Museums at Night intern Holly Parsons shares what she’s learnt

The Culture24 team at the Museums at Night 2013 launch party on the Cutty Sark – Holly’s on the left in the blue dress. Photo courtesy Aniko Boholy.

Wow! Six months have gone by so quickly. It feels like only yesterday that I walked in, an innocent and nervous intern on her first day. So much has changed: I now leave Culture24 with greater work experience and the essential, elusive office experience so many jobs require. But what exactly have I learnt?

Firstly, I really appreciated the opportunity to work in an office: something I have never done before, yet some of the jobs I was applying for required office experience. Having spent time in this busy environment with my lovely and slightly alternative Culture24 colleagues, I now feel I could work in any office.

From looking up event details and talking to museum staff on the phone and over email, I’ve also learnt a lot about museums across the UK. On my first day I was given the task of calling museums to promote the Connect10 competition, and spoke to museum staff in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. Not only did the change of accents disorientate me but it was just immense to be talking to people across the country. Those of you who spoke to me on the phone that day may have noticed how nervous I was – it’s amazing how this does not affect me as much any more, and it now seems natural to pick up the phone for a lovely chat with museum staff from the far reaches of the country.

Part of my work here has involved using some computer programs which I’d never heard of before, let alone used. Beyond Excel (which I now feel I should have a degree in) I have learnt to use the Highrise customer relationship management system, Wufoo to retrieve competition submissions, and Culture24′s Direct Data Entry system to work on event listings.

My social networking skills have also been put to use, using Twitter to promote festival events, Storify to track conversations about Museums at Night and WordPress to publish blog posts.

The key thing I have learnt is about the importance of marketing. Through working with thousands of photos, I now understand the types of images that are best for museum publicity. I have also improved my communication skills by writing blog posts and tweets.

Overall my time with Culture24 has been brilliant: I’ve met some lovely people; learnt lots of transferable skills which I can apply to future jobs; and most importantly I now know about an unbelievable number of UK arts and heritage organisations, which will make me invaluable at any museums pub quiz.

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Holly our intern

Holly Parsons studied History and Politics followed by Heritage and Museum Studies at the University of Portsmouth. She lives in Brighton and has a keen interest in museums, volunteering in several and visiting as many as she can.

Now she is leaving Culture24, Holly plans to carry on her current museum work while seeking paid museum employment. Find out more about Holly through her LinkedIn profile.  —————————————————————————————————-

Museums at Night 2013 last minute marketing tips

There’s nothing like a Museums at Night event to get people excited, and already  we’ve seen lots of media coverage of your events. Want more? Here are some last-minute promotional tactics that you can carry out in the next 15 minutes.

1) Register!

Make sure that your Museums at Night event is registered in Culture24′s database! With two days till the festival kicks off, this is your very last chance to benefit from our national PR campaign: if journalists ask us what’s happening in your area, and we don’t have details of your event, we can’t spread the word about it! Here’s how to register.

2) Make sure your event is listed on your own website

Double check that you’re promoting whatever your Museums at Night event is on your own site (and Facebook page, if you have one). It sounds obvious but at the very least you need to list the date, event times and ticket price, along with contact details for potential visitors to make a booking or find out more.

3) Chase your local media

If you’ve already sent press releases, that’s great – but now’s the time to follow up with a phone call. Your local newspapers and radio stations are looking for content – so could you do a short interview with them on Thursday morning about the Museums at Night excitement you’re planning?

Will they send a reporter or photographer along on the night? Phone them now!

4) Use your social media channels

Reach out to your followers on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, and any other social media channels you use. Share your excitement as you get ready – we’re already seeing some great behind-the-scenes photos being tweeted, such as this teaser from artist Julian Wild:

And by night…. #museumsatnight @museumsatnight @blistshill twitter.com/jrewild/status…

— julian wild (@jrewild) May 13, 2013

… and this costumed preview from Chiltern Open Air Museum:

Staff at Chiltern Open Air Museum preparing for a fairy tale Enchanted Museum evening this Saturday! @museumsatnight twitter.com/ChilternOAM/st…

— Chiltern Museum (@ChilternOAM) May 13, 2013

However, in your messages, be sure to include a link to your event listing online, or to the site where people can find out more and book tickets. Rather than just broadcasting, if you want your followers to take action, make it easy for them by giving them a link to click rather than forcing them to Google for more details.

