Episode 14: #MuseumBouquet and #MuseumSunshine
May 22, 2020
My guests today are Emily Haight of the New-York Historical Society and Hilary-Morgan Watt of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. They manage the social media accounts for their respective institutions, and during the COVID-19 crisis, they’ve been collaborating on campaigns that offer a little bit of light and joy, in an otherwise dark time. You may have seen the hashtags #museumboquet and #museumsunshine, through which they’ve shared virtual flowers and rays of light from their collections.
We had a great talk about the importance of connecting people to museums and each other through simple human gestures and explored the importance of digital media during the shutdown and beyond.
But first, I wanted to know how these two social media managers, from two different types of institutions in two different cities became close collaborators. So, that’s where we’ll start.
If you’d like to be a guest on What’s On or know someone else doing innovative work online for their museum—especially now—send me an email. It’s nick@cuberis.com.
Episode 13: Claire Lanier from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 11, 2020
If you work in social media for your cultural institution, there’s a pretty good chance you know Claire Lanier, or are at least familiar with her work. I first interviewed Claire for this podcast about two years ago, when she was managing social media at the New-York Historical Society. She and Meredith Duncan, who was at the Museum of the City of New York, had just won MUSE Award for the #MuseumSnowBallFight campaign, in which museums around the world lobbed snow-related images at each other via social media, while much of the US was shut down during the Bomb Cyclone storm.
Based on that conversation, I knew that Claire had a knack for using social media to connect a museum’s mission with its audience, even when that museum’s doors are closed. So I thought this would be a good time to check in to see how it’s been running social media for the Met during a pandemic.
Episode 12: Alison Byrne and Brad Tuggle from Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art
Apr 27, 2020
If you’re listening to this in April 2020, which is when I’m recording this, I don’t need to tell you how much has changed in the world since the last time I did an episode of What’s On. If you happen to be listening in the distant future and don’t remember what I’m talking about, we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and museums are temporarily closed to the public. Physically, at least.
As days of sheltering in place turned into weeks, and now over a month, museum members, families, and just people in general have been hungry for the sort of cultural and educational sustenance that only a museum can provide. And some museums are using digital tools to rise to the occasion.
A couple of weeks ago I was looking through the excellent thread of posts using the #MuseumFromHome hashtag, and I spotted a tweet from Virginia MOCA announcing the launch of a new site: Virtual VA MOCA. When I clicked through, I landed on a pretty robust site, with virtual galleries of current exhibitions, educational resources and videos made from home, and interviews with artists, who are exhibiting from home. All of this was built out on a free Google site, and it felt totally made for this exact moment. Because it was.
I started this podcast two years ago to showcase the great work museums are doing with online content, in the hopes of inspiring other museum professionals who are struggling with content strategies. And now, more than ever, that’s my goal. So I spoke with Brad Tuggle, Virginia MOCA’s Director Of Audience Development, and Alison Byrne, Director of Exhibitions and Education, to ask them to share a little inspiration in this strange and challenging time.
Episode 11: Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell of Oregon Historical Society
Jan 25, 2019
My guests today are Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell from the Oregon Historical Society, and they’re talking with me about their recently-launched blog, Dear Oregon.
**FULL TRANSCRIPT**
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber.
My guests today are Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell from the Oregon Historical Society, and they’re talking with me about their recently-launched blog, Dear Oregon.
I met Jay last year in Vancouver, at the Museums and the Web conference. It was my first time at MW, and I was co-hosting a content strategy workshop with our CEO Eric. I’d like to think that everyone in the class got something out of our session, but Jay, in particular, seemed to be especially excited to be there.
JAY: So I walked in thinking, well I know a little about content strategy, but not focused on museums, this will be great. But then, in like the first two minutes, Nick says, “So, content strategy is a big topic, but what we’re going to do to get your feet wet in an actual project, we’re going to pretend that your organization is starting a blog. And I was like [clap, clap] awesome. Because, of course, we were…
ERIN: We were starting a blog!
NICK: A few months ago, I checked in on the OHS website to see how the blog was going. And I was so thrilled to see that their new blog, Dear Oregon, had not only launched but was producing some really rich collections-based content. So I reached out to Jay to see if he wanted to talk about the blog, and he insisted that I meet Erin Brasell, too, who Jay described as the brains behind the blog, and they joined me over Skype. Since I’d never been to the Oregon Historical Society, I wanted to know a little bit about what I’d find there, and that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation.
ERIN: Our mission is to preserve our state’s history and make it accessible to everyone in ways that advance knowledge and inspire curiosity about all the people, places, and events that have shaped Oregon.
And it’s a mouthful, and it’s a pretty broad mission, but we do work to advance the mission in a number of ways, including, we have permanent and temporary exhibits, both here in the building and online. We have a research library, we do a number of public programs and workshops here in our downtown location. We also partner with other organizations across the state.
And the Oregon Historical Society recently launched a digital collections site in 2017, which makes available online thousands of images. We also have oral histories and documents from our collections. And they’re constantly being updated. So, like hundreds a week, usually?
JAY: Yes, hundreds a week. There’s tens of thousands of documents on there and the diversity is astounding. And there’s just more and more stuff up there all the time. And part of what’s important about that is that even though we’re located in downtown Portland, we’re the Oregon Historical Society. So we’re really charged — we’re not a part of the government, we’re an independent nonprofit that is charged with — we have a duty to preserve and share the history of the entire state with the entire state.
So one of the reasons that — my title is web strategist — one of the reasons I was hired almost five years ago was because we needed to do a better job providing services to people who aren’t physically here. And so that’s really where the web comes in. So the digital collections site has been a huge leap forward in our abilities to provide access to our materials to people who aren’t just here.
NICK: Awesome, and actually, I had this as a question later on, but Jay, since you mentioned being a web strategist, could tell me a little bit more about what you do at the Oregon Historical Society?
JAY: Sure, so my title is web strategist and it’s really “web everything.” So on a typical day, I might do anything from input and manage content to write code to sit down and meet with folks and figure out where our web strategy should be in five years. So I do everything from the 30,000-foot perspective down to the nitty-gritty of why isn’t this page working. And that’s fun for me, because I’ve been in web development for 20 years, and I’ve done all of those different things at one point or another as part of a team, and so now I pretty much get to play with all the fun toys and participate in all the different aspects of communicating and working with the public online. And so that, to me, is just very satisfying.
NICK: And how about you, Erin? What’s your title?
ERIN: Yeah, so I’m the editorial design and production manager for the Oregon Historical Quarterly. And the Quarterly is a peer-reviewed public history journal that’s published by the Oregon Historical Society. And we’ve been publishing continuously since 1900. And so the Quarterly is a benefit of our membership. On a day-to-day basis, I’m responsible for production at the OHQ, meaning design and layouts, setting schedules. I also do editorial work, including bringing some manuscripts for peer review and getting the files ready to go to the printer and managing that sort of process.
NICK: So blogging is not your full-time job. And managing a blog is not your full-time job.
ERIN: And it’s funny, we wrote a little piece of it into my job description and this sort of goes into one of the motivations for creating the blog was, I was personally motivated to become involved with it because OHQ produces this great scholarship about Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, and I wanted to get some of that information out beyond just our readership, which ranges between 4,000-4,500 on any given print cycle.
But there’s so much information that we produce, and the Oregon Historical Society just didn’t have a platform to disseminate the information more widely than just what we print in OHQ.
JAY: Absolutely, and the other thing, too, the blog really fills a gap. Especially in our content strategy and in our social media strategy. We put out a lot of really cool and interesting chunks and nuggets of content relating to items in our collection, relating to events, either current or historical, through social media. But there’s only so much you can put in a Facebook post. There’s even less that you can put on Instagram or Twitter. And so in between that and — how long is a typical OHQ article? 5,000 words?
ERIN: Well, it can range from 3,000 to 9 or 10,000 words, so a pretty big range, but that’s a lot.
JAY: That’s a lot, and in between a tweet and 5,000 words is a pretty big gap. And there are a lot of, again, items in our collection, events in history, either well-known or obscure, people, places, all these things that there’s more to say than you could fit in a Facebook post but we don’t necessarily have the bandwidth or reader interest to write an OHQ article about every single thing like that. And so the blog really allows us to hit that sweet spot and to not have to be as soup-to-nuts comprehensive.
When it comes to scholarship, we should also mention we have a number of digital history projects that put historical content out there online, and one of them is the Oregon Encyclopedia, which is a fantastic resource, peer-reviewed, has a fantastic stable of writers and historians that develop content for it on a continuous basis.
ERIN: And a pretty robust editorial board, too, so it is an authoritative source on Oregon History, so it’s really important.
JAY: Absolutely. And if you’re going to write an OE entry or an OHQ article about a subject, you can be darn well sure that it’s going to be comprehensive. It’s going to be reviewed, fact-checked, this is not a trivial process. It’s also not a shallow or…
NICK: Ephemeral was the word that I was thinking of for social media…
JAY: Right, and so, for the blog, we can kind of dance between those boundaries. We can have — one of my favorite blog posts is a wonderful woman in our museum, a cataloger, Silvie Andrews, talking about this really bizarre Victorian-era tricycle in our collection. And she talked about it, and she shows how it runs on a video, and it’s just, nowhere else could we say, ‘Here’s this weird thing that is in our warehouse, that doesn’t necessarily fit into some bigger picture story. It’s just weird. And it’s cool. So take a look.’
ERIN: The cool thing about it is the mechanics of it. So it doesn’t have pedals, it has these leather stirrups that you kind of push down and force your seat up, and then it propels itself forward in that way. So it’s really awkward, and obviously didn’t catch on because there aren’t many of them, but the blog is a great place for us to put that out there for people to see and hopefully generate interest in other things that are going on.
And one of the other things that I really like about the blog is it gives us a platform to stay relevant with rapid responses to current events that are going on. And so there are a number of things we published recently in OHQ that deal with immigration, citizenship, a lot of the really hot topics right now, that are really put in perspecitve. Some of the things that we’re seeing in the news today that need a little more thought than what can be put on Twitter or Facebook. It gives us the space to do some of that analysis and bring in these resources that we have and this scholarship that we produce, and put it out there for people to consider. So that’s some of the work that I’m really excited about.
NICK: So obviously you do need to leave some room in your editorial plan for these topical stories that you can relate your collections to, but beyond that, how do you decide— you know, the funky Victorian tricycle — how do you decide which stories are best to tell and when?
ERIN: When we started out, we basically started out with a list of ideas that we had gathered over the course of a year or so. Talking to colleagues, going out to coffee, having folks pitch stuff to us, us finding interesting things in the collection that we sort of ask people to run with… So right now our editorial calendar is part strategic, in that we have certain events that we would like to promote…
JAY: We have a huge event coming up, which is the opening of our signature exhibit on Oregon history, which is called Experience Oregon. We had a previous exhibit that was in the same space, that covered roughly the same subject matter called Oregon, My Oregon, that was opened in 2005. And so it’s a big deal that we closed this big exhibit and completely created a new one from scratch. And that’s opening February 14, and that’s a big deal, and so one of the things, again, fun about the blog.
The blog lets us tell, again, these little interesting stories within the story.
NICK: Well, so one of the things I wanted you about was, Experience Oregon, as you mentioned, is replacing Oregon My Oregon, and having not been to the museum or the Historical Society, from my perspective I would assume that those are sort of marquee exhibitions, sort of all-encompassing broad exhibitions about your state’s history. And so while the former version of it was closed for renovation while you’re building Experience Oregon, did you see your blog as an opportunity to — in addition to marketing the exhibition itself — to sort of supplement or augment the stories that would have been told if there hadn’t been a renovation or the types of stories that will be told when the new exhibition opens. Do you see the blog as sort of a digital version of what that’s going to be?
ERIN: I definitely see it as potentially a digital supplement. Because like you said, if we had unlimited space, we would tell all the stories of all the people and places and events in Oregon. But we are limited by exhibit space, and so we do have plans to try to make connections to the new exhibit, especially since it is designed to provide an entry point for people coming in to learn about the history of Oregon. And so, getting into the specific stories and things on the blog, and particularly through the artifacts that are on display, and the documents from our collection that are going to be on display, it provides a really nice space to get into a deeper history associated with those things that will be there for visitors to see when it opens.
JAY: Absolutely. I think in some ways when we knew we were going to have to close the exhibit, this was actually long before we even thought of the blog. It’s certainly long before the blog was launched.
ERIN: I think the exhibit has been a three-year process. The idea to redo Oregon, My Oregon, to actually opening the door. So, I think we’ve been working on the blog for about two years.
JAY: We’ve been working on the blog for about two years, but it’s only been open to the public, as it were, since November. So really, all different aspects of our websites have been getting beefed up over time to fill that gap. With new entries on the Oregon Encyclopedia, we’ve added some digital exhibits, of course, the OHS digital collections site has been expanding during that period that the old exhibit was closed.
So really, in some ways having to close a big exhibit like that was really a blessing. At least, for someone like me with my nefarious purpose do more of our work online. Because we had to. It highlighted the need to do a better job and a more comprehensive job of telling the stories of Oregon’s History online. And to provide people with the resources, so that they can learn more about the stories that are interesting to them. And that’s what I think is going to be really interesting. Because now we sort of had to beef up what we did online with the closure of the exhibit, and because we knew we had to anyway, but now that we’re opening the exhibit, that exhibit is really going to be the gateway drug to Oregon History.
It’s going to be wonderful in and of itself, but every photograph, every little text panel, chances are there’s a full-blown article on the Oregon Encyclopedia about that person, place or thing. There’s probably a few OHQ articles that relate to that. There could be digital exhibits or primary sources that are on the Oregon History Project or the digital collections site. There could be a wealth of content. And in a physical exhibit, you only have space for one paragraph or one little photograph.
So we’re really hoping that we can connect people to the online resources that are necessarily more detailed and more exhaustive through the physical exhibit because you never know. Somebody walks through a 3,000 square foot exhibit, you don’t know what’s going to capture somebody’s attention. You don’t know what they’ll wish they could learn more about. You have to make your curatorial decisions, and balance everything. But then someone’s going to really want to do a deep dive into this one thing. And if we can make it easy for them to find that one thing, well, then we win.
NICK: Well, so, on a similar note to the idea of somebody in your exhibit seeing something that grabs their attention and being able to find a full-fledged article about it online, I’ve noticed that on your blog, at the bottom of your posts, there’s related collection items. And I was wondering if that — how should I put it? — was your content management system built with that in mind? Was this something you have to manually do? I am wondering about the technical aspect of it, but also strategically, how important to you was it that somebody reads an article and then decides they want to dive into your collections?
JAY: So that’s very important, and that’s actually a feature that predates the blog. That was something that was developed when we designed the strategy behind our current website, which was launched in November of 2015. A big problem with a website for an organization like ours, or for a lot of organizations, is that you want to provide people with an easy way to find the content that they’re looking for. Right? The basic user experience design. But how do you help people find the content they don’t know they’re looking for? How do you help people find the content that they don’t know you have?
An organization like ours, we record lectures into podcasts, we make videos of our programs, we have OHQ articles, we have OE articles, we have Oregon History Project primary sources, we have things on our digital collections site. All of which could relate to a particular subject matter, but no one’s going to know to search for that stuff just off the top of your head. So that’s where we came up with this idea of these related content blades that would be able to go at the bottom of any post. So if it’s a program about XYZ topic, what do we have? Do we have articles? Do we have primary sources? Do we have collection items? Do we have things in our store? Books about it that somebody could buy? All of these types of things, we can put at the bottom of the post. And it’s extremely important for helping people understand — again, you can’t search for something you don’t know exists. And this is our way of exposing that.
The blog is just that many more opportunities to talk about a topic and then say, “look at all the resources we’ve got.”
The other thing that I love as the webmaster is that I get to do it the other way around. We’ve got an event or an exhibit or something else on a topic, if we’ve got a blog post on it, you can be sure you’ll find it at the bottom of the page.
NICK: Well that’s great. I’ve been working on this, I don’t know, mantra when working with clients on content strategy, of ‘creating no dead ends.’ So when I’m on your blog post, I can click through to a related object page, and then when I’m on that object page, I can find other related objects, or yet another blog post about it, so I think it’s really exciting to me that you guys have that built into your website and that you’re making a practice of doing it on all types of pages and posts. So kudos.
JAY: And again, search is OK, but you can’t search for something you don’t know you want to find, and that you don’t know exists. So we had to come up with these ways of — like you said, no page should be a dead end. There should always be, “Learn more,” “Read more,” there should be that subtle call to action somewhere, and that’s why all those related content links are purposeful. “Read this.” “Watch this.” “Listen to this podcast.” “Do something.” “Take action.” Because if somebody wants to, you don’t want to say, “No, you’re done.” Right?
NICK: Right.
JAY: That’s the dead end.
NICK: Because you don’t know if they’re ever going to come back to your site actually, you know?
JAY: Exactly.
NICK: And maybe ultimately you could get a donation from them, or convert them into a visitor or member.
JAY: Absolutely.
NICK: Was there anything that we didn’t get a chance to talk about that you really wanted to make sure that you address?
ERIN: Well, actually, one thing that I was thinking about was — that we really didn’t get to touch on — was why it took two years…
JAY: Oh sure!
ERIN: …to get the ball rolling. Partially because we aren’t dedicated blogging staff, but also we really took our time planning and thinking about it, and I think we were the butt of many jokes at OHS. The blog was the Canadian girlfriend, right? Like, there’s a blog, it’s there! And people were like “sure, OK, great”, like, “Let’s get another staff meeting update on what you guys are doing.
But a happy outcome of that really elongated process is that people kept hearing about it and thinking about it, and eventually it worked its way into people’s everyday jobs. So we now have managers who understand why we have a blog and are totally behind the blog, and have now written into people’s job descriptions, “One of your professional goals this year is to produce at least one blog post about the work that you’re doing.”
NICK: Cool!
ERIN: And I don’t think that would have happened if we had quickly gone through the process, released it…
JAY: “Oh, by the way, we have a blog.”
ERIN: Yeah, by the way, you’re gonna start writing for this. And instead, we’re creating this really rich content that’s developed by the experts in our building and it’s a great marketing tool because it is real. It’s not just fluff. There is substance to it. And I don’t think that would have happened if we had gone about it a different way.
JAY: We also found out that in the first month of its launch, the section of the website that holds all the blog posts jumped to number four in page views.
NICK: Awesome!
JAY: So we took a long time to do it right, but we’re reaping the dividends, and it’s been successful, and I’m sure it will only be more so. So just wait to see what kind of cool posts we have coming up in February!
NICK: That was Jay Cosnett and Erin Brassel of the Oregon Historical Society. I want to thank Jay and Erin for talking with me, and I want to thank you for listening.
If you’d like to hear more episodes of What’s on, head over to cuberis.com/podcast. You can also find a link to our ebook, The Art of Storytelling, on our site.
And if you’d like to be a guest on a future episode, or know a museum professional doing great work online for their institution, send me an email. You can reach me at nick@cuberis.com
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 10: Jennifer Henel of Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art
Nov 21, 2018
Jennifer Henel is Digital Humanities Developer at Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art
When we talk about museum website content at Cuberis, we break it down into four types. We call one of those types “Essential Content.” This refers to the day to day work, mostly scholarly in nature, that occurs at your museum, and would even if you didn’t have a website.
Thanks to recent innovations and initiatives, more and more institutions are finding innovative ways of repurposing Essential Work as web content. Jennifer has been helping curators and historians publish their work online for years, and joined me to talk about some of the unique challenges of digitizing scholarly works. She also has some great ideas and insights for others who are looking to do something similar for their own institutions.
**FULL TRANSCRIPT**
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On: The Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber.
If you’ve ever worked on a website redesign project, you know that it takes a lot of content to fill an entire website. But for a moment, imagine that your museum didn’t have a website at all. Think of how much content your museum would still to produce — Catalogs, scholarly research, educational resources, labels — all of the work that is essential to your museum’s mission and purpose. But your museum does have a website, and that work can now impact people who can’t make it to your physical location.
When we talk about museum websites at Cuberis, we refer to that type of content as Essential Work. Thanks to recent innovations in digital technology, more and more cultural institutions are making their Essential Work available online, making it accessible to more historians and scholars, and taking advantage of the Internet’s intrinsic properties to make it easier to read and understand.
My guest today is Jennifer Henel. She is working with Research Conservator Melanie Gifford of the National Gallery of Art to produce a new publication for the all-digital Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. I invited her to join me to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of publishing scholarly work online, what peer review looks like for digital publications, and what sort of insights she has for museums looking to make more Essential Work accessible to more people.
Jennifer joined me over Skype from the National Gallery of Art. Before we dove into the technical aspects of her work, I wanted to know more about the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Arts.
JENNIFER: Sure. It is the scholarly production of articles, etc, relating to Netherlandish art, Flemish art, Northern Baroque paintings, by and large, Dutch Art, that kind of spans the 1400s – I’m making large generalizations here — through, I’d say the early 1700s, depending on the subject matter. And they are deep scholarly dives, often, into a particular painting or paintings, that sort of thing.
It is a community of these various historians that are spread out throughout the world, and they can all contribute. And they aim for quarterly publication, though it just depends on what is coming up when they produce certain publications.
So that is what the journal does.
NICK: So you just started working with them — or recently started working with them — as a digital humanities developer. What is your role there, and what does that title mean?
JENNIFER: So I am working on a specific new publication that is part of the journal offerings. It’s going to be slated for next year. We’re aiming, I believe, for late June to push this out. And what I’ll be doing is, I’m working with a scholar, Melanie Gifford, on her research on the Sir Peter Paul Rubens painting The Fall of Phaeton, which is at the National Gallery. Melanie is a scientific conservator here at the National Gallery, and she is interested, not only in doing an article, but allowing for the narrative to take the reader through an exploration of the painting on a very technical level, but also to allow space for users to play around and see the different layers.
