New opportunity: Host a Museum Town Square!

Culture24 seek expressions of interest in Museum Town Square, an expansion on Market Hall Museum Warwick’s ‘Great Warwickshire Show And Tell’ event for Connect10 in 2014. We are looking at the idea of rolling out these open-air museum events around the country, either in 2015 or 2016.

Visitors flock to the market stall in Warwick. Picture courtesy Rebecca Hone

What’s the big idea?

The philosophy behind Museum Town Square is simple – give people a forum to present and talk about their passion, without hierarchy or the need for prices or literature – and they will make a deeper connection with the people they meet.

The huge breadth of collections and displays, from beekeepers to bread-makers, cheese-rollers and barrel burners will tap into the hidden resource and passionate expertise of Britain’s collectors. In contrast to the homogenous nature of the modern town centre, for three days in May streets and squares will showcase the diversity of the country’s enthusiasms.

Museum Town Square will be artist-led, empowering people to be at the heart of the art, with activities and things to do animating the spaces throughout the day. It will attract enormous media coverage; from local TV, radio and press, supplemented with national BBC programming, creating a unifying national experience.

The Warwick story

This idea was piloted in Warwick for Museums at Night 2014 by Alex Hartley in partnership with Market Hall Museum, attracting over 4,000 people to the market square and the museum. The town’s market stalls were used to unify the exhibits into a single celebratory event. Basic rules prevented direct selling and commercial signage. Each stall was manned by an expert, creating a hosted cabinet of curiosities.

Watch the short film about the Warwick event: http://youtu.be/bWj8-hR2khs.

A dancing ban man welcomes visitors to Warwick’s Museum Town Square

What will Museum Town Square mean for your community?

Museum Town Square will turn town squares nationwide into outdoor museums, creating a national mass participation event and art happening on a grand scale. Centrally curated by artist Alex Hartley, with input on a local level from local artists, the stalls will feature community and hobbyist organisations and individuals – turning each town centre into a giant outdoor show-and-tell, for one late afternoon/evening only.

Each event would be run with a very simple set of ground rules (including no selling or print material allowed) with the aim of facilitating a dialogue and conversation between enthusiasts and visitors, which worked so well in Warwick last year.

The fluorescent outfits of the breakdancing binmen shine brightly as evening falls

Event co-ordination 

Each event will be run by a local museum or gallery, with central support and guidance from Culture24 in every aspect of the project. The lead organisation in each town will be responsible for coordinating the invited local community groups and running the logistics of the event, which presents an opportunity for that organisation to raise their profile both within the community and directly to audiences.

Next steps 

This project will go ahead subject to a successful application to one or more public funding organisations, and would be managed on a full cost-recovery basis for all participating venues.

If you are interested in being part of this project please fill in this very short Expression of Interest form: https://culture24.wufoo.com/forms/museum-town-square-expression-of-interest-form/

Final call to get your after-hours events on sale in Boots and WHSmith!

If you took part in Museums at Night, regularly run after-hours events, or are simply interested in generating income for your organisation, this is your last chance to join Culture24’s Activity Superstore partnership promoting cultural gift experiences in museums, galleries and heritage sites.

Four boxes will be sold on the high street from the beginning of September in shops such as Boots and WHSmith.

 

The Museum Lates box is dedicated to providing two adults with an enchanting, insightful evening in a museum or gallery. This could be anything from an in-depth tour of an exhibition, a talk or access to a workshop. This is a fantastic way for you to attract new audiences and generate income.

A number of brilliantly diverse venues are already on board, including the Art Fund Museum of the Year, Yorkshire Sculpture Park; the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings; and the Museum of Carpet.

These boxes are most commonly brought as Christmas presents, so it is vital for you to get involved as soon as possible.

Frequently Asked Questions 

What is Activity Superstore?

Activity Superstore provides a range of gift experiences, sold in attractive gift boxes in high street stores. The boxes contain a booklet and a code that customers can use to book their experience on the Activity Superstore website. Examples of boxes that are already being sold are Traditional Afternoon Tea for Two, Ferrari Driving, Two Night Camping Experience and Vineyard Tour and Tasting for Two.

