Hello everyone!

Last post considered how to engage audiences and this one will as well, though in a different manner, as audiences are going to be the main Focus of our Communicating the Museum conference this year.

This years theme is as we previously announced "Audiences: Keeping the Old, Finding the New" and we will greet both museums professionals, as well as cutting-edge experts to discuss how to retain and reach out to new audiences today and tomorrow. New types of audiences are emerging and being singled out but also new ways of dialoguing with them are becoming part of the arts organisations' communication strategy. Is it all about attendance figures? What does this shift mean for the structure of the museums in terms of philosophy and teamwork? 

Here are some of the issues we are going to be working on

>> What attracts audiences, what do they like, what do they want?

>> Segmentation, niche audiences, non visitors, the old and the new : who are they?

>> How to reach audiences : what communication do they use?

>> How do we retain them? What works? What are the efficient tools?

>> What is the future of the relationships with our audiences?

>> How can we work together with our audiences to produce content?

>> How is the role of marketing and communication changing? 

The pink Lady you can see above, fresh as well as a classic, embodies these questions. Maybe she is a symbol of the multiplicity of audiences who enter arts organisations nowadays, or maybe she represents the multiplicity in one single person/visitor, how complex they have become and how crucial they are in the communication process. 

Can you guess who she is?

Our line-up is being finalised at the moment and is looking fantastic. We will keep you posted on the several speakers we will have on this blog.

This year our president Damien Whitmore, head of Public Programmes at the Victoria & Albert Museum will start the conference by delivering an inspiring speech about the fundamentals of developing audiences drawing from his experience as directing the complete rebranding of the Tate including the hugely successful launch of the Tate Modern.

At the V&A, He oversees the museum's exhibition programme and has rebranded the organisation, launched the widely acclaimed V&A magazine and more than doubled attendance figures.   

This will be the starting point for a row of discussions, masterclasses and return on experiences by arts organisations middle-size and big, local and international, mature as well as new. 

The conference takes on a shorter and more dynamic format, but stays true to its style, with great venues, such as the Kunsthistoriches Museum, the Albertina and the Mumok, and remainining a unique occasion for Museum and arts professionals to network.

We also felt that this theme was the unique occasion to discuss how arts organisations can work and come together as teams to achieve a common goal and have set up a special fee for museums curators.

All arts organisations are welcome.

Stay tuned and hope to see you in Vienna this summer!

Visit our website for more information.

 The meeting gathered a panel of bloggers from different backgrounds but with a shared interest in contemporary art around Marc Sanchez Artistic Director of the CNAP –the National Center for Fine Arts which organisesmajor cultural events for the Ministry of Culture - and Aurélie Lesous, who is in charge of mediation and educational programmes for Monumenta.

  On at the moment is a piece much talked of : Christian Boltanski’s installation entitled « Personnes » for Monumenta, a widely acclaimed yearly artistic confrontation between the 13,500 squ. meters of the Nave of the Grand Palais and a internationally renowned artist creating a piece for the occasion.

Monumenta’s main focus is to promote contemporary art beyond its usual fanbase, reaching out to wider audiences to fullfill the gap in understanding that  exists between audiences and contemporary art, changing typical reactions such as  « How should I interpret this ?», or « I could do that myself ! » into a dialogue.

 We were all gathered to discuss the reception of contemporary art amongst audiences and the work Monumenta achieves in this respect and had a very thought-provoking exchange on the conditions required to engage audiences online as well. 

 We first discussed the philosophy of cultural mediation, Aurelie insisted that the first goal of mediation is to propose and not to impose. The interesting thing about initiatives like that is that the Grand Palais is not filled with guards at the moment but with mediation-trained agents, not a familiar sight in a usual museum in France. If the visitor wishses to, he can then engage in a dialogue with mediators about the particulars of the work presented and thus start to work on his own impressions. 

 With that in mind, a discussion about the online translation of  this belief in dialogue started.

 Why not extending these precisous dialogues and personal impressions beyond Monumenta ? Why not having a blog to communicate on this, or more genrally a job done with participation of staff to enhance Monumenta?

 The reason why Monumenta has chosen not to engage in a full online development says Marc Sanchez is because he does not necessarily feel comfortable with talking  about an arts event while organising it. What is the role the staff would endorse ? Could it be perceived as mere advertising ? In this regard,  Marc Sanchez discussed some past experiences, some of them when he was a manager of the Palais de Tokyo which spoke in favour of his doubts, typically some mediators who took part to the dialogue being quite violently bashed for being bound to  be biased and do sheer promotion of the work. The way I personnaly see this issue is about finding your own voice. If staff engages in a conversation about Monumenta and are criticised for that, it can be because they haven’t yet their own space of expression where they would be asolutely legitimate in launching and framing debates and collecting some testimonies. In Monumenta's case, creating a space where the mediation-trained staff can interact with audiences seems more relevant.

