We're building a website: Audience, assets and content

As promised, I’ll explain the evolution of this drawing by the super-smart Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied:

The Digital Engagement Framework

Adrian’s deceptively simple drawing is a variation of an online engagement strategy conceived by Jasper Visser from Inspired by Coffee who ran a Digital Engagement Framework workshop as part of the ICOM Australia 2012 Conference held at the Australian Museum. 

Adrian's picture posits a clear communication strategy for M&G NSW. Connect our audience (the smiley guy on the left) with our assets (all our resources) using content.

It’s no mystery that to successfully engage your audience you need to know who they are and what they want. Except the only way to know what your audience wants is to research them and ask them. M&G's website has two audiences (both with overlapping but also contradictory needs): the public and the sector. 

So what do our audiences want?

Pure and Applied looked at existing data about our audiences and conducted interviews with members of the public and sector. Based on the collected statements and data, we picked out key patterns in their cultural needs, demographics and online engagement and we built 'personas'. Like this one:

As you can see above, Fiona is 35, single, not very wealthy, engaged on Facebook but not Twitter. It's important to realise these personas are not supposed to represent accurate personalities with all their potential for contradiction, idiosyncrasies and subtleties of taste. Instead, they’re a summation of data that allow us to personalise broad generalisations about audience interest and meet those interests online (what would Fiona be looking for online: Opening hours? Educational tools? Collection information?)

Assets

Which brings us to the other side of Adrian's picture: the assets. Your assets could be your café, your educational programs, unique items in for collection, or the volunteers who tell stories. M&G NSW's assets are the aggregation of everything you are doing on a regional and state-wide scale. Our job is to describe the relationships between your organizations, their context, the nearby amenities and overall destination.

Connecting audience with assets: content

As you can see our assets are "wrapped" in content and its the multiple opportunities to display and aggregate this content on the M&G website that has driven the development of the user experience. Our original conception of the new website was a homepage displaying a massive google map of NSW. Instead, when users come to our front door they will be greeted by a selection of stories (interviews, onsite travelogues about regions, exhibitions, festivals, opinion pieces and videos highlighting programs). This content invites users to visit individual museums or galleries or highlights the connections between organisations. Simply put, the front door is like a "magazine" with articles rather than a  searchable directory.

But don't worry . . . 

Visitors will still be able to search for every museum, gallery and keeping place in NSW (by region) with a click of a button. And in the next blog, I'll be showing you exactly how we'll achieve both these aspects when we look closely at designing the user experience. 

Further information on the Digital Engagement Framework 

Digital Engagement Framework 

Audience research:

Arts Council of England's Arts audiences:insight 2011 

CONNECTING:// ARTS AUDIENCES ONLINE

Guess Who's Going to the Gallery? NSW State Report 2011

Culture segments New Zealand

Revealed!

Hurstville Museum & Gallery on Friday evening

The nature of collecting itself comes under scrutiny in Hurstville Library, Museum & Gallery's new exhibition Revealed! that opened last Friday evening.

What do we collect? Why do we collect? The sheer range of collections (anything from sci fi toys to doilies) is testimony to the strange, guilty passion that turns sane people into obsessives, and back rooms into Aladin's Caves.

Luckily, Hurstville secured guest speaker Claudia Chan Shaw to navigate the variety of collections and collection psychology. Claudia has a perfect background to discuss collecting: she presented the ABC TV Show Collectors; has an extensive collection of tin space toys and robots (among many other things); and has written a book called Collectomania: From Objects of Desire to Magnificent Obsession.  

Claudia Chan Shaw explains the ins and outs of Collectomania. Image courtesy of Hurstville City Library, Museum & Gallery.

Claudia explained the difference between hoarding and collecting (the former is an obsessive-compulsive disorder) but noted the downright weirdness of some collections. One man collects his belly button lint, coloured depending on the towel he uses to dry himself. Even weirder, the collection has been valued at a few thousand dollars. 

Visitors at the opening of Revealed!. Image courtesy of Hurstville City Library, Museum & Gallery.

