Weeknotes #1

The main reason I started this blog was to increase transparency about what i’m up to. There are so many conversations, topics and actions that are stored in OneNote, email chains or floating around in my brain. I’m testing weeknotes to see if they’re a useful way of recording interactions and highlighting steps along different journeys.

Welcome to the first 👋

The beginning of the week started with a screenshare with Samuel Biscoe at Mercury Theatre in Colchester. I‘m helping Samuel get Google Analytics 4 (GA4) set up and configured for his website. We hit a common stumbling block when we tried to access the Google Tag Manager account installed on the website: the two-step verification text was sent to a staff member’s phone who was on leave. We’ll pick it up again once we’ve got access.

Mercury Theatre, Colchester © Visit Colchester

I was off on Tuesday looking after our two cheeky monkeys (aged 3 and 1) whilst my wife Caitlin went down to Portland (Dorset, not the cool American one) to prep for her residency at B-Side Arts Festival. Caitlin is setting up a radical art printing press on the island, which is going to be so, so cool.

Fair Fight © Caitlin Akers

Later in the week I spoke to Helen Bartosinski who is working with BarrowFull, who are doing some great things engaging with the community in Cumbria. Again, there was an issue with access as a Google Account was linked to an inactive email address and the verification text was sent to a ex member of staff.

I caught up with Antareepa Thakur at Akademi (South Asian Dance) who i’ve been helping get set up with GA4 and a few other things. Antareepa is using the Monster Insights plugin which passes data on email (mailto) and phone (tel) clicks on the site alongside the Enhanced Measurement tracking, which is useful.

Plastic Drastic Fantastic © Akademi

Next up was Karen Chandisingh at Dukes Theatre in Lancaster. We had a good chat about, you guessed it, GA4. I’m going to visit Karen and her team in a couple of weeks to plot out what data is useful and how to visualise everything using Google Data Studio.

Last of the week was a chat with Lee Johnson at The Halls in Norwich and the council IT team. The questions were around the right approach for setting up and configuring GA4 with a Cookie Consent manager. I recorded a step-by-step video of every single action needed to create a new GA4 account, a Tag Manager container and the script needed for Civic Cookie Control using Google’s Consent Mode. I’ve started using Loom to record screenshare videos, which worked really well for this. I’ll be recording some new step-by-step guides for the Digital Culture Network knowledge hub soon.

I liked the Civic Cookie Control so much, I’ve now added it to this site to replace the really limited Squarespace version. I’m just using the Community version, which is free.

I finally wrote up my reflections on the AMA Conference 2022 and put together a list of useful Tech newsletters for Arts and Culture. Let me know if you’ve got any more to add to the list!

Top tip for the week:

Create a Google Account using an shared inbox organisational email address (for example: marketing@yourorganisation.co.uk) and make this the administrator of your different Google platforms (Analytics, Tag Manager, Ads, YouTube etc). You can then add additional users at different permission levels and remove them if they should ever leave.

Don’t use a shared Gmail account.

When creating a new Google Account, there is an option to Use my current email address instead.