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!

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!

Museums at Night volunteer intern opportunity

The Museums at Night team (myself and Project Manager Nick Stockman) are looking for a volunteer intern to help us coordinate the Museums at Night 2013 festival. Would this opportunity be right for you? Please take a look and share it with anyone else who may be interested.

Museums at Night festival seeks volunteer for internship 1 day a week

We’re looking for an enthusiastic and friendly person, with good communication skills, experience of using Microsoft Office, and a genuine interest in culture and heritage and/or arts festival and events management.

The placement will last 6 months from January – June 2013, and we’ll ask you to volunteer for one day each week. You will be working together with one other intern.

You’ll learn about arts marketing and audience development, and support the festival’s PR campaign, working with our media library of images and getting involved in our launch event. Of course, you’ll go along to report from a Museums at Night event during the festival. You’ll also help out with the evaluation of the festival, seeing the project through from beginning to end.

The tasks involved in this unpaid role include general administration, using our databases and CRM system and updating Museums at Night social media (blog, Twitter etc) – we would give you full training in all these programmes.

The internship is at Culture24′s office in Brighton, alongside our friendly and supportive staff: priority will be given to applicants from Brighton and the surrounding area.

By spending time with our team, you’ll pick up a lot about online publishing and the UK museum and gallery sector, which we hope will provide useful experience to further your future career plans.

Former intern Beth discusses her placement at Culture24

In the green room backstage at the Culture Matters conference in Norwich last week, I caught up with former Museums at Night intern Beth Hogben and asked her to share her experiences of working on the 2012 festival. The placement has made a real difference to her career:

“I’ve just started working for Visit England as a Project Officer – if I hadn’t worked as an intern with Culture24, I probably wouldn’t have had as much to say in my interview, and got the post!”

Watch the video to learn more about the challenges, highlights and learning opportunities that arose for Beth as a result of her internship at Culture24:

Your next step

If this could be the right opportunity for you, and you’d like more information, please email a copy of your CV to rosie@culture24.org.uk, and I’ll give you a call next week.

The deadline to apply is 5pm on Wednesday 12 December.

Get extra publicity all year round with Culture24′s BBC partnership!

One of the key elements that helps the 5000+ arts and heritage organisations on Culture24′s database to reach new audiences all year round, building on the big spike of interest that happens around Museums at Night, is signing up as part of our BBC partnership.

I’ve asked Culture24′s Activities Assistant Jack Shoulder to explain a bit more about how this partnership works and what the benefits are for your venue.

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Did you know that Culture24 is the official cultural data provider to the BBC? This means  we can send the details of your Museums at Night event to the BBC’s Things To Do site, which gives people a chance to discover hands-on activities happening around the country.

It’s more than just Museums at Night though! Activities going on at any time of the year feature on the Things To Do site,  providing you with an even bigger platform to get the word out.

The best bit? It’s all completely free.

“Oh, I suppose this means I’ve got to brand all my events as a ‘BBC thing’ now?” Actually, you don’t. You don’t have to be running specific BBC-themed events to become a partner or feature on Things To Do. All sorts of activities being put on by museums, galleries, heritage sites, science centres and other cultural venues feature on the site.

The one thing they all have in common? They all get the audience involved.

The Next Step:

It is quick and easy to become a BBC Partner with us: just fill in this simple form and away you go!

If you have any questions or want to know a bit more about the BBC Partnership, please contact jack@culture24.org.uk or conrad@culture24.org.uk.

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Thanks, Jack!

Museums Showoff comes to Brighton – sign up to take part!

Museums Showoff is great fun: it’s an open mic night where people who work in arts and heritage, or who just love museums, galleries and archives, get together to celebrate and share quirky or entertaining stories.

It’s open to everyone: curators, conservators, librarians, collectors, Museum Studies students, archaeologists, social historians, educators, multimedia developers, explainers, visitors, theorists and everyone else associated with museums, galleries and library special collections. It brings together people from different areas of the museum and gallery world, and gets them to show off their skills, knowledge and passions.

I spoke at the first Museums Showoff about Museums at Night, and was overwhelmed by the sheer loveliness of the friendly, supportive crowd. It had a great atmosphere, more like a Fringe comedy show than any other gathering of museum folk I’d ever been to!

I’m delighted to help bring this special night down to Brighton: it’ll be taking place upstairs at the Temple Bar in Hove on the evening of Thursday 20th September.

You get 9 minutes on stage to do anything you like about museums or galleries: sign up for your 9 minute slot here!

So, what sort of thing might you do with your 9 minutes of glory? At the last 2 Museums Showoffs, I’ve marvelled at and been entertained by things as diverse as a shrunken head that smelled like a goat, songs about dinosaurs, a collection of preserved tattooed human skin, and interpreters from the Roald Dahl Museum performing a pantomime version of Cinderella.

