If you missed it this week, Brendan Ciecko (CEO & Founder @ Cuseum), with special guests Susan Edwards (Associate Director, Digital Content @ Hammer Museum) and Koven Smith (Museum & Nonprofit Digital Strategy Consultant), came together in a webinar to talk about steps cultural organizations can take to captivate, connect, and communicate with their remote “visitors” and audiences.
You can view a recording here and read full transcript below:
Brendan Ciecko:
Thank you everybody for joining us today. I'm really excited about the webinar. Last week's webinar, we were completely blown away by the sheer volume of questions and participants and this need to discuss these really pressing questions around how to engage and connect with your audience while your doors are physically closed.
Due to the rapid spread of coronavirus and government recommendations for social distancing, three-quarters of the museums across the United States have closed temporarily. And, as a result of these closures, many cultural organizations face new levels of uncertainty and difficulty navigating these unfamiliar waters. In particular for visitor serving organizations, not being able to bring visitors on site produces significant challenges. While being physically closed, how do you continue to engage your would-be visitors. That's the question that we're going to be diving in today.
I want to give a big thanks to everyone who joined us today. Over 3,000 people from the museum community and cultural community came together last week for a conversation about how to engage audiences during this time of uncertainty and closures. And since that time, there have been more temporary closures, and the circumstances continue to evolve by the minute. I know it can be scary and we know it can be stressful, but we'll absolutely get through this and hope to provide some answers.
It's been incredible to watch the community come together to share best practices, exchange creative ideas, and support each other. We hope today's discussion and gatherings just like this will help you and your organization be prepared and as successful as possible. So whether you're a social media manager or a museum educator or a dancing Australian zookeeper, we're all in this together and we're all here to support one another. Whether you're at a small historic house in Nebraska, a zoo in Singapore, or a contemporary art museum in Johannesburg, we're all here to be a resource.
So, today's theme for the hour is how we can captivate, connect, and communicate with our audiences during coronavirus. So, let's go. And without further ado, I want to introduce our two panelists for today's discussion. We have Susan Edwards, the Associate Director for Digital Content at the Hammer Museum in L.A. Previously, she worked at the J. Paul Getty Trust for over 13 years, where she collaborated with curators, scholars, educators to develop digital experiences for users, including games, web projects, and digital publications. Thanks for joining us, Susan.
Brendan Ciecko:
Hailing from Austin, Texas, we have Koven Smith. Koven is a nonprofit digital strategy consultant with a deep background in museums and galleries. He previously held senior positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum as Director of Technology, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He teaches museum digital theory and strategy at Johns Hopkins University and also founded Drinking About Museums, a meetup for museum professionals with chapters worldwide. Thanks, Koven, for joining us.
Koven Smith:
Happy to be here.
Brendan Ciecko:
Awesome. And, lastly, I'm Brendan Ciecko. I'm the founder of Cuseum. I'll be your host and moderator for today's discussion. So, let's jump into the, into the questions.
My first question is for you, Koven. Some of the recent digital strategy projects you worked on were for The Smithsonian, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which are fairly large and well resourced organizations, to, to say the least. Many smaller museums have reached out wondering what they should do or what they can do in the absence of social media teams, online collections, virtual tours, and more. What would you advise museums and cultural institutions that fall into that category?
Koven Smith:
Well, I would say if what you should do is not already clear to you, then you're probably already doing what you need to be doing. If your website is accurately communicating that you're closed to the public, and when your best guess is as to when you're going to be open, if you have that, you're probably doing all you need to do.
I think one thing to be cautious of during this moment, because there's so much that we don't know about how long this is going to last or what it's going to look like on the other end of it, that this is probably not the best time to overstretch what limited resources you already have. My feeling really is, if you already have some online programs in place, obviously keep those going. This is probably not the best time to be starting one from scratch, or building it from whole cloth, because the circumstances are too complicated.I mean, those kind of programs are very difficult and resource intensive under the most ideal of circumstances, and this is hardly ideal.
Brendan Ciecko:
Susan, what are your thoughts on that?
Susan Edwards:
I agree. This is really a good moment to lean into stuff that you already have, and maybe bring forward, online content, digital resources, materials that are not part of the regular exhibitions and program schedule that you can now foreground. But I would really lean in on what you already have, things you've already developed, and push those to the front at this point. For my team, we're only a week and a half into this. This is early days maybe, and maybe right now it's just a matter of getting into a new cadence so that we can then plan when we have a better idea of how long this is going to last for.