What will venues gain from being involved?

It is a fantastic way to attract new audiences and gain revenue from your events. The whole project is also a really exciting way of attracting individuals who might not often chose to visit museums and galleries. With exposure in several high street outlets such as WHSmith and Boots, Activity Superstore is a great opportunity to get your name and your brand out there in front of high street consumers.

What does your venue need to do?

For each box that you choose to be involved in, you need to offer four or more activities between January 2015 and December 2015. You can either offer four or more of the same event, or four or more different events; it is totally up to you.

What about events that are already open to the public?

These are fine. If you are including events that are already planned, you could perhaps include some special element like a cup of tea and cake in your café, a voucher for your gift shop, or a special welcome from a curator or guide.

How do box sales and event bookings work?

Each will be sold in shops: customers will choose one experience from a range of venues throughout the UK.

Each time the box is bought and two adults visit your late event, you will invoice Activity Superstore for a share of the money.

Activity Superstore’s experienced team take care of the bookings, and will make the logistics as hassle-free and profitable for you as they can.

What other boxes are available?

• Inside Art and Design – anything art/design related, such as an in-depth curators tour/talk (2 adults).
• Forgotten Skills and Traditions – anything history-based, for example workshops about traditional crafts or activities (1 adult).
• Curious & Creative Kids – anything for under-12s e.g. children’s crafts/activities (a family of up to 1 adult and 3 children – doesn’t need to be for this many people so long as we know).

Any other questions?

If you are interested in taking part or have any other questions about the boxes and how it all works, please contact Culture24’s Rina Lakhani on 01273 623357 or email rina@culture24.org.uk

We look forward to working with you and helping you to make money and attract new visitors.

Call for guest posts: share your event planning and marketing case studies!

Do you have a story to tell about how you planned or marketed an event at your venue? Have you taken advantage of Museums at Night to try out a new way of working, or to stage a different type of event, or to bring in a new element?

Janette Parris’ musical performed in Cardiff Story Museum (c) Klaus Wehner

Writing a reflective case study can be a great way to talk about your organisation and celebrate the work your team does. You can see examples of previous guest posts here: https://museumsatnight.wordpress.com/tag/guest-post/

This writing opportunity is open all year round to anyone who works or volunteers in an arts or heritage organisation.

Adur Valley Scouts ready for their first ever museum sleepover at Worthing Museum & Art Gallery

The idea of publishing guest blog posts is to showcase lots of different voices from museums, galleries and heritage sites, passing on marketing and event planning ideas to inspire other venues who may be considering taking part for the first time.

• Do you have any tips for other venues based on your experiences?
• What worked well?
• What have you learned – e.g. about your own capacity, about timings, about the most and least successful forms of promotion, about what different audience most appreciate?
• What would you do differently next time?

A good guest post consists of:

1) 300-400 words, in a chatty, friendly style
2) A couple of photos of visitors exploring your venue, ideally at night, with the photographers’ credit. We always like to put up photos of people having fun at cultural / heritage venues!
3) A couple of lines about yourself, I’m happy to link to your website / Twitter account / LinkedIn etc.
4) A thumbnail-sized photo of you

If you’re interested in writing a guest post, or if you have any questions, please drop me an email at rosie@culture24.org.uk or give me a call on 01273 623336.

Museums at Night: your next steps!

Wow, we’re still reeling from the terrific impact that this year’s Museums at Night festival had – now it’s time to assess that. Here’s how you can help!

Listening to the band at Beamish Open Air Museum. Photo shared by Beamish Museum on Instagram

Venue Survey

If you ran a Museums at Night event, please take 5 minutes to tell us how many visitors came, what worked well and what you think we could improve for next year by filling in our Venue Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FMBHLNG

Visitor Survey

If you visited a Museums at Night event, we’d really like your feedback on it! Please take a few minutes to fill in our Visitor Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VH5RH2C

Printed forms

If you put out printed visitor survey forms during your Museums at Night event, please post the completed ones back to me:

Rosie Clarke
Culture24
Office 4, 28 Kensington St
Brighton
BN1 4AJ

Next year’s dates for your diary

Museums at Night next year will run from Thursday 14 – Saturday 16 May 2015, so please put the dates in your calendar now!