So we envision having not only the article, where you can go in a very linear fashion, but also using IIIF is our goal to allow a user to get really deep into a painting, to layer different images such as technical imagery, such as infrared reflectography and x-radiographs to reveal certain things about how the painting has changed, and also to draw comparisons with other paintings that are not in the gallery’s holdings.
So it is a very specific project, but the idea is there will be an expansion of how the Journal works in order to allow for future articles to have some of this functionality.
NICK: How does that work as far as rights or, you know, what do you call it, provenance, or you know…? How did that scholar decide, ‘I’m going to do this piece,’ and what is the National Gallery’s role in that, as far as saying — do they have to give permission since the Journal doesn’t hold it, the Gallery does. So how does that relationship work?
JENNIFER: How does that work? It’s a good question, and it is one that is becoming increasingly relevant, I think, in terms of digital scholarship right now. And thankfully, I think the tide is moving toward more openness and more allowances with regard to what you do with it. Because, ultimately, the Gallery is perhaps the best example because it is the Nation’s collection. So we feel very much that this is the collection belonging to the people.
Just a few years ago, we were able to make all of our images Open Access, and earlier this year we migrated all of the images of the gallery to IIIF compatibility. So those images are done. The technical images that have been produced, which I believe has just happened, we have to see how we can make them integrate because we have not yet rolled that out, at least at the NGA. So we are kind of watching to see how IIIF is put out in other places because JHNA is not built on the same platform. So we have a different sort of hosting mechanism.
But as far as the image permissions, and deciding to work on it, it’s really at the discretion of the scholar. So in most places, when scholarship comes up, it’s because it’s either maybe prompted by an exhibition or just general interest, or perhaps even kind of that fun scholarly rabbit hole. Like, you’re looking at something else and you happen to stumble upon a little piece of information that leads you down another path.
With the impetus for what Melanie wanted to do, I’m actually not sure what totally led her to this, but she has done some really great scientific wok at the NGA. She did a large bit of scientific analysis for the most recent Vermeer exhibition that we had, as well as with the van Aelst exhibition in 2012. So she’s actively working on these kinds of questions around how works are painted, what pigments are used, what the composition is, etc. So form that perspective, it’s really scholar’s choice.
And for rights and reproductions, that sort of piece of it, at least at the NGA, this is all contributing to the dossier on this painting. So we want it to contribute to better understanding of the work, and I believe strongly that this will help do that. So the article is definitely a plus for the Gallery and to draw more attention to some of these paintings.
NICK: Wow, that’s great. And I was actually looking around the National Gallery website because I was trying to find van Eyck’s Annunciation, which I told you before we started recording, is one of my favorites. But one thing I forgot to look at, that I’m really curious about, is would that article then be linked to from the NGA website back to the Journal? When you say it becomes part of the dossier, is that what you mean?
JENNIFER: It is what I mean, in terms of — actually, I’m currently working on some projects withing Curatorial Records, so it would become the record on the object. From a practical perspective, ideally, that is what would happen is that we could link to this wonderful content.
The Gallery is undergoing quite a bit of change with regard to its digital strategy and establishing one, and we are by extension getting a new director soon, so I think there are a lot of changes coming down the pike. How that will ultimately materialize, I don’t really know yet. But I do think that’s the ultimate goal, is to have better connectivity with things that– with resources, especially that can relate to our content and make it richer for our user.
NICK: That actually leads me to a question I was going to ask a little further down, but before I get to that, when you were talking about the National Gallery of Art, you said “we” a couple of times, so for our listeners, could you explain your relationship to the National Gallery of Art and how you work now for the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art relates to that?
JENNIFER: Sure, so I worked formally at the Gallery in a number of roles over the course of about 15 years. And my formal time drew to a close earlier this year, but I am now working on contracts that relate to the NGA.
Earlier this week, I began a new project working on a digital project for the Kress Foundation, an ongoing effort that will continue, I believe until 2020. My piece of it is set up at least through next year, but I have worked on a number of projects at the NGA and I am actually sitting at the NGA right now.
I most recently was the curatorial coordinator for digital content, and I was responsible for helping our curators bring their ideas to digital format, making them accessible. The bigger projects that we did, we had Molly Donovan’s essay on Rachel Whiteread. That exhibition is up right now but we preempted it with a scholarly essay that has a lot in the apparatus that allows a user to read, and cite, etc.
I also worked on the online scholarly catalog initiative effort here to produce Dutch paintings of the 17th Century. And that was roughly a five-year endeavor that was 30 people plus. And was in the curatorial office for many years, in Northern Baroque paintings, so I know the content pretty well and I was able to serve as the project coordinator, so I was responsible for working with the curatorial staff and the technical staff and kind of liaising with everybody to ensure that we have a catalog up, which is now happily online and accessible to all and free.
So that’s a little bit about my background, and I hope to continue getting to work on NGA projects as we move forward.
NICK: Yeah, that’s great. It’s neat that you have found this overlap between the two and that your work with the Journal can benefit from your work at the NGA. I’ll jump ahead — the question that I was kind of saving for last, but I think relates to what you were talking about, about working with curators to make the digitization of their work accessible.
When we work with museums in a content strategy consultancy role, we help simplify the process by breaking down their websites into these four different categories, and I won’t get into each of them — well, maybe it would help if I did. So the four categories would be Foundational Content, which is just the stuff that you need to have a website. Blogs and social media, we know what that is. Digital projects and productions, and then Essential Work. And Essential Work is the label that we’ve given to the types of things that happen at a museum, whether or not there was a website. So, particularly scholarly work particularly.
And so there’s often a challenge for making web content out of that Essential Work, and so it sounds like what you had been doing at NGA, but also what you are doing at JHNA is all about this Essential Work, putting it online, making it accessible to audiences who care about it. So what sort of things have you learned over the years, and what sort of advice would you have for the museum who says, “Gosh, our curators do so much work, but it doesn’t all see the light of day, particularly on the website.” What sort of parameters, or advice, or words of wisdom would you give to somebody hoping more of that accessible?
JENNIFER: To bridge that? It’s a really great question, and somewhat complicated. I think that it is entirely essential that we think of that kind of essential work that you do as married with a digital platform to do that. Because that is really making that bridge between what is accessible and what is not.
The great example that I can give from the NGA’s perspective is that we produced and worked upon the Systematic Catalog Initiative in 1986 to produce scholarly research on our permanent collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. The reason that prompted the Dutch Catalog to get worked on — it was published in 1995 originally — and then in 2004, it went out of print. So at that point, our curator and then-publisher, editor-in-chief, rather, said, “You know, we have to figure out a way of going forward with this.”
And that’s what prompted us to say, “Well, how can we leverage what is being developed online to try to get some of this content out?” Because the reality is when these things are produced, they are beautiful, they are low-production in terms of quantity, they’re expensive, both to produce and to buy. So an average consumer may not acquire a collection of information. And they’re hard to get to. So if you live in the middle of nowhere and you cannot get access to this book, we’re effectively blocking you from getting this information.
We are trying, at least at the Gallery, to make inroads to get the content out and making it accessible. So, I think that a lot of times, there a bar of, “We have to have everything figured out in advance,” because we, at least in the curatorial sense, and in the scholarly sense, often like to like to think like a book model. Like, we have to know everything about this there is to know. Period. Full stop. In order to push it out there. But that’s not really the case.
I think that the way that digital and museums can change the direction of how we approach scholarship, is that we need to be somewhat compartmentalized and take granular steps toward a better and deeper understanding. This is not an endpoint. The publication is no longer the endpoint, the publication is a progress.
So I look at it more as what we’re trying to do is, with journal articles, like this one at JHNA, with the scholarly catalog initiative, that many museums are now getting on board. It’s just, put your information on it out there. Work on having it fine-tuned and letting peers review it after the fact, after it goes up there, because you can get feedback and you can change things on the fly, and you can version something, and you can archive that version, and we can basically create a really great space to get a dialog going.
And further, I think this is some of what you were asking, too, is that I think it will also help expand the audience. There are some people that I’m sure would love to know about Rembrandt’s self-portrait and they maybe only know it because they’ve seen a postcard of it. And the way of approaching it is getting a little piece of content, like an overview to let a user get into the content gradually, and then if you want to go deep, there’s a full entry there for you.
So I think it’s a matter of saying, “How can we best do this?” I think it’s really pushing the importance of the permanent collection, is the key for museums. And then, focusing efforts on expansion of ideas in the permanent collection is critical. We don’t necessarily — I mean, exhibitions are great, but the permanent collection is what your external people come to see, and it’s where I think the heart of any museum lies, and that is the Essential Work.
NICK: Excellent. So on a more technical level, are there any tools that you have used or that you have come across that you think museums would be interested in learning more about.
JENNIFER: Yeah, absolutely. With my work on the online scholarly catalog initiative, that was generously funded by the Getty Foundation, the National Gallery was one of nine institutions embarking on kind of putting forth these efforts in online scholarly publications, and we had the effort of taking an existing publication, migrating it online. Others were starting from scratch, and they’ve all taken various approaches.
But one thing that was so great is that the Getty also funded IMA Labs to create an OSCI toolkit and that’s still available via the Getty’s webpage that will give you a description on the initiative and the OSCI toolkit is built in Drupal, and it’s got a ton of tools in there to allow museums or anyone to produce scholarly content on a collection basis. I personally have not used it, but I know it was modeled largely after the work that IMA Labs had done for the Art Institute in Chicago. That is Drupal-based.
So that’s a great tool to be able to get some of this content up. I would also say I worked on the Leiden Collection scholarly catalog last year. We built that in WordPress, and it was– with a lot of heavy customization, I don’t want to minimize that– but I think that WordPress is a great platform for tailoring that and there are a lot of resources. But the OSCI toolkit is a great one to look at if you want to dip your toe in.
NICK: Yeah, great, thank you, and speaking of WordPress, I noticed that the Journal’s website is built in WordPress as well, so you can do a lot there.
JENNIFER: I think it’s really– there’s a lot more flexibility than what meets the eye. And that’s been really great.
NICK: So you mentioned the peer review happening afterward….
JENNIFER: That’s just my idea.
NICK: Oh!
JENNIFER: That’s my preference.
NICK: What sort of challenges are there then with getting articles peer reviewed when they are sort of evolving? Because, like you said, the publication is not the end, it’s progress. So I originally had two different questions, but I think they relate to each other. Is there a possible credibility issue with certain older generations of researchers, and then on a practical level, how do you update a peer review?
JENNIFER: Sure. That’s a great question, and what that I don’t know that there’s really an answer because there are definitely camps of both parties. I would say, in terms of your question about– I think there’s definitely the older guard of how scholarship is done, is that the way we have always done it is, we write something, we send it out for blind peer review or open peer review, it depends on what is selected. So they review it, we get the information back, we adjust the writing, the scholarship, and then that’s what gets produced.
With digital, the way that I would like to see it, and the way that I think some people do see it, is that I’m going to go ahead and put this up there, and when I get an email from a colleague who I know, and whose opinion I want to measure and integrate that opinion, then it’s a matter of saying, “I’m adding this to a footnote.” It is still peer-reviewed.
In essence, it’s an ongoing peer review because people are writing into you and saying, “You know, I found this piece of information and we found this out,” or you know, a colleague from another department within the same institution can say, “this is what I’ve observed.” And that changed our understanding.
So I think the definition of what “peer review” is, it’s supposed to be a gut check. Right? It’s supposed to make sure your ideas are not too far off base and that they tie back to things we know in the field. But they still pave the way. So what I’m hoping to see, and what you see now more with journals like JHNA, is that they will post if it’s a double-blind peer review, what kind of peer review is given. And if it is something to which it will constantly be added. So separate from the Journal — the Journal is not going to be updated, per se. But whereas a permanent collection in a museum and they have an entry, they can update it at whatever speed they want.
So I think basically noting, this is the version we published on this date, so you can go back. If you’re studying it, you can go back and say, OK, it was peer reviewed on this date, but new information came in and there was a new version put out. So I can then discern what does that mean. Or what does it mean that this person gave an opinion? Does that augment my understanding of what this scholar is saying?
So I think can cut in a really positive way, it’s just the sea change of trying to get people to get comfortable with that. It’s a long arc. We’ll see how it goes.
NICK: That makes sense to me. It’s almost like a book may publish a new edition or something like that, so it’s constantly building on what had come before with the addition of new knowledge.
So in the more traditional model, and I might be showing how little I really know about scholarly research. Rather than this versioning model that you’re talking about, which seems to make total sense, especially given the technology we have these days. Traditionally, would it be that another paper would sort of refute a previous paper, and the new one sort of becomes the truth, or the…?
JENNIFER: That’s exactly right. So the way that it would happen, a book is produced a review of that book is put out and the either agree or disagree, or they agree with some parts but not others, and that is all again part of this canon, this dossier, on the art object, our understanding, or the subject matter.
So I think that’s a lot — in terms of that whole versioning concept, that’s why for scholars, I feel that it is so important to have those versions available. So using permalinks, using perl.org to archive your versions so that you can go back to them, is critical. Because in trying to construct the narrative of what happened when and who said what when, to get you to, OK, so where are we now? Like where is the final word? That’s really helpful to know, and being able to trust that you can go back to it is key. Because that’s the other thing, too. If so-and-so disagreed with the person who wrote the article, and that information is captured in the footnote because so-and-so wrote to me and they disagree, but I happen to think this.
You can actually put that in the text of a footnote. You can make a new version, put that in the text of the footnote, and you’ve done away with the academic arguments that happened on paper in publications. So, I think that’s a real plus.
NICK: I just wanted to ask you about other pluses of digitization on a more sort of practical or formatting basis. So to the reader, what sort of advantages are there consuming this kind of content digitally compared to in print?
JENNIFER: I think that it allows for — at least, for art historians — so I will give you, anecdotally when I was working on the scholarly catalog initiative here at the Gallery, I was working on trying to work through what our technical requirements would be with a number of people. And one of the most annoying things about reading art historical literature in print is that, if there are images to compare, you have to fold the pages. Or if you’re using a computer, you have to bring up multiple browsers to compare the images and it is utterly annoying. But in print, I find it especially super-cumbersome.
Another thing is footnotes. You see a reference that says, “see Wheelock, 1995.” You have to go flip to the back of the book, find whatever they’re talking about. These things, just in terms of reading and not losing the thread of what you’re reading, are ultimately annoying.
But I think that the image comparison is perhaps the most salient. So allowing for scholarly text to be read online where you can do a side by side image comparison right there on the page while you’re reading it is crucial to being able to understand what you’re talking about, what you’re reading, making opinions, etc. So it is the total benefit. I think one of the greatest benefits of putting scholarship online.
Better tools for scholars. And not just for historians, obviously. Having footnotes that expand inline is a thing of beauty. Having links to other rabbit holes that I might want to follow as a scholar. Fantastic, which you can do from the footnotes, obviously.
And I will say this, too. Some people — and I may even be in this camp to some extent — I still like to take my thing away and read it later, per se. Like I might want to read the text on the train, on the plane, without Internet capability. Having something where I can download a PDF and highlight it, and make my own annotations, and work how I want, I think that’s also the great flexibility. You can read it right there on the screen. And there are tools — you can have hypothesis down there, you can start to make annotations, you can add it to your Zotero library. And those area great functions, but you have the flexibility if you want to download it and take it for later and be old school, you can do that, too. So I think it’s a plus.
NICK: Awesome. Was there anything that you had in mind before we started our call that you were hoping would come up, or that you wanted to add to the conversation?
JENNIFER: I think I would only add — I keep coming back to that idea that you had thrown out there. Like museums trying to get their brains around, “how can we move this content out?” And I think the one thing I will say is being able to be flexible about trying new things is one of the hardest things for institutions to take on because it’s a risk. 100% it’s a risk.
But I think that leveraging things that are happening in the field, looking to other disciplines and positioning yourself. Like if you’re thinking, oh maybe we’ll apply some content tags, well maybe you go a step beyond and you say, I’m going to apply controlled vocabulary because that will eventually allow for better connectivity. Not only with my objects but with other institutions’ objects. And not only that but with other disciplines. Because that’s really where the promise lies, and with what new scholarship we can do.
So I’d just say, don’t be fearful museums, just go for it. Just try it out, or find some willing participants to just give it a test run. It could fail, it could also be really awesome.
NICK: That was Jennifer Henel of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art and the National Gallery of Art. I want to thank Jennifer for sharing so much great knowledge and experience about producing Essential Work online.
And I want to thank you for listening. If you’d like to hear more episodes of What’s On, head over to cuberis.com/podcast, and you’ll find all of our back episodes.
If you’d like to join me as a guest on a future episode or know someone our listeners would love to hear from, send me an email. It’s nick@cuberis.com .
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 9: Adrienne Clark of Museum of Pop Culture
Oct 19, 2018
If you’re like Adrienne Clark, you might find that you have more in common with your museum’s audience than not.
Before she was the Museum of Pop Culture’s Content Manager, Adrienne was a member of the museum and a fan of their collections. And because she can empathize with her audience on that level, the MoPOP blog and Instagram feed always feel vibrant and relevant.
I came across the MoPOP blog a few months ago as I was scanning through hundreds of museum websites, and her work immediately stood out to me. Not just because of the subject matter — as you’ll hear, I’m also a fan of the museum’s topics — but because of the content’s voice.
I wanted to know how she developed the voice of the MoPOP blog, so I asked Adrienne to join me for a Skype call.
**FULL TRANSCRIPT**
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On. The Cuberis Podcast. I’m Nick Faber. My guest today is Adrienne Clark, Content Manager at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle.
As someone who produces content for your museum, how often do you think about your audience? It might sound like a trick question, but in my opinion, it should always be the first thing you do as you sit down to write an article, take a photo, or produce a new web page.
If you start out by asking some simple questions — Like, who is this content for? What value do we expect to give them? And how could this shape their experience with our institution? — you can ensure that your website, your blog, or any other digital content you create is making an impact and reinforcing your relationship with your audience.
And if you’re like Adrienne Clark, you might find that you have more in common with your audience than not.
Before she was the Museum of Pop Culture’s Content Manager, Adrienne was a member of the museum and a fan of their collections. And because she can empathize with her audience on that level, the MoPOP blog and Instagram feed always feel vibrant and relevant.
I came across the MoPOP blog a few months ago as I was scanning through hundreds of museum websites, and her work immediately stood out to me. Not just because of the subject matter — as you’ll hear, I’m also a fan of the museum’s topics — but because of the content’s voice.
I wanted to know how she developed the voice of the MoPOP blog, so I asked Adrienne to join me for a Skype call. But first, I’ve never been to her museum, so I wanted to know what I could expect to see if I ever got the chance. And that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation.
ADRIENNE: Well, the first thing you’ll see is a big, colorful kind of crazy-looking building designed by Frank Gehry. It’s right underneath the Space Needle. You can’t really miss it. The monorail, which you probably would have seen swooping through the neighborhood goes straight through the building as well. So that’s the first thing you’re going to see, and you’re gonna go, what is this place?
Inside, you’re going to see exhibits on music — Nirvana, Pearl Jam — exhibits on science fiction and horror film, as well as indie games. And right now we have a huge, massive — our biggest exhibit to date — of Marvel Universe of Super Heros, so a pretty cool addition.
NICK: Awesome. Yeah, I noticed lately that you’ve had a lot more Halloween related content, so I was wondering how much horror is actually on display in the museum. Is that a pretty big part? Is it like film in general, or are you pretty genre-specific?
ADRIENNE: It’s actually one exhibit that focuses on horror. You’re seeing a little bit of my joy of horror as well, I’m a big horror film fan. And every year we do a kind of initiative called “31 Days of Horror”, but we only have four or so events, so the rest of that is filled out with content. It’s our bread and butter this time of year.
NICK: Yeah, it looks that way, I’m a big horror fan, too. I love when October comes around and all the streaming networks start adding more horror films, and so when I was just checking in on your blog, I was like, “Oh, wow, this must be like Christmas for MoPOP to have Halloween!” Cool.
So the reason I reached out to you in the first place was when I work with museums, something that comes up a lot during content strategy planning is this idea of voice. And a lot of times that can be a struggle for a museum to figure out, what is the voice of our institution or our content? And then to keep that consistently from author to author. And so, I noticed that you’re not the sole author of the blog, but that you seem to have most of the posts there… I really like the voice of your writing, and I imagine a lot of that comes from you, but you also work at a really fun place. So I was wondering how much of that is just your own personal flair, or was there some sort of conscious decision of, this is the voice of MoPOP and you should write like this?
ADRIENNE: Well, thank you. It’s a little bit of both. I feel like it would be incredibly big-headed to say, “Oh, it’s all me!” But it is a lot of how I’ve approached writing. But there’s definitely conscious choices made to it. What I like to say when I talk about our content and the way we speak, and my personal rule of thumb working here is that we don’t yuck anyone’s yum. We’re constantly positive — almost a little breathless. We are a fan of fans. So that guiding principle really helps a lot of our writers. In addition, I do copy edit everything that goes on, so there will be times when Sarah — our recent contributor wrote something, and I just — twisting some things around a little bit, putting some adjectives in front of nouns that can keep things seeming consistent.
NICK: I’ve noticed a lot that the most successful communication to fans is to really treat their fandom with respect. I remember, it wasn’t too long ago, kind of pre-internet, where the “Trekky” was a negative stereotype or something, and so it’s cool that you are really celebrating people’s interests. Because you’re the holder of everything they think is cool.
ADRIENNE: Yeah, and you know, we think it’s cool, too. We’re an organization of fans. Like we already said, for me, every day is Halloween. And nobody — well, maybe they think I’m a little crazy. But this is a place where you’re welcome to be a fan —
NICK: That’s awesome.