Brendan Ciecko:
Great. I want to toss in a question from the community, on this very question.
Madeline Rosemurgy at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Illinois, on that notion of being a smaller organization says, "We're a staff of three and I do all of the social media on top of other communications. How do we manage expectations when other museums have other larger teams and resources?" What would your advice be, especially at that scale? It's not a matter of having or not having the department, it's literally there are three people or, or five people, or ten people at an organization, trying to figure what to do around their communication and digital strategy right now.
Koven Smith:
It’s a question of: what is your goal in staying present digitally during this time? Is it just to remind people that you exist so that when you reopen, those people will still be there? Chances are, especially if you're a smaller institution, the audience you had before is likely to be the audience that you have when you come out of this.
If you see that there's an opportunity here, where it's like you have some very specialized unique content that maybe no one else has, and for the first time you've got the space to really work on putting it out there, I would say certainly consider that. But I think as we were discussing earlier, as a consultant most of my work is done remotely anyway.So it's like, I'm getting calls like this all the time now. And the thing that I've found is that a remote conference call is about twice as emotionally and psychologically taxing as a normal meeting would be. If you can normally handle three meetings in a day, you can probably handle a Zoom and a half. And, and I think we all need to be realistic about what we're able to contribute during this time.
Susan Edwards:
Yeah.
Koven Smith:
And, not pressuring ourselves to do more, especially when it's like...I mean, my son is literally on the other side of this door right now, doing school while we're here having this conversation. That's not unusual for any of us probably on this call.
And I think it's important to recognize that.
Susan Edwards:
Yeah, I think the inclination is to go whole hog on social media and on your online channels, because that's all there is right now, because you don't have your exhibitions and your programs that you can lean in on. There might be, and I can imagine a lot of staff, no matter whether you have 3 people or 300 people, there are people who have less to do now, because they're not putting on those programs, and there's people who have a lot more to do now because they are the digital people. And now, there's an expectation that we're just going to throw everything over there. So, I would echo what Koven is saying, which is: be easy on yourself. It's only been less than two weeks for most of us. It's going to be a longer haul. And take the time to assess what you have, what you can leverage, start making some experimentations and plans. Keep what you have been doing going and start to plan for the next couple of months.
Brendan Ciecko:
Thank you. Thank you, both.
Koven Smith:
I'm seeing, like, hundreds and hundreds of messages piling up in the chat!
Brendan Ciecko:
Yes. A couple of people are saying, "This is really what I needed to hear right now, because things have been stressful." So, I think the community absolutely appreciates that notion of slowing down a little, and chilling a bit. It doesn't need to be rapid fire, because this is a marathon, not a sprint. And if you spend all of that energy right now, where is it going to be when your audience is back to enjoy your museum or cultural institution when your doors open? So that definitely seems to be resonating with a lot of the attendees. But Koven, you wanted to add something?
Koven Smith:
Yeah, I think especially there's a tendency for us, in moments like this, to want to focus on those public facing programs. There is something of a potential opportunity here to try and build a firmer foundation that you usually wouldn't have the time to do during this moment. And I think about the kind of debt that tends to acquire in projects like this, where it's like, "Well, we have a big chunk of our collection that are not online, because we haven't cleaned up the collections data.” So maybe it’s like, "Hey, you know what? Maybe this is a good time to engage our frontline staff who are not doing frontline work right now in helping us do image descriptions, alt-text descriptions for works, for images on our website or works in our collection." Things like that, that often tend to not get done. It feels like this could potentially be a moment to refocus on some of those things, especially if you've got high value staff whose work really pretty much depends on that interface with the public that is not happening in that same way now.
Brendan Ciecko:
It's absolutely true. It seems like most of the attention is on these public facing efforts. The pressures are really, really high. Probably higher than they've ever been, and the pace is rapid. So, it sounds like both of you are putting out a little hint to slow a little, take a deep breath. Think strategically about what you're doing rather than shooting at the hip, which as one could imagine, there is a lot of shooting at the hip.I like that idea of thinking about what those investments are for longterm audience development and engagement. And I think Koven, you gave some really interesting and helpful tidbits there.
My next question is for Susan. You've led an expansive and diverse career in the museum field. You've been on the front lines of visitor services and a curatorial associate during your time at the Seattle Art Museum, but then you shifted into the digital world, which has been your focus for close to two decades. Putting on your visitor services hat for a minute, where could these efforts of museum staff in visitor service be temporarily shifted to? Because there aren't people coming on site today, what does a day to day look like for someone who's overseeing or on the front lines of visitor services?