 What are your thoughts on the subject ? Are those fears legitimate  and how do you swiftly accompany the change in the way staff and audiences interact ?

You can follow Monumenta on The Monumenta Twitter thread as well as on the dynamic Monumenta Facebook group.

Thanks to the Cnap for receiving us and for being open to discussion, this is much appreciated.

Photo credit : Alexandra Rigaud

Let me first wish you a happy and eventful new year full of arts, visits and discoveries, experiences and learnings from your fellow workers, students, journalists or institutions.

Museum Strategy has been sleeping a bit after CultureBusiness and will be back with a detailed account of our forum, a new focus on a French museums and much more.

 For now on, the news I want to share with you is about the second installment of the conference initiated by leading consultant and lecturer Jim Richardson: MuseumNext.  

Unlike the first successful edition which took place in Newcastle, it will be set in London this time around.  The foundations of Museum Next lay in the sharp analysis of how technological progress reshapes the way the audiences want to experience their museums today and tomorrow. Jim, founder and Director of Newcastle-based design company SUMO has lectured across Europe to encourage arts organisations to embrace this radical shift in the way an institution communicate with their public.

 At Agenda we are convinced that being able to bring about this change is key and will make not only a difference between organisations but that developing a  knowledge, a taste and an adapted practice of Web 2.0 tools is a crucial point for their development.

At the end of 2009, I wrote a post on the first edition of MuseumNext and later had a guest post by  AliceLebredonchel reporting on her experience of  MuseumNext original and forward thinking format.

Staged at the Wellcome Collection conference center, MuseumNext 2 will explore story sharing of successful Web 2.0 campaigns thanks to an impressive line-up : Gail Durban from the V&A, Victor Samra from the MoMA,  John Stack from the Tate, Elyse Topalian from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that we had the pleasure to hear this summer at Communicating the Museum and freshly announced Jan Willem Sieburgh from the Rijksmuseum to talk about Iphone apps devices. Museumnext will also greet Diane Drubay from France, which we are very happy about as it seems that our country is going international in this field.

To attend, all the information is on Museum Next website. Don’t forget to visit it, as well as the blog and Twitter thread.

See you there!

Hello everyone!

I am taking a minute to post on our forum CultureBusiness which took place last Thursday 10 December at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine in Paris. 130 participants from 12 different countries took part in a full day of questioning the future of the funding of culture in light of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the making of budgets today. Don't do cocktail parties for your launchings anymore, bring in some meaning for your communities, the message seems to be as from now.

But what exactly is CSR? Is it unavoidable today and how can it really make a difference in your communication strategy? In building CSR-based projects, how do you gain world exposure but also get in competition with sports, environment or social solidarity organisations? Can culture compete and show it is as much a part of basic human development as any other area?

These are the questions which were raised during two fantastic keynote speeches,"CSR and Social Solidarity: the Next Positioning of culture"by Michelle Wright, Head of Culture at Four Communications and "The Changing face of Sponsorship: a Return to the Core Values of Brand and Social Responsibility" by Jane Marriott, Director of Development at the Royal Academy of Arts and Head of the RA Trust. Of course there will be blogposts  about these talks soon.

At  Culture Business we also debated along with sponsors and cultural organisations on what are the difficulties of as well as the ingredients for a successful partnership. There was also a workshop on how to negotiate a partnership  by Danish coach Malene Rix and it all ended with a "Speed-meeting" session, a succession of appointments between sponsors and arts organisations to build fruitful partnerships at the beautiful venue that is the Conciergerie in the heart of Paris. Here are some pictures of the day sessions, to show you what intense brainstorming we have been at! See you in a few days for more in depth analysis.  

Photos of CultureBusiness will be online on Flickr soon. Thank you to the people who followed us on Twitter on #culturebusiness, discussion continues on sponsorship issues anyway. The conference package, synthesis and presentations will be available soon and free for participants. For those of you who did not attend the conference, please contact me.

Talk to you soon.

Hello everyone! After a long time of technical difficulties of all sorts, I am more than glad to announce that Museum Strategy is alive and running! It was a long-time wish to be able to give our readers a taste of how it is about working online for a French museum. You would think that to get there we had to go interview the staff of the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay or the Centre Pompidou. Well whatever your expectations were if you had some, you probably did not think two of the most active webmasters in France are to be found in the beautiful and thriving southern city of Toulouse. Samuel Bausson - The Museum de Toulouse, second biggest natural history museum in France - and Alain Romang, - Les Abattoirs, a leading contemporary art museum - are some of  the people you want to talk to to get valuable insights. Discover their impressions on being proactive in the French museum world, committing oneself to a public institution and dealing with your private/public persona online. French version available very soon!

