COVID, Content Strategy and Organisational Change
This text is taken from a talk I gave on 10/12/20 for the Museums Computer Group conference Museums+Tech 2020
- Thanks very much for having me
- I’m Georgina Brooke and in January this year I started a new job as Digital Media Content Manager at National Museums Scotland -and what a year it’s been!
- I’m going to be talking to you today about COVID, Content Strategy & Organisational Change
- A bit on National Museums Scotland, we have around 450 staff spread across 4 sites and a collections centre. It’s the largest multidisciplinary collection in the UK outside of London. We have collections ranging from art & design, world cultures, Scottish History and Archaeology, Natural Sciences and Science and Tech)
The title of this talk is COVID, Content Strategy and Organisation change and I’ll really be covering how my team and I created online content throughout 2020: from early January when everything was plain sailing, through to initial responses to the UK lockdown, through to a more settled strategy over the summer when our museums were closed and finally -organisational change mechanisms: how we went about getting the Museums to think differently about the role of digital media
Jan to March
January 2020 feels quite a long time ago now! But I remember settling in to my new flat, celebrating Hogmanay on Carlton Hill
At work, I’d met my new team and — by March — I’d written a new content strategy, which was about to be rolled out across the organisation. I was beginning to feel like I’d got my feet under the desk.
March
By mid March my mood had changed.
On March 17th we closed the Museums to the public.
On March 19th we closed the offices.
(and, importantly, evacuated the ants)
It was all feeling a bit post-apocalyptic and like we were in this for the long haul.
In the space of a couple of days the museum had closed, all exhibitions indefinitely postponed, my team was going to reduce by 50%, and all my lovely online audiences were very online, very stressed and very vocal.
On the last day in the office, at 6pm, I posted this:
And on the day after Boris made his announcement of ‘a very simple instruction: STAY AT HOME’, we posted this:
Now these are the 2 best performing posts for their respective channels we’ve ever run, by some margin, but they relied on a very specific set of circumstances at the beginning on the pandemic. In some ways, this was the easy bit!
As the population adapted to lockdown we had to find new ways to sustain engagement and empathy with our collections.
What I’m going to present to you in the next sections has less to do with fantastic social media content but more the thinking our team went through to evolve the way we worked within the organisation at speed and what we learnt in the process.
During April to August while our museums were closed, we created themed weeks of content around different areas of our collections: ranging from Bonnie Prince Charlie, to our transport collections, fashion and entomology: a real mix. These weeks allowed us to build a more complex understanding and familiarity with the different areas of the collection, whilst playing to one of our core USPs, which was the breadth of the different collections on offer. No one person would see all the content we posted across the week but they might well see more than one and that way we were able to tell a more complex story and increase their familiarity with different areas of the collection.
During these themed weeks we experimented with a couple of new formats for us, I’ll take you through a few of those now
These are some screenshots of our Virtual Tour of the Ancient Egypt gallery with our Principal Curator of the Ancient Mediterranean; Margaret Maitland, who structured her tour around themes of family, togetherness and separation, using our collections to generate empathy, solace, and common human emotion across time and place. We already had Google Street View footage of the galleries, so once the curator had worked her script to time and knew where in the virtual gallery she wanted to go, we used screen capture software to film their guided tour and overlaid a voiceover —and delivered this personalised expert tour to our audiences from the comfort of their sofa — not something we could offer in the gallery at this scale (this bit of content reached 100,000 individuals).
The second recurring part of our themed weeks was an ‘Ask Me Anything’ with a member of staff. I’d work with curators to tell the story of how they got interested in their field/ what a day in their life looks like and reformat this text for Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. On the day itself, we’d post their story but also ask our audience to ask curators anything — and they did!
Again, this was something that made good use of the digital medium — it wasn’t like we could have offered this at this scale in the physical museum (these reached between 88,000 and 177,000 people). Being able to connect everyone from budding specialists to interested kids with our curators and their knowledge and expertise, felt really important, particularly under COVID.
These weeks taught me personally and the team a lot —
we discovered we had a massive fashion following on Twitter (and gained a fair few more) in the week we ran content relating to our historic fashion collections. We experimented with new formats we’d not used before: Twitter polls (we ran a Dinosaur world cup; which had the shock result of determining that Triceratops, rather than Tyrannosaur, was our most popular dinosaur).
In short the summer felt a bit like our ‘R&D’ phase, we had time and freedom to experiment with online only audiences.
Organisational change
In August we reopened our museums, but at a much reduced capacity and welcomed our staff back from furlough. As an organisation we started to ask:
- How were we going to engage a much larger family audience without in gallery sessions?
- How were we going to engage teachers post COVID?
- The organisation — as with so many- is under much more financial stress than it has been before, how could we raise more money with reduced in gallery capacity?
These are still questions we’re learning how to tackle, and how to reapportion our time and priorities. As a team we were sympathetic about using digital to try and address these needs, but also realistic about what we could and could not achieve organically with the audiences we already had.
In this last part of the talk I’ll share with you 2 artefacts I used which helped the organisation understand the audiences we have access to on social media.
I started sending this weekly snapshot from our web, blog and social media to the external relations and learning and engagement teams (72 people) along with a selection of curators who had opted in to it. The reports really made up of two things
- Stats of the week
2. Most popular content of the week
The other artefact I created with the team was the principles of good content creation — to help steer organisational comms objectives into a framework that worked for our digital audiences
For us, ‘good’ online content:
- Makes sense in terms of the organisational brand (why are we specifically running this bit of content, what is unique to us that we own in the digital space)
- Is created with specific audiences in mind
- Is guided by the data we get back from audiences (if we know from past experiments a certain piece of content will deliver poorly, we probably shouldn’t run it)
- Is appropriate for an online medium (what can we only do online? Simply repackaging something that worked well in the physical space may not naturally translate online)
- Is clear on ‘what do I want this content to make people do/feel?’ If we’re clear on this then it strengthens our message
And sometimes… not being afraid to be silly /not just running the safe stuff, but doing it well. Most stuff that takes off on the internet takes a bit of a leap in order to make historic collections relate to the modern world. And doing this kind content well means it can matter too, in so far as it generates broad scale empathy/engagement with an organisation, in a way that no other medium most museums have access to is capable of right now.