Susan Edwards:
I think a lot of people are probably thinking about, "How can we leverage our staff in lots of areas, not just on the frontline, but helping with this bigger lift around digital," as Koven pointed out. At the Hammer, we have always worked really closely with our visitor experience team, so the digital team and the visitor experience team on the floor are the frontline, whether it's the frontline online or the frontline in the physical space that we have.
So, we already have a really close relationship there, and I think there's probably potential for some of those staff to help with some of the messaging and help fielding questions and checking digital messages that are coming in and things like this. But I don't think we should limit it to that staff.
I think there's, like I said, probably staff who help manage your programs in your museum that are not happening anymore. Exhibitions are being rescheduled and moved. A lot of the education team's work - well we've already started working on some projects with our education team and putting some of their things online. But again trying to do all this stuff all at one time is too much. And what's probably happening in a lot of museums, I know this is happening in mine, is that we have a very small and nimble digital team, and we are not used to managing a giant army of new workers. So, it's going to take us some time to figure out how we could implement something like that, what skills that are required for people to do those roles, and how we manage all of that. But I think it's probably doable.
Brendan Ciecko:
Something that people keep asking about, and this comes from someone who's attending here today, Lisa Viscusi at The Frick Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
How can non-social media, non-marketing, non-digital staff members best support their social media, marketing, and digital folks?
Susan Edwards:
So one of the things I recommend, if you don't have this already set up in your museum, is some sort of digital taskforce or digital working group that is a cross-departmental team of people who can come together periodically and talk about what you're doing on your digital fronts. We already have this set up at the Hammer Museum, and we're having our first post-corona closure meeting this afternoon. But if you don't already have one of these set up, I would highly recommend doing that.
This is a forum where you can start talking about, how can all the staff from all these different areas brainstorm together and collaborate together on creating some new solutions? Or even continuing forward with what they've already been doing in an effective way that is not too heavy of a lift.
Collaboration is another big theme that I've seen a lot of people talking about right now. Collaboration within your institution, collaboration across the field, collaboration with the museums in your local region. I think this is really a time for us to lean on one another and learn from one another. It's happening on social media already. A lot of social media managers across the country are, are doing #MuseumMomentOfZen and there was another one where there were flowers being given between L.A. museums yesterday on social media. Collaborate. And I think that as communications frontline digital people, we're going to need to put on our teaching hat, so to speak, and learn how we teach our craft to other people and show people what good digital content looks like. So, we're going to have to also shift a little bit, from pure implementers into a little bit of instructors and moderators and guiders.
Koven Smith:
And I feel like that one thing that I would urge us to be a little bit cautious about, because I think one dangerous thing that can happen, especially in smaller museums is that, because the digital team knows how the tools work. They're, in this situation, suddenly become an ersatz marketing team or an ersatz outreach team. And I think we have to be very careful about that, to make sure that, that those people who know how to do work directly with the community are still doing that work, that it isn't suddenly like, "Well, you know how Twitter works. So, now you're in charge in that."That's something that has a tendency to happen in museums if we're not very deliberate about it. And I think that's something we have to be careful about.
Susan Edwards:
That's a really good point, Koven.
Brendan Ciecko:
Since the beginning of March until now, we've gone from just a few museums in major cities announcing temporary closures, to over three-quarters of the museums in the United States of America making the decision to close their doors until further notice. What are some of the trends you're seeing right now with how museums are leveraging digital tools, content, programs to connect with their audience? What are some of your favorites? By the way, I'm looking at the chat and there's a lot of conversation about Cowboy Tim.
Koven Smith:
We can't not talk about Tim.
Brendan Ciecko:
We can't not talk about Cowboy Tim. So, why is Cowboy Tim so successful? Is it because it's authentic? Or is there some other reason? What do you guys think?
Susan Edwards:
Because it’s a real person that is just connecting. He's not doing the marketing thing. I think he would have also been a huge hit, not even now. Not during a crisis, he would have been a huge hit.
Koven Smith:
I think so, but I think we could also argue that there's much more appetite for what seems like a true connection with a real person. You do feel like, "Well, this is just him talking and saying what he's thinking about." I hope he's not on this and hearing us talking about him.