1. Where are you from initially and how did you come to be museum webmasters? 

 Samuel: I am originally from Brittany and came to Toulouse to take part in the grand reopening of the Museum de Toulouse. The museum had been fully refurbished and its direction entirely rethought, putting the focus on visitor experience. The museum’s approach was fresh and new, implementing a non-centralised managing pattern and expressing the desire to give audiences a more proactive role, which in turn was very much in tune with  how one works online. This was an opportunity that allowed me to continue working as a cultural editorial  webmaster as well as to get back in touch with a line of work that really matters to me : I majored in  Cultural Anthropology -Grinnell College- where I originally studied ethnology.

Alain: I have lived in Toulouse for fifteen years and thanks to les Abattoirs I have had the opportunity to put my technical skills in website management and DTP into practice, as well as new technologies and contemporary art, at the service of a wider audience.

2. You work for two regional institutions that do not rank among the most important French museums. However, you remain as a major presence on the web. How can you explain this?

Alain: Both our institutions recognised, from a pretty early stage, the importance of exploiting online social networks as they have proved to be very time-effective in circulating information and creating interactivity with audiences. Given that larger museums do not tend to venture into these unchartered waters, our own initiatives naturally draw attention in the same way that some Anglo-Saxon institutions do.

Samuel: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about us, except that perhaps we were able to migrate and articulate the museum’s offers to differents platforms and online services quite early on. When major French museums decide to invest in a real presence and strategy online, they will no doubt take over with their wider-reaching influence. It also has to be said that in comparison to the larger Anglo-Saxon museums -The MoMa, the Brooklyn Museum or the Tate-, our presence online remains relatively insignificant. Those museums lead the way and I'm very impressed by their online offers.

Alain: We are also in the habit of thinking globally, keeping an open mind and constantly looking to build closer ties between the museum’s website, blog and social networks. This has probably had a lot to do with our relatively significant online influence.

3. What are some of the common difficulties that you have to deal with on a daily basis?  How do you feel about your role within the museum?

Alain: The museum places a lot of trust in me and so I have a lot of freedom. I need to take great care in my daily organisation as I am also in charge of printed communication media - leaflets, banners and so on.

Samuel: It’s certainly true that we have a lot of freedom and I appreciate the fact that the museum trusts us. This being said, I don’t think that we are integrated enough into the structure of the institution. Being cut off from the rest of the staff is pretty normal for a lot of webmasters, who tend to end up doing their own onlin e strategy rather than that of the museum.

Over time I have met with other museum staff who were willing to work with me and I was able to translate many of their job experiences online, such as the records department on Netvibes and Twitter and the museum’s conferences on Facebook.

I think that it is important to add that I’m not working alone: Maud Dahlem, a sciences mediator at the museums, works with me and is in charge of the contents. This has enabled us to delve into a lot of other areas, especially FlickR.

The museum’s organisation is currently in the process of being completely restructured and this will change the way in which we work. For the moment, the plan is to work closely with the department dealing with audiences which is a rather positive step, in view of the work we have accomplished so far. Ideally, I would like to form a real team of people committed online. 

5. You both have Twitter accounts. What are they about and what do they say about you? Do you run them alongside your Museums' Twitter accounts? Do you think more generally that you have to devote your entire self online when you’re a webmaster?

Alain : @alainromang, I take information that might potentially regard my job as a webmaster and circulate it. Twitter has proved to be a very useful daily tool to both monitor and share information. Thanks to ‘direct messages’ I can also send and receive message through another account other than just my job email address. Last but not least, @alainromang allows me to focus on and clarify any details or requests originally coming from the official museum’s Twitter @lesabattoirs so as to avoid disrupting its coherence.  

Samuel : On @samuelbausson, I tweet almost exclusively on museums and the web. I do a considerable amount of monitoring and find the platform quite a pleasant way to get to know people and engage in conversations with them.  On the museums account, I tweet about the life of the museums and more generally, I take part in the museum ‘conversations’. Elodie Guiraud, who works as an archivist, is my ‘ally’ on the board: she enriches the museum’s threads with a daily scientific monitoring. Sometimes our paths cross but not too often fortunately.

I personally think that you should never devote yourself one hundred percent to an online persona. I use my real name because it is far simpler for professional contacts to find me if needed though I think that it’s understandable to have different pseudonyms online. The frontiers between professional and private life are becoming more and more blurred, as they are inscribed in a conversation flux and so it’s difficult to completely separate things, places and time. Perhaps, my point is best exemplified by the fact that I am answering your questions on a Saturday afternoon!