Don’t forget, the Twitter hashtag for Museums at Night 2013 is #MatN2013 – if you use it, we’ll retweet you.

5) Send an email about your event

Send a quick newsflash reminder to your email network about your Museums at Night event – this is their last chance to book tickets! Bonus points if you have a good image to include.

6) Guerrilla marketing on the night

You’ve already distributed posters, flyers and leaflets around your area, but you want to attract new audiences on the night too – but if you don’t have enough staff to stand outside welcoming potential visitors, how can you grab their attention?

Good signage can make a big difference: if your venue’s on a side street that doesn’t get much passing traffic, use pop-up A-frame signs to catch people’s eye.

Don’t have signs? Simply chalk on the pavements! During Museums at Night last year several venues chalked a trail of arrows to direct passers-by to their front doors, and were delighted to report that this drew in curious new visitors.

7) Keep us updated!

If your tickets are selling slowly or quickly, if you may have to cancel or if your event’s now fully booked, please update us! Call 01273 623336 or tweet @MuseumsAtNight.

To be opened very soon … they’re from the champagne tasting night at Bath’s Fashion Museum, and they’ve got our name on! (c) Bath Fashion Museum

Thanks to everyone who’s shared their marketing highlights with us, including blog posts by poets performing at events; a teaser feature about artist Richard Wentworth’s Museums at Night plans for Manchester;  and this promotional video from Liverpool’s Light Night:

LightNight from the Hatch on Vimeo.

And finally, thanks for all your lovely comments about this year’s BBC History Magazine Guide to Museums at Night!

Got good or bad news about your Museums at Night event?

With seven days to go until the festival explodes into life, it’s that time when last minute changes happen – so please keep us informed!

A face from the past at London’s Benjamin Franklin House, preparing to take visitors back in time (c) Benjamin Franklin House

Making changes

We’ve already sent out a lot of press releases about the Museums at Night events registered in our database. If the details of your event have changed, please log in to your record and amend the listing.

Slow ticket sales

If you’re having difficulty selling tickets and your team are getting concerned that your event may not be a success, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can go all out to flag it up in our public-facing communications. If you let us know straight away, we may be able to help you! Contact Nick Stockman on nick@culture24.org.uk or call 01273 623278.

Cancellations

If for some reason you need to cancel your event, please tell us so we don’t keep promoting the event and send frustrated visitors your way, only to be disappointed! Simply email rosie@culture24.org.uk ASAP.

Sold out?

We’re always pleased to hear that your events are sold out – but the public need to know as well.

Log in to your event record and open the Event Status dropdown menu – then change the status from Confirmed to Fully Booked, and save your changes.

All the best!

There’s not long to go, now – excitement is mounting and the Museums at Night team are already getting booked up for radio interviews! And for the second year running we have well over 500 Museums at Night events taking place across the UK – find out what’s happening in your area at www.museumsatnight.org.uk.

Museums at Night 2013 visitor surveys: free to use!

Museums at Night is now only a handful of days away, and we have a suggestion for all participating venues.

If you’re planning to survey the visitors who come along to your event, please consider either downloading and using our official visitor survey, or copying our questions to use in your survey.

These survey questions were designed by our independent evaluator, and if you do use them, we’d love to include your results in our official evaluation of the festival.

Download the official Museums at Night visitor survey here.

Once the surveys are filled in, if you’re able to, please type the responses into a spreadsheet and email it to us by Friday 24th May. If you don’t have the capacity to do this data entry, you can post your visitor survey forms to Culture24 office and we’ll process them for you.

Help us – and yourselves!