You know, and I mean, for, for better or for worse, our communications channels have, and especially social channels, are more professionalized. And I think for the most part, that's good. And what we may be seeing is that we're in a moment where that kind of communication is somewhat less valued. But I know that's extrapolating a lot from one very particular example. Because I certainly wouldn't encourage another museum to, "Go find your Tim Send and put him in charge of your Twitter feed."Because I think that would be a really facile way to look at this success here.
Brendan Ciecko:
Yes, one thing I’ve been hearing a lot from historical sites, art museums, and other types of collections is this feeling that when they see the news about the penguins over at the Shedd, they're like, "Wait a minute, you guys have an easy - that's an easy win in your court. You have cute cuddly animals and wildlife and creatures, whereas we don't have that same luxury."
But we're seeing that a dancing zookeeper can capture the attention of the global audience. We're seeing that a cowboy can capture the attention. Do you think that we should start to see a little bit more of the real people behind the collection - the real people that are coming to work, or rather staying at home right now, making things happen behind the scenes?
Susan Edwards:
I think we always should have been doing that.
Brendan Ciecko:
I agree.
Susan Edwards:
I don't think just because this is some special moment. I think that's always been something we should be doing. One of the things that we've been thinking a lot about at the Hammer is distraction, and the fact that people just need a distraction now from the news. And some of the most successful things that I've noticed online, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium's meditation with the jellyfish and other examples are escaping me, is about letting people have a moment of not having to think about the news and what's happening right now. And also we are, as an art museum, thinking about, "How can we give people pleasant distractions, and also remind them of the creativity of human beings and how artists add to our lives and how artists help us think more about why we are human and what we as humans can create, and how." And that's sort of the extent of our strategy at the moment. A little bit of a timeline and some scheduling put on top of that. So, that's what I've been noticing.
And then the other thing I've been noticing is a flood of just all the digital, from every museum coming online.
Brendan Ciecko:
Let's talk about that right now. Right now the sheer volume of museum content making its way onto the web is pretty remarkable. I would wager that it's at an all-time high or a record high. Do you think that there should be a threshold or an ideal cadence? Is there such a thing as too much content? And do you think that there should be cross-institutional planning and structure? What are your thoughts on that, Susan?
Susan Edwards:
I think it would be great if we, again going back to the collaboration idea, if we could collaborate on some of these, as in collating all of these resources. I know as a parent myself, I've gotten a gazillion different Google sheets of all the different lessons and teaching resources at museums and libraries, and I can't even keep straight where they came from. And it's impossible to sift through.
I don't know the answer though to how best to bring all of our resources together. And what I keep going back to is that maybe our local professional organizations, our regional organizations, AAM, MCN, Museums and the Web, these sort of professional groups that already bring together museums from lots of different areas, maybe those can be somehow leveraged as central locations for stuff. It's a problem that has been noted for over a decade in the digital humanities field at, at universities where people put out so many digital projects and they're up on their websites and everywhere and nobody can find them all. So, it's not a new problem, it's just a new moment when we need to figure out how to collate all that.
Koven Smith:
I feel there are a couple of factors here, too. One is, even when we refer to this moment and what people are going to need us to do in this moment as museums, that is very much a moving target. Right now, we need the cowboys, we need moments of zen. And two weeks from now, everybody will be like, "Well, it looks like we're homeschooling indefinitely." And so, now we really need educational resources and we need teacher packets. And that kind of up to the moment responsiveness has historically been very difficult for museums to do.
Susan Edwards:
Yeah, we can all think back to last week, about how different we felt.
Koven Smith:
And so, I feel like that's something that is going to be very difficult for us to navigate. Which is another argument for sort of holding as much in reserve now as you can. But I think another factor here too is that, you have this moment of essentially the digital presence of museums becoming the only presence of museums.That there's a sort of locality issue that we never really resolved as museums, that is, "Well, why, why would I go to local art museum's collection online when the Getty's collection is online, literally one click away?" And so, I feel like there is a sort of regional thing that has to be addressed here. And putting out that content is not just putting it out, but are you really aiming at your local audience? And what are you doing to engage them specifically?
Susan Edwards:
This just for me goes back to, "What's your mission, and, and why does your organization exist in the first place?" I think that's where we can lean back on our more traditional content strategy around, "Why do we do what we do? Who's our main audience? What makes us unique?"
Koven Smith:
I think that's true.
Brendan Ciecko:
It almost sounds to me that if you have the resources to do so, if you're thinking through your content, whether it be broad, whether it be regional, come back to that root question of, "Why are we doing this? Who do we serve? What's our mission?" Is that something that you think is the Holy Grail defining question behind any type of content museums put out there?
