Ask a Curator 2 « Jim Richardson – Digital thinking for the Arts. Mixeum.net. Le%20mus%C3%A9e%20LEGO. The Event-Driven Museum? This is the casual attendance data from my first full month as the Executive Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz. It doesn't include school groups or facility rentals, but it does include everyone else who walks through our doors during open hours. This graph is making me change the way I think about what our museum is for and how we should market it. Simply, I'm shifting my perspective from an exhibit-driven model to an event-driven one. Let me explain. First Fridays are raucous and fabulous events. While part of our attendance spike on First Fridays is certainly due to the fact that the Museum is free, that's not as significant a factor as the fact that First Friday is an exciting event with a lot of community support and publicity.
Over the past several months, as I've been thinking about what makes the arts habit-forming, I come back again and again to the primacy of events as the driver that bring people in the door. I know there are limitations to this model. Research_report_PACE. @OonaghTweets. The Ruru Revolution. Let's say you've gotten excited about some innovative ideas for your institution. You want to get some projects going, but you're not in any particular position of power. Where do you start? Ruth Harvey has a brilliant solution to this problem. Ruth is a curator of pictorial collections for Puke Ariki, a museum/library/visitor center in the small city of New Plymouth, New Zealand. Last year, Ruth received a Churchill fellowship that allowed her to visit U.S. institutions that were doing innovative work in audience engagement.
(We met when I sent her a list of offbeat places to check out.) But Ruth was really smart. So Ruth decided to start with a simple project in which she'd invite staff from across Puke Ariki to write first-person labels about favorite objects. But she didn't just ask people to write labels. This is really unusual and totally brilliant. Perhaps the most notable and potentially silly part of the Ruru approach is the badges staff get for participating.
Empowering Staff to Take Creative Risks. What kind of support do you need to be confident about taking a risk in your work? What are you willing to risk to pursue your professional dreams? Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums in Houston, I was honored to chair a fabulous panel on empowering museum staff to take creative risks (slides here). This is a topic of particular fascination for me as someone who has worked as an external consultant/provocateur/risk-encourager and is now in the director's seat for the first time. I was joined by Lori Fogarty (ED of the Oakland Museum of California), Adam Lerner (ED and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver), and Beck Tench (Director for Innovation and Digital Engagement at the Museum of Life and Science). I learned three big things from this panel: Risk-takers need space-makers.Risk-takers and space-makers are different kinds of leaders.Risk-takers often don't see their choices as risky.
Here's a bit more on each of these. The Museum of the Future » Integrated media strategies for museums. Photo by Kristian Vinkenes on Flickr.com One of the recurring themes at the recent MuseumNext conference in Edinburgh was what I call the “holistic” or “integrated media strategy”. Social media or technology is not an isolated department within the whole of the strategy of an institution, but a core function such as communication, education or finance.
This means it’s no longer about having a great Facebook strategy within your team. It’s about having an overall strategy for all media (new and traditional), connected with the activities you do and the expositions you host. A strategy that is interconnected and continuously attracts new visitors, retains the old ones and engages them with what you do. The museum as a media producer If you think of media as communication channels (and is there any other way to think about them?) This model is all about people moving from one level to another (up and down). Attracting and retaining (and engaging) Conversion rates Designing a strategy Conclusion. Pourquoi va t-on au musée ? Une typologie des motivations très utile | minixeum.