantically named Culturemondo project.

We now have a pretty serious three-day agenda full of keynotes, conversations, master classes and case studies covering issues from the UK and Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Africa and a diverse mix of Asian countries. I am travelling out to chair the event and present a case study about Culture24 that tracks our evolution from “portal to publisher”. We are lucky to have sponsorship from TELDAP part of the Academia Sinetica and supported by the Taiwan government) and the event is being held in a rather beautiful and nostalgic Culture park in the heart of Taipei that used to be a wine factory.

Being part of this informal network has been a real inspiration for me. The exposure to real international differences and intellectual perspectives always has something new to show me. I have also been the guests of Japanese, Canadian, Croatian, Cuban and Taiwanese hosts and know all about the value of some good face to face conversation and cold beer (not to mention the odd moment on a sun blessed beach).

To coincide with the roundtable we are reinvigorating the networks Google Group and our website and sending out the first in a series of regular posts (beginning w/c 17th Nov 08). If you would like to join the Google Group, you can find out more here.

We have also gone live with our third international survey of cultural portals and it is now open for completion by anyone who is running a cultural portal of some kind. You can find it on survey monkey here.

The survey will continue to benchmark the size, scope and development of our sector internationally but will also, for the first time, be collecting statistical information from which comparisons can usefully be made. This is because this is the first time we are only collecting stats from the same system – Google Analytics.

The survey will stay open online until after the roundtable in December and the results will be incorporated into the next published report summarising the roundtable that is being written by Katherine Watson from Lab for Culture.

One of the good things about watching something grow, organically from individual peoples passions, is that you have no shame about seeing it for what it is. Warts and all and if nothing else, Culturemondo has allowed me a perspective on the failures of Culture24 as much as it has helped our successes to shine brightly.

One thing that sticks out like a broken thing, is our use of the word portal. Intuitively, I always hated it (maybe it sounds better in French or Italian?) but it is a struggle to find a word that accurately describes the new model of cultural online publishers that some of us are becoming.

Culture24 Dashboard

An idea in development for a information dashboard about Culture24 activities.

It was inspired by the work of the Indianapolis Museum of Art that I have talked about in an earlier post.

Guardian article on Culture24: Virtually the best of British heritage

Thanks to Jack Schofield for the endorsement in the Guardian yesterday (9th May) about our site the 24 Hour Museum. It is great to know that the work of our small, hard-working team in Brighton doesn’t go unnoticed.

He is right of course about the potential of the site to do more and we are currently in development of a new publishing system that will produce a new generation of sites. The work is slow, partly as we are small and partly as there is not a lot of money (which we want to make go as far as possible).

I’ve stopped saying when we will go live but we are very close to starting testing the first early version and are all very excited about the new themed navigation, faceted search and content sharing capacity.

Hopefully, he will be as nice about the new site when it is live.

Presentation to the NMDC (National Museums Directors Conference) March 08

Below is the text and slides from a presentation I was invited to make to the National Museums Directors Conference meeting about what I see as the current digital issues and opportunity that national museums need to know about.

There have been huge changes in recent years online such as the hype about Web 2.0, the blogging boom, delicious, Flickr, etc. Including some high profile projects from museums like the Launchball game from the Science museum whose popularity on the social bookmarking site DIGG took out their server.

Too much to talk about in ten minutes, so going to concentrate on three examples of interesting work that is happening at the moment that encompasses some of the key issues.

1. Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

Put online over 70,000 of objects from storage.
Built a system that invited and allowed users to tag objects with words that meant something to them.
The tags not only add meanings that sat alongside the curators tags but also created better links between data and search engines.

Within first three months every single object had been viewed.
Since launch in June 2006 over 25 million collection records viewed.
300% increase in overall traffic.
Proportion of website traffic engaging with collection up from 8% to 65% (collection is now integral part of why people visit the museum website)

They have developed a very nice way of treating the viewing of objects online (above).

Result is that they have in effect turned their museum inside out.
Opened up access and improved visibility to search engines.

Through their interaction with people, have brought knowledge back into the organisation about their collection.

At Powerhouse the success is driving organisational change- puts the collection back at the centre of the organisation (why they exist, why they are different to other ‘leisure attractions‘). Most popular three objects have never been on public display, up-turning internal perceptions about collections.

Culture24 is working with the lead developer at Powerhouse who is doing this work – Sebastian Chan – because we are working with him on our international project Culturemondo Seb writes an excellent blog called Fresh + New about their work that is well worth following.

Through my conversations with him, I know that it is not about big budget, but clever use of technology.

Their *particular* system is also giving them new ways of understanding their audiences.
Software their team has built to present the collection (recommendations engine, social tagging, smart ranking) is generating an enormous amount of business intelligence around their collection and how people use it.

The intelligence allows the Powerhouse to rethink its real world exhibitions, classification and documentation processes, and will lead to more effective communication to their audiences. It isn’t just that the collection is online … it is that it is usable, user-centric, self-learning, and dynamic.

Another project, just gone live that also uses tagging of collection but in this case they have put their collections into an existing online community.

1. Flickr ‘Commons’ project

The Library of Congress Pilot Project
Show the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection.
Show how with audience input, a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

Within the first *month*:
- Over 5 million page views for LoC Flickr account
- 60,000 tags, 10,000 unique (So, a tag “woman” added to 5 photos)
- About 400 people added one tag, all the way up to one person adding 5,000!
- Roughly 5,000 comments

This is where the gold is in terms of useful data. The LoC has already made about 12 updates to their catalogue based on corrections they’ve received via Flickr!