Alain : That is a tricky question and I don’t really have a proper answer. One part of the solution lies in creating an online identity which is halfway between your work-self and your private persona. This way, you can really give as much of yourself as you want online, with due protection. However, the question of what one can and cannot say remains a burning issue, especially when one works for a public service. In some cases, this seems quite incompatible with personalising your interactions online. 

6. In terms of the museum’s image, what real changes have you brought about through your work? Did your work create bonds between the two institutions?

Samuel: I really have trouble perceiving the museum’s image from an outsider’s perspective and I am well aware that the internet users who follow us closely form a very minor part of the museum’s audience. I have bonded with fellow webmasters and people in charge of media in museums but at the institutional level these relationships prove harder to establish, as institutions are rarely able to concretise bonds made online. Despite very tough conditions, the institution’s online presence as I know it owes its success to the small few who are willing to work on it.

Alain: I have had a lot of positive feedback but I agree that it’s hard to measure the real impact of our work on the web without resorting say, to an in-depth survey of a large population sample. But we can safely assume that these new ways of informing and interacting with people contribute to creating a positive image of the museums. As regards the bonding with the institutions, I would agree with Samuel.

7. So, what’s on the cards for the near future?

Alain: Well, we started dabbling in social networks in 2007 and 2008. Ideally, we would like to take the work that we’ve already started and make it durable, before moving on to the refurbishing of the new website and the circulation of information through mobile phone devices. We need to attract a greater audience in our communities and improve the quality of our interactions with them, drawing inspiration from the Museum on Flickr. We will continue to closely monitor what we are doing because in this relatively new arena, you never know where the work is going to take you. The constant evolution in this field of work means that we need to think of new approaches all the time.

Samuel: As far as we -the museum- are concerned, our main goal is to continue strengthening the museum’s online community. I am also working hard on a project for mobile phone apps that for accompanying museum visits. But it’s still early days….

Interview by Claire Solery

As you may have noticed, I was finally not at the Museum Next conference last 22 -23 October, but present and thus giving us the opportunity of a second guest post was Alice Lebredonchel, French consultant in cultural communication and owner of Innovart, a blog specialising in innovations in culture, particularly dedicated to the theme of growing audiences through marketing. She provided us with a full account of her experience at Museum Next that you can only read with profit. The layout slightly differ, so you can find the original post at Innovart.

"Back from Newcastle, here is my report on Museum Next, a conference for worldwide museum professionals based on a great interaction between its participants through workshops, “unconference” sessions  and other debates, that is to say two intense days of sharing, exchanging and brainstorming among the participants. Approximately 70 professionals of the museum world were there among whom artists, curators, institutions directors, members of  education departments or consultants, an eclectic mix to think together about tools and strategies for involving audiences in museums in order to make them more lively and interactive.

This event was held at the Great North Museum for the first day and at the Center for Life for the second day

Day One :

For the first moments of exchange between participants of Museum Next we went to a space specifically aimed for the young audiences of the museum imagined by the collective [re] design , a sustainable exhibition designer group. Each participant was asked to test the scenery in groups,  from the design of a monster with a sock or a sculpture with paper cups.

 After these first moments of chatting and “creative stimulation”, we got to work with a presentation of every "wild ideas" submitted by some participants

Once these presentations were made, work could begin and groups were formed  each treating on one of the 6 “wild ideas”

Day two :

The second day began with a fascinating presentation by Nina Simon (slides available here). The content of her inspiring remarks , relevant examples that she has contributed to, and the conceptualisation of ideas she presented - and the quality of the layout of her power point presentation:)-  have been, I think, an inspiration for all participants until the end of the conference.

Then followed 8 “unconferences” submitted by participants during the previous evening, two sessions of approximately 45 minutes held on topics as diverse as:

- How can we measure success?
- How to manage  visitors who came because they had to?
- How can social interactions be facilitated by digital devices in museums and so on and so forth

Then we got back to our  “wild ideas”.

During  lunch break I had the chance to visit the exhibition “Democracy” with some attendees accompanied by its designer Jim Richardson. This exhibition aims at being  as democratic as possible, with works chosen through a voting system which is continuously updated. You can visit the website of this incredible exhibition here or listen to Jim himself :

Back to the Center for Life, we had the opportunity to finalise our proposals before presenting them to the rest of the participants.

All the videos are available here.Congratulations to Jim Richardson and Nina Simon for giving us the opportunity to think and create together and to leave Newcastle with our head full of ideas!"