Susan Edwards:
I mean, it is for my museum. And I am lucky that I work at a museum that has a very strong and very specific mission.
Koven Smith:
Yeah, I think it is a moment to refocus that. But I feel like it's almost a moment to realize that we've not actually addressed this question well in the digital realm to this point. It's like, you have museums that have very locally focused missions, and then they say, "But when we put our collections online, it's not going to be respective of that at all."
Susan Edwards:
Right.
Koven Smith:
The collection is designed to have appeal to everyone across the world. Which is all well and good, but it's often that the digital presence has this sort of stealth other mission that hasn't actually been articulated. I feel like that's a sort of weird thing that sits out there and not addressed.
Brendan Ciecko:
We had a question come in, and I want to continue to dive down this regional versus global community focused aspect of this conversation we're having right now. Holly Shen at the San Jose Museum of Art in California asked, "How can regional museums coordinate partnerships around content development?" What would you want to see coming from these regional museums that are perhaps starting to amp up, or at least, move towards some of these digital efforts, and try to jump in the game of double-dutch that we're seeing right now around museum content? Is there strength in numbers around this for regional museums? What does that look like?
Susan Edwards:
Most of these regions have local regional professional groups. Here in L.A., we have SoCal Museums, which is a local group of L.A. museums that get together and normally talk about this stuff. And so, there's been activity there. As we've been talking about this, it's making me realize the potential that regional museums have to support the people in their region through this really difficult time, and possibly renew your commitment to the community in a way, and provide something.
So I think this crisis is hitting every community a little bit differently. As someone who lives in L.A., but reads The New York Times updates all the time, it feels a little bit weird. Because it's hitting New York so hard right now. There's a very weird shift happening when you read the news versus your reality in your quiet home, where nothing is happening.
Brendan Ciecko:
The positioning or messaging around the civic role that the museum has is probably more important than it was two or three weeks ago. That's kind of what I'm hearing in that realm.
But solely from a content perspective, that in itself is probably a challenge. In a community, and in an extremely diverse community, there are all of these subgroups and different types of messages and different types of appeal that an organization can have. So, do you think a lot of that starts at the regional professional association? That slows things down. And I know there's some advocacy around slowing some things down, but if you have a hunch around what you feel would benefit your community the most at certain point in time, shouldn't you start slowly putting out some of those feelers and seeing what works?
Koven Smith:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential there. I think the issue with regional museums and with regional museums associations has always been just a lack of technical resources, frankly. So, a lot of the state museums associations see their role as putting on an annual conference, full stop. That's it. And it would be interesting to see if at this moment, you start to see more of those organizations begin to take on more of a services based model, where they are able to provide services to a wide range of smaller institutions that normally could not afford that on their own. But I think we're a ways off from that. But for me, it's more a question of, is there something that this moment can tell us about what we should be prepared for the next time? And one of those is more technical services to smaller organizations.
Brendan Ciecko:
Right. Susan, in last week's webinar, the topic of games came up over and over again, and it seemed to strike a chord. And we had Seema Rao from the Akron Art Museum, who's been spearheading a wide range of easy to assemble digital games. I know you've spoken about museum games dozens of times over the past couple of years. Do you think games will have the right lift and appeal right now? Or would your suggestion be to concentrate that attention in, in other areas?
Susan Edwards:
I actually have been meaning to talk to Seema about this and ask her about games. Again, going back to the distraction thing. Games are a great distraction. People are puzzling and game boarding it up right now. And I know my daughter is on Minecraft constantly. Games are a distraction and they're a release. Making games is not that easy, though. Again, I'm going to go back to the collaboration thing. Seema did an amazing thing setting up a collaborative way to do that crossword puzzle. She set up the structure. All you have to do is go in and add your question to be part of this larger thing that brings in lots of museums together. Yeah, I would go on the collaboration front.
Similarly, some of the Twitter hashtag threads that are going on right now between museums sharing collections are sort of like games. And again, the collaboration makes that work easy. Even simple games can be hard to design and create, and if you don't already have that skill in your team, it's going to be not the easiest thing to just start doing immediately. So, if you're thinking about it, I would look to collaborate or find existing templates out there that you can follow and adapt with your own content.
Brendan Ciecko:
It sounds like if there are frameworks and 101s available for really low effort projects, you would say give it a shot and see if it sticks with your community? As long as you're not reinventing the wheel and spending lots of time and, and resources on that?