Also created so far about 10,000 new contacts to the Library’s account in Flickr, so new photos they publish will fall into the “photos from your friends” page, and into RSS feeds and such.

This project interconnects the historical and contemporary, creating relationships between the two, effectively making Flickr a huge record of living social history photography.

Third and final example if much closer to home.

3. Integrated Architecture project – Partnership with MDA and MLA.
- Vision for a unified ‘infrastructure’ for creating; managing and sharing information across the sector
- Way to bring together different systems to share data openly easily
- Delivering locally-based services from a national platform
- Uses what exists, cost-effective framework, greater impact and reach

This builds on work Culture24 have done championing data sharing across sectors. Things like our RSS feeds and our agreement with Visit Britain to provide them with all our event data for inclusion in their own site.

It is also informing our current work with LOCOG to provide them with UK wide event information about Cultural Olympiad for inclusion in all their online projects.

As well as our work that has just received support form DCSF and BECTA to get stuff in front of teachers, kids and families.

For me, the Integrated Architecture project is about collaboration and an understanding that the future of the online world resides in the ways that information comes together into services and structures that meet the needs of different users in different ways.

So could museums in UK do what Powerhouse has done?
Yes of course, but why not go further?
How about browsing across collections and institutions.
Searching across different organisations. Bringing together meanings?
I see this as the big opportunity and the recent changes at MLA I think offer a chance to be bold.

To work across sectors with ACE, Tourism, Creative Industries and address the fact that there is still a lack of any digital strategy in the UK cultural sector.

I think a good starting point is with the National Museums Online Project, which I am sure you all know about – as you have helped to support the consultancy work that is just beginning. As you know it initially brings together a few of the nationals – Science Museum, National Maritime Museum and V&A, with Culture24. Bridget Mackenzie from FLOW has been appointed to explore the possibilities for online collaboration between different nationals and their digital collections.

There are very exciting opportunities here to bring on board an even wider set of partners, people like, MLA, PCF, Art Fund, Arts Council and DCSF, and set a national agenda that is focussed on needs of users.

NDAP international conference, Taipei, Taiwan 2008

Taking part in a conference run by the National Digital Archives Programme in Taiwan. I have been working with them for several years as part of the Culturemondo project and it is great to finally to meet them in their home country.

The conference has a selection of some great speakers: Seb Chan, Jennifer Trant and others. Jennifer talked about the recent development within the Steve Museum project. They have built a Facebook widget that allows users to invite friends to tag art in facebook. It is a great little tool and maybe a new generation of widgets for an audience that love art or culture. You can read her blog on the conference and the sessions.

Seb talked about his really pioneering social tagging work at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. He is taking further the work he has done with his team to open up access to their online collections. What is really interesting here is that the site is constantly evolving as they analyse and consider what information the system is collecting from users and how they use the site. They use this data to scope plans for the way the site develops and are looking at ways now of automating the process of grouping tags into ‘who / what / when’ categories using Calais. It makes clear that value that can be gained from bringing data sets together to extract new meanings.

Other interesting speakers included Cassey Bisson talking about his project called Scriblio which is working with open source software and library catalogues.

Hello Culture24

The organisation that I run, that publishes the 24 Hour Museum and Show Me websites, has changed its name to Culture24 at a special celebratory event hosted by Secretary of State, James Purnell at the DCMS on November 26th 2007 (read the full story).

Here is me, with James and our chairman John Newbigin.

The new name reflects the fact that we are not just about museums – we’re about arts, heritage, archives and libraries, too. It also marks the beginning of a period of change and improvement that will see our family of websites rebuilt, renamed and relaunched in spring 2008 using a new technical platform called the Integrated Architecture Project (IAP).

The IAP is a joined-up approach to digital strategy, converging a range of developments into a single, coherent offer. The result will be a unified ‘infrastructure’ for creating, managing and sharing information. Once live, the IAP will provide a publishing system that will power a range of partner websites and enable data to be shared simply and quickly.

Our new logo, designed by Victoria Baker from Spinning Top Productions.

For now though, although the organisation’s name changes to Culture24, it’s business as usual for our sites www.24hourmuseum.org.uk and www.show.me.uk, where news, reviews and features continue to go live.

Curate more and create less

Jeff Jarvis’s Guardian article sets out some pretty good advise for the future of media … the group hug. He says “it is less about products – that is, controlling content and distribution – and more about networks”.

How true is that? There are not many sites which have enough money for large editorial teams to create online content. Surely the only really sustainable option is to find ways for your content to actually come from your network – either the people who you represent or the people who the site serves?

For the work I am doing at the 24 Hour Museum, this is what we call our direct data entry system – where cultural institutions put their own information onto our system themselves. For me, this network of over 1,500 organisations is at the heart of our sites success and all of our future plans.

We need to nurture our network so that it is a rich living thing that produces content for us. We can then curate our own front end websites or services for different audiences using that content and hey presto … we have something that is sustainable and can evolve (as well as all the other benefits).

As Jeff says ” curate more and create less. Or as I have said in my PowerPoints: Do what you do best and link to the rest. And: gather more and produce less – but encourage others to produce more so you can gather it. And how do you do that? Pay them.”

Sharing advertising revenue with your network is a great way to keep them active in the network. I don’t think it is the only thing but is a business model worth looking into. I have ever seen this done in the publicly funded online world. But why not? Why not let income sharing be an incentive along with shared advocacy, cultural entitlement and straight up cross promotion?

Surely this is what Google have done?