Archive for August, 2007

by Terry Makewell, National Museums Online Learning Project (Victoria & Albert Museum)

You would find it hard to locate a museum in the world which doesn’t say that it is interested in engaging with its audience in new ways. A logical way of doing this is through the digital environment. This is especially apt as one of the foundations of Web 2.0 is user generated content.

There are many examples of museums inviting the audience into their digital environment, but there are also examples of museums getting the audience more involved in exhibitions themselves. This is not a new idea and has been implemented by many different museums across the world.

‘Inspired by…’ (an exhibition close to the heart of our project) is the Victoria & Albert’s annual art competition for people on part-time courses. The aim is for participants to create a work of art or craft inspired by the collections. These objects then make up the basis of the exhibition. It is solely for newly created work and doesn’t use anything from the collection itself in the displays. This video shows one of the people who exhibited this year talking about their work. There are many museums which run similar exhibitions where people have created work inspired by that particular museum’s collection.

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by Che Tibby 

OK, I’m afraid of losing you on the first couple of lines, so I’ll say this really quickly and move on: ‘I wrote my PhD on theories of nationalism.’

Now, in the world outside of academia nationalism has a pretty bad reputation. This is almost entirely because people automatically associate nationalism with racism, jingoism, militarism and other poor behaviour. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Nationalism is often adopted by the jingoistic or the racist, but in practice it is just the everyday process of identifying with your fellow citizens.

You ever hear that Southern comedian from the US? He’d go, ‘If your gun-rack has a gun-rack on it … you miiiight be a red-neck.’ Here in New Zealand you could say, ‘If you can name at least one All Black captain, you miiiight be a Kiwi’, or, ‘If you can name the guy on the $5 bill, you miiight be a Kiwi.’ I could go on.

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Check out this graph from an article on eMarketer about ‘The rising roar of word-of-mouth’. More and more, people are influenced by friends, family and also strangers over other promotional channels when they make decisions about what to buy and where to go. Click on the image to see a larger version of the graph. It means we can’t underestimate the value of promoting our services and activities using testimonials, reviews and commentary from our audiences.

Rules can be handy. Here’s a quick read from the BBC - their fifteen web principles. I like the fact that they remind us that it’s not just all about me and my website, but about taking and giving, linking and feeding, across the web.

Finally, a link to Alan Brown’s article on Fuel4Arts outlining his framework for the value of the arts. It’s a great piece of work - I won’t attempt to summarise it here - read the article instead, or cast your eye over the short summary on Creative New Zealand’s website (where you can also listen to a webcast with Alan). At a seminar in Wellington last month, Alan directed his arguments to both marketers and arts managers, arguing that his framework provides a common language for explaining the benefits and values of our programmes to our audiences and to our sponsors. He strikes a great balance between reminding us that the number one reason people attend arts events is to relax and have fun (and that we should design our programmes to be more relevant to these people’s needs and this social context) with his obvious belief in the value of the art itself:

Being completely absorbed in an arts activity is at the root of everything and without it, you can’t reap the other benefits.

We don’t mention sport often enough on this blog. Sport is part of this Ministry’s definition of culture, and it’s obvious to say that the cultural life of many New Zealanders includes both sports and arts and other cultural activities. I’ve been enjoying a spot of snowboarding this month, as well as getting to music gigs (looking forward to Minuit this weekend).

Attending a session run by Peter Cox from SPARC at the conference Eventing the Future 2007, I was struck by the similarity of at least some of the issues for sport and the arts - having attended a seminar only weeks ago about the value of the arts and how to communicate it.  

SPARC is doing some heavy duty thinking about the value of sport. There are a couple of drivers:

• the need to provide evidence of return on investment for sports events (across events of all sizes but especially for bigger events)
• the events industry won’t move ahead unless it can be accountable and withstand a high level of scrutiny and audit
• significant competition from Asian countries bidding for events, whose governments may be less concerned with evidence for return on investment.

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I couldn’t resist posting a photo of my puppy, Baxter, who grabbed my conference registration when I unpacked my bags … Further sessions from the conference Eventing the Future 2007 (see also previous post) revealed tips for developing memorable experiences and marketing to your target audience.

Memorable experiences

Robert Rossman, author and consultant on recreation programme design, presented on ‘creating experiences’. Rober cited research that shows that humans are happiest when they are able to exercise their individual strengths and abilities. If we want to create successful events, we need to design experiences that make humans happy. He argued that in an environment where it is increasingly difficult to complete on price, quality and delivery, we need to compete on creating memorable experiences.

Robert said we need to look at events as ‘a series of social interactions staged to engage participants in a memorable way’. Your audience will value the social interaction that your event produces and the memories that it creates. To design memorable experiences, events managers need to:

• maximize opportunities for participants to make choices – not just the choice to attend the event, but options within it
• ensure participation in activities that are intrinsically satisfying (where the reward comes from the ‘doing’)
• engage participants by allowing them to play a part in determining and directing the outcome of the event.

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