Whether or not you decide to survey your visitors, on the night of your event, there are two things your team can do that would be really helpful:

1) Count the number of visitors who come to your event

We’ll be asking every venue to send us their visitor numbers afterwards. Last year, over 120,000 visitors came along to Museums at Night events, including more than 45,000 people who were new to the venue they visited and over 5000 people who had never been to any arts or heritage venue before. It’s great to have these numbers, and we are hoping that even more people will attend Museums at Night this year.

2) Take high-resolution photos you’ll be able to use for marketing in the future

Every year we ask participating venues for images to illustrate the idea of Museums at Night, and it’s always a challenge. Pictures showing people having a good time while exploring your building and interacting with your collections are really useful. If you’re taking photos of children, be sure to ask permission from their parents or guardians. You can find guidance on photos and publicity here.

Evening concert in Grimsby Minster, one of several Grimsby venues taking part in Museums at Night 2013

Eight days to go … we hope you are as excited as we are!

Calling all venues: register your Museums at Night events by Tuesday 26 February!

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery are preparing to open their doors after hours for the Museums at Night festival. Photo (c) Alan Russell

Culture24 has had an action-packed few days launching the Connect10 public vote, which seems to be reaching more people than ever before - in less than a week, over 10,000 votes have already been cast!

We’ve also been speaking to lots of museums and galleries about registering and publicizing your Museums at Night events, which this year range from Doctor Who sleepovers to bat walks and ghost hunts. (Looking for inspiration? Check out our Big List of Museums at Night event ideas.)

Our next series of themed press releases highlighting interesting Museums at Night events will be sent out to magazines on Wednesday 27 February. Your event can be part of this next round of publicity – but you’ll need to register it in our database by 5pm on Tuesday 26^th February.

To register your Museums at Night event, log in to your Culture24 account here and add the new event listing, making sure to open the Programmes option and tick the box marked Museums at Night 2013.

Do describe your event making it sound as compelling as possible – what makes it unique, why is it unmissable, and what will visitors be able to experience if they come along?

If you haven’t yet confirmed your plans, but know that you’ll be doing something, you can log in and add as much detail as you can to your event listing as normal, but change the event status from Confirmed to Planning. This means that the Culture24 team will be able to see it and mention it in publicity, but it won’t be visible to the public until you log back in and switch the status to Confirmed.

And once you’ve added your event listing, please email rosie@culture24.org.uk any high-res photos of people having fun at your venue after hours, which we can share with the media. Here’s what we look for in publicity photos.

If you have any issues or questions, please call 01273 623336 or email rosie@culture24.org.uk.

Finally, if your plans aren’t finalized yet and you can’t register your event on our database before this deadline, then don’t worry – we’ll be accepting event registration up until Museums at Night weekend. However, to make the most of the PR opportunities we can offer you, the sooner you can register your event details the better!

Marketing update: making the most of Museums at Night

Visitors at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire (c) National Trust Images / Paul Harris

Early publicity: a good example

Kelham Island Museum have been talking about their entry in the Connect10 competition on Twitter, where they attracted the attention of a local journalist. They quickly followed up this contact with a press release and a set of images, which has already lead to an article about their plans in the Postcode Gazette – congratulations!

This is a great example of how Museums at Night marketing works: we’ll be promoting the festival as a whole through targeted PR activity aimed at national and regional media, but there’s no substitute for doing your own local marketing as well, using all the channels available to you to get the word out!

Help us to promote you:

1) Register your Museums at Night events in our database as soon as possible, describing them to make them sound exciting!

2) Send us your publicity photos for our media image library.

3) Tell your local audiences and media what you’re planning – I’ll be reissuing an updated version of our Museums at Night PR Toolkit very soon to help you with this.

Spreading the word through Twitter

In addition to retweeting your tweets about your event plans, @MuseumsAtNight will be tweeting a different Museums at Night event highlight every working day from now until the festival kicks off in May.

The Museums at Night 2013 hashtag to use is #MatN2013.

Idea development – call us!

This week I spoke at a meeting of members of the Historic Houses Association about the benefits of taking part in Museums at Night, and particularly how the festival marketing campaign can help with audience development.

One of the key points I took away was that the kind of idea generation and marketing coaching I’ve been offering informally over the phone is very much appreciated, and probably something I should be talking about more!