ADRIENNE: It is awesome.
NICK: What else do you do at MoPOP besides writing in the blog?
ADRIENNE: Sure, I also — well, my title is Content Manager, but I actually also do our social media. So that voice stays consistent across the board, and they really are hand in hand. You can’t do a deep dive into the first Iron Man film in a tweet, but you can pull people into your blog and say, hey, here’s where we’re really talking about this stuff.
So that’s my two balances. So that’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Sometimes also doing some writing for YouTube, etc, but those are my focuses.
NICK: Cool. And as the manager of your social media channels and the content producer for those as well as your blog, what sort of interactions do you get from your readers and your followers on social media? And is there any single piece of content that you’ve put out there that has either done better than you expected or maybe fell flatter that you wished it would have?
ADRIENNE: Oh! Yes, yes, and yes. The great thing about working — we kind of touched on it — in pop culture is your job is to make people happy. It’s the things that you want to see on Facebook, it’s not the darker side that we’re always being reminded of. So it’s a joyful job, and you’re hopefully bringing joy to people. And so it’s often overwhelmingly positive.
The one thing that constantly blows my mind but I don’t know why is Gizmo. Anything Gizmo performs so well — that’s Gizmo from Gremlins —
NICK: Yeah, the Mogwai.
ADRIENNE: Yeah, we have a puppet of him and I just actually did a piece on why he looks the way he does. So, if you’re listening to this, you can go to our Instagram and see a shot of him — or the blog. He looks very surprised. Almost — I don’t want to use the word deceased, so I’ll use the word frozen, and people really don’t understand why and so we get a lot of pictures on Twitter saying, what’s wrong with Gizmo? Why is he so upset? So I thought I would dispell that concern in a post. So I got to tell everyone that that Gizmo puppet is from the very end of the film when he ramps the toy car over the shovel and he surprises himself. So that puppet’s from that one sequence.
NICK: Oh, wow! That’s really cool!
ADRIENNE: Yeah, and I’d been telling people over Twitter because I didn’t want them to be sad for him.
NICK: Oh, yeah!
ADRIENNE: I’ve been telling people over Twitter this story and I finally realized it was time to immortalize it on the blog so I could just pass that to people when they’re concerned for little Gizzy. But that always… People love him, it’s amazing.
NICK: So would you say that part of your strategy is to try to address things that you’re hearing from your followers and readers just to either have a link that you could send next time somebody asks for it, or by getting that feedback you learn that this what people are maybe interested in learning about? How much of your editorial plan draws from your audience and those sort of interactions?
ADRIENNE: I would say quite a bit. I think that, institutionally, is a truth for us. It’s pop culture, right? So we’re not any more of an expert than the fan is. Quite often, the fans know more than we do. And we love that. We’re not trying to tell you, this is how you do it. We’re just showing you the things. So I definitely like to pull from that.
Also, strategically, just looking at the calendar of what’s happening that year, it would be very sill for us to not talk about our Michael Meyers mask, for example, with the new Halloween film coming out next week. People are interested.
So I try to take from what people are talking about and also trying illuminate areas where people wouldn’t know something. Like that puppet, for example.
NICK: So knowing that it’s Halloween and knowing that your audience knows that it’s Halloween, you have a lot of blog posts about the holiday during October. So… how much of that content is also represented in the museum? Are you using examples of movie posters or things that you might have for the post, or are you also just drawing from, more broadly, horror films and Halloween-related stuff?
ADRIENNE: Sure. Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. So, you know, if it’s in the museum, all the better because then I have the curators that I can go and bother with my questions and get quotes from, and use their expertise. But also, more globally we talk about things that aren’t there, as well. But I would say I tend to look into the exhibits for examples because it’s something that we’ve studied and vetted and, you know, I just want to make sure we’re not just saying stuff. You know, there’s enough of that going on in the world.
NICK: Yeah, yeah. For sure. So you mentioned talking to curators or getting input from other staff to vet your ideas or opinions. How much collaboration would you say that you get with the content that you produce?
ADRIENNE: I would say a lot. And I always want more. It is a busy world that we live in, so a lot of times if we want to produce regularly, which I feel very passionate about, I just kind of move forward. But I’m always trying to pull people in, even if it’s just to get their feedback, as opposed to them writing a post. We’re slowly building that out, though. Are curators have contributed, now some of our public engagement producers are contributing this month with their picks for horror movies to watch for the season. We’re actually going to put a guest post on a local con, Geek Girl Con’s, blog, and hopefully, we can get them to bring some of their thought leadership into our blog as well.
We’ve been at this for about a year, actually. It’s a relatively young blog, so we’re still getting our feet underneath us. More community voices is always the way I’d like to go.
NICK: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s great. That’s good to acknowledge ’cause when I was talking about the tone of how you write, but that’s the other thing we really try to encourage museums to do, is think about who works at your museum, or who does your museum represent, and are those perspectives also being represented in the content? So that’s really encouraging to hear.
ADRIENNE: Yeah, precisely, I can be a fan all day, but my experience is unique to being a white woman, and that’s not the only experience out there, so we definitely don’t want just that to come through.
NICK: How you say that your blog, being that it’s only been around for a year, how would you say that it’s connected to the mission and overall goals of the museum? And do you know the origin story of why the museum decided it should have a blog?
ADRIENNE: Sure! Well, our mission — I’m going to read it so I don’t get any words wrong. Because we actually had just revamped it, as you do. Over time, things change. But our mission is to make creative expression a life-changing force by offering experiences that inspire and connect our communities.
And what I really think is important in that mission for the blog, is that last part about connecting our communities. Access is hugely important to us. In fact, we have core values that go along with the mission, and one of those is Open Arms. And that means within the museum, and also outside of the museum. Including people, like yourself, who can’t get to the museum. We want you to come and explore what we have, and get your hands dirty, and play our indie games, and look closely at Steve Ditko’s inking of his original Spiderman comic. We want you to be there, but if you can’t, we also want to be with you. We want you to be able to experience our content wherever you are.
An example of that recently was, we hosted MineCon, which is the Minecraft convention, if you will. But they’re such an incredible company. Instead of placing a steak in the ground and saying, come to us, spend a lot of money for a con. They actually stream their con online and then invite people to have parties at their various buildings.
NICK: Wow.
ADRIENNE: So we hosted one for Seattle. And so I thought, let’s do some Minecraft blog posts. Also, full disclosure, we have a Minecraft realm here. We have people that are that into it. I’m in the realm.
NICK: Nice.
ADRIENNE: We love Minecraft. So there was a lot to pull from. So I thought I would highlight our creations on the blog to show we are hosting this event, and we’re fans of it, bringing that in.
Long story longer, I start putting this out on our various channels, and I get a message from — I think he’s a teenager, I believe — a teenager from Russia. He said, “I love Minecraft. I play it all the time. It’s so cool to see there are grownups playing this in America. And I learned about your museum, and I can’t ever get there…”
Which, I was like, no someday you can get there. Dream it, do.
“…I can’t ever get there but I feel like I’ve been because of this.”
And that was crazy impactful, because that just doesn’t happen. You know, you don’t hear things like that. And that really highlights to me what that aspect of what we’re doing is. And “life-changing” in our mission is… it seems like a very… it’s a stake in the ground, it’s an impact statement. But I like to think of it from everything from maybe he’ll become the next developer, or simply maybe he feels a little more connected. And just by having a new experience, the world has changed.
And that’s how I think that fits into what we’re doing.
NICK: That’s really powerful, and that’s gotta be really affirming to you, too.
ADRIENNE: Yeah.
NICK: For anyone who’s listening to this and are feeling inspired, like, “Oh wow, we should have a blog as well, and we could be reaching somebody in another country who’s interested in what we’ve got going on here,” what have you learned in managing the blog and producing the content? Do you have any sort of advice as far as planning? What would you tell someone who isn’t quite sure that they’re capable of maintaining a blog for their museum?
ADRIENNE: Sure, sure. I think the most important thing before you begin, is take the time note — this is going to sound sort of slimy, I think, but I don’t know another word for it — but take the time to know your angle.
Like I said before, the digital space is incredibly noisy and there’s not enough time for duplication. Buzzfeed took all the simple stuff away. And that’s fine because we don’t need it. That’s cotton candy. We can do more, and we can do better, and we need to be authentic.
So taking the time to figure out what types of work are true to your museum or your organization is the most important thing. And that can evolve, but having some sort of — even if it’s just internal to the content producer or if it’s external to a team — saying, these are the things we do. And that gives you a framework within to play. I think that that’s tremendously important to begin.
And then it’s just rigor and trusting the process because it’s so easy to not produce. It is not an easy thing to — even a short piece takes an incredible amount of time to concept, to outline, to produce, images, sourcing images, all this stuff that most people can push it to the end of the day. Which, don’t do that. Get it done first. You just have to really be strict with yourself.
And that actually is true, too. If you are slipping behind, get in. For me, don’t answer your email. Don’t look at the Facebook questions. Write it first. It won’t take as long as you think it will. And if it is, OK, then fine. OK. Answer those emails so everybody doesn’t hate you. But strike out in that direction that you’re going to finish that first and I think you really will.
NICK: That’s great. And I could probably end the whole episode right there. That’s… I mean, I totally resonate with you about… I don’t think it’s slimy at all. I think that it’s important. It’s your positioning, it’s your niche. What do you have or know that is unique to you, and how can you synthesize that for people who are interested in it, I think is…another way to… I’m just repeating back to you what I heard.
ADRIENNE: I completely agree! It’s all about knowing what you want to say. And of course, having your facts straight, right? Or that’s something that I’m at least very passionate about. I started as a copy editor, so right and wrong or true and false is very important to grammar people like me. And I think that when you’re speaking on behalf of a museum, you’ve got to know what you’re saying. You may not have all the facts, and you still need to produce, well then you don’t talk about that part of it. Or you say, we still need to look at this part of it. But you know, you just don’t want to lead people astray.
NICK: Yeah. Well, is there anything else that you had in mind that you thought maybe you’d like to talk about today that you haven’t had a chance to talk about?
ADRIENNE: Well, I don’t know… I mean, do you ever speak on other… What have you talked to other people about? Do you talk about blogs often, or…?
NICK: My– My sort of interest right now is… The word blog has so many connotations, often negative, because of its origins, because there were kids like me who were just writing about whatever I felt like writing about. But today, the tool of the blog is so powerful and flexible. So it can be a chronological list of articles related to, you know, events at your museum. Or it can be these, like, rich stories that link to other stories or have videos embedded, or have photo galleries, or whatever. So, think that they’re incredibly important.
I’ll share this with you too. So, I did research. I looked at 1300 museum websites, and just — oh, I’m going to get this backwards — but I think just over half of them had blogs. And of those, about a third that had blogs, they were inactive. So that means that somebody thought, “Hey, we should have a blog!”
And actually, this is how I ran into your name, is because I was doing this research and I was trying to take note of the people that I thought were doing it well. And so, all of those inactive blogs to me, it was like a sad story. I could picture the kickoff meeting of like, “All right. We’re gonna have a blog! Here’s what the first ten posts are gonna be!”
And then after those ten posts are done, they don’t know what to write for number 11. Like you said, it’s easier not to write.
And so, in this last article that I just wrote, I was pondering, could that be because of the connotations and like the weight and baggage of the term “blog” or what people think that blogs are? And can we — can museums — I was being a little facetious, but can museums start a revolution where we’re gonna rename this thing we call “blog” and make that word go away but keep the platform.
So I try to make it broad, but I came to you because I was in the middle of thinking about blogs, and…
ADRIENNE: Sure. It’s funny that you say that. It does make me think of something worth championing in this podcast world. You mentioned that a lot of blogs are inactive, and you see like ten posts and then nothing and it’s been years and years.
One of the things, I think, working in content marketing and writing for my time that I have, is that people value the product, but they don’t value the process necessarily. And so, what probably happened there, in a negative, reverse-negative version of what happened here, which I realize I didn’t answer your question about how the blog got started, so I’ll tell that tale in this moment. What probably happened there, is that someone whose job did not include blogging said, we should have a blog. And they did feel passionate about it at some point, or maybe still do, and everyone got really excited, and here’s what we’re going to do, and then go. And there was never space given in that person’s job and time to continue.
And that is something that I see over and over again, and I don’t want to paint it as some sort of negative, evil, “you shouldn’t” like they think it’s bad or whatever. But don’t understand the time it takes or the value it brings.
Now, nonprofits aren’t completely focused on ticket sales and conversion, but there is a focus on, well we have to get these signs written or we’ve got to get the door repainted. There are things that are generally thought of as more immediate. And I just really think it’s important to champion space for creativity and for people to produce these things.
You can’t go — well, you certainly could go wrong — but you can’t go wrong in sharing and spreading your knowledge in that way. But you really have to give people the space and the time for that.
What happened here is that I started at the museum as a copywriter, so that’s why I referenced writing signs. Because I spent a lot of time writing directional signage and other things. And I had always thought — you know, I had been a fan of MoPOP since I moved to this city 10 years ago. I just thought it was the coolest thing and I loved everything about it. So I was even a member of the museum before I was an employee, so I’m a real ride or die fan of the museum. And I’d always wanted more, more, more content from them.
So when I finally got this dream opportunity to work for them, I immediately started putting that out there. And it took a while for the idea to land, as new ideas do. But I really have to give credit to my boss, Ivan. I brought it up to him, and he immediately was like, “Yes, we need this!” And that speaks to his background working with content marketing and understanding its value. And in classic Ivan fashion, he was like, “And we’re gonna do it by the end of next month.” But I really appreciated him pushing me off the cliff like that, after the pain of falling off the cliff. I put a couple casts on my legs and neck brace on and then I was like, “Oh, thank you”. But it was really smart of him to just say, “And we’re going.”
And then he actually moved me into a new position to allow the space needed for doing that work. And that speaks volumes to the focus and the attention. So I think, for all of the people who may listen to this, and are not sure how it might work, give that person the space. Champion them, whoever you want to be in charge of this, and let them fly with it.
NICK: That was Adrienne Clark of the Museum of Pop Culture. I want to thank Adrienne for joining me, and for giving me my new favorite philosophy for content creation: Don’t yuck anyone’s yum.
And I want to thank you for listening. If you want to hear more interviews like this one, head over to cuberis.com/podcast, and you’ll find a full archive of past episodes. You can also find us on iTunes or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.
If you’d like to be a guest on What’s On, or know someone else doing innovative things online for their museum, send me an email. It’s nick@cuberis.com. I’m always looking for great guests.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 8: Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crewe of Carnegie Science Center
Oct 09, 2018
Screengrab from: https://youtu.be/ldqv6Y2myKI
Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crew host Science News and Qs, also known as SNaQ, for the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. They combine their curiosity about science with the intimacy of podcasting to help the Science Center reach people in its own community and around the world.
Each new episode is not only fun and informative, but it also extends the Science Center’s mission to delight — as you’ll hear, they’re definitely delightful — educate — they know what they’re talking about and are great at explaining it — and inspire. And if you’ve ever considered starting a podcast for your museum, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to finally do it.
**FULL TRANSCRIPT**
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On. I’m Nick Faber, Director of Content Strategy at Cuberis. My guests today are Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crewe of the Carnegie Science Center.
If you’re listening to this episode right now, I don’t have to tell you what a podcast is. But I would like to tell you why I like them so much.
I grew up listening to talk radio, and not just for the news. I especially loved the shows where it was just one or two people in a studio, talking about current events, sharing stories from their lives, making jokes. Just… talking. It felt like a constant companion in my life, like a reliable, funny friend, who was always ready to hang out.
When podcasts became more accessible, I started listening to those. And I sought out shows that reminded me of the radio shows that I loved. And the best part was, I didn’t have wait to tune in at a certain time, I could just listen whenever I wanted to.
As podcasting grew in popularity, something really great happened. They started getting really, really specific. Now there are podcasts about board games, podcasts about a single band or movie, podcasts about other podcasts. It seems like there’s a podcast for every niche.
When I work with museums on developing content strategies, one of the exercises we work through is figuring out their unique positioning. Basically, who are you, who do you serve, and what do you do for them? In other words, what’s your niche and what sort of content can you create to own it?
My guests today have become experts at using the intimacy and immediacy of podcasting to help their institution serve its audience of science-curious folks in their own community and around the world. Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crew host Science News and Qs, also known as SNaQ, for the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.
Each new episode is not only fun and informative, but it also extends the Science Center’s mission to delight — as you’ll hear, they’re definitely delightful — educate — they know what they’re talking about and are great at explaining it — and inspire. And if you’ve ever considered starting a podcast for your museum, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to finally do it.
Charissa and Ralph joined me over Skype. I asked them where the idea for SNaQ came from, and that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation.
RALPH: About… what, a year and a half, two years ago, I started talking about doing a podcast. I’m lucky that I get to make new programs at the Science Center. My title is Program Development Coordinator. And I share an office with Charissa. And Charissa and I have been working together for years, and we’ve done live planetarium programs and other things for a long time.
And I just basically– I listen to a ton of podcasts, and thought, why can’t the Science Center have a podcast? So we started working together and brainstorming. We put together a little miniature episode about bees.
CHARISSA: Yes, our two-minute pilot.
RALPH: And showed it to the directors, and were like, hey look, we can make this kind of content and they bought it. And they were like, yeah, let’s do it.
CHARISSA: It stemmed from– There wasn’t anything like this coming from our organization yet, and there wasn’t anything like this coming from our city that we were aware of. And at the Science Center, we like to be that community voice for science, and people come to us and ask us all these questions on a daily basis. So we just wanted to have some kind of answer for that that’s on a regular schedule and something that’s accessible for a lot of people.
NICK: So yeah, can you guys talk a little bit about what you guys do at the Carnegie Science Center and how it might relate to…? Like, why do you guys sit in the same office, for instance? It sounds like you do pretty different things, but it sounds like you do actually work together.
RALPH: Well, why don’t you go ahead, Charissa?
CHARISSA: Yeah, so my title is Producer, so I’m the planetarium producer, and it kind of goes with everyone here. We all wear a billion hats. So mainly I’m 100% planetarium, except for this podcast. So I am in charge of creating shows in the planetarium, I do all of the coding and take care of all of the equipment, so if something breaks I have to fix it. I’m like the tech person in there, I guess, but I also help write shows and present. I present a lot. We also do a lot of stuff in our observatory, so I’m kind of all over the place. Most of the time, I’m behind the scenes, but every so often I’m also out in front giving presentations, doing shows, doing demos in our lobby, whatever the need is that day.
I’ve been in the planetarium for — gosh, this is my ninth year here now. That’s a very long time. So yeah, most of the time I’m behind the scenes, working code, and writing scripts, and stuff like that.
RALPH: Now my role is somewhat in the planetarium as well, which is why we share an office. So I help develop programming, I help run our observatory for a program, which is great. If you’re ever in Pittsburgh, come see SkyWatch. We have telescopes on our roof. So we’ll start out in the planetarium and do a star show, and then go and see the real thing. We have a large research-grade telescope upstairs. A lot of people haven’t been up there and it’s really neat.
But I also do a variety of things. I host the podcast with Charissa, I host a science lecture series, where I get real scientists to come to the Science Center and talk about their work. It’s called Cafe Sci. And that’s a ton of fun. And I do a lot of program development for both the planetarium and for Science on the Road, which is our outreach program. We send science shows to schools and libraries and stuff like that all over the country. We make these big shows. Each show has its own van, and a big stage setup that goes in it, and it goes across the country. The most recent one we put out is Science Takes Flight, which was sponsored by PPG. And that show, I know, has played as far away as Los Angeles. If you’re in Pittsburgh, that’s a long van drive.
CHARISSA: Yeah, they drove the whole way there.
NICK: Wow. That’s dedication. And so, the two of you have been working together for a while, and you had this rapport already, and I think that really comes through in the podcast. Was it a conscious choice, like the format you guys have, of just sort of having a conversation about topics, or has that evolved over time?
CHARISSA: I mean, we kind of went into it from the get-go with a few different goals in mind. We knew we wanted to talk about science news, and we knew we wanted to have certain topics that we would really dive into. And we knew we wanted an interactive element to allow people to reach out to us. We always knew we wanted it to be conversational, because that’s what we do.
RALPH: Yeah, and I think that’s what people respond to the most, too. People can tell when you’re reading a script and it just sounds boring. And I think it’s also evolved a bit. If you listen to our earlier episodes, we’re a little stiffer, a little more like we’re reading news stories. And now we’ve really settled into a groove where we talk about what’s going on in a more– You know, I like to think of it like the listener is a third person in the conversation that’s just not talking very much right now. I find that that’s also fun to make a podcast that way. It just feels natural.
CHARISSA: Yeah, it’s fun, too, because there are some topics that maybe I don’t know as much about, like biology stuff. Because I studied physics and astronomy. So there are genuine times when we’re doing the podcast, when we’re recording that I’m hearing stuff for the first time, and I don’t know as much about the subject, and it’s really exciting because I’m actively learning it along with a listener, who also hasn’t heard about this as much. So it’s a fun kind of– it’s exploratory for both of us, I think. It’s very much a natural conversation.
RALPH: Yeah, and one thing I think we’ve started doing more and more is, we’ll split up the news and I’ll write half the stories and Charissa writes half the stories, and we actually talk about it ahead of time a lot less than we used to. So that I can actually be experiencing the story as Charissa is literally telling it to me. And I’ll be like, wow, that’s neat! And I can ask genuine questions. Like, if you hear one of us interject in a news story and ask a question, that’s a real question that we’re actually curious about.
NICK: When I was hearing you talk about, like Charissa, you might know more about something and Ralph, you’re kind of learning through the episode, how do you guys pick your stories? Do they come from research that comes out of your science center? Or are they things that you just come across that you think are cool? How do you prepare?