Here are some suggestions from the Museums Showoff website for what performers might choose to do:

Show and tell:

Your new acquisition
Your favourite or a ‘star’ object from your collection
An interesting find from the stores
Something you’ve conserved
Your current research
Run a group handling session
Tell us about something you’ve dug up
Describe the weirdest thing in your collection 

Pitch:

Ideas for your next exhibition
The most recent object your collection should acquire or dispose of
Road test ideas for exhibitions/public programmes/galleries
Tell us what a museum should be collecting and how
Tell us about research into what museums are doing and why
Demonstrate new digital projects/ideas/concepts

Or generally show off:

Showing a film or oral history project you’ve just made
Trying out a new demo or interactive exhibit
Practicing a new museum-based comedy set
Reading your latest poem/performing an interpretive dance about your museum work
Performing a 9-minute play aimed at museum audiences
Play your new song about the Tudors
Re-enact a historical event
Tell us about the latest behind-the-scenes goings on at your organization…

Or anything else!

If reading this has got you feeling inspired, please join me and sign up now to grab yourself a Museums Showoff slot! You’ll need to leave a short comment explaining what you’d like to talk about, but it really is that simple.

If you can’t make it to the Brighton event, Museums Showoff will be back in London this autumn too – but I hope to see lots of you at Temple Bar, whether or not you decide to show off!

Museums at Night 2012 is here!

Museums at Night is here at last – and the last 24 hours have been a whirlwind of activity for the Culture24 team behind the scenes!

Our partnership with the Huffington Post saw them republish posts from this blog showcasing various museum voices: Emma Black from Surgeons’ Hall Museum, Lindsey Braidley from Bath Museums, Teresa Fox-Wells from Borough Museum & Art Gallery, Katherine Biggs from Kew Bridge Steam Museum, blogger Ben Wallace and myself.

Bompas & Parr and their team arrived at Brunel’s SS Great Britain, and have shared photos  of their Herculean task flooding the ship with lurid lime green jelly.

Bompas & Parr’s team spreading their green jelly installation around the base of ss Great Britain (c) ss Great Britain

We also have a wonderful video of the jelly being installed and glimmering eerily in the darkness – if you’re in Bristol and you haven’t witnessed this incredible sight, head down there to discover this unique spectacle tonight!

Friday morning kicked off with our lovely festival ambassador Lauren Laverne enthusing about Museums at Night on the Radio 5 Live breakfast show. The station has a large and enthusiastic audience, and within minutes of Lauren’s talk  hundreds of people were tweeting about the festival and coming to the Museums at Night website to look for events!

Lauren also interviewed the indie band Django Django (who played at National Museum of Scotland’s sold-out Museums at Night event) on her BBC 6 Music show, and again sent a new audience to find out more about the festival!

Culture24 CEO Jane Finnis spoke on Gaby Roslin’s show on BBC Radio London early in the morning, and also appeared on the Review Show with Kirsty Wark in the evening, discussing Museums at Night. You can watch the Review Show here for the next 7 days: Jane’s segment begins around 38:30 minutes in.

Museums at Night Campaigns Manager Nick Stockman was interviewed by a Polish radio station, and headed up to Liverpool to speak at the launch of Light Night - here’s his review of Polly Morgan’s taxidermy performance at the Victoria Gallery & Museum.

I was interviewed by Splash FM yesterday, and BBC Radio Sussex at the shocking hour of 6:40 this morning, wrote about Museums at Night for the DCMS blog, and last night visited Mind the Map at London Transport Museum.

Arts writer Mark Sheerin visited the Alfred Wallis exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, while Culture24 reporter Ben Miller tweeted his photographs from Museums at Night events at 4 Oxford museums.

The rest of Team Culture24 are out at Museums at Night events tonight and tomorrow too – so why not join them? Find events in your area at www.museumsatnight.org.uk.

Number 11 Downing Street comes alive at night!

On Tuesday night the Culture24 team travelled up to London for a celebration of the Museums at Night festival at Number 11 Downing Street.

Number 11 at Night - the Culture24 team go through the famous front door

We didn’t want this to be a traditional reception, but an example of how a Museums at Night event can show a space differently and bring a venue to life in a new light.

Our idea for ‘Number 11 at Night’ was inspired by the fact that Downing Street was built in the 1680s – so we put together a music playlist from the era, and suggested to caterers Mesdames Green and Graham that they look at recipe books from the period for inspiration.

Based on recipes from ‘The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby Kt’, ‘A delightfull daily exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen’ and ‘The English and French cook’, the delicious food options included potage, salted duck with juniper and boiled onion, herb ‘sallat’ and chicken ‘fricasie’.

Afterwards we drank Stepony raisin-and-ginger cordial, and sampled rosewater macarons and Leach lumbar-gingerbread (made with red wine and aniseed) – a tasty way to round off the evening!

We were keen to showcase the expertise of the arts and heritage sector, so invited historians and curators to act as storytellers to give some background on the building and its collections.

We’re very grateful to historians and archivists from the History of Parliament Trust and the Parliamentary Archives for sharing their knowledge about Downing Street, the people who’d lived there, and Chancellors from the past.