Susan Edwards:
I mean, this is a time to experiment. If you have the time and if you have the staff, this is a really good time to try new things and see, because people are, people are online and they're looking for things to do.
Brendan Ciecko:
Yeah. I just want to point out for a moment, that the sense of the first webinar we did last week to this webinar, last week felt very much like foot on the gas- now is the time, here are some ideas, here's what other museums are doing. And I know so much can change in terms of our own personal energy, our own personal grit, and our viewing of this as a, "One week to go before things are back to normal." One month, two months? We don't really know. And so, it seems like the notion of storing that energy for the long-term and being reflective in moments like this, and putting your foot on the brake just a little bit, is what I'm hearing from both of you.
Susan Edwards:
Right.
Brendan Ciecko:
The thing that I want to put out there, and I know there's no right or wrong answer to any of these, is if you slow down too much, are you then missing on certain opportunities while everybody's in "hibernation" during this period? Because these museums that are getting the visibility that I think a lot of museums really appreciate right now and hope for, probably started with a really small, wacky, creative idea.
The thing that I really like about the ideas that are getting all of the attention right now is, they didn't cost anything. They didn't really take a lot of effort. There weren't strategic planning meetings over the course of several weeks to think about what is going to captivate or distract or entertain the public during moments like these. They were just, "What's an idea? Give me some ideas. Let's try this out and see if it sticks." Are either of you, seeing examples of that that you really like? Is the Hammer doing anything of that nature? And if not, do you foresee that being a part of your practice, or do you still think hold your cards a little bit longer?
Susan Edwards:
I think that phenomenon of, what's his name? Tim at the Cowboy Museum. That's always been a thing, that somebody at a museum had an idea and wanted to play with it and it, and it takes off, right?
Brendan Ciecko:
Yeah.
Susan Edwards:
And it's really hard to engineer that. So, that's not part of your strategy. That's just comes from experimentation and trying new things. And yes, of course we are, we are doing that.
Brendan Ciecko:
Storing all of your acorns for the winter versus saying, "Now's an opportunity where our community needs us most, or they need this distraction. What are some things that can, in a truly agile low cost, lean way, come together very quickly?"
Susan Edwards:
Yeah. So, one thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the pressure of the, the press and the media and all the stuff that they're putting out around, "Here's another list of, things you can do on museum websites. And here's all the games museums have played, and here's all the things that these museums are doing." And it's creating, I think, a little bit of a FOMO amongst us staff at the museums that think, "Oh, my God. We're not on that list. We need to get on that list." And maybe we're getting calls from our director asking us why we're not on that list and why we weren't in that article.And it creates this pressure, right? And I want to remind everyone that that pressure is a little artificial right now. The press doesn't have the regular exhibitions to write about. The art press is looking for things to write about. So, that's the first thing.
And then the second thing I think it would be that, if you're a smaller museum and every other large museum is pushing all of this content out into the world right now, you are not going to be heard, even if you jump into the fray. Maybe what you need to do is wait for a moment when everybody is not looking at the Met and MoMA and, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium and push your stuff out then. The cadence isn't just about your organization anymore and your audience. It's also about the larger museum ecosystem and finding the moment when you're going to slot yourself in.
Brendan Ciecko:
Koven, what do you think? You've worked on a tremendous number of social media and digital strategy projects. If you are a museum that….I don't want to use the, "You can't compete with the larger selections," because of course everything has a different appeal and a different regional place in all of this.
But how do you position yourself to be successful in reaching your own regional audience if that's all you can do right now?
Koven Smith:
I think to a point that Susan made earlier, one good thing to focus on is, "Well, what is it that you have to say about this stuff that is unique and vital, and important?"
Susan Edwards:
Yeah.
Koven Smith:
And this is going to sound like 101 for the social media people that are on this call: there's no reason that you have to create it all yourself. You have an interesting local take on other stuff that's out there already, whether it be other museum content or others. This is the time to do that.
Back to my first point on this. If you're not already doing it and if it doesn't seem obvious to you what to do, I wouldn't push it. If anyone had read Kaywin Feldman's, the Director of the National Gallery, she just did an op-ed. She note that it is going to be exceptionally hard, especially if we've been closed for months and not weeks. And we may have very little preparation for that, by the way. It may be that on Saturday you learn that the museum is reopening on Monday. And it's like, "Now we have to do that." And if you are maxed out at that point, if you are doing your normal sort of museum regimen of working 40% more than you're paid for, you're done at that point. How are you going to make that work?