RALPH: We just look on the Internet for what’s going on in science. There are various science websites that we’ll check. Honestly, Reddit’s a pretty good goldmine for what’s interesting in science.
CHARISSA: It’s also a really good goldmine for what people want to hear about because it kind of self-selects. The more interesting stories tend to get to the top.
RALPH: Yeah, and the Science Center is a science education resource. We’re not like a university, although we have done tons of work with various universities like Carnegie Melon, and the University of Pittsburgh, but we don’t have a research division here that’s actually doing research. We focus on communication of science more than anything.
But we do get to work with a lot of scientists who do do research. Actually, our natural history division, which is in another museum, they actually have quite a lot of researchers, including some that we visited on the show. If you listen to our fossils episode, that’s in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Bone Rooms. We got to talk to various paleontologists, we got to see dinosaur bones. It was really amazing. Everything on display there is maybe 5% of their collection, and we got to go underneath where they keep the Ark of the Covenent-looking rooms. And see all these amazing dinosaur bones, and even fossil frogs, little things that you wouldn’t even think are that interesting, and they are just totally stunning.
CHARISSA: Yeah, we try to get inspiration from literally everywhere. For the news stories, it can be anything that’s a really big story that maybe everyone has heard, but we still want to talk about it because it’s really important, or maybe it’s a big story that is kind of a niche subject. Like we talked a lot about CRISPR, which is a gene editing tool that not a lot of people know or understand, but it’s still really cool, amazing breaking news science that’s happening.
So we try to span what we’re talking about and I tend to lean more towards the space stuff, so Ralph keeps me in check…
RALPH: Well, I love space, too!
CHARISSA: But we try to keep it across the board. Anything big in science that’s happening.
NICK: Well, I listened to the episode that you put out yesterday, and I think the first story was about octopi taking Ecstacy…
CHARISSA: That was a big story!
RALPH: It was a big story!
NICK: …which is really interesting, but it’s also sort of quirky. Do you find that you tend to look for quirkier things, or do think is science just in its nature a little out there. No pun intended.
RALPH: Absolutely. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Ig Nobel Prize, like there’s a whole bunch of researchers out there who do– I mean, I’ve heard of research on whether or not ponytails look like rabbits to hawks. Which, they do, apparently. So be careful out there.
But yeah, I think anything can be an interesting story and you can have fun with it. Science isn’t just about huge questions, it’s about curiosity in general, which can be like, why is my toenail shaped like that? Or how did the universe start? Or anywhere in between.
CHARISSA: It’s also giving people an understanding of the quirkier stories might spark their interest in a subject that they would not have gone past the front door. Once they understand, hey this weird stuff is happening, what else is happening that I don’t know about?
It also depends on, you know, maybe there’s a week where there’s not really anything funny/quirky going on, there’s just some papers that were released, and these stories, and the cure for this diseases… Every story is important, every story is being reported on for a reason. Whether or not we’re encoding GIFs into DNA, or we’re giving octopi Ecstacy.
RALPH: I also still, I want to know what it was like when the researcher came up with this idea. At one point, there was somebody who was like, you know what we should do? We should give Ecstacy to this octopus here. I mean, how did that happen?
But from there, we learned that the nervous system of an octopus, which is very different than the vertebrate nervous systems that we have, has similar reactions to psychoactive drugs, which is surprising. When we share an ancestor with an octopus, you have to go back…
CHARISSA: 500 million years.
RALPH: Yeah, before vertebrates even existed. I think that tells us an insight into the larger evolution of life on Earth story. We have more in common with an octopus than you might think, and even more than you might realize on the surface. And doing research that, on its surface, might seem silly, like giving a drugs to an octopus, that gives us insights into these bigger interesting stories as well. So you never know.
CHARISSA: Yeah, there’s always more questions behind any quirky story.
NICK: Well, speaking of questions, that’s a big part of your show, is taking listener questions…
RALPH: Yeah, so we get questions in a variety of ways. People can call in, people can email. One of my favorite ways that we’ve gotten questions is, sometimes Charissa and I will be out in the Science Center live, and people will just walk up, and we’ll record questions that way.
We also recorded questions at a bar nearby, just from random people, and I think it’s really fascinating to see the curiousity that people have and get a chance to ask a science question. Also, it’s interesting: A lot of people, they say I have tons of questions but I just can’t think of any right now! It’s funny to see how I have to draw curiousity out of them.
CHARISSA: But once you do, they can’t stop asking questions.
NICK: Cool. Can you remember any favorite questions that have come up?
RALPH: Well, one that was asked on our most recent show was a question about why, if we’re inside the Milky Way, why do we see it the way it looks in the sky? It’s the object that looks like it’s beyond us, it looks like this stripe across the sky, but why if we’re inside it, why is it like that? I thought that, on its face it’s a simple question, but it opens up this whole contemplation about the way galaxies are shaped and what it’s like to observe a structure that you’re within. From the plane of our solar system out to the Milky Way, and I thought that was really thought-provoking from just a simple question. Getting to think about the density of stars in the galaxy. Once stars are far enough away, they start to blend into that milky patch, and there’s just a whole lot more of them in that direction. But we’re within something that would look like that from far away. It’s just that the stars in the neighborhood are far apart. I don’t know, it’s just really fascinating to start thinking about stuff like that.
Also, I really enjoy astronomy and seeing the Milky Way. I don’t know if you’ve ever been able to get to a dark sky area where you can see it. That’s a really special experience, and I encourage our listeners and anybody to get a chance to go see. Because it’s beautiful, it’s really special.
NICK: So, when you take people on top of the building to look through your telescopes, you’re in a city…
RALPH: Yeah, a very light-polluted area.
NICK: Yeah, so does that mean that the experience is somehow less when you’re in a city or can a telescope somehow see beyond the light pollution?
CHARISSA: As far as what we can do here, I don’t think it lessens the experience. I think people understand that you’re in a city. But we still can see a lot, and there’s still a lot you can see with a telescope from here. With our telescopes, even as close to the city as we are, we’re still able to see a ton of dark sky objects. We’re able to look at the Orion nebula, we’re able to look at the Andromeda galaxy. And these are things that people would not see if they don’t have a telescope at home, they wouldn’t have access to that type of thing. So even with our light-polluted sky, we’re still able to give people that opportunity to see things they normally wouldn’t. Obviously, the light pollution doesn’t help, but we can still see…
RALPH: There are objects that are too dim to observe in our light-polluted skies…
CHARISSA: But we can still see a lot.
RALPH: Many of the most exciting things, like the rings of Saturn, or the moons of Jupiter, are things that are actually quite bright and easy to observe in the city. A telescope is very valuable, even in a light-polluted area, because not all celestial targets are extremely dim. Some are. So like that Whirlpool Galaxy, we’ll never get from the roof of the Science Center. We would if we were out in the middle of nowhere. Our telescopes do go out on the road sometimes, so we have been to do that.
When you come to the Science Center, you get to see a really high resolution, large, beautiful telescope take a look at Saturn. It’s pretty special stuff. I’ve seen a lot of people’s jaw drop when they look at it. Saturn, in particular, changes people’s lives when they look at it, and the view of that from the Science Center is great.
CHARISSA: I think it just comes down to, the main point of Skywatch is just to give people that first-hand experience with the universe — sorry I keep sounding like a bumper sticker. It’s a matter of, you can read about how you can see Mars in the sky, but going somewhere and meeting someone who has studied the stuff, knows the stuff, and says, yes that is a planet, people’s minds are blown. We are bridging that gap for them and really helping them connect with it in a personal way. It’s really similar, I guess, to what we do with the podcast. It’s just trying to connect with as many people as we possibly can and making them feel welcome to it.
NICK: Yeah, I was just thinking that. The way you were describing the experience of Skywatch sounds very much like what you do with SNaQ. So this is probably, at this pont, a bit of a softball question, but how would you say that the podcast helps support and extend the mission of the Science Center?
RALPH: Well, it does certain things really well, like it does science news, right? One of the things that the Science Center is amazing at is exhibits, but we can’t build a new exhibit gallery every time a piece of news comes out. And we can make a new episode of a podcast. And that, I think, is really awesome, this abilility to have cutting edge science content all the time. We are always within two weeks of the news of science. And it’s often the day of. Some of the stories we report are hours old. And that’s really cool, and also the Science Center can go beyond — you, it’s the 21st Century — we can expand beyond just our walls.
We are a huge, established brick and mortar institution, but we’re also more than that. And people experience the world digitally so much now. And a podcast like SNaQ is a great opportunity, and it’s also something like– we’re a nonprofit, our budget is somewhat limited at times, but we’re doing well. But we can make tons of content with relatively little investment with a podcast. And that’s been really satisfying. If we were making videos, we would only be able to make a tiny fraction of what we make with the show.
CHARISSA: And also, the Science Center itself, we really try to establish ourself as a community square. People from all over can come to us for reliable information and that happens all the time. If there’s a breaking news story, you’ll probably see one of us on the news. Quite frequently we do stuff with news stations, so people come to us for reliable information, so having this podcast is kind of a way to spread that beyond maybe our local area.
RALPH: Right. We’ve been downloaded in, I think, 50 different countries.
CHARISSA: It has a good reach, but still helps establish the Science Center as, you know, this is a place you can come to if you have questions about anything or if you want to hear what’s going on in science lately, I know where I’m gonna turn. So we just wanted to continue being a reliable source for that.
RALPH: Yeah, and I also think that that expands our audience. As Charissa was mentioning earlier, we see a lot of families here, which is awesome, but sometimes young adults might feel like maybe this isn’t the place for them. And that’s just not right. There is a ton of stuff here that’s great for them. And podcasts, I find… Our podcast is for everybody, but it’s something that I know a lot of professionals listen to on their way to work, or sitting on the bus on your way to CMU or Pitt here in Pittsburgh, you listen to podcasts. And so we’re able to reach an audience that maybe wouldn’t, at least not at first, walk in our front door.
NICK: That’s awesome, guys. So, was there anything else that, before we started talking, you were thinking would be nice to share?
RALPH: Well, I would just like to encourage anyone who’s listening to your show to also maybe consider listening to our show, of course. And also encourage people to call or ask questions. If you’re feeling curious, but you’re nervous, send us an email, ask a question, and participate.
CHARISSA: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be a phone call.
RALPH: I don’t know, I just encourage people to keep on talking to us because we like talking to them, and we’re having a lot of fun doing it.
CHARISSA: And stay hungry for science.
RALPH: Yeah, and stay hungry for science.
NICK: And get ready for a SNaQ.
RALPH: That’s right.
NICK: That was Charissa Sedor and Ralph Crew of the Carnegie Science Center. You can find Science News and Qs or SNaQ (S-N-A-Q) on iTunes, or any of your favorite podcast services. Or you can just go to sciencenewsandqs.com, where they’ve made it really easy to find.
I want to thank Charissa and Ralph for joining me today, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. If you’d like to be a guest on my show or know someone who would be perfect, feel free to send me an email. It’s nick@cuberis.com. Also, if you want to find the full archives of this show, go to Cuberis.com and click “What’s On.”
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 7: Katharine Uhrich of Field Museum
Aug 09, 2018
My guest today is Katharine Uhrich from The Field Museum, and we’re talking about social media. Social media has become a standard part of most marketing and communications strategies, but just showing up on Twitter isn’t enough to keep potential visitors engaged. The best accounts to follow don’t just interact with their followers, they regularly provide entertainment, information, and something of value in every post.
Katharine is the social media manager at Chicago’s Field Museum. Day in and out, the Field’s social media feeds are filled with high-quality updates from its collection, its researchers, and its visitors and fans. And sometimes with a little help from its Twitter-famous T .rex, SUE. I wanted to know how Katharine manages this vibrant presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, in a way that isn’t just engaging but also aligned with her museum’s mission. So I invited her to join me on the podcast.
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On. The Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber. My guest today is Katharine Uhrich from The Field Museum, and we’re talking about social media.
You know, maybe I’m stating the obvious here, but, in some ways, social media has become the 21st century equivalent of fan mail. Think about Twitter, for instance. Celebrities are more accessible than ever. Unlike the old days where you had to find an address in a magazine and hope your favorite pop star or actor gets your letter, and then really hope you hear back from them, today, there’s a pretty good chance that you can have a real-time interaction with them.
And furthermore, social media has made celebrities out of people, places, and inanimate objects who would have been harder to reach in whatever niche they occupy.
Now you can tweet at an airline. Or a baseball team. Or a dinosaur.
But accessibility does not a Twitter follower make. The best accounts to follow don’t just interact with their fans, they regularly provide entertainment, information, something of value in every post.
Katharine Uhrich is the social media manager at Chicago’s Field Museum. Day in and out, the Field social media feeds are filled with high-quality updates from its collection, its researchers, and its visitors and fans. And sometimes with a little help from its Twitter-famous T .rex, SUE. I wanted to know how Katharine manages this vibrant presence in a way that isn’t just engaging, but also aligned with her museum’s mission, so I invited her to join me over Skype.
Here’s Katharine.
KATHARINE: We try to be very friendly and welcoming, obviously inclusive and respectful. And sort of generally be seen as an authority, but not authoritative. We also try to be clever and fun, you know. Talk like a real person to real people. And a lot of that voice comes directly from our mission and our brand. So I think social’s a great opportunity for us to be an extension of that, and to be the living personality of the brand and mission online.
And, obviously, depending on the platform, the voice expresses itself in different ways. For instance, on Facebook, I’d say we’re a little bit more formal and by the book. Whereas, obviously, on Twitter, you can have a lot more fun. The pace is more rapid. There’s more opportunity for witty banter and whatnot.
NICK: And emojis.
KATHARINE: Yes, and many emojis.
NICK: And so, the SUE account does use a lot of animated GIFs and emoji, and makes a lot of jokes and is sort of irreverent. Would you say that, as the Field social media manager, that you’re taking any kind of cues from that, as far as what people respond to? Or is the SUE account helping to influence what you do as far as that kind of friendly voice and the style of emoji and banter and stuff?
KATHARINE: Yeah, absolutely. I think the SUE account and the main accounts are really great foils for each other and they each allow the other to do something sort of unique. For us, it’s a great opportunity and asset that we have both to use and play off of each other. I think of SUE — SUE is a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex that’s 67 million years old, so the personality is as such on Twitter. They’re sarcastic and sassy, and they do a lot of things that the main account would never touch. And I think that’s great, but we’re able to have this kind of caretaker-kid relationship that’s sort of fun at times and allows the museum to step into an area that it might not normally go.
For instance, I remember a moment when SUE was mentioning that they wanted an otter from the Shedd Aquarium, and the museum was able to step in and say, “Well, until you prove to us that you can be responsible for cleaning the Tsavo Lions’ litter box, we’re gonna have to wait and see.”
And opportunities like that show a little more clever side or humane side of the museum, and I think that comes across a lot more and a lot better when you’re in conversation with someone else and not just trying to create that in your own feed.
And I think SUE is sort like that high school student, that cool kid. Not the popular kid, but the kid that really was into things because they were just cool. They just had a passion about them. So SUE brings in so many people that might not necessarily think of themselves as museum lovers. And that’s so awesome because maybe they find SUE, maybe they find us, maybe they don’t find us, but at the end of the day, both the SUE account and the main account are trying to educate and spread this love of natural history to our followers. And so I think they take two very different approaches but at the end of the day the end up at the same spot.
NICK: That’s cool! And we’re mostly talking about the Twitter accounts here, but as the social media manager, what other channels do you manage, and what other channels is Field on in general? And in the questions I sent over to you, I did mention the Shark Week quiz on BuzzFeed. Are there any other channels that we might be surprised to find a museum on?
KATHARINE: Yeah, the Buzzfeed was done — I actually started in December, and that was done before I came on, and I think pretty much anyone can go onto BuzzFeed. It’s kind of like a fun little thing they’ve got set up where anyone can create a quiz. So we just used that functionality to create that and link to it during Shark Week. But we are — the Field is on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Those are our main accounts. We do have a Snapchat account that, for instance, with our current exhibition Antarctic Dinosaurs we have a filter up there that people, when they’re in the museum, that filter will pop up and they can use it. But we don’t do too much on Snapchat because, essentially, as the social media manager I’m responsible for strategizing, executing, gathering content, reporting, all of that. And I also work very closely with Caitlin Kearney, who’s our digital content and engagement manager. So we’re essentially one and a quarter or one and a half people who manage the social media for, you know, one of the world’s largest natural history museums. So I think we’re really in a place where we feel like it’s a quality over quantity game for us. And we would rather be in fewer places, having more sound strategy, and putting better content out there than trying to spread across so many different platforms.
And of late, I don’t think we’re really on any non-traditional channels, or anywhere that would be especially surprising, but we are trying to really dig into the functionality of these various social media platforms. For instance, creating content for IGTV. On Instagram, doing more with the stories there. We are trying to really up our game with Facebook live.
So it’s sort of like, there’s so much that is constantly evolving and changing with each one of these platforms on their own, that I feel like you can do a lot without being on a lot of channels.
NICK: Yeah, so, how do you decide which channels to focus on? Do you get feedback from your audience and say, oh, we get more traction on Instagram so we should be putting more of our energy into there? With so many options, how do you choose?
KATHARINE: I think for us right now, we found that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all very deserving of our attention. Each one has a slightly different audience, has a slightly different voice. So it really is great if we can be on all of those. And, I think we really let the platform dictate what kind of content we put there.
So, obviously, if we have really visually striking and gorgeous images, those would go on Instagram and be talked about in a little bit different way than if we, you know, have a cool photo from the archive that might be of lesser quality, but still has a really interesting story behind it, where that might go on Facebook or Twitter.
NICK: So how much planning do you do in advance for your content, and how much of it is spontaneous? Because I know social media is by its nature is supposed to be spontaneous, and in the moment, but when you have so many channels to manage and you’re essentially doing it by yourself or with half of another person’s time, how much planning do you need to put into it?
KATHARINE: We put a lot of planning into it. Airtable is the main tool that we use for our editorial calendar, and it is basically our bible. If you’re not on our team and you look at it, I think it’s like walking into a garage where a serial killer is — it’s kind of terrifying. But it allows us to do what we do, really, because I don’t know how we would manage the breadth of content that we have across the museum.
The museum has over 500 employees. 150 of those staff members are active scientists doing research on all seven continents. So, not only are we talking about the museum’s exhibitions and events, and one-off initiatives, but we’re also talking about our scientists’ research, their published papers, we’re trying to highlight our collections, go behind the scenes, and of course, try to do the fun social media holidays and recurring events. So to keep all of that organized, and especially to keep that prioritized, and know when it’s most important to talk about what, we have to be planning certainly days, and oftentimes weeks and months in advance. So, yes.
NICK: It’s interesting because you just mentioned so many different sources of potential content, and one of the questions I was gonna ask you was, I speak with a lot of people from art museums and, you know, they’ve got their digitized collections, and so that is sort of automatically a content source that they could just post lovely images all the time every day. And I was gonna ask if not having an analog to that is some sort of disadvantage, but it sounds like there’s always plenty to talk about.
KATHARINE: Yeah, it’s funny, I feel like we have infinite content in a way. But just because you have infinite things to talk about, doesn’t always necessarily mean you always have a great thing to link to or a wonderful image to accompany it. So yeah, it can be a bit of a challenge, but we were lucky to have, in addition to our staff photographer, we have a lot of great photographers and storytellers on staff so that if someone’s going out into the field, they might be able to grab photos for us and write back. And we’re trying to do a lot more of that, to highlight that scientific research that our institution does.
But I would say, in general, we do have a photo archive and digitized collections, and probably about 20% of our content and our images comes from those sources. The sort of staff photography or behind-the-scenes photos that we post, about 20% comes from the staff, and then myself and my colleague Caitlin, we create about 50% of the content that goes up. And then about 10% of it, we’re sharing out user-generated content.
NICK: OK.
KATHARINE: So those are our four main sources.
NICK: So for that 20% that comes from museum staff, do you have pipelines? Are there certain people that sit in different departments that know to send stuff over to you? Or that you know to tap for content? And also, I meant to ask, what department do you and Caitlin sit in?
KATHARINE: We’re in the digital communications department. So Caitlin handles the blog and a lot of the content that goes on our website. I’m the social media manager, and then our other three colleagues work fully on the website and the development of the site. We’re the digital communications team and we sit under the marketing department.
NICK: OK.
KATHARINE: Yeah, to get back to your question about how we get the staff photography, we do have… I mean, I think so much of social media — doing it successfully — is building those relationships within your organization or within your institution and knowing who you can tap for great stories, great photography because so many people have great skills in those areas.
So, we definitely know that, for instance, when Lesley de Souza goes down to Colombia, that she’s going to be taking amazing pictures. Or, when Adrienne goes to Wyoming for Stones and Bones, we can count on some cool pictures there.
And then, in addition to that, we have our staff photographer who’s always taking really great pictures from exhibitions and around the building. We have a staff member in the division of insects who takes amazing pictures of the collection. So, yeah, I think if you can, and we sort of think of our staff as other followers that we might approach to say, “Hey, you took this really cool picture. Do you mind if we use it and share it?”
NICK: I wanted to take it back to something you were talking about in the beginning of our conversation, which was that the voice of your social media accounts is informed by the mission of the museum, and the voice of the museum. The Field Museum recently went through some rebranding, including a brand new website and a new logo. Would you say that that rebranding had any sort of impact on the way that you view the voice of the institution and the work that you do? Was there any sort of, like, “Oh, regrouping. Now we’re a little more focused in this direction”? Or, do you think that maybe the rebranding or the new website was almost solidifying or reinforcing what was already the brand of Field Museum?