In Revealed there was (thankfully) no lint on display but plenty of oddities to be found still. Hurstville Historical Society first began collecting objects related to the St George Region in the 1970s and, since then, the collections have grown predominantly through object donations. Curator Birgit Heilmann  has put together an exhibition that celebrates randomness, eclecticism and stories of unique objects and individuals. 

Here are a couple of my favourites:

This is actually a cake.

So is this.

The Library, Museum and Gallery actually has over 50 sugar art pieces like the above, inherited from the former Australian Cake & Sugar Art Museum and Gallery in Strathfield. The oldest cake in the collection dates back to 1989. 

The interpretation anticipated my one question: how do you preserve cakes like this for years? Well, sugar artists use a sugar substitute called Isomalt that is resistant to humidity and crystallisation. Also, Isomalt doesn't lead to tooth decay like sugar. 
 
The exhibition also featured a mystery object:

This is not a cake.

What is it? I have no idea. if you want to see the answer keep your eye on Hurstville's blog at http://hurstvillelmg.blogspot.com.au/

PS: Just as a side note about the ubiquity of collections. After the event, my companions and I ate at the Ritz down the street. In a glass cabinet right next to us was a boot worn by Muhammad Ali. Just awesome. 

Revealed! Treasures from the Hurstville Library, Museum & Gallery Collections is on until 14 April 2013. 

Contact: 9330 6444
Admission: Free
Website: http://lmg.hurstville.nsw.gov.au/

Director does Dallas

Brett Adlington, the director of Lismore Regional Gallery, embarked on a NSW Government Fellowship with the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), focusing on their new Centre for Creative Connections in December 2012. 

The Center for Creative Connections (C3) is an experimental learning environment designed to stimulate curiosity, inquiry, and reflection in visitors of all ages and learning styles. It was one of several significant developments after the DMA undertook extensive audience research in 2005-2008. These developments resulted in a 100% increase in visitation.

Brett discussed the many opportunities that arose as part of his fellowship experience. 

Had you been considering a fellowship for some time? 

I wasn’t thinking about a fellowship per se but the opportunity at the Dallas Museum of Art was timely. I had been grappling for some time with the possibilities offered if Lismore successfully gets its new space; especially how we can work with audiences to develop new programing. I heard the Dallas Museum had been dealing with exactly this topic in their Centre for Creative Connections.

How easy was the process of organizing the fellowship?

The process was pretty straight forward and streamlined. The hardest thing to organize was what time would suit Lismore Gallery and the Dallas Museum.

As it happened, I got there at a really mad time for the DMA because they were announcing their planned launch of free entry. This may not seem so radical to us but was a very different direction for them, even getting press in the Guardian.

In addition, they also announced a new Friends Program whereby the Museum tracks people’s activity and engagement through a points and badge system.

Even the Center for Creative Connections was changing. There was a push to have the public engagement programs out in the galleries rather than in the C3 dedicated space. So, I arrived at an extremely hectic time for the Museum.

What was the value of the fellowship with the Dallas Museum of Art

I was initially skeptical that two weeks would be enough. I thought you’d only barely scratch the surface but it was actually mind blowing how much I did get out of the two week period. 

This is thanks in no small part to Susan Diachisin, The Kelli and Allen Questrom Director of the Centre for Creative Connections, who arranged some thirty interviews. I was really interested how the DMA maintained community partnerships so Susan arranged for me to visit several institutions in the wider Dallas arts community, including the University of Texas, Dallas Contemporary, The Modern,  Big Thought, Oil+Cotton and many other places.


Did studying the DMA’s practice provide you with knowledge?

The lightning bolt moment for me, after the Museum had exposed me to so much thinking around philosophies of public programing, audience engagement, and education, was when the Director of the DMA, Dr. Maxwell Anderson, announced the Friends program. At the heart of his talk was the DMA’s participation and engagement with the city of Dallas. He described the experience for a majority of the people entering their building for the first time. How they’re asked ‘are you a member’ and this instinctively makes first time visitors and Dallas residents feel like they don’t belong.

The DMA’s acknowledgement of this problem and response revealed the ethos embedded in the whole institution.

What other value does the fellowship provide?