Each new Chancellor gets to select artworks from the Government Art Collection to display on the Downing Street walls, so two of their curators explained more about the paintings we were surrounded by.

Finally, there’s a tradition of displaying political cartoons of former Chancellors on the main staircase at Number 11 – and who better to interpret these pictures than experts from the Cartoon Museum and Lord Kenneth Baker, the museum’s chair?

We also wanted to explain to our guests and the media what our Connect10 competition for venues to win an artist involved – and were pleased that photographer Simon Roberts and jellymongers Bompas & Parr came along to talk about their plans.

Bompas & Parr also brought a south coast flavour to the capital by serving jellies in the shape of Brighton Pavilion’s domes.

It was a great opportunity to meet lots of museum and gallery people, and compare notes on what we’re all doing for Museums at Night weekend.

Several guests spotted David Cameron (whose family actually live at Number 11 Downing Street, rather than Number 10) – and I think most people stepped up for a photo in front of the famous front door!

Team Museums at Night couldn't resist posing outside Number 10 either...

Connect10 project outline: what’s the big idea?

UPDATE 22 January 2013: The Connect10 competition is back for 2013!

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Last week we announced that Culture24 had secured funding for Museums at Night 2012, and that this would include a new project called Connect10. Find out more about our plans here!

Connect10 project outline 

Connect10 will connect contemporary artists, venues, and audiences in an entirely new way. Venues will compete to win one of ten well-known contemporary artists to take part in a ‘meet-the-artist’ evening event during Museums at Night 2012 (18-20 May). The competition is designed to require venues to reach out to their communities, galvanising them to vote to make the event happen.

When the competition goes live in February there will be a minimum of 20 and maximum of 30 venues vying for the ten artists in ten polls. Each venue designs an event specifically with one of the artists in mind and competes against a maximum of two other venues to ‘win’ that artist. Venues will then reach out to their communities using any channel at their disposal (email, Twitter, Facebook, websites and print media) to get as many votes as possible for their event.

Members of the public will be encouraged to go to http://www.culture24.org.uk/connect10 to vote for their favourite venue/event/artist combination. Venues receiving the most votes at the end of the competition period ‘win’ that artist for their Museums at Night event.

The prize

The prize for the venues is the artist and the prize money. Every one of the maximum 30 venues taking part in the competition will receive a bursary towards the running costs of a Museums at Night event. The venues that win will receive £500 towards the cost of holding their event. Even the venues that don’t win an artist will get £100 to put on an event, perhaps featuring a local artist instead, or with a completely different theme.

Each artist gets to embark on an exciting journey with the venue, devising a unique event, interacting with a special collection and connecting with a particularly engaged audience. As each event is likely to be small and intimate and demand for tickets high, those people who have voted will be entered into a ballot to win tickets to attend.

Timetable

Culture24 will confirm the artists taking part in the run-up to Christmas, with all ten confirmed by the New Year. During this period we will release more information to venues about how to take part, the terms and conditions and resources to support you while you’re devising events.

We will accept event ideas in January through a simple online form and the competition will go live in early February. Voting will take place throughout February and close in early March, when the results will be announced. This should leave plenty of time for each venue to liaise with the artist about their event in May.

How are the project’s stakeholders engaged?

The three primary stakeholders in this project are the venues, the audiences and the artists. Culture24 will create an online environment hosted within our family of sites where the three primary stakeholders will be able to interact.

Each of the venues will have an area to promote their bid, which will include a venue image, an event description and a link to their chosen artist’s profile. Venues will encourage members of the public to go to a Connect10 platform and ‘love’ the artist they want to win. Venues will be able to keep tabs on the status of their poll through the real time poll widget.

Audiences will be able to vote for their favourite venue/event/artist combo. When this vote has been registered the voting widget will flip to a current poll status display and there will be an opportunity to share their voting decision through a range of social media channels.

Artists will have the opportunity to read and input into the venue’s event suggestions, veto any that they are not prepared to engage with and confirm they are happy with the two or three events which will go ahead to the competition. Artists will be represented by an image and short biography on the Culture24 site.

Culture24’s specific aims for the Connect10 project are:

- To raise the profile of participating venues and the campaign

- To increase the involvement of practising artists in the Museums at Night campaign. Museums at Night has been successful in breaking down silos between the museums and galleries sector and this project will combine both in a new and exciting way.

- To connect these venues with their networks and wider communities through advocacy exercises conducted mainly through social media. As venues reach out to the public to get as many votes for their artist event as possible, they will create ambassadors and learn about social media as a marketing tool

- To build capacity in participating venues, developing their confidence in planning and marketing successful events

- To produce 10 superb events, giving members of the public the opportunity to spend time with cutting-edge artists

- To create culture-loving ambassadors for local venues

- To reinforce the work Culture24 has already done in measuring the success of online engagement

For more information on the project, please contact Nick Stockman:

01273 623279 or nick@culture24.org.uk

For press enquiries and images, please contact Pandora George:

07729 469220 or pandora@bulletpr.co.uk

Click here to download a printable PDF version of the Connect10 project outline