KATHARINE: The museum rebranded in March, and I don’t think we were changing anything about who we are, we were just changing how we presented that and how we speak about ourselves. And so, similarly, it didn’t really change what we talk about on social media, it just really helped solidify that voice and be really consistent no matter what channel we’re talking about ourselves on. Whether, that’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and then even beyond, in our out of home advertising that our marketing department is doing, in our press releases that PR is sending out, in our newsletters. I don’t think the substance change, it was just a really great opportunity for us to hone that voice and present it consistently across everything from our social channels to our website to our membership communications, and just remind people that not only are we this 125-year-old museum with almost 40 million objects and specimens in its collection, but we are out there doing scientific research on all seven continents every day, making scientific discoveries and enabling solutions for a better future.
NICK: Would you say that you have something that you would point to as, this our social media strategy, and what is the relationship of that to the mission of the Field Museum?
KATHARINE: I think, to boil it down quite simply, our strategy in social media is to tell the stories of the museum and bring the museum to the people who aren’t there in person. And those people may end up becoming visitors, or they may never come, but regardless, we are bringing education of the natural world to them and I hope that that sort of influences, or inspires or sparks some curiosity in some way.
And I guess that ties back to the museum’s mission, which is, as mission statement go very abstract and broad, but it’s something about ‘fueling a journey to enable solutions for a future rich in nature and culture’. And so, I guess on social we’re really trying to highlight how rich our world is and everything we do is a great example of that. We want to help encourage attendance and drive revenue, and all of those things, but at the end of the day we feel like our efforts are a success if we can spark that curiosity and foster that love of the natural world.
NICK: Awesome. Social media has become a pretty normal channel to communicate through, but I think institutions still have trouble figuring out, ‘Well, what am I supposed to tweet?’ Or, ‘How do I get followers?’ Things like that. So, do you have any advice for someone who’s still trying to crack the social media nut for their museum?
KATHARINE: I think you’re right. You know, the landscape has changed so much. In some ways, I feel like social media is almost under scrutiny now. And it’s such a key piece of the communications and marketing strategy, so it can get really easy to get hung up on what’s right. And absolutely there are best practices, and there are things you should absolutely not do. You know, you cannot be hateful and illicit, but in general, I think it’s a little freeing if you can know that it’s not all going to be perfect. Especially know that you can not do it all — that is a hard thing for me to remember. It’s constantly changing and evolving and you’re not going to be able to be on all the platforms and use all the functionality, but if you can know that it really frees you up to have fun and be human.
You know, I think being a social media manager at a natural history museum is one of the coolest jobs a person can have. And if you can just sort of give yourself permission to show your institution and why you love it, and why it’s exciting to you, I think that goes a long way to creating a great presence online.
NICK: That was Katharine Urich from the Field Museum. I want to thank Katharine for talking with me and sharing such great insights. And I want to thank you for listening.
If you want to hear more interviews like this one, head over to Cuberis.com and click “What’s On”, where you’ll also find our ebook, “The Art of Storytelling.”
If you have a story that you’d like to share with other museum professionals, I’d love to have you on as a future guest. You can reach me at nick@cuberis.com.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 6: Tess Colwell of Brooklyn Historical Society
Jul 16, 2018
If you’ve ever managed a museum blog, there’s a pretty good chance that you started off with a lot of steam, publishing two or three posts a week. But over time, your output slowed to a trickle, and you were happy if you were publishing one post a month. Or quarter. Without a good plan in place, you might run out of ideas or worse, fall victim to the dreaded choice paralysis.
With so many great stories at your fingertips, it helps to have creative parameters to make sure you’re telling the right one at. One way to create guardrails on your blog is with recurring features. Think “Curator’s Corner”, or “Artist Profiles”, or, in the case of the Brooklyn Historical Society, “Photo of the Week.”
As Digital Projects Archivist at Brooklyn Historical Society, Tess Colwell oversees major grant projects, provides assets for researchers, and spends a lot of time processing BHS’s collections, particularly the photos. Sometimes she comes across a photo that could bring light to a collection, or provide historical context for a current event.
With Photo of the Week, Tess and her colleagues have developed a popular platform for illuminating hidden treasures of Brooklyn Historical Society’s vast collections and expanding the institution’s reach.
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s on. I’m Nick Faber, director of content strategy at Cuberis. My guest today is Tess Colwell of the Brooklyn Historical Society, and we’ll be talking about the “Photo of the Week” feature in the BHS blog.
One of the biggest content challenges for museums is the blog. Some museums don’t think they need one, and those who do, don’t always know how to keep it going or even relevant.
If you’ve ever managed a blog, there’s a pretty good chance that you started off with a lot of steam, publishing two or three posts a week. But over time, your output slowed to a trickle, and you were happy if you were publishing one post a month. Or quarter. Without a good plan in place, you might run out of ideas or worse, fall victim to the dreaded choice paralysis.
With so many great stories at your fingertips, it helps to have creative parameters to make sure you’re telling the right story at the right time. One way to create guardrails on your blog is with recurring features. Think “Curator’s Corner”, or “Artist Profiles”, or, in the case of the Brooklyn Historical Society, “Photo of the Week.”
As Digital Projects Archivist at Brooklyn Historical Society, Tess Colwell oversees major grant projects, provides assets for researchers, and spends a lot of time processing BHS’s collections, particularly the photos. Sometimes she comes across a photo that could bring light to a collection, or provide historical context to a current event.
With Photo of the Week, Tess and her colleagues have developed a popular platform for illuminating hidden treasures of Brooklyn Historical Society’s vast collections and expanding the institution’s reach.
I wanted to know the origin story of Photo of the Week, and how Tess knows which photos to share every week, so we talked over Skype
TESS: Photo of the Week is an interesting story. It started before I came to BHS. From what I understand from colleagues, the Fort Greene Patch, which was a local blog, they approached someone from our communications team about creating a Photo of the Week for their website with the intent that the photos would be highlighting the neighborhood of Fort Greene.
And we embraced the idea, and we dedicated one post per month to Fort Greene. And then we posted all those posts to our blog as well. And then other neighborhood blogs contacted us as well, but it didn’t really catch on. And then, ultimately the For Greene Patch fell off the radar, but we continued the posts and then actually started it as a weekly installment.
They publish every Wednesday, and then they’re sent out in the newsletter on Thursday.
NICK: Awesome. So how do you decide which photos make it into the blog today, if it’s not necessarily neighborhood-centric?
TESS: There’s not really one specific way that we determine what’s going to be published on Photo of the Week. I would say that my starting place is always looking at our historic anniversaries document that was created by our public history department. So when I’m thinking about what’s going to get posted the following week, that’s always the first place I look to determine if there are any key anniversaries or events that I should highlight.
Also, our collections support projects that are throughout the institution, so I also try to use it as a way to promote what’s going on throughout the institution. Our exhibitions, educational curriculums, public programs, but I will say that I do have a lot of flexibility when it comes to what I post. Sometimes it’s about a new acquisition that I think would be really beneficial for researchers, or I use it as an opportunity to educate the public about photographic formats, which is something that I’m personally really interested in. Or as a way to connect our collection with other Brooklyn repositories that I feel maybe have some complimentary collections.
I’m an avid reader of the news, especially local news, and I also like to use local Brooklyn news as inspiration to connect past photographs with current events. But I would say, really, the possibilities are endless. We’re on a schedule, so every week I create a draft of a post and then I send it to our Director of Public History and then the managing director of library and archives, and they both review it just to ensure it’s historically accurate or it’s the voice of our institution. And also to catch any grammatical or spelling errors. There have been times when I have submitted a draft, and the Director of Public History will say, “Hey I think it would be a really good idea to highlight what we’re doing over here this week, so maybe you can push this post to the following week…” I also get recommendations from my colleagues in other departments, if there’s something that maybe they stumbled upon in their own research. I would say it’s pretty collaborative but I have a lot of flexibility.
And photography is a personal passion of mine, so I find it really fun to uncover collections that don’t get the attention that I think they deserve.
NICK: The reason I was asking about planning and how you choose which objects is that so many different institutions, like BHS or museums, have so many objects with so many stories that they run into this thing I call “Choice Paralysis.” It’s like, “I can write anything about anything, so where do I start?” So it sounds like between the historical dates that you’re tying it to, or the news and just the things that you come across, that that’s enough of guardrails to always have something to react to and not just be sitting in front of an open WordPress screen going, “Uh… what do I write today?”
TESS: Absolutely. And the goal is really to increase access to our collections and highlight new acquisitions, and also just highlight collections that maybe people don’t know about. So I really try to think about that when I decide which image I’m going to highlight for that week, but I try not to be repetitive. We have a really robust, dynamic photography collection here at BHS. And there’s just so much to work with. I feel like it’s a real gift to be able to share that with the public every week.
NICK: So who do you consider your audience? Who are you thinking of when you’re trying to figure out which objects or which photos to feature?
TESS: You know, I would say that I’m definitely thinking about researchers, but also the general public. I try to tie in research guides that we have to assist researchers in housing research, or genealogy, which is another really popular topic here. But also I just want to get people, even the general public, interested in what we have in our photography collections.
NICK: So when you say general public, does that specifically mean people with connections to Brooklyn?
TESS: Yeah, you know, I would say a lot of the subscribers to the newsletter, who I believe is how most people get acquainted with the Photo of the Week. I would say most of the people who receive the newsletter have some connection to Brooklyn. They either live her now, or they formerly lived here, they have relatives here… but our newsletter definitely reaches beyond that as well. But I would say probably the majority have some sort of connection to Brooklyn.
And so, when I’m thinking about writing the photo of the week, I’m certainly thinking about researchers, like I said, but also how I can help increase access to our collections, and highlight new collections, and connect to people who might not physically come to BHS but can draw some sort of connection to the work we’re doing here.
I think one of the most gratifying aspects of writing this weekly post is the email responses I get to the posts. We have a really lovely collection — It’s called the John Morrell collection. He was a former librarian here at BHS and he would take street photographs in nearly every single neighborhood in Brooklyn, so it’s a very well-documented collection. And as a librarian, he also added really rich metadata. And he took these photographs between the 1950s and 1960s, so I find I get a lot of response from people who formerly lived in Brooklyn. They feel some nostalgia and reflection when they see photographs of Brooklyn that they know from that period of time. It’s really exciting to receive those kinds of responses.
And, you know, also I get a lot of research requests directly through the posts. So people might see that we highlighted a specific collection and maybe want to learn more. So it’s always nice to get those types of responses where I can lead people to other resources or give them the opportunity to explore more from that collection.
NICK: That’s really awesome to hear. I think a lot of times, people when they’re creating blog posts, or social media, or other types of content, you can kind of lose track that there are people on the other side. And it sounds like your audience is not just really interested in what you’re looking at, but they’re hungry for more and they actually feel a connection to your institution in such a way that they can reach out to you and put in research requests, or dive deeper into your collections. So, that’s awesome. It sounds like, if that was a goal of Photo of the Week, it sounds like you’re definitely reaching it.
TESS: Yeah, and it’s really exciting to think… I’ve only been writing the Photo of the Week for about four years, but it started several years before I came here. And it’s really neat to see how it’s evolved and we’re in the process right now of building our new institution website. And it’s neat see that Photo of the Week is going to play a larger part than it has now. Right now, it’s just posted on our WordPress blog but we’ve been part of a conversation where Photo of the Week is going to play a prominent part on our website. So it’s really exciting to see how it’s evolved. And that’s really from the public’s interest in those weekly posts, so it’s really exciting to see that.
NICK: How cool. Well, I think that that’s great inspiration for people who are thinking about starting a blog or have one and they aren’t really sure how to use it. With that in mind, is there anything that you’ve learned over the course of doing Photo of the Week that you could give to other museum or archives professionals for creating a sustainable content plan to both further of the mission of their institution, but also one that’s sustainable and they can keep going as long this one’s been going?
TESS: I think for us, consistency has certainly been key to building an audience. We have a really set weekly schedule for creating content, and then reviewing that content and publishing, and I don’t think we could have kept it up without having some sort of set schedule like that. Also, we’re lucky that we have tons of support from our communications team. And they push out the content to our various social media platforms and through the newsletter. So think the consistency and also the support of social media has really helped to bring Photo of the Week to where it is today.
NICK: Great. Is there anything else you would want to add that we didn’t get to?
TESS: Something else I just want to add while I’m thinking about it is, I think one of the best parts for me in writing the Photo of the Week is learning more context about our collections and about the history of Brooklyn. For some posts, I really do some serious research. And that helps, not only to better inform the public but to enhance our collections. Some of this research that I do for our photographic collections, that goes back into our records to enhance our records, and make them more accessible, and to assist with research.
So that’s been an unexpected aspect for me. We have a pretty set format for how the posts are laid out, but other than that, I think before they weren’t always super historical, necessarily, or super news-related, but I think that just has to do with some of my own personal influence.
I really love learning about Brooklyn History, and it’s really nice that I have the opportunity to work with our Director of Public History and she can add details to that, or maybe correct some of the information that I find elsewhere. She really provides a new perspective on our collections as well.
NICK: That was Tess Colwell of the Brooklyn Historical Society. I want to thank Tess for talking with me about Photo of the Week, which you can find at brooklynhistory.org/blog/. And I want to thank you for listening.
If you’d like to be a guest on What’s On or know someone doing something cool for their institution, send me an email. It’s nick@cuberis.com.
To find more episodes or subscribe to What’s On, head over to cuberis.com and click “What’s On.” Or look for us on iTunes.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 5: Tricia Robson and Emily Jennings of FAMSF
Jun 21, 2018
Tricia Robson is the Director of Digital Strategy and Emily Jennings is the Associate Director of Education, School, and Family Programs at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In this episode of What’s On, we’re talking about the FAMSF’s Digital Stories platform.
Tricia Robson – Director of Digital StrategyEmily Jennings – Associate Director of Education, School, and Family Programs
If you work in the museum industry, there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of their digital stories. Maybe it was de Young’s Teotihuacan story or the Legion of Honor’s Degas story. These long-form narrative pieces, supplemented with rich media elements, tell the stories of these exhibitions in immersive and captivating ways. And like many people who have interacted with these stories, you may have wondered, how could my institution do something like this?
I spoke with two of the people behind the digital stories to learn more about the collaboration, planning, and production that goes into making this platform a success. We start by discussing the backstory of the project, and how it sprang from a surprising inspiration: sports fandom.
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On: The Cuberis Podcast. I’m Nick Faber. My guests today are Tricia Robson and Emily Jennings of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: FAMSF. And we’re going to be talking about their Digital Stories platform.
But first, I’d like to tell you a story of my own.
When I was a kid, I was really into sports. And like anyone with a passion, I wanted to soak up as much information about the teams and players as I could — stats, bios, logos, and uniforms. I collected the trading cards and figurines, I played video games, wore t-shirts, and I watched whatever games were aired in my local market.
But the funny thing is, even though I grew up near Washington, DC, my favorite baseball and football teams were both in Minnesota. I loved the Twins because, even though I had never seen him swing a bat, I thought Kirby Puckett was cool. I got into the Vikings because I liked their uniforms. And because I had the cards and the games, I could learn the names of everyone on their roster, their strengths and weaknesses, their backstories.
So when the Vikings came to Washington during the 1989 preseason, I wanted desperately to go, and my dad took me. Even though it was an exhibition game, just being at the same stadium with this team that I adored, made it an unforgettable experience. And because I already knew who all the players were, their skills and specialties, I didn’t have to be distracted by leafing through the program or squinting to read the players’ names on their jerseys. I could just be present, and root, root, root for the visiting team.
As you’ll hear in my conversation today, a cross-departmental team at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have set out to create a similar experience for visitors to their exhibitions.
If you work in the museum industry, there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of their digital stories. Maybe it was de Young’s Teotihuacan story or the Legion of Honor’s Degas story. These long-form narrative pieces, supplemented with rich media elements, tell the stories of these exhibitions in immersive and captivating ways. And like many people who have interacted with these stories, you may have wondered, how could my institution do something like this?
I spoke with two of the people behind the digital stories to learn more about the collaboration, planning, and production that goes into making this platform a success.
Tricia Robson is the Director of Digital Strategy and Emily Jennings is the Associate Director of Education, School, and Family Programs. They joined me over Skype.
I wanted to know the backstory of the FAMSF’s digital stories, so that’s where we’ll start the conversation. You’ll hear from Emily first.
EMILY: The idea for Digital Stories came from a really clear articulation from our Director and CEO, Max Hollein, and one of his pillars, which is to extend the museum beyond its walls, both in terms of the way we represent ourselves for conservation, preservation of our objects, but more importantly about education.
So at his prior institution, he had very great success at engaging a large population into the core content of their exhibitions and collections. And in one of his first presentations to us, he’s like, “Think about the sports world. Sports enthusiasts can recount all sort of facts and stats about their favorite players. We want to cultivate that same level of enthusiasm with art lovers as well. How do we need to do that?”
So in answer to that call to be able to give our audiences actual information, really drove the content strategy behind digital stories, as well as the user interface to make sure that it was constantly an engaging process for our users.
And our first one that we ever did was in February 2016 for our Monet: The Early Yearsexhibition, and I believe we started working on the platform, like the actual development of it, in November. So you can see how quick of a turnaround that was developing that.
NICK: And Emily sort of answered this already, but how would you say your Digital Stories fit into your global content strategy? Because obviously there are different types of content on your website. So are these part of a whole content strategy or do you look at the Digital Stories kind of like their own thing?
EMILY: I would say that Digital Stories is defining the future of our content strategy. We’re really looking at how to populate across our website really rich content in multiple areas. And so, as we’re working with Digital Stories and honing the length and tone of it, we’re providing our audience with what we feel are the most actionable elements of the exhibition and solidifying that with really juicy content.
But through that process, obviously, there’s a lot of information that we also have to cut out to keep it bite-sized, if you will. Or at least a half an hour sized read. So that’s really surfacing a lot of exciting opportunities for us to think about how those other stories that we’re leaving sort of on the cutting room floor can serve as additional juicy content. And so that’s kind of our next evolution, is how this really becomes a content hub of how we channel things across our different outlets through the website.
TRICIA: And just to kind of add on to that point, because Emily makes a great point of this being sort of a start or a major impetus for us refactoring how we’re thinking about content at the museums. On the physical side, you know, we’re always pushing the museums to consider not just digital strategy a separate spoke itself, but really part of the larger strategy for the museum. We can’t really talk about digital-first until that sort of thinking is truly integrated into our larger content routine.
NICK: So I’m curious as to how you decide which exhibitions will get a digital story, and what content you’re going to use for these big undertakings. And how do you decide between using things from your permanent collection and your temporary exhibitions?
EMILY: So the scope of the project originally was to be a value-add for our temporary exhibitions. And within the last eight months or so, we’ve begun planning for how we can pivot that to serve our permanent collection as well.
And in terms of how we choose and what we’re doing, it’s the curators that give us the best gifts. It’s really based on what we anticipate to be the visitation for those exhibitions. So we look at the projection and think about what has the greatest audience potential. We have pretty aggressive user percentages that we’re going after. These platforms offer us a way to increase our institutional profile for both our members and our non-members. So they get to know what are the opportunities here at the museum.
TRICIA: And I would add the boring logistical point that of course we’re looking at the projection for our special exhibitions and incorporating collections, but the decision is also largely based on production. How much can our teams actually get done in a given period of time?
NICK: So I wanted to ask you a little bit about the collaboration that it takes to put these stories together. Emily, you’re an educator, right? And Tricia, you’re the head of web. So working in two different departments to put a project together like this, plus you mentioned curatorial input — they’re the ones that give you the gifts of which stories to tell. How do you manage getting all this buy-in and participation from different departments?
EMILY: That’s a great question. It’s been an evolution, really. And I think Tricia and I are really proud of the way that we work together, and it’s really sustaining I have to say. But when this project was originally launched, it was set within Education as the champion for the project. But it quickly became evident that we couldn’t do it without the support of Web, even though Web was there advising along the build. But as we’ve done the reiterations of each platform, it’s really become a place where we’ve been able to think about how much time do we have, what are the appropriate workflows, how do we respectfully ask for input? And for me, it’s been a huge learning opportunity about how you create content for your intended media if you will.
So the reason I was put on this project is my area of expertise is actually in school, and teacher, and family programs, so I’m really attuned at distilling information for usually the written or guided experience. And for me, it was really about learning what plays well on the web. And I just appreciate it so much that Tricia’s team was able to bring a sense of nuance into understanding what actually plays well.
So it was the ability of us to be able to step back and realize that even though we had these hopes and aspirations, to really execute that it meant that we had to set our goals first, and not have a solution. And Tricia’s team is so great at listening to those goals and coming with multiple solutions for us to then collectively decide on.
So it is definitely a project that is co-held by Web and Education. We have had great strides in incorporating marketing in this process as well, and I would say that that was our really big learning curve. But in the beginning, our marketing department was always so empathetic. Because they have literally 50 things a week that they’re supposed to be promoting. Like programs across two buildings, and with our robust temporary exhibitions, and our special projects, and all sort of institutional priorities. But these are becoming more and more a foundation of go-to content area for the institution, and therefore everyone’s more invested in us meeting our goals so that the platforms are continued.
TRICIA: And just to add on there, I echo Emily’s enthusiasm and appreciation for how well our teams work together and how we’ve built this trust and system over time. But just reiterating that it requires a lot of resources and a lot of buy-in from the institution. So not only do we have the support from our Director and CEO, but we also built a system. And it took us many months to hone. And we’re constantly refactoring it, but we’ve got clearly defined roles across departments. Education in fact hired a digital manager to lead the project. We had countless meetings going over workflows and exactly at what point each team would step in. So we’re in such a great place, and we’ve always enjoyed working together, but it’s gotten more and more smooth over time as we’ve committed to a group to working that out together.
NICK: So could you talk a little bit more, on a practical level, on what goes into producing these stories? Starting with choosing which one you’re going to make the content for, and what do you need to do to get ready to put something online?