When you’re somewhere new and different you have the opportunity to sit back from your daily workplace culture. At work, you have to make reactive decisions quickly, just to get the next thing up and going. The fellowship gave me time separated from all that to think more clearly about Lismore’s direction.

So how relevant was the fellowship to what you do at Lismore?

The first thing the fellowship at the DMA taught me was how to start thinking more cleverly about our participatory engagement. For example, Lismore Gallery’s entry point off the street isn’t great. We need to make it a fun and inviting space that allows contributions from the community, a space they can own a bit more.

Currently, we’re waiting to see whether the Gallery’s proposal for a new space in Lismore is successful. Part of this new location will be a big outdoor location and C3 provided plenty of ideas for what we can do there to build a more community participatory space.

For more information about the mentorship, fellowships and placements come to Opportunity Knocks at the Gunnery on 26 February. 

This is an Arts NSW devolved funding program, administered by Museums & Galleries NSW on behalf of the NSW Government.

All images courtesy of Brett Adlington. 

We're building a website

For the rest of the year I will be writing blog posts about the process of building our new website. This is obviously to keep you in the loop though I also hope to develop a sense of the project's opportunities and pitfalls by articulating the whole journey. With these goals in mind, let’s start with the most obvious question.

Why?
For some time, there had been dissatisfaction expressed about our current website both internally and externally (in all fairness the designer built it in 2007). 

Our concerns with the website went far beyond the look or feel. They were about our online strategy and it’s expression in our style and content.

Clearly our strategic goal was to advocate the visitor experience of museums, galleries and keeping places throughout NSW and yet our current website seemed obsessed with our organisation. Even when it was blatantly obvious we should be communicating with you, we seemed to be talking about us to somebody else (I don’t know who). 

We have a dream
We envisioned an easily searchable website representing every museum, gallery and keeping place in NSW to the public. This website would tell the collective stories of volunteer museums, show the programing strength of public galleries and unveil the hidden stories of collections everywhere. Organisations would be able to update information themselves or in partnership with us. 

Original website ideas and concepts for reference committees and potential partners.
Design by Katie Duncan.

And we wouldn’t stop there. There’d be a new, improved sector facing site with accessible resources and online opportunities for collaboration and discussion. 

Simply put, we wanted to make a website that didn’t represent M&G, it was M&G.

Easy, right?

Nope
It’s taken a year from this original impetus to actually procure the design team. During this year, we researched “competitors”, developed a digital strategy with Stuart Buchanan from The Nest and consulted our wise and clear-headed reference committees to explore the project’s risks and opportunities. Late last year we finally procured the services of the Interaction Consortium, Toben and Pure and Applied. 

Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied has just completed the user experience and wireframes for our new website: a process that encompasses questions around everything from communication strategies, social media platforms to what exactly you should call the button that takes you to Exhibitions and Events (“Exhibitions and Events” as it turns out).

A few weeks ago, just after Christmas, Adrian drew this picture on our whiteboard:

And in my next post, I’m going to explain exactly what we’ve been doing with Adrian and why this picture is key to everything we’re planning on doing on the website.

P.S. I welcome comments, questions and ideas throughout this process. Also, we're currently looking for someone to be a big part of our online journey. For more information click here.

Great expectations

For many years, friends and colleagues have recommended a visit to the Pioneer Women’s Hut, so it was with great expectations that I finally got the opportunity to visit the museum, located seven kilometres from Tumbarumba on the Wagga Road.

The humble entrance to the museum conceals a delightful collection, which concentrates on the common, everyday objects that are usually discarded when worn out. However, here, they make do and mend ethic of earlier generations is celebrated, along with the female instinct to creatively decorate even the most prosaic of items. Themed displays relate to rural domestic history, revealing “the ingenuity of women in finding solutions to the challenges of looking after a family in early rural Australia.” http://www.pioneerwomenshut.com/home.aspx

Decorative utilitarian household items appear in many of the displays. “Coping with flies” (November 2012), features this eye-catching food cover and fly-swat.

