Weeknotes #8
This week I delivered my webinar Why are you measuring that?
It was a really fun session and I loved the imaginary sea creatures we caught 🐳🦞🍤🐙🧜♀️. (Congratulations to Aidan Woodburn from Spike Island for correctly guessing the string length 🏆).
Here is the recording and you can view the additional resources on the Digital Culture Network Website. Huge thanks to Rose and Laura for the pre and post event setup, Amanda for live captioning, and Dean for running the chat.
The webinar is all about categorising the right metrics for what success means for your organisation.
An example of the marketing funnel
I use a marketing funnel as an example way to do this. There are different marketing activities for each step of the funnel, and different metrics to report on. By grouping your metrics in this way, it makes reporting easier to set up, understand and share. It’s just one example of using a framework to help bring everything together.
If you’re using something like this, please share. I’d love to see some more examples of this being done really well in arts and culture.
Activity Stream
Emily and I caught up with Mark Laurence Stein, Director Of Business Development and Partnerships at Activity Stream. We’re exploring ways to do collaborative content pieces for arts and culture organisations, and highlight the benefits of using the platform.
If you’ve not heard of Activity Stream before, it is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) which integrates with your existing systems and marketing channels to analyse customer behaviour, identify opportunities and run campaigns. I’ve had several discussions with cultural organisations who were considering building their own data warehouse to just that. Activity Stream is a great alternative and takes away a lot of the pain of building, configuring and maintaining sonething of that size and complexity
Also, Activity Stream recently acquired Yesplan and crowdEngage to help organisations manage events from the planning stage, building an audience and creating great visitor experiences. It’s a really interesting proposition and one which would work really well for some organisations.
Top reads of the week
I get a huge amount of recommendations from the arts and culture newsletters I subscribe to and people I follow on Twitter and LinkedIn. Here’s a few from this week:
Optimising user journeys – one step at a time
I was at our team training day last week so couldn’t attend the Ticketing Professionals Conference 2022½. Kate Mroczkowski from Supercool delivered a talk at optimising user journerys and has thankfully written it up as an article!
There’s some great advice here, especially about defining your audiences and objectives.
“What are your organisation’s commercial goals? Are you aiming to generate more revenue through memberships? Do you need to increase the number of returning bookers? Knowing what your goals are will help you to prioritise work later on.”
A template for good exhibition webpage content
Georgina Brooke from One Further has followed up her post on cultural homepages with another great piece on exhibition pages. There are some great tips to consider and gets to the core of what your users need to know.
“Based on usability testing quite a few museum exhibition pages (and looking at the pattern of user journeys in analytics), we’ve found time and again, most folk want to know...”
Digital Storytelling
Haydn Corrodus, our ex-Social Media Tech Champion, was interviewed by Tim Deakin for MuseumNext.
It’s a really good read and highlights some of the main pain points we hear at the Digital Culture Network.
“I think there is sometimes a hesitancy within cultural institutions to ‘say too much’ or ‘be too loud’ – which is something that just doesn’t enter the conversation for commercial organisations.”
I was definitely nodding along through all of this.
“The responsibility lies with senior managers to upskill themselves, understand the value of digital channels and find ways to integrate them into their broader strategic goals, so that those talented young professionals have the necessary guidance and framework in place.”
Haydn will be speaking at Culture Geek in November. See you there if you’re attending!
Join the Digital Culture Network
Did you know we’re looking for a Senior Manager to join the team? If you’re interested in shaping the Digital Culture Network and enhancing the digital skills and capabilities of the arts and culture sector, this could be role for you!
It’s 35 hours a week, you can be based anywhere in England (outside of London), and you’ll get paid £43,604. You also get to work with me!
Here is the job description and recruitment pack.
On Thursday 6 October at 2pm there is a drop in session where we’ll tell you more and you can anonymously ask questions about the role.