EMILY: These wouldn’t happen without three essential people. One of which is our project manager in Education, Emily Stoller-Patterson, and then on Tricia’s side we have Kelly Mincey, who really coordinates and manages the execution of the projects. And then Andrew Fox, who’s our webmaster. Getting all of us queued up and on the right timeline is just a huge undertaking.
So in terms of the timeline, we generally know what we’re going to be writing for usually a year out. So we’re making those decisions every fiscal year based on those projections. And then the process really starts intensely about six months out. So that’s when I start going through all of the information that Emily Stoller-Patterson has gathered for me. And then we have meetings with curators to start distilling what are the essential stories that we want to be telling about the exhibition. We’ll cross-reference possibly if there are things that have been left out of the catalog that are going to be particularly relevant to the current moment, and/or alternate interpretations that are going to be really meaningful to our audiences.
So we’re constantly looking at things from a social equity issue, a feminist perspective, and thinking about how could we round out those interpretations during that period. And then, I would say about four months out we get the text all locked down. We’ve done our storyboarding, we’ve done our SEO research, we’ve looked at our anticipated profiles so that we can really synchronize how the content is meeting those objectives. And then we start to hand over the content to the Web and Digital team to start loading it into the platform, which they do in about a two-month period where we’re going back and forth about userability.
In terms of the sustainability of the project, that’s definitely something we’re trying to hone in on so we’re not spending so much time in the back and forth on the design. Because it really is a tax on Tricia’s team to have to be making changes in the build when we’ve given them all the content.
TRICIA: And I should say to add on to that, that goes through our standard content development and production framework. This is really possible because we’re using a CMS. We’re using a system that’s pretty turn-key and our team is equipped to manage content in that way. And it alleviates our developer from having to make too many in-the-weeds updates. But, like Emily said, there have been design needs and tweaks from feature to feature, and that’s something we’re really trying to streamline and, in many ways, eliminate moving forward.
So for the first set of these features, having a functional backend system and internal working system was a primary importance just to get the ball rolling. And to ensure that we were able to keep it rolling, we’re also, on our side, working with Education and an outside agency to streamline the design of these features. We’re in the process of reskinning them so that moving forward, some of the production timeline is cut down a bit.
NICK: The last thing I wanted to ask about is, if there’s someone who’s listening that works at another museum and is trying to emulate what you guys have done but might not have the same budget or resources that you have, is there anything that you’ve learned over the course of making these digital stories that you could impart to somebody who is aspiring to do their own digital story-type content?
EMILY: Yeah, we’ve already had people reach out to us and inquire about what we’re doing. And we’ve been pretty straightforward about making sure that you have support across divisions, seeing as that was one of the really big first big lessons that we had. And it was definitely helpful that support was coming directly from the executive office for this project. But that’s not the reason it’s persisted. It’s persisted because Education, Digital and Web, and Marketing are supporting it. So that’s the first thing.
I would think about who you already have on staff whose writing in a way that can be accessible. I was really fortunate in that I was able to get support for the type of writing I was already doing for students and teachers, and it’s been really galvanizing for those audiences as well to have the content that they need, provided in such a robust and well-designed platform. So thinking about where you already have resources that you can just leverage to greater visibility for your institution, are the two main things that come to my mind. But I know that Tricia has a lot of logistical recommendations, too.
TRICIA: I absolutely agree with that, and we’ve learned so much through the process and are constantly learning and tweaking what we’re doing.
I think first and foremost, set a clear project team. Have role definitions. And invest in that unit. So together, though we have had a budget to work on the development for this, and now the design, though limited as is the case for many non-profit organizations. There are many ways to support or champion the resource of this project and team that don’t require a budget. So we have really invested in creating systems, style guides, resources, standard timelines, to make sure that the system works well and really talk through all of the nuances of that to make sure we’re on the same page.
We’ve also invested in making sure that we’re training ourselves to think in terms of SEO and other digital best practices. So a lot of that resource or stewardship can happen internally. It doesn’t always require a budget.
But I think first and foremost, having a set project team and committing to that team is my primary piece of advice.
EMILY: Listening to Tricia also reminded me, we have been really intentional, which is not necessarily always the case for a fast-paced, museum of reflecting on what’s working and what’s not working. And I think every time we launch a Digital Story, we have a review with our director and during that process, we talk about the marketing plan, and recently we began to talk about what’s working from the marketing that we have been doing.
And we also talk after each build, internally, about what went well with that build. So just to build off Tricia’s articulation of the value that comes from — you don’t have to pay, necessarily for that, but making sure that your teams are able to work more closely if they’re having more transparent communication. It means you’re just going to be that much more of a team moving forward into the next build.
I think that that’s pretty much it. I guess the last thing that I would add is, we’re really aware of the reality of this, that this type of interface is going to have a lifespan of two to three years, and so as institutions begin to think about these types of entities, to be realistic about what that investment is. And if we’re not willing to continue to update it, we’re going to become pretty dated quickly. So that’s something to have as just another lessons learned. And think about how you budget and prepare for those updates.
TRICIA: But I would say, adding to that, if you have a really healthy working process and content development system, whether or not the platform itself is relevant in two to three years, the work we’re doing together could be pivoted differently. So really investing in that process and that content strategy will be key no matter how you move forward.
NICK: That was Tricia Robson and Emily Jennings from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. You can find the full listing of their museums’ digital stories at famsf.org/digital-stories. Or you can look for them on your favorite search engine.
I want to thank Tricia and Emily for talking with me, and I want to thank you for listening. If you want to hear more interviews like this one, head over to Cuberis.com and click “What’s On”, where you’ll also find our ebook, “The Art of Storytelling.”
If you have a story that you’d like to share with other museum professionals, I’d love to have you on as a future guest. You can reach me at nick@cuberis.com.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 4: Meredith Duncan and Claire Lanier of #MuseumSnowballFight
May 30, 2018
Back in January, during the infamous “Bomb Cyclone” storm, museums all over the country and around the world used the hashtag to hurl virtual snowballs at each other in the form snow-related images from their collections. As a content strategist who works with museums, I’m always looking for innovative ways that museum professionals use technology to tell lesser-known objects’ stories. Not only did #MuseumSnowballFight accomplish this goal, it also showed that museums, and the people who work at them, can have fun.
But then, I noticed something else. The co-recipients of the award were both from different institutions. How did they pull off such a successful collaboration from opposite sides of Central Park?
I reached out to the initiators of #MuseumSnowballFight to find out.
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis Podcast. I’m Nick Faber.
Do you remember the blizzard of January 2018 dubbed “The Bomb Cyclone?” For a full week, that ominous term about the snowstorm that shut down airports and entire cities seemed to be everywhere. And if you were on social media, chances are you saw, or maybe even used the #bombcyclone hashtag.
At the same time, there was another hashtag taking the museum world by storm, #MuseumSnowballFight. This hashtag, which originated at two historical institutions in New York, encouraged museums to share snow-related images from their collections on Twitter. And it was a huge success. Well-known institutions from around the world, from the Smithsonian and the V&A to more obscure ones like my own alma mater’s Special Collections Library at James Madison University, all had a chance to share their objects, and their missions, with a global audience.
By the time the Bomb Cyclone dissipated, posts with the #MuseumSnowballFight hashtag had been viewed over 20 million times worldwide.
So, who started the Museum Snowball Fight? My guests today are Meredith Duncan, Social Media Manager at the Museum of the City of New York, and Claire Lanier, Social Media and Content Manager at the New-York Historical Society. In May of this year, they were the co-recipients of a Media and Technology Silver MUSE Award for the #MuseumSnowballFight Twitter campaign.
When I first saw the American Alliance of Museums had given the award to both of them, I wondered how two people from two different institutions on opposite sides of Central Park could have collaborated on something so successfully? Well, I asked them. And that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation. First, here’s Meredith. She and Claire joined me over Skype.
MEREDITH: Yeah, let’s see. What’s the Museum Snowball Fight origin story? I’m at Museum of the City of New York on the East side of Central Park, and Claire’s at the New York Historical Society on the Westside. We’ve been talking for a little while about how we could work together, maybe. How we could do something that was maybe playful, maybe a little competitive. How could we get our institutions to talk to each other online?
So we’d sort of been just thinking about that for a while, and then, on that very snowy day, it kind of just seemed like the right moment to try something.
CLAIRE: So what was cool about it, it was totally organic. Meredith just called me on the phone and said, “Oh, you’re at work, too,” and I said, “Yeah, I’m at work,” and we’re both here at work in the middle of this big snowstorm. So we’re like, oh, if we had to trudge all the way into work, let’s just do something fun today. So it was really an organic, informal type of idea.
NICK: And so you guys — you were friends already? You kind of have a similar role at two different institutions. What’s your connection to each other?
CLAIRE: We actually met at a museum social media managers meetup.
NICK: That’s very specific.
MEREDITH: Yeah, at the Frick, I believe.
CLAIRE: At the time, Meredith was at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and I’m at the New-York Historical Society, so we just hit it off personally, and were really invested in what each other were doing at our different institutions.
MEREDITH: And it’s kind of fun, I think, to connect with another history institution. It’s definitely really helpful to talk to social media managers who work at any kind of museum. Because we’re all dealing with some similar challenges, but there is something specific about being at a history institution and what kinds of stories you’re trying to tell, and what your resources are, versus talking with someone at an art institution or a library or something like that.
So I think that added to the excitement of, “Oh, you’re doing such similar work to what I’m doing. Let’s talk about it!”
NICK: I wanted to ask more about the Museum Snowball Fight, but along the lines of what you were just saying, what are the challenges you face as a social media manager for a history institution? You mentioned resources, you know, I have this notion that you’ve got so many stories out there, that you’ve got a million posts at your fingertips, what are the challenges for not just choosing which stories to share, but, I guess, having the input from other people in your institution.
CLAIRE: I would say one of the chief challenges at a history museum in particular that I’ve found, and I’ve been at other history museums as well… Social media is conversational. That’s the social part of the social media, and history is very political. And so when you work at an apolitical organization, which most museums are, that can be a really — not to use a museum snowball fight pun — but that can be an icy path to walk on. So I think, to me, that’s one of the foremost challenges of history museums is finding ways to talk about things that are political in history without taking political stances, which I think is unique to history museums.
MEREDITH: Yeah, I would add to that that history museums and historical societies — not every geographic region or city even has a history museum. We grow out of historical societies often, and those are small, often volunteer-run places to begin with. So the actual resources is a challenge. We have to work with curators, or content experts, about what we’re going to talk about and everyone is doing three jobs at once. So the access to that knowledge can be a challenge, and then our collections are vast. But our resource challenge for history institutions is having the funding to process those collections.
So even if we have tons and tons of photos or ephemera or objects, someone needs to go through and catalog those and discover what the stories might be behind them. So, yeah, resources, which I guess is true for any non-profit or any museum. History museums tend to be the smaller ones so it’s a particular challenge.
CLAIRE: And to add to that, I would say, too, that as anyone who runs social media for any organization anywhere knows, that it’s so image-based. If you don’t have a good photo, you don’t have a good post. And so it’s a real luxury. I’m lucky at the New York Historical Society that we’ve had so many of our collections and photographs digitized at really high resolutions.
But on a day to day basis of challenges, I’ve worked at a lot of smaller institutions where you don’t have as much digitized, and that really is an impediment to what you’re able to talk about.
NICK: Do you all have — this would be a question for either of you — do you have any sort of editorial calendar, or are you trying to line up your social media efforts with other marketing campaigns, or other curatorial initiatives? Exhibitions? How do you plan for it, and how much of it is spontaneous?
CLAIRE: Well, I will answer that because I recently put together a really comprehensive editorial calendar, which is a very challenging thing to do when you’re a singular social media manager. And, actually, I recall at the first meeting at the Frick, when I met Meredith, someone asked the question who was new at this and said, how much should I plan in advance? Should I have a week scheduled in advance? Should I have two weeks scheduled in advance? And someone said, “Oh my god, I’m lucky if I have a day scheduled in advance. My goal is just to get something out at all.”
And so often that’s really the challenge, which I totally understand. I’ve had the accidental benefit, and challenge, of working with some really long-lead exhibitions where we have to have a lot of approvals for the content that we’re posting. So that has forced me to create really long leads of content — like seven months, essentially, based on exhibition schedules and curatorial demands, but that’s really — that’s hard.
NICK: Yeah, I guess there’s things you can plan for, but it almost feels like antithetical to social media have things planned so far in advance, right?
MEREDITH: That’s true. I think that, especially at a museum where so much of your content is related to exhibitions, then planning ahead really makes sense and is helpful. You have access to the images that relate to that exhibition, and those are planned many, many months to years in advance. So you can be thinking about, how do I want to be using these images, how could I do something a little bit different?
I loved how the Brooklyn Museum, for their Bowie exhibition, they obviously had to plan this very far in advance, they had a huge Bowie cutout that they brought to all of these different places in New York City, these iconic locations, neighborhood locations, and took pictures of Bowie on the Brooklyn Bridge, or at a deli, or that kind of thing. So, to execute something like that, you need months in advance to make that happen. But it’s creative, and it’s playful, and I think it did really well on their social media streams.
But then you also need to be flexible. It sounds so silly, but yesterday was the Brooklyn Bridge’s birthday, and I didn’t have that on my calendar anywhere. So I was able to just jump on it and share something, you know? You need to have room in your calendar, to adjust to things that are happening in the world, or things that you kind of overlooked, but planning ahead is so important as well.
NICK: Well, I wanted to ask you about how your social media strategy sort of fits into the broader strategy of your respective institutions.
CLAIRE: Our mission first and foremost is to educate that public. I essentially adhere to that on our social media channels and I tend to operate in the 70/30 best practices for social media marketing in general, which is that you’re only selling to your audiences 30% of the time. 70% of the time, you’re just giving them what they came for, which is the content and the education. And so, for us, I really strive to make that parallel, so that our social media channels really do reflect our mission of educating the public. It sounds sort of simple, but that’s really my driving force.
MEREDITH: Yeah, I think that’s the same for me, and trying to share content that is information that people might not know, and something new for them to learn that day. And also trying to reach new audiences, younger audiences, who might not know about our museum already, or might not have visited us before. And that sort of brings it back to #MuseumSnowballFight in my mind, because Claire and I talked a lot about how when museums collaborate, we not only get to share our own followings with each other, and introduce our own followings to each other, but in the case of #MuseumSnowballFight, where something had so many institutions involved and went viral, we were reaching people who don’t usually follow museums.
And that’s one of my goals, too. I want to talk to people who wouldn’t automatically choose to follow a museum, or wouldn’t think that a museum is something that they would want to interact with. I want to reach those people, show them that it’s interesting, we’re fun, informative, and hopefully that would translate into people walking into our museum. Because that is a big goal of our general marketing efforts at the Museum of the City of New York, is to turn eyeballs who see information about us on their screens into people coming and visiting.
NICK: What sort of feedback did you get back from people on social media from Museum Snowball Fight? Within the museum world, like from other institutions, but also from those folks you mentioned who maybe don’t think museums are fun or wouldn’t have followed you otherwise?
CLAIRE: It was the best. I’ll just say that. It was the best. It was so overwhelmingly positive and people were so excited like Meredith was just saying. It’s such a cool, fun, opportunity to showcase that museums are fun places that don’t always take themselves so seriously. And I think people within the museum world really saw that an appreciated it.
MEREDITH: Yeah, having people tweeting that– one of my favorites was that the museum snowball fight was “profound nerdery”, which was just the greatest compliment you could ever get. And then on a more institutional level, someone was like, “this is why we need to fund museums and education,” and I was like, “yeah, that’s right!”
NICK: That’s awesome!
MEREDITH: So it was really nice to see that kind of response. And then, with other museums, we were just really touched that other museums agreed to participate, so that was really wonderful to see. And we like to think that one reason that many people participated, beyond the fact that everyone was just talking about snow that day and it kind of made sense for everyone to participate, was that it was a low-stakes involvement. Most museums, whether you’re a history museum, or an art museum, or a natural history museum, you might have something in your collection that has to do with snow. It’s such a broad topic, so we felt like it was easy for other institutions to jump onboard. And that’s really important when this is a spontaneous piece of content. This isn’t something that you spent a couple months preparing for, and you might not have been in the office that day, so it’s something, hopefully, that was easy for people to be a part of.
CLAIRE: And I think the thing that– Meredith and I were so excited that it reached so many people worldwide, we were so honored to get an AAM award related to the Museum Snowball Fight. All of that was great. But I think the point of pride primarily is that for every Smithsonian and major museum that tweeted, there were about 30 smaller, local museums throughout the country that were able to participate. So the campaign was really fed by local or state museums or organizations or libraries, and so that was just really awesome to get smaller places up on a larger map. Because that’s really difficult to do, so anytime that a larger organization can offer that opportunity is valuable.
NICK: Yeah, and what a gift that is to these smaller institutions. In my role as a content strategist, one of the things that I’m trying to help museums do is to illuminate objects that there may not be space for in a gallery, or that somebody might not have found. Because online, you don’t have a limited amount of space, and so to be able to have some sort of theme, or game, or campaign like the museum snowball fight, now all of the sudden, “Oh, wow, yeah, we can start pulling up stuff that we haven’t exhibited in a while, or that has just been collecting dust in the archives.” So that was the thing that really got me excited about what you all did and then going through the hashtag and seeing all these wonderful objects that might not have seen the light of day. And even if they had, they’re spread all over the world. And so here’s one place you can go to to see all this great work.
MEREDITH: Yeah, that’s something we talk about a decent amount at the Museum of the City of New York because we don’t have a permanent collection on display. So another important role that our blogging and website and social media fills is sharing more of our collection that doesn’t get to see the light of day as much as we would like it to. And just one more thought, you just basically described bingeable content, and that’s something Claire and I talked about a lot with this, too, when we’re looking back, like, why did this work? Part of it is, if you were following the hashtag, you just got to scroll through so many delightful images. Many that I shared were from the late 1800s, so pretty old, but then you had — oh, who was it? I think you know, Claire, right? One office actually went outside and they had a physical snowball fight.
CLAIRE: That was my favorite. The Drawing Center, yeah. They took it with a very literal interpretation and they were like, “we’re getting out,” and it was hilarious. They posted a video of them actually having a snowball fight. It was great.
MEREDITH: Right, and one of the presidential libraries shared a photo of the Obamas a couple years ago playing in the White House lawn with their dogs. So you were seeing a lot of different types of imagery.
NICK: So the final question that I had for you all, is what sort of advice do you have for someone who might be a one-person social media manager, as far as planning, or just using social media in a way that is meaningful to their followers and also advances their institutional missions?
CLAIRE: One thing I would say is well, A) join — there’s a Facebook group for museum social media managers, join that group — join networks of other people who are doing the same type of work that you are doing. You can learn so much. And it can be really an isolating thing when you’re — this sounds very dramatic, but it can be a really isolating position when you’re a sole social media manager at an organization. So joining any kind of network like that is really, really helpful.
And I guess my other thought on that cue is people don’t know what you don’t post, so it can be really stressful making sure you’re getting out content, but they don’t know what you weren’t able to accomplish. So don’t stress over those things. Your energy is better spent on what you’re able to get done.
MEREDITH: Yeah, I have very similar advice. The first thing that I think of is my first role at a museum doing social media was a smaller institution and at first, it was very overwhelming. And I think what helped me the most was to decide what my schedule was and to make sure it was reasonable. And then try and fill content to that. So if you’re one person, are you also a development officer? Are you also a curator? Are you also a librarian? You need to decide what is reasonable for you to achieve every week. So if that schedule is two Instagram posts a week, three Facebook posts, and one tweet a day, if you’ve figured that out for yourself, then you can decide how to fill it. And like Claire said, people don’t know what you don’t post, and so you know what you’re able to fit into your schedule. Whether it’s fitting in National Coffee Day, and something about an exhibit at your institution, you figure that out. Because if you try to do a lot on every channel every day, you’re just going to go insane.
CLAIRE: That’s true. I will so as a history institution if you work at another history organization, when in doubt, just post a really rad black and white photograph. Meredith and I talk about this all the time. We will labor over posts, we’ll think about it, we’ll hem and haw over it for a week. And that post that we hem and haw over will do like, eh, kind of OK, and we’ll just sort impulsively throw up some really funky old black and white photo and it will just go off like gangbusters. So, lean into it.
MEREDITH: Which is both wonderful and depressing because you’re like, well there was no historical content in that one, but, OK.
CLAIRE: But a pretty picture works.
MEREDITH: Totally.
NICK: That was Meredith Duncan of the Museum of the City of New York Claire Lanier of the New-York Historical Society. I want to thank Meredith and Claire for joining me, and I also want to congratulate them on their award. Congrats!
Thank you for listening to What’s On. If you want to hear more interviews like this one, head over to Cuberis.com and click “What’s On”, or look for us on iTunes.
If you have a story that you’d like to share with other museum professionals, I’d love to have you on as a future guest. You can reach me at nick@cuberis.com.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 3: Jennifer Dasal of the North Carolina Museum of Art
May 16, 2018
My guest is Jennifer Dasal, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She’s also the host of the ArtCurious podcast. In each episode of ArtCurious, Jennifer sheds light on some of the most unexpected, mysterious, and, well, curious stories in art history. And she does so in a way that is not only unique but also, as Salon.com put it, “non-boring”.
As anyone who works at a museum knows, different visitors have different levels of interest in the work you do and the objects you collect. Think of the teenager who is tagging along with their parents, or the person just trying to impress a first date by taking them to a museum. To them, your galleries are just filled with old… stuff. How do you engage those people with the stories behind the stuff? Well, Jennifer understands those people because, as she told me, she used to be one of them.
I asked Jennifer where her story ideas come from, how much work goes into an episode, and, what would the mission statement be if her podcast were a museum?
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis Podcast. I’m Nick Faber.