So, if you’re considering running a Museums at Night event – if you’ve had a look at the Big List of inspiring event ideas, and our tips on audience development, and you’d like to talk through your plans, give me a call on 01273 623336. Let’s have a 15 minute brainstorming chat about making the most of your skills and resources, pitching the event to appeal to your target audience, and how you’re going to market it. Everyone who I’ve had these focused phonecalls with has found them useful – so please don’t feel shy about giving me a call.

And finally, a lot of our work around Museums at Night is about connecting museums, staff and volunteers through different networks; building capacity and sharing skills and learning from across the arts and heritage sector. With this in mind, it’s interesting to read the latest update from the Happy Museum Project.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Excellent Museums at Night publicity photos

Hello again, it’s Holly the intern here!

I’ve had a very busy couple of days playing with a spreadsheet which has details of all of your lovely Museums at Night events. I’ve called a lot of participating museums, asking you all to send me photos of previous after-hours events that Culture24 can use to publicize the Museums at Night festival.

We’ve received an abundance of emails with some really amazing photos, and we wanted to share some of the best with you.

Because the festival is Museums at Night, we need pictures taken at night, or at least dusk. This example from Lewes Castle is excellent as it shows the castle at dusk, with a volunteer in period dress holding a dramatic blazing torch as he looks over the castle walls – giving a good impression of what it would be like to visit their venue.

Soldier on the ramparts of Lewes Castle.

So what could be better than a lovely night time picture of your museum and its surroundings? Well, a picture of visitors interacting with your collection of course!

This picture from Canterbury Museums, who are running an event called Owls, Lanterns and Moonlit Landscapes, where stories come alive inspired by their collection of paintings and objects, represents this well as the boys in the image are actively partaking in the activity and all look engaged as they pick up the pieces of pottery.

Children enjoying the hands on area. (c) Canterbury Museums.

Now they say “Never work with children or animals,” but family events are always popular at Museums at Night, so many museums have sent us pictures of previous events aimed at children.

Some excellent examples have come from John Rylands Library in Manchester who are holding a Doctor Who sleepover again this year. Their pictures show children who are in their fancy dress costumes, laughing and having fun, while showing off the historic setting of the library building.

Children in Doctor Who costumes (c) John Rylands Library

Many other venues also ignore this saying by running events that make a feature of the animal kingdom – this year there are several nature walks taking place at museums across the country such as Killhope Lead Mining Museum, Knebworth House or Prestongrange Museum.

But Museums at Night isn’t just for kids! This picture shows mature visitors enjoying themselves at Arlington Court, who are running a Victorian Dinner Party this year. This lady is genuinely laughing and having a great time: looking at this picture, I’d love to be there!

Visitors at Arlington Court enjoying the activities.

We are also looking for images of events that may not normally happen in museums such as this glamorous night out organised by the Museum of Soho.

Woman in masquerade mask at the Museum of Soho.

So having read this, you must be wondering if it’s too late to send us your photos. And the answer is of course not! We still want your photos to add to our media image library to publicize the festival.

Please send us pictures that

• Are in focus
• Are high resolution (at least 300 dpi)
• Feature interested-looking visitors having a good time at your venue, with their faces visible
• Are taken at sunset, at night, or at least out of direct sunlight.

Please send your images to rosie@culture24.org.uk and we’ll work our magic to spread them to the wider world!

Call for images, #MatN2013 Twitter hashtag and 11 February publicity deadline

It’s great to see so many venues registering their Museums at Night events in our database – remember, we can’t start promoting what you’re doing until we know about it!

The first deadline to register your Museums at Night events in Culture24′s DDE database  is Monday 11 February 2013 - if you can add your event listing by this date, it will be considered for inclusion in this year’s BBC History Magazine Guide to Museums at Night, our printed brochure.

It will also be included in our big PR push out to long lead glossy magazines – so now is a great time to confirm your plans so as to take maximum advantage of our marketing work!

If you know what you’ll be doing, please log in to your Culture24 account here and add the new event listing, making sure to open the Programmes option and tick the box marked Museums at Night 2013.