I do think that this is a time to really, really be careful and cautious and tentative. And if there are experiments that feel right to you, yeah, by all means do them. But we are in this moment where some of the stuff that people seem to be responding to, I don't think any of us would have predicted a day before that would be the thing that everybody would get into.
Brendan Ciecko:
Right.
Koven Smith:
So, it's hard to even strategize about this. There are probably social media managers on this call who are like, "Grr. Yes, you do strategize and we plan these things," and that's true.But I also do think it is a moment to relax a little bit.
Brendan Ciecko:
Right. Well, let's jump into a couple questions from the audience on topics that we haven't spent too much time on, if any time at all.
We have a question from Beth McDougall at the Gardens, Libraries, & Museums of Oxford University over in, in the U.K. What would you suggest for engaging older audiences? She adds, "I run a very basic MailChimp newsletter. I'm sending postcards, I'm setting up phone calls for the personal human touch. What are other platforms you would suggest that maybe have better engagement or are easier to navigate for older, uh, audience members?"
Susan Edwards:
So one of the things I just thought of when you were saying that is like, "Who are these older audience members?" Are they members of the organization, or are they just people out there at large that you're trying to reach? So, I think those might be two different things. With your members, you might be able to experiment with Zoom calls like this, for example, or Instagram. I actually think email is probably the best.
Koven Smith:
Yes.
Susan Edwards:
And especially if that's the way you have been communicating with that audience already. This is not a time to change the way you reach out to any audience. Like the actual method, this is not the time for that.
Brendan Ciecko:
You mentioned members, and we haven't really talked about the implications on members and donors and those who are more financially supportive of the organization and have a different type of expectation and bond. Are you seeing any changes in outreach to that community, as well as different types of content going out to that community, that has been either a surprise to you or you think is a good strategy for museums around that member engagement component?
Susan Edwards:
Our membership team is thinking really hard about how to engage with their members in new ways and to give them special content, special digital content that is unique to them and con- and is special only for them.
Brendan Ciecko:
Unique for the specific member, or unique to all members?
Susan Edwards:
To all members. So, they've sent out a new newsletter that's sort of a behind the scenes email. They've only sent one out, but I think the intention is to send multiple of these, looking at recommendations from different staff members.
So, that is a place where brainstorming is certainly happening. And it's because that's a team that normally interacts and has special events for these members that are physical, in-person events. And they're looking for ways to engage that audience online in a new way, because they don't have this other thing anymore.
Brendan Ciecko:
And then we have another question from Charles Fulcher at the Washington National Cathedral in our nation's capital. In cases where you are beholden to the narrow funnel point for online communications, how can other departments and teams advocate, and I think the key word here is advocate, for the importance of community building through new online engagement, as well as assisting folks who control that work, so that we can actually make things happen together?
We talked a little bit about this earlier, but I think there's more to be said about it, because it's a completely different working culture. It's a completely different shift to roles and hierarchy. But I'd love to hear how you're seeing some of those shifts at the Hammer or across wider groups of organizations that, Koven, you're working with.
Koven Smith:
From the organizations I'm working with, I sense a certain amount of relief at the funnel frankly that there's that single point of contact. I think strategically speaking, one thing that is a bit of a concern is that the longer this goes on, the greater the temptation is going to be for a lot of rogue projects to start to develop that are sort of outside of the museum's mission or outside of its ability to sort of maintain and sustain over the long-term.
Brendan Ciecko:
I think it's around how the team comes together to advocate for the community centric aspects of it. You're keeping your eye on the ball and you're making sure that it's known from top to bottom, from director to intern, how we can help each other make the most of this time, to make sure that we're continuing to build community. And I know that has a broad meaning, but how do you continue to, to build that community?
I even think on top of that, your community is external and internal because you need to be building your community inside the museum, where we aren't used to working remotely and not having casual encounters, where when you do those rare moments to speak to each other over virtual or video chat, that's business. That’s all business, all the time. You're maybe not going to be as humorous or lighthearted. So how do you balance all of that, where you're building community inside your organization and building community outside your organization?
Susan Edwards:
Yeah, I think that's critical, Brendan, and I was actually just having a conversation about this with our director of public programs last night, about the importance of the staff who all now feel so isolated.