My guest today is Jennifer Dasal, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She’s also the host of the ArtCurious podcast.
You know, we like to joke around at Cuberis about how boring the word “Content” is. It feels sterile, devoid of humanity, obligatory. But what we really mean when we talk about your museum’s content — your blogs, your digital stories, your podcasts — is storytelling. Every object in your museum’s collection has a story, or sometimes, usually, many stories. Especially when you look at them through the perspective of different people, like your educators, or your curators, or even you visitors. Technology has made it easier than ever to produce “content”. The difficult part is deciding which stories to tell, and how to tell them.
In each episode of her podcast, ArtCurious, Jennifer Dasal sheds light on some of the most unexpected, mysterious, and, well, curious stories in art history. And she does so in a way that is not only unique — with humor and the type of intrigue you would expect from a true crime podcast — but also, as Salon.com put it, “non-boring”.
As anyone who works at a museum knows, different visitors have different levels of interest in the work you do and the objects you collect. Think of the teenager who is tagging along with their parents, or the person just trying to impress a first date by taking them to a museum. To them, your galleries are just filled with old… stuff. How do you engage those people with the stories behind the stuff? Well, Jennifer understands those people because, as she told me, she used to be one of them. And that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation.
JENNIFER: So one of the reasons I started the podcast was actually because I used to be somebody who did not like art, at all. It wasn’t something that I grew up being exposed to. We had art class in my school when I was growing up, in elementary school, but I didn’t find it interesting. It wasn’t something that happened frequently. It was extremely occasionally that we would have a class. And for me, it was all pretty torturous because I didn’t feel like I had any artistic skill, nor did I know anything about the art that I was supposed to be looking at and enjoying. So I grew up thinking art was pretty boring.
Fast-forward about twenty years, and suddenly I’m an art history major. Long story short, I discovered that art was actually not boring when you have the right teacher telling you about it and giving you the right cool stories behind it. And I was so excited, that that sensation of learning and having a teacher who was really inspiring to me always stuck with me.
And even now, in my day job as a curator, I feel like I run into two groups of people. And the first group of people are the people who say I’m at the museum all the time, I’m a member, I love being here. And then there’s the people who are like I used to be. And they would say, I’m only here because my mom wanted me to be here today and I’m so bored and it just doesn’t do it for me. And I’ve had people tell me, over and over again, that to them it’s just a picture on the wall, and that it doesn’t have any sort of life or energy to it. And I always kept coming back to thinking that that was a shame, but that I understand that impulse because I used to feel the exact same way.
So I was thinking the best way to do it sometimes is just to tell these weird stories that you might not have heard before. And part of that is, for people who might not have heard these stories before, maybe they’re novices. Maybe it can get them interested in art a little bit more. But then, for people who already say that the like art, maybe these are stories that they never heard in their traditional art history courses. So I try to tell stories that are a little — I call them — unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful. So a little bit off the beaten path.
NICK: What was the moment… why did you decide a podcast was the right medium for doing this, as opposed to, say, a blog or just the work that you do in the museum?
JENNIFER: And you know, thinking about it now in retrospect and with 20-20 vision, I always think, oh how bizarre that I chose to do a podcast for a visual medium. But I think it really just came down to storytelling for me.
For me, I’ve been listening to podcasts for years, and I think that they’re — it’s like grown-up storytime, and I am constantly listening to them. It’s the background noise of my life, and I learn so much from podcasts, and I find so much enjoyment.
And I think I was one of those people that doesn’t realize how difficult podcasting could actually be and how much time it takes. And so it was simply a matter of thinking, ooh, I like podcasting, that looks like fun, I’ll do it! And also the thing I like about podcasting is that I think it’s a very accessible medium. As long as you have access to a smartphone, or a computer, or something like that, you have the technology available. Because it’s free! And as long as you have that, you know how to access a podcast, I’m going to give you all this free material. So I hope it’s something fun and educational at the same time.
NICK: So when you jumped in without really knowing all that goes into a podcast, what sort of things surprised you as you started producing your own?
JENNIFER: The time and the workload, I think, was the big thing. I knew nothing about editing before starting this. I had to learn everything on my own, crash course, as I was experiencing it. So knowing that what would end up being a half-hour episode or a 45-minute episode, would take me weeks to complete from start to finish was a very enlightening experience. It was really eye-opening.
Eventually, I had to cut down what was, now I see as being a really unrealistic amount of episodes I had in mind for myself, and an episode delivery calendar, and narrow down simply because the workload was very intense. But now that I think about it, I don’t know that I would have wanted to know just how intense it was because not knowing really gave myself permissions to just do it and see what happens without being nervous or frustrated up front.
NICK: Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s something that keeps a lot of people from trying new things or innovative things because it seems so daunting. And so without knowing that ahead of time, you were in it already, so you had to keep going.
So, you mentioned the editorial calendar and how you had originally planned to have more stories than you have produced, or are able to produce. How do you pick which stories to tell when, and what does having a calendar and an editorial plan do to really help you produce regular stories for your podcast?
JENNIFER: Just with the podcast, and also just with any job in a creative field like a museum, I feel like you’re surrounded by people who have so many ideas and stories to tell, and so for me, organization is key. It’s the bottom line. So I have to have a physical calendar, a paper calendar, that I look at and that helps me to see how I can divide my time, and also to see if there are any interesting correlations I can make in the stories I want to tell.
I don’t have a whole lot of those in this current season, but I have done them before where I will plan an episode about two artists that are in a relationship together around Valentine’s Day. Or I will put some information out about artists who were in World War II around Armed Forces Day, for example. So a lot of that is also just planning ahead and looking at the calendar, and seeing what connections I can make.
But in terms of coming up with now with the stories and how I determine the stories I want to tell, I originally began during my first season of my podcast by telling whatever story I wanted whenever it came up. The idea would come up and I’d say, oh great, that’ll be my next episode! Then I’d go forward with writing. Now I’m a lot more thoughtful and careful about it in that I’ve come up with themes for a whole season. And then I plan a number of episodes around that theme. And I’m more thoughtful about in what order I want them to be produced. Before, I did not do that at all, and so now it’s much more detailed like that.
NICK: Could you talk a little bit about, specifically, what goes into the episodes? So you talked about how you pick the stories, then where does the content come from?
JENNIFER: Yeah. I begin everything with a series of research. Now I have a really good advantage in that I’m an art museum curator and, literally, 20 steps away from my desk at work is an art research library. It’s very well maintained, I have hundreds and thousands of books I can choose from to do research from, and same with periodicals, online materials. So I use that to my advantage to start doing the groundwork for any episode that I’m going to be doing.
And I have a serious period of anywhere from about five days to two weeks, depending on my episode and how significant I feel the workload will be, to specifically research how I want to frame my story, what the facts are, and then how I want to spin it into a cohesive narrative. So that’s the most difficult and time-intensive process.
Then, when I actually have the narrative written out, I write every single episode out, it’s a solo voice, a single-voice podcast, and it’s all scripted. Then I go into my recording studio, which is my closet, then I record it. And then I go into the post-production period. I’m very lucky in that I now have somebody who produces my show for me. So I hand over the file, and then he does all the editing work and all the post-production. But it takes him, I still think, a few days to turn something around once you come up with all the edits and the cleanups, adding music, adding anything else, additional ads and so forth.
So at any given time, I usually am working on two to three episodes. I would have one that I’m just finishing writing, one that’s in the process of being produced, and one that I’m starting the research process of. So, I’m usually trying to juggle a couple things at once.
NICK: Where does the seed of any given idea come from?
JENNIFER: Some if comes from just things that I remember when I was in school. Like the very first episode that I did for ArtCurious stemmed from really a haphazard thought that one of my art professors threw out when I was in college and we were learning about Renaissance art. And she was telling us all about the Mona Lisa, and in the middle of just discussing why this is an important and famous painting, she said, oh but, by the way, it’s fake.
And I said I have no idea what you’re talking about right now. And she really didn’t go into a huge amount of detail, but enough just to say, oh, it was stolen a few times, and in the 20th Century, when one of the people who stole it was a known art thief, and art forger, so it’s entirely possible that in that time they created an amazing forgery, and that’s what I think is on view at the Louvre. And onward to the next subject.
So she never talked about it, I never thought to follow up and ask, but that story stuck with me for, literally it’s been decades now. And that was the first episode because I thought, I really want to know that story. I want to know what would make somebody who seems very logical, and thoughtful, and obviously hugely intelligent, think that the most famous piece of art in the world is not the real deal. And that is what started the podcast.
NICK: With a story like that, you are sort of setting a tone and coming up with your own perspective and voice for all the subsequent episodes after that. Could you talk a little about how that experience with imagining and producing the first episode sort of led to, OK, now I kind of get what the tone, or what the sort of theme of my podcast is.
JENNIFER: Yeah, I would say a lot of things I’m going for is sometimes an element, a little bit of mystery, or something very different and unexpected. So I might go a little bit into what an art term like chiaroscuro means, but I’m not going to lecture you on art history or why a work of art is such a masterpiece. I mainly want to give you the human story, or just a weird story. Something that will make you look at something and want to go a little bit deeper instead of just saying, oh, that’s a pretty sculpture. Moving on.
So I do want to have that kind of weird element to it. So this season, I’m going into a whole slew of episodes that’s all about rivalries. And I figure that that central idea of conflict is something that everyone has experienced, that everyone can understand. And it might bring something that looks like an old work of art — something that’s 400, 500 years old — to light in a new way when you think about the struggles that people had between one another in creating these works of art. You know, were they in competition with one another? Were they artists who used to be friends and then got in a big squabble? Were they enemies? And just really get you to look at art in a different way. That’s my number one goal.
NICK: Great. And how would you say that relates to the work you do as a curator, or if at all? And does one influence the other?
JENNIFER: Definitely. I would say I’ve specifically chosen not to talk about contemporary art. I’ve specifically chosen to look at what I lovingly call “the old stuff”. Part of that’s because I don’t spend my day looking at the old stuff, I spend my day with the newest, and the freshest and most exciting works of art, in my opinion. So I like to do that so that there’s a differentiation between my day job and my little passion project on the side.
The other thing is that I don’t necessarily want there to be an overlap because I find fulfillment in my day job and I don’t want to overdo it enough in my side project there. So it’s a way for me to kind of get this larger, holistic view of art history and enjoy both parts of it, if that makes any sense.
NICK: Totally. Yeah, that’s great. So if you were, say, a museum, what would you say your mission with the podcast is, and, more concretely, what the goal for it is?
JENNIFER: I think the mission for it is just to expand art, visual art in particular, and art history to a large audience. Because something we see in the museum, and in museums in general, that I think also relates to the podcast is that there’s still this sensation that art is very singular in that it’s meant for one particular group of people.
We’ve been talking a lot recently across the museum board, as a museum community, about diversity in museums, about degentrification, because art is still seen as being something that is really meant for the elite.
And there is also this sensation that it’s really hard to understand. And those people are really hard for people to overcome. Myself, having that experience of feeling like art wasn’t for me, art was boring, I didn’t have access to it. And I simply, personally believe, that that’s not true. I believe that that’s not true. I believe everybody can and should, if they would like, to be able to experience and understand art. And that, I think, is one of the missions of the museum, and also of the podcast, is to be able to open up this world to people who might already be there, and already might feel like they don’t understand but they would like to belong.
NICK: Do you ever hear from your listeners with their own stories of how you’ve helped them see something differently or given them a new perspective?
JENNIFER: I do, and I would say that that’s probably one of my absolute favorite parts of doing this podcast. People tweet me, or they contact me through my website, they email me, and a lot of people like to give me ideas for future episodes, which is hugely helpful. Because it’s always nice to hear what other people want to hear. And I’ve definitely done episodes based on people’s recommendations.
And then it’s also really gratifying when I hear exactly what I wished the podcast would do, and somebody tells me that it’s done that for them. So the one story that sticks with me most is that I had woman contact me on Instagram about a year ago and said that because of my podcast, she is a visual artist, and she was studying to get an MFA and she was adding on a minor section in art history, specifically because she got excited about art history from hearing my episodes.
NICK: Wow. That’s awesome.
JENNIFER: That was huge. I’m pretty sure I cried that day.
NICK: Yeah, wow. You couldn’t ask for anything better than that.
What would you say to somebody who might be surrounded by these stories but not quite think that they have it in them to tell them?
JENNIFER: I would first of all say that I completely understand because I feel that way even now. Sometimes I feel like I’m not a natural writer, I’m not a natural storyteller. Sometimes it’s just about convincing yourself that you a) can do it, and b) taking the time just to jump in and do it. So I think now that I would think about, I would want people maybe not to necessarily jump in blindly like I did, because it can be a bit of a shock to the system to see what it’s like to create your own podcast, or a film, or a blog, or whatever it is that you’re doing.
But at the same time, don’t get hung up on the details of the process. I would say, give yourself permission to try and also give yourself permission to fail. If it doesn’t work, I think that’s OK, but everybody is talented and everybody is capable of creating. Creating isn’t something that’s just for “creative people”. I think that’s something that everybody falls back on saying, is “I’m not creative”.
NICK: Right. That kind of says that other forms of creativity aren’t the same as art, or being artistic. Problem-solving is creative, coding is creative, and there’s a lot of ways to be creative. And so, yeah, that’s good to remind folks that that is just something innate in everybody and you might have had it beaten out of you over the years, but it’s still somewhere in there.
JENNIFER: I think there’s a lot of overlap, too, in definitions of what art can be or what creativity can be that I think wasn’t something that was understood or maybe allowed ten years ago. Like now, there’s so much flow. I even see it in contemporary art today between something that isn’t a painting, but it’s not a drawing, but it’s not a sculpture. It’s like there’s these weird overlaps, and I think that applies to the world in general. There’s a lot more fluidity now.
NICK: Yeah, and I’m sure as a curator of contemporary art, that you see so many things that somebody without the background knowledge or the context would look at that and be like, why is that art?
JENNIFER: Every day.
NICK: Yeah, “I could do that!”
JENNIFER: Every day. There was a cartoon I saw once. I don’t know if it was in the New Yorker, or if it was something else, and it was just a simple math equation. And it said, “Modern Art = My Kid Can Do That + Yeah, But He Didn’t”. And I thought, perfect, that’s exactly right.
NICK: There you go. There you go.
So, if there is a museum professional out there who is thinking about creating a podcast for their museum, specifically, and they haven’t been scared off yet by the amount of work and effort that goes into it, what sort of concrete tips would you give as far as what sort of equipment do they need? Or what tools would they use? Or who on their staff would they turn to for their stories?
JENNIFER: I think the big thing about podcasting, which I’m sure is the same as writing or making art of any kind, is that it really can be as inexpensive as you want, or as expensive as you want. So the number one thing is you need a microphone, you need a computer, you need something you’re going to be editing — editing software — on. And some of that stuff is free. Like we were speaking earlier off mic about using Audacity, which is a free editing program. And a lot of this stuff doesn’t have to break the bank to do. A good set of headphones can cost you anywhere from $15-$30, it doesn’t have to be $100. So within a museum’s overall marketing or A/V budget, I think it could probably be fairly small.
The one thing about a museum that I think would be very helpful, as opposed to doing an independent podcast like mine, is that, in terms of the workload, you already have usually teams of people who can pair up or bond together to create this. So whereas I am mostly doing the podcast on my own, a lot of the work falls on my shoulders. But if you have a marketing team that’s predominantly doing this, you all of the sudden have a lot of backup. So something that might seem like it takes a lot of work becomes quicker and second nature.
If you happen to have a space that you can repurpose, someone’s office, or a closet in my case that you can repurpose as a recording studio, you can leave your equipment up. You don’t have to worry about taking stuff down all the time. It takes me 15 minutes to probably put together my studio every time I want to use it.
But really, to do a podcast, you don’t need much. And you don’t even need a studio if you if you want it to be very casual, and very conversational. You can record it outside of a museum, you can record in the galleries, there’s all kinds of options that would make it really easy.
The thing that I think is really fun with podcasting, the same with blogs, is that it can be very casual. We’ve talked a lot about accessibility and I think podcasts are very accessible in that you don’t have to tell something in a very firm way. You’re not following any of the rules that you might have to follow for a wall label, for example. The world all of the sudden opens up to you.
And, personally, I kind of like even just a story that’s someone’s opinion. It doesn’t have to be, what does this artwork about? It can be, what does it mean to you? Which is just as valid. So I would say, if you’re struggling to find a story that you personally want to tell, go to the person who sits in the office next to you, or the cubicle next to you, and say, what is your favorite work of art in the collection? And tell me why. Just five minutes of your time.
NICK: That was Jennifer Dasal, host of the ArtCurious podcast and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
I want to thank Jennifer for taking time to speak with me at the museum offices in Raleigh, and I want to thank you for listening.
If you want to subscribe to future episodes of What’s On, or download our Ebook, The Art of Storytelling, head on over to Cuberis.com and click “What’s On”.
And don’t forget to check out ArtCurious. It’s at artcuriouspodcast.com. For the more inquisitive listener, you can dive even deeper thanks to the links and images Jennifer shares with every episode.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 2: Philip Leers of Hammer Museum
Apr 11, 2018
Take a moment and think about all of the materials that go into an exhibition. It’s a lot, right? Objects, documents, essays, labels, not to mention the installation itself. And your museum can only fit so much of that into its physical space. What about all of the other stories that end up on the cutting room floor? The outtakes? What about the stories that get generated during and after the exhibition?
With your museum’s website, the only limitations to the stories you can share are time and resources. And those are real. But with a little bit of planning, you can come up with a strategy for enhancing your collections and exhibitions online. And that’s exactly what the Hammer Museum has done.
Today I’m talking with Philip Leers, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Hammer Museum, about telling a museum’s stories online.
**FULL TRANSCRIPT**
NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber.
Today I’m talking with Philip Leers, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the Hammer Museum, about telling a museum’s stories online.
Now… Take a moment and think about all of the materials that go into an exhibition. It’s a lot, right? Objects, documents, essays, labels, not to mention the installation itself. And your museum can only fit so much of that into its physical space. What about all of the other stories that end up on the cutting room floor? The outtakes? What about the stories that get generated during and after the exhibition?
With your museum’s website, the only limitations to the stories you can share are time and resources. And those are real. But with a little bit of planning, you can come up with a strategy for enhancing your collections and exhibitions online. And that’s exactly what the Hammer Museum has done.
The Hammer’s digital archives are a fantastic example of using technology to illuminate a museum’s hidden treasures and augmenting those on view. If you haven’t seen what we’re talking about, I’d encourage you to head over to hammer.ucla.edu and click on “Exhibitions.” You’ll find the Expanded Digital Archives on the right-hand side.
So, I spoke with the Hammer’s Philip Leers over Skype and asked him to talk about the work that goes into these projects. We talked about planning, collaborating, and the value of creating goals for individual projects.
First, I wanted to know who exactly worked on the Digital Archives, and that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation.
PHILIP: For some of the Digital Archives — that’s the term we use for the projects — we’ve done two that were for exhibitions, so the websites are built around all of the materials that go around planning the exhibition and that came out of the exhibition. So, essays for the catalog, and label text, and images of the installation, and any material we could get our hands on. So the material is coming from curatorial, but, in terms of the building, this is part of our website, which falls under our communications team, so I work really closely with them. Our IT, our registrars, everybody comes into contact with the project at some point.
NICK: Got it. And so, you said you’re building it out of all of the materials that go into the exhibition, are there also things that don’t make it into the exhibition that, because you’re using a digital platform, that you’re able to bring online?
PHILIP: Yeah, absolutely, and that was one of the big things we talked about. We didn’t want to just recreate the catalog, we didn’t want to do a virtual exhibition. We wanted to include things from both the exhibition and the catalog, but we also figured we’re making these after the fact, we’re doing them on a platform that offers us all new capabilities. So some of the things that we included, we could only do because we’re doing it kind of retrospectively. So we could include press reviews of the show, we can include images of the shows and other materials if it traveled to different venues. So if you’re interested in studying the exhibition, you’re not just seeing how the Hammer did it, you’re seeing how the next museum did it in terms of how they marketed it, in terms of how they installed the show, in terms of how they framed it.
So we were always looking for opportunities to expand beyond what we’ve been able to provide in the past, in addition to all of those things that we were able to provide, but are either no longer available because the show is down or because the catalog is out of print or what have you. And this is one aspect where doing it after the fact is kind of helpful because a lot of the people who worked on the exhibition may not even be at the museum anymore. So it reflects a whole new perspective that we’re bringing to it. And we want to encourage that, rather than discourage that because that’s all added value for us.
NICK: Wow. That’s really interesting that you’re able to look at it from sort of a positive perspective. Because I would think that while people are working on the physical exhibition, that it’s top of mind, you have all of those resources at your fingertips, people have stories that they’re uncovering, things like that. And if those folks have left, then you’re kind of on your own to do detective work to put it back together. But it sounds like what you’re saying is that it’s almost an advantage because now you can almost present it from a different point of view.
PHILIP: Yeah. We were sort of forced to take that approach, and I think it works out well. There are definitely some challenges that come from looking back. The first project we launched was the digital archive for Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, which was up in 2011. And so we’re working on it three years after the fact, basically. And the challenges that come from it are, like you said, that the people might not be on staff who were working on it, which, in this case, they weren’t. And you have to be reliant on the file keeping at your institution and the people who were around when the show was up. So we had a lot of resources on staff who, even if they didn’t work directly on the show, were around. And, in the end, I think it’s fun to think of it as sort of bringing this thing that’s gone back to life, and giving it kind of a second life that’s different from the first, but that carries on what it accomplished and makes it available for hopefully a whole new audience of people.
NICK: Has there been any effort or desire to make them sort of more contemporaneous to a physical exhibit at the time that it’s in the museum? Or even thinking about it before something goes up?