Another personal favourite was the tea-cosy pictured below; the whimsical, tumbling flowers caught my eye. It was easy to imagine a group of women, sitting on a veranda after a hard day cleaning, cooking and mending, enjoying a cup of tea, and maybe a plate of scones with jam and cream, carefully protected from flies with a decorative food cover.

The theme of Making-do runs through every display; darned socks, sheets that have been patched many times, trivets made from covered bottle caps (pictured below), packing-case furniture, patchwork clothing and quilts.

The 75 quilts in the collection motivated staff to develop a new building dedicated to their storage and display. Opened in 2011, the Heritage Quilt room currently features the “Gift of Thrift”.

Glenroy Cottage Crafts is a little shop on the same site, selling locally made products, including jams and pickles, knitted wares, jewellery and the very amusing garden critters made from recycled materials.

So, expectations met and surpassed. This is one museum that I will revisit.

Tamara Lavrencic

Regospective opens in Tamworth

Recently I had the pleasure to be invited back to Tamworth to launch Reg Lynch’s Regospective exhibition at the Tamworth Regional Gallery as part of the 2013 Country Music Festival. Regospective is based on a selection of Lynch’s work produced over the past 35 years. It is Reg’s farewell after a long history curating Guitar Shaped World, a series of exhibitions to be presented in conjunction with the world renowned music festival.

On a particularly hot day in Tamworth (over 40 seems the new norm) it was pleasing to have a large turnout (in excess of 100) to enjoy the hospitality of staff and fine catering of the Friends.

As the official proceedings unfolded I was joined by ABC Radio presenter and art critic Henry Mulholland (a five times Archibald Prize finalist and Guitar Shaped World artist). Henry spoke in some detail about Reg’s work.  My role was to contextualise his contribution in helping cement the gallery’s relationship with the festival and all things country music.

When I was Director of the Tamworth Gallery (1989-97), Reg was engaged to curate Guitar Shaped World.  Selected artists were invited to produce ‘guitar shaped’ work and Reg’s particularly inclusive style saw many surprising and remarkable works shown. Of note was the year we engaged Wagga based performance artist Arthur Wicks to ‘perform’ on the back of a semi-trailer as part of the festival’s signature Saturday morning cavalcade, but that’s another story.

Reg Lynch graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 1981 with a degree in Design/Visual Communications and is best known as a designer, illustrator and cartoonist, with work regularl published in Fairfax media.

See newspaper clippings from the opening below, or a slideshow of Regospective works here

Remembering the 2012 IMAGinE awards

Jennifer Colless from the Walgett and District Historical Association Inc passed on the following memories about last year's IMAGinE awards:

Once again Museums & Galleries have hosted a magnificent event on 23 November 2012,  in the most interesting setting, the White Rabbit Gallery at Chippendale.

This was a great evening and, to old and new members of museums, it was inspiring and awesome and a great showcase of the wonderful work being done by the museum development sector helping all areas of museum growth and progress.

It was pleasing to see the Barkers from Lightning Ridge being honoured after their years of preservation of the stories and artefacts of the Indigenous people and lovely to see the family still involved.  We wish them lots of success in the future.

We also congratulate all the Award winners, such a good job they have all done and the award a great reward of which they are justly proud.

Lovely to meet up with folk from other museums, some of whom we have met before, and to catch up on their efforts over the years.

The professionalism of the entries in the competition was good to see and we can all learn from that.

The Grant funding has expanded one of our newer member’s outlook and she will pass on her enjoyment and what she has learned from the function.  Members need to take the opportunity of attending such functions to develop a broader outlook and new expansive ideas develop more readily.  It is good for all members to see what work other museums are doing, how they display, what they use, their space  (OH for the space in the White Rabbit – it made our mouths water).

We were delighted to have the opportunity of viewing the White Rabbit’s galleries.  I loved the open space, the (apparent) simplicity of some of the exhibits and the cleverness of many of the works, they appear to be something else (the honeycombed paper exhibit looked like a lazy serpent waiting for some unsuspecting animal to come within its reach, the military display and the fascinating door, motes of dust , the log and chains, painted bottles, life sized interview (fascinating), porcelain table & chairs, sunflower seeds and so many others. 

It was great, just goes to show what can be done.  Loved it!!