Do describe your event making it sound as compelling as possible – what makes it unique, why is it unmissable, and what will visitors be able to experience if they come along?

If you haven’t yet confirmed your plans, but know that you’ll be doing something, you can log in and add as much detail as you can to your event listing as normal, but change the event status from Confirmed to Planning. This means that the Culture24 team will be able to see it and mention it in publicity, but it won’t be visible to the public until you log back in and switch the status to Confirmed.

Making the most of our marketing opportunities – send us your photos!

Our PR campaign is built around the stories and images from your events: the stronger these are, the more media interest and coverage the festival will get. So, please send us your photographs so that we can create the most eye-catching publicity material possible!

We need images that are high-resolution – at least 300dpi – and ideally which are taken at sunset, dusk or night-time. The pictures could be of the outside or inside of your venue, but should ideally involve interested people having a great time interacting with objects, collections or exhibitions at your venue.

An example of a good photo: visitors smiling as they discover Geevor Tin Mine in a new light (c) Bernie Pettersen

The sort of pictures which the media are most likely to be use involve people – cute kids are always good if your event is designed to appeal to a families; or if you’re going for more of a grown-up, aspirational audience, shots of glamorous people discovering your space with a glass of wine in hand may help set the tone.

Remember to ask parents’ permission before photographing children.

The images we receive which capture the spirit of the weekend could be featured in:

• local, regional and national press coverage
• the Culture24 website and Facebook page
• this blog
• BBC History Magazine’s printed Guide to Museums at Night
• in presentations given by Culture24 staff
• and in many of the other ways we promote Museums at Night events

Please email your images, and any photographers’ credits or copyright info, to me: rosie@culture24.org.uk.

Twitter hashtag #MatN2013

And finally, if you’re tweeting about your events, the official hashtag for this year’s festival is #MatN2013 – do include it, and we’ll retweet you!

Introducing new Museums at Night festival intern Amy Strike

Hello, my name is Amy Strike and I am one of the Culture24 interns for this year.

I am a book artist, which involves sculpting ships and castles and dirigibles out of books. I am also an active member of the JAG Gallery and a founder member of the Enter the Clutter art collective, an organisation formed to discover and promote opportunities for artists in Brighton. I am currently making a tree out of books for the 13 Women Exhibition.

It has already been a very exciting start. Last week I travelled up to Oxford to attend a trade show at the National Trust Bringing Places To Life conference. This was held at Heythrop Park, a very beautiful house in the Oxfordshire countryside. The longest part of the journey was the trip from one end of the Heythrop Park driveway to the other. Luckily for us, the taxi driver did not let us “just get out at the gate and pop up the driveway on foot,” otherwise we would probably still be climbing it now.

The trade show went very well, with plenty of opportunities to talk to people and venues about Museums at Night. The nicest thing was the number of people who came up to tell us that they knew about Museums at Night, had been involved before and thought it was a great and exciting event. We also spoke to lots of new people, who were really interested in getting involved with an event.

I am really looking forward to the rest of my internship, and to seeing some of the amazing events planned for May. I may be talking to you on the phone soon!

Museums at Night London networking event, Tuesday 5 February 2013

Calling museums, galleries, libraries, archives and heritage sites in South London – come and find out more about Museums at Night!

If your organisation hasn’t taken part in the festival before, but you’re interested in learning more and possibly collaborating with other local venues, we’re working with Better Bankside to offer a free lunchtime presentation and ideas swap.

Sandwiches will be provided, and this is a great opportunity to get inspired, compare notes with other arts and heritage venues, and work out the next steps to take in planning and promoting your Museums at Night event.

Place:
The Bankside Community Space
18 Great Guildford Street (on the corner with Zoar Street)
London SE1 0FD

Date: Tuesday 5 February 2013

Time: 12:30 – 1:30pm

Cost: Free

How to book: Contact Joanna Sawkins for more information and to reserve a space – email js@betterbankside.co.uk or call 020 7928 3998.

I look forward to meeting you there!