PHILIP: Yes, actually. And it’s good that you ask. Now I’m working on the digital archive for an exhibition called Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. That’s a show that just came down from the Hammer and it’s now traveling. It’s going to be up at the Brooklyn Museum very soon, I believe. So we still have the curatorial team that worked on the show, and I’m getting to see what it means to work on the digital archive in a much more contemporaneous way. I was able to let the curatorial associate know, these are the materials I want to include in the website, this is the format that we like to have them in. If you can work them into your workflow, it makes my life that much easier. And I have to say, it has. It’s really great to have that. And if I have a question, to have somebody two feet away who I know knows the answer.
So I think this is an opportunity to see how it is to build a digital archive alongside an exhibition. In terms of making the research and the material gathering easier, it’s been a huge difference, and I’m really excited. It’s exciting to work alongside the team, too, and to feel like you’re part of this project that — I’ve been at the Hammer since the Radical Women show was being conceived, and now it’s great to take the ball and run with it. I’m enjoying it.
NICK: So you mentioned it’s great working along with the team. You mean your curatorial team, right?
PHILIP: It’s the curatorial team, but like I said, all of these projects — one of the first things I realized is that you can’t be an island. You need to reach out and, especially with technology projects in museums, because tech stuff doesn’t just stay in one area. It bleeds into everything. So, I work closely with communications and IT, and our development team in terms of fundraising, and our finance team in terms of the budget, and our registrars in terms of our cataloging information and things like that. So, yeah, the research is coming from curatorial, and I’m working closely with them, but as always, I’m always trying to pull other people into my orbit.
NICK: That’s awesome. So that sort of leads me into something else I wanted to ask about. How would you say your online and digital initiatives support the Hammer’s mission?
PHILIP: Our mission is that “The Hammer believes in the promise of art ideas to illuminate our lives and build a more just world”, which I’m reading off my screen. I don’t have it memorized. But certainly, I keep the mission in mind. I think of the mission of the museum and the mission of my individual projects as being concentric circles. So I’ll kind of have my own, or the team will have its own mission for the project, and our goal is for that mission to help fulfill the mission of the institution as a whole.
NICK: So I saw that you taught a course with UCLA’s Digital Humanities program. Is that something you still do? How did that come about? What were the lessons that you were trying to teach the students as they prepared for their final projects?
PHILIP: The course was one of the most rewarding things I’ve gotten to do. It was really a fun and exciting opportunity that I never thought that I would have. It came about when I started the position in 2014. One of the first things I did was reach out to Miriam Posner, who’s the coordinator of the Center for Digital Humanities at UCLA just to set a meeting, and let her know what I was doing, and to see if there was any way for the Hammer to partner with Digital Humanities at the University. And she threw out the idea of me teaching a course, which I was totally not expecting. But, of course, I’m not going to say no to that opportunity.
I love teaching, and one of the goals of the grant is to strengthen our connection to UCLA, which is our parent organization. We’re part of the UCLA family. I was looking for any opportunity to get my work to intersect with what UCLA is doing.
So the course that I thought of was a project-based course focused on the Franklin Murphy Sculpture Garden, which is on UCLA’s campus. It’s the center of their north campus, where the humanities buildings are. The works themselves are in the Hammer’s collection, so it’s this shared space that I thought would be a really great topic for coursework.
In the first quarter, they generated a research project, and it included a proposal for a digital aspect of the project. And that’s what the next quarter, the Spring quarter, was designed to help them realize those projects based on their research.
The ideas that come out of it are really inspiring, and whether or not it becomes a project for the Hammer, it helps to see how other people use your resources.
NICK: So that seems like a good opportunity to segue into what advice would you give to other folks who work at museums who have the task of creating digital stories or content. If they were you or students… or maybe I shouldn’t put it that way. I guess, just broadly speaking, from your experience, whether it be as a teacher or a project manager who works with a lot of people and you understand different departments and their own goals and needs. What advice would you give to somebody who has a task like you’ve had of telling the stories of their museums and the works online in a really meaningful way that does help fulfill their mission?
PHILIP: A lot of it specific to the institution. Every museum is different and will have different stories to tell and different ways of telling those stories. But some of the lessons that I’ve learned: One is to build a strong team. You get into a lot of problems if you try to silo these projects, if you think, oh, this is just a curatorial thing, this is just tech thing, or this is just a marketing thing. I just find that you strengthen the team by getting more people invested. It helps to bring in different perspectives that you might not have thought about yourself. You don’t want to get yourself into an echo chamber, you don’t want to be the one person making a decision on everything.
And that’s one of the great things about museums, is that you’re surrounded by really smart and capable people with different areas of expertise. If it’s not obvious, I’m speaking from experience where when I started, I felt a lot more isolated and alone, and as I started to get more connected with the staff, and as new staff members were brought onboard, and new people joined the team, the change was like night and day. As soon as I was able to have this kind of support system, which is not just support for me but support for the project, all of whom are, no matter what their relationship to the project is, they start to get involved in it.
It helps to make a project like mine, which is grant-funded. So, in a way, it’s sort of separated from the rest of what the museum does. So, kind of getting my hooks into all of these departments helps keep me tethered to what the museum is doing, and makes the project feel a lot more organic to the museum, and a lot more kind of naturally a part of a lot of the stuff that we’re doing. And that’s really important, I think. You want that institutional buy-in. You don’t want to create these projects or products that, even if they’re great, they feel like this whole separate thing to what the museum does.
NICK: Yeah. So, is part of getting that buy-in demonstrating the value of the work that you’re doing?
PHILIP: I think that that’s at the basis. And if you can’t get buy-in on that, you’re in trouble. But that’s the whole– the great thing about a project like mine that is built on our past exhibitions and our collections, of course, we care about these things. These are the center of what the museum does and the center of what we value.
So I felt very sure throughout the entire process of every project that none of this stuff is unimportant to the people around me. The entire museum needs to be committed to how we treat that kind of material because that’s at the heart of what museums are about. Art museums, specifically I’m speaking about.
And that’s kind of where the idea that we were talking about earlier, about fulfilling the mission statement for the museum and having that kind of coincide with the mission of the project itself. That’s where that becomes really important. Because as you’re working on a project, it’s easy to get lost in the details. But we always went back to that goal of, are we creating good content for an academic audience? Are we making this tailored to the researchers that we’re supposed to be serving? And I’m happy that I can look at all of the projects that we’ve launched and say that we have accomplished that goal.
NICK: That was Philip Leers of the Hammer Museum.
I want to thank Philip for taking time to share with us, and I want to thank you for listening.
If you want to subscribe to future episodes of What’s On, or download our Ebook, The Art of Storytelling, head on over to Cuberis.com and click “What’s On”.
And if you know of any great examples of museum content, or maybe you’ve produced some yourself, send me an email. I’d love to showcase your work. You can reach me at nick@cuberis.com.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
Episode 1: Karen Kelly of the North Carolina Museum of Art
Apr 05, 2018
When I first came across Circa, the blog of the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), I could immediately tell that they recognized the amazing potential of the blog platform. With its weekly schedule, high-quality stories, rich media, and even its own name, Circa is far more than a museum…blog.
I spoke with Karen Kelly, the Senior Editor at NCMA. She has been managing NCMA’s blog since it was relaunched as Circa. We talked about the role of the museum’s blog, how she gets participation from a wide array of museum staff, and how she manages to keep it all organized and consistent.
**FULL TRANSCRIPT**
Hi, and welcome to What’s On. I’m Nick Faber, Director of Content Strategy at Cuberis. My guest today is Karen Kelly, senior editor at the North Carolina Museum of Art. And we’re going to be talking about the museum’s blog.
In my job, I spend a lot of time looking at museum websites, and one pain point that I often find is the museum blog. I did an unscientific study for an article we wrote a few months ago, and out of 100 museum websites I looked at, only 51 had blogs. 8 of those hadn’t been updated in over a year. I could just imagine someone sitting at their desk, asking, “What should I write today?” And I guess if the answer is unclear, it’s easier to write nothing at all.
Which is a shame. Your museum is full of more stories than you can fit in your physical space, and a blog is the easiest solution for telling them online. But without any strategic focus or planning, the blog can become an afterthought.
When I first came across Circa, the blog of the North Carolina Museum of Art, or NCMA, I could immediately tell that they recognized the amazing potential of the blog platform. With its weekly schedule, high-quality stories, rich media, and even its own name, Circa is far more than a museum…blog.
I spoke with Karen Kelly of NCMA. She’s a writer and editor and has been managing NCMA’s blog since it was relaunched as Circa. She talked about the role of the museum’s blog, how she gets participation from a wide array of museum staff, and how she manages to keep it all organized and consistent.
First, I asked her about her position of Senior Editor at the museum.
KAREN: Well, as you say, I work as a writer and editor at the museum and I’m positioned at the nexus of several departments. Of course, marketing and publications, and interpretation and curatorial, and also membership and development. So, juggling a lot. If there’s a baseball analogy–which there isn’t–but if I had to come up with one it would be shortstop, third base coach, catcher, batboy, and groundskeeper. A lot of groundskeeping.
So how does the blog fit into that? I work with an associate editor–I have to–who is priceless. So what comes across an editor’s desk at a museum is anything from exhibition scripts to the humble business card. Beautifully designed catalogs to restaurant menus and anything that we produce that has text on it. So I collaborate with teams on creating content, and also refining content, and joining in on those conversations about how to communicate to the public in the most effective way.
The blog is a part of that, and also a part of our marketing scheme, but it’s very Janus-faced. It looks both at how can we create content that extends the mission of our exhibition, but also how do we draw people to our exhibitions, and I think a blog post can do both.
NICK: You mentioned helping to fulfill the mission of the exhibitions, how does that fit into the overall mission of the museum?
KAREN: So it’s part of our marketing campaign, but it’s integrated into our exhibition goals and our marketing goals. Our goals for our permanent collection, and our goals for getting folks to the museum, but also informing them and luring them to the museum. I don’t think we could sustain the blog if it weren’t integrated.
And it came about as the direct result, I’m frank to say, of a budget cut to our print budget. So we wanted to maintain–and a necessary cut–we wanted to maintain our connection to our membership, so we were publishing a bimonthly members’ magazine that then got reduced to a quarterly, and then to an annual. So we still produce an annual. So that’s where some of the magazine feel comes from. Also, we wanted to carry readers and members and visitors over to the digital experience a bit more. And digital offers so many more opportunities and enlivens the content that we lost in the magazine. So that was exciting to me.
So we launched it with new goals in mind, a title. I don’t that it’s a brand, really. I think of “brand” as a larger term for the museum as a whole. But I like the idea of a brand for it. I don’t know that it’s that focused, but it definitely has a status–we wanted it to have the status of our magazine. And I think that draws participation internally, as well.
The more we edit it, the more we make it look nice, folks are happy once they see their name. There’s a byline for our authors. There’s a headshot. So there are some particulars that help give Circa a little more status than when it was just our blog.
NICK: Yeah, I think “blog” is the worst word for online content, and then “content” is the second worst word.
KAREN: Right, “content.” Such marketing speak. We know what we mean!
NICK: Yeah, exactly, and then followed by “thought leadership”.
KAREN: Yes, right.
NICK: Who contributes to Circa, and how are assignments given, things like that?
KAREN: So in terms of who authors, it’s almost like All Things Considered. We take content and stories from the entire staff. So we’ve had a post from a security guard who wanted to write on a piece. So, all ideas are considered, and what it took on the outset was letting folks know that we were receiving ideas. “Pitch me something,” is basically how I treated it.
So that meant initially meeting with a couple of focus groups, and that was very productive, but I knew I couldn’t sustain that. It could almost become oppressive to bring the staff in on a monthly basis, at least in our midsized museum. We’re all wearing a lot of hats.
So that initially helped a great deal, but anyone can write for Circa. It’s important to have editorial filters there. It helps bring the writing up for less-experienced writers. We want to hear their stories as well, but we want to bring it place where the reader doesn’t stumble or get distracted over minor issues.
A lot of the stories are buried within departments, and once a department knows that we want to hear these stories, people stop me in the hallway. So it’s disciplined in the sense that I’m recruiting on a quarterly basis, but I meet individually–maybe it’s 15 minutes–I meet with someone over coffee and we generate a few ideas. And there are a couple of sources that now I have.
And now it’s running like a well-oiled machine almost. Folks are contacting me, and it’s very exciting. But we didn’t start out that way. I definitely had to recruit that and develop that feeling of, “I’d love to hear your ideas, but also how about this?” And that’s not to say that I don’t go and ask for stories.
But an editor, unlike, say, a web developer, is situated at a nice spot. I hear what gets put on the cutting-room floor, I know which stories we weren’t able to tell inside the gallery, and I think that’s very useful, not to put any more extra work on an editor’s plate out there. But it’s a unique position to be in, and helpful for generating content for the blog.
NICK: You mentioned that, with digital publication, you’re able to enliven the stories. And I’ve seen that. You use a lot of video and photographs and things, and so I’m just curious, and I think other museums who are trying to make similar kind of content would be curious, do you specifically produce those videos and photographs for Circa? Or do you kind of–to use a museum term–curate media that you have into a post that you have expertise on or are thinking about at the time?
KAREN: So, it’s a combination of sometimes we create a video expressly for Circa, as we did for our laser. Our conservation team has wonderful stories, and in concert with scientists at Duke University, they created a laser that is the first in the world to be used to conserve paintings. So, that seemed like an important piece to go into Circa, but also be a part of the museum’s evergreen archives of important stories that we always want to have available to folks. So it has an evergreen purpose as well.
So I hate the term “archive” because it feels dusty and old, but when we say that we’re going to keep something alive, we typically say that we want to make it archival.
And, as we know, a lot that gets created for social media is really ephemeral, and that’s too bad. I mean, a videographer and editor of video can tell you, “Oh, the work!” It’s a labor of love. But if we can house several short videos that are related–for instance, we interviewed a lot of models.
We had an ebony fashion fair exhibition last fall, and it turned out that several models lived in our area, who had been a part of that show. We invited them to the museum, our social media team grabbed great video and interviewed them briefly, but in a post in Circa, we were able to house those short, social clips in one space. And then publish a little bit longer interview with a model. And that’s just a nice souvenir as well. So it both promoted the show ahead of time and is also a kind of reminder of the show. So it’s dual-purpose.
NICK: Is that something you had planned to do? To recap it in a Circa post? When you have an event like that coming up, do you sort of plan before, during, after? Or is that something that just dawned on you, that, “Oh, actually there’s all this great media out there that I should be putting together”?
KAREN: In general, it’s a combination of both. In that case, I heard that we were doing that. So, keeping one’s eyes and ears open about what’s already in production. But now we cooperate to the extent that folks on my team know that I can use this for Circa.
I’m also approached. Curators just went to lunch yesterday and discovered a great story underlying one of the paintings we have in our collection, and I look forward to presenting that story. So that’s something that we are going to initiate, and something social can use. So it’s a back and forth.
NICK: So what advice would you give to other museums for sustaining a blog?
KAREN: Well, one very concrete tip that I could offer is that initially, I used Podio, or like a Basecamp, a place to house the ideas. First, it takes idea generation, and then also to track the progress of them. I know that’s an added amount of work, as well, to keep that up. But Podio, or having a place to house the ideas works. That’s also a platform where one can draw in staff members and make assignments if one would like to go in a very concrete, organized fashion. That’s very helpful, and using our Podio platform helped in the beginning.
Also, just creating a schedule around–because our exhibition schedule is well-established ahead of time, understanding that I’d like four features, maybe, per exhibition, or more. But establishing goals around our exhibition schedule, much like I did while managing the print publication for our magazine. So, I think establishing a schedule.
And then definitely getting buy-in from the staff. And we had a period where we went dark between our old blog and our new blog, and I recommend that as well. If the old blog is languishing anyway, let’s take advantage of that and build a bank of stories. So I’m never working on one blog post at a time. So if one can dedicate a certain amount of time per work to generating the content, then that’s very helpful. But it’s also very helpful to establish a bank and then move forward. A bank of four or five stories that are ready to roll.
During the sort of blackout period, we were revamping our entire website. So it worked well with that for various reasons, which I could go into in a minute. I just treated it like a print publication. So, several meetings to get the new brand, if you will, launched. And also getting a publication schedule and just meeting those goals. So, treating it like a print publication helped me a great deal.
NICK: And was that your background?
KAREN: Yes. So, I just used the tools that I have to organize and create print publications, and they served well. So, that thinking about the discipline of getting–the harder work is not so much the scheduling and the creating of the product because editors are doing that across the board, all over the museum. It really was about getting the participation. I think that folks who are in charge of the blog can relate to that.
But, I’ll also say curatorial interns, editorial inters, museums are full of interns who are looking for bylines, and this is great on their brag sheets. And they often have the time to dedicate and will go the extra mile to do an interview with a living artist.
It also just requires a lot of planning, but also the ability to improv. So, next week we have a visit from Mickalene Thomas, and I hope to sneak in on some of the media interviews and grab a couple of soundbites for Circa. So it’s a combination of a lot of planning, but also being able to think quickly.
NICK: And then what sort of technology do you need? In your content management system, does what you have now enable you to do everything that you want to be able to do?
KAREN: It’s a great question. Luckily, I was able to write up a vision statement for what I wanted the blog to be when we relaunched. So we had components, as you call them, or modules, built in that spoke to our needs. And I think that’s critical. I can’t embed video if there’s nowhere to embed it. And there are other pages on our website, where one can’t embed. Although, more and more it’s a very flexible platform.
And also, editors will appreciate this, but at every line inside a website, be it on a blog post or anywhere on a blog template, we need to be able to italicize, we need to have en dashes, we need special characters, not just in body copy but in every headline. So that’s what also gives it–visitors to museums are spoiled in the sense that they’ve seen a lot of high-end content, and high-end production, so why should the blog suddenly be like the neighborhood newsletter? “Ah, that fell off the cliff!” And that’s simply a matter of making those special characters available so that you can simply italicize the name of an exhibition and not look unprofessional.
Do our everyday visitors recognize that? I think they do. They might not be able to put a name to it, but it’s a kind of housekeeping. If there were trash strewn everywhere–now I’m really sounding like an editor–but if there’s trash strewn, you don’t know how it works, but you know the floor’s not clean. So you have a sense of that.
Just because it’s “free”, treating it as though it were an eight grand publication going out, I think just keeps the level of sharpness up and vitality.
NICK: That was Karen Kelly of the North Carolina Museum of Art.
I want to thank Karen for taking time to share with us, and I want to thank you for listening.
If you want to subscribe to future episodes of What’s On, or download our Ebook, The Art of Storytelling, head on over to Cuberis.com and click “What’s On”.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you tell it?
A New Podcast for Museums
Mar 27, 2018
We’ve just launched our new website, and visitors to our previous site might notice some new features. In addition to new case studies, portfolio work, and a more robust introduction to our capabilities, we have added an entirely new page. We’re excited to bring you What’s On, our new content publishing hub, full of website insights for museums.
Building on the success of our monthly Museum Digital Insights newsletter, What’s On includes two new resources for museum professionals who want to make their websites as effective as possible. The first is our eBook, The Art of Storytelling, a practical guide to Museum Content Strategy.
The other new resource is our new podcast, also called What’s On. Hosted by me, Director of Content Strategy Nick Faber, each episode will feature an interview with a museum professional using online content to illuminate their institution’s stories in innovative ways. My goal for each episode is to provide insights that you can use to improve your own museum’s content strategies.
If you’d like to add What’s On to your podcast routine, you can find links to subscribe above. You’ll also find an embedded player, where you can hear our introductory episode, the transcript of which is below.
Thanks for checking it out, and feel free to contact me if you know of, or have worked on, any examples we should feature in future episodes.
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
Hello, and welcome to the introductory episode of What’s On, the new podcast from Cuberis. I’m glad you found us.
I’m Nick Faber, the Director of Content Strategy at Cuberis. If you’ve found this feed, you may already know who Cuberis is, but in case you don’t, we’re a boutique, museum-focused, front-end website and content strategy firm based in Durham, North Carolina. And we love helping museums tell their stories.
So why are we launching a podcast? Well, as we talk to different museums, we realize a couple of things:
First, there are some common issues museums share. As a museum, you have no lack of stories. Your objects, your histories, and even your buildings have their own stories. And as a museum or cultural institution, you have a necessarily broad mission to serve a vast array of people with different levels of interest. When you take all of these factors into consideration, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with which stories to share, and how to share them. As a consequence, your websites often fail to reach their potential.
The good news is — and this is the other observation we’ve made — there are plenty of museums who have found innovative ways to overcome these challenges and to make some really great web content. From regular blog posts to high-production digital projects, these folks have been able to create content strategies that make a habit out of storytelling and illuminate the many stories of their institutions in meaningful ways.
So, in this podcast, we’ll be talking with museum staff who are doing great things online. They’ll be sharing their own experiences and challenges, as well as tips for you, the museum staffer tasked with creating online content.
And it’s my hope that what you hear on this podcast will really motivate you and inspire you to start thinking strategically about your web content.
Oh, and just a quick plug: If you want to start thinking about ways that your website can promote your mission — and maybe even improve your margins — I’d encourage you to download our free eBook. It’s called The Art of Storytelling, and it’s full of exercises, examples, and expert interviews to get you started. You can find it on our website, cuberis.com, that’s c-u-b-e-r-i-s.com. And you’ll find a link in our footer.
We’re really excited about this show, and we can’t wait to get it out to you. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our podcast feed, and get ready to hear from museum folks like you who are doing some really cool things online. And if you have found some great examples of museum content, or maybe you’ve produced some yourself, send me an email. We’d love to showcase your examples. You can reach me at nick@cuberis.com.
Until next time, I’m Nick Faber. What’s your story? And how will you share it?
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