We have a couple of departments of only two or three people, who are completely separated from the rest of the institution. And how can they help if they're not incorporated into the larger community? So, I would say a couple things going on here. Transparency is really important, and you're going to have to create new modes for transparency, because the old modes don't work anymore. Honestly, a lot of the transparency, for me sometimes, happens in the kitchen when I'm filling up my water bottle and I overhear conversations. But it's not happening anymore. So, I'm experimenting today actually, with a new Google dashboard that I created, to try to funnel all of these projects into, and let people see what other people are requesting. And see ideas that other people have, so that we can create some synergy around some of this maybe, because there's probably someone in one department who has an idea to do some online thing and someone in a completely different department who has the same exact idea. So, going back to this idea of some sort of digital working group within your organization, I read on another forum that some other museum created a taskforce and they're meeting weekly about. So, if you don't already have an internal digital task force that meets once every other week to talk about what you're doing, I think that's really important. And then this community, internal community thing, which would be a great subject for a whole other webinar. How do you do that?
Brendan Ciecko:
Someone just asked on the, on the Q&A, are there any ideas for singalongs, team games?
The morale of the staff is so important, so we don't feel all adrift. And I feel like even the non-museum community, the corporate community that has the executive coach and the team coach and all of that, they're not even doing that yet, because there is this, "First we have to get our bearings and then we can start to add on those elements to boost that morale." But I'm curious, are you hearing about museums?
I would imagine The Philbrook, we had Scott on last week, would be running forward with keeping everybody's morale high. But are you hearing anything, doing anything, or do you think that, "It's urgent, we need to do this, but it's going to take a little bit of time?”
Susan Edwards:
I'm seeing virtual happy hour pop up in the thread a lot. I haven’t done that internally in my museum, but I've had several virtual happy hours with friends.Which are great.
Brendan Ciecko:
Koven, you founded Drinking About Museums, which is all about morale. It's all about uniting people that share the same mission and vision. What does that look like right now? And if people want to find a place for them to either share ideas or commiserate or have a cocktail virtually, are there places like that? Is that role more important than it's ever been?
Koven Smith:
Well, funny you should mention that. A few of us, Andrea Ledesma and a couple of others, put together a virtual Drinking About Museums, I think it was late last week. I want to say Thursday. It was just sort of advertised via Twitter. And we are now reviving an idea that we had talked about several years ago, which is that we would do a nonstop, all the way around the world Drinking About Museums, starting out in New Zealand and then gradually working its way across time zones west.
And so, that is going to be Monday, March 30th. So, if you go to drinkingaboutmuseums.com, there's not information about it there yet, but there should be by the end of the day today. And if you want to sign up to host your own local event, we're looking for people across all timezones so we can get there. So, that's happening. And I know on the last day of the virtual Museums and the Web conference, we are now doing a karaoke event.
Brendan Ciecko:
And can I just confirm for everybody, Corona is not a drink that is welcome. Has the ban been lifted, Koven?
Koven Smith:
No, Corona's fine, though COVID when shouted across a teleconference software sounds a lot like my own name, so it's very distracting.
Brendan Ciecko:
Interesting. What a coincidence. Well, we only have a couple more minutes, but before I ask my one final question, I just want to again thank everybody for making time, taking time out of your day to join us. We had over 4,400 registrations. Over 3,000 people tuned in for this conversation from all over the world. After this webinar, we're going to compile everybody's questions, ideas, and solutions into one living document and share that around the community. There were 72 questions that came in through Q&A and I know we only had a short bit of time to tackle some of them, but we want you to feel free to share your thoughts in the webinar chat or email them over to hello@cuseum.com. And I'm confident that any question you have can be answered by someone in this community, whether it be someone in education, curatorial, marketing, digital, so on and so forth.he fact that you're here shows that you're proactively taking steps to prepare your museum, to sustain your museum, and we're all in this together, and we're all going to get through this together.
So, we have one more question. Koven, can you leave us with one big idea that we can bring back to our organization during this time?
Koven Smith:
Keep lots in reserve and pace yourself.
Brendan Ciecko:
Thank you. And Susan, how about you?
Susan Edwards:
Collaborate. Collaborate with your internal team, collaborate with other museums.
Brendan Ciecko:
Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you, Susan. Thank you, Koven. I really appreciate your expertise and your time today. I hope you and your families are doing well, and I can't wait to see you in person whenever the conferences go back in play. Thanks everybody for joining today, and we really appreciate your commitment to your organization and to your museum. And again, we'll get through this together.