Last minute London pop-up museum opportunity

There are just two weeks to go till Museums at Night 2014 kicks off!

We have a last-minute exciting promotional opportunity which could be right for your organisation, if you’re willing to lend out collection objects for half a day, and able to act quickly!

Do you fancy furnishing a pop-up museum in a fancy hotel room in central London for a photoshoot before Museums at Night?

Get involved in a great PR opportunity with all the costs covered: we’re aiming to shoot this on Monday 12 May and for the images to be shared widely over the following few days.

This could be a great last-minute chance to raise awareness of your collections ahead of the festival, whether or not you’re planning to open late.

If you’re interested, please call Nick Stockman on 01273 623279 or email nick@culture24.org.uk as soon as possible.

We’re here to help!

This opportunity not quite right for you? No worries: whether or not you’re in London, it’s not too late to register a Museums at Night event, do a marketing push or call us if there’s anything you’re not certain about.

We only released the Museums at Night poster files as downloads yesterday, and already venues are turning around lovely publicity such as this new flyer from Gladstone’s Library in North Wales promoting their Museums at Night author talks.

Order your Museums at Night 2014 brochures by Monday 31 March

Thanks to everyone who’s registered Museums at Night events in the database: BBC History Magazine are now compiling our major piece of print publicity, the official Guide to Museums at Night.

This A5-sized colourful 16-page brochure goes out to all BBC History magazine readers, and selected Tourist Information Centres across the UK. It contains short interviews and features about some of the exciting festival events, along with list of participating venues arranged by region.

The goal of the brochure is to send people who pick it up to the Museums at Night public-facing website to find events they’d like to visit in their area.

The front over of BBC History Magazine’s Guide to Museums at Night 2014, designed by Stuart Kolakovic

All venues running a Museums at Night event will receive a small box of 100 brochures – unless you tell us otherwise! These come to you totally free, and you have 10 days to let us know how many you’d like.

Please fill in this simple form to let us know how many boxes you’d like: you can order small boxes containing 100 brochures, or large boxes containing 500 brochures – or if you don’t want any brochures at all, please use the form to tell us this. We can’t send out fewer than 100 brochures at a time.

You can help raise awareness about the Museums at Night festival by placing the brochures in foyers and cafes, local libraries, bookshops, theatres, cafes, bars, and supermarkets: you know better than we do the places that people are likely to pick up brochures in your town. 

If you’re not running a Museums at Night event this year but would still like to take a box of brochures and distribute them in your area to help raise awareness of the festival, please do order a box! To our delight, this happens every year, and it’s really encouraging for Nick and I to see the sector come together to encourage more visits to arts and heritage venues.

Please order your brochures here by 11am on Monday 31 March 2014.

Call for Museums at Night images

Thanks to everyone who’s registered Museums at Night events: we have almost 300 in the database already!

Our latest publicity opportunity is a great one if you have high res photos showing people exploring your venue and collections. This opportunity is open to any organisation taking part in the Museums at Night festival, large or small.

Outdoor photo of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, who are running twilight tours for Museums at Night

Our festival PR agency, Bullet PR, are putting a call out for images to represent the Museums at Night festival 2014.

If you have a great image to accompany your Museums at Night event, please forward a high res version (1.5 mg or more) either by email or dropbox link to pandora@bulletpr.co.uk.

If you’re setting up a photo opportunity and want to take pictures of children, you must get their parents’ permission.

When you’re sending images through to us, don’t forget to tell us what the image shows (e.g. any specific collection objects or buildings), the photographer’s credit and any copyright information.

Fire jugglers welcome visitors to the Black Country Living Museum after hours (c) BCLM / Patrick Mulvaney

The best images will be selected for the Museums at Night press image library: when media representatives get in touch with specific requests, e.g. asking for landscape or portrait photos of families or costumed characters having a good time at festival events, this is where we direct them.

Georgian costumed character lighting candles after dark at Fairfax House in York

Your pictures could appear in newspapers, magazines, on websites and across all kinds of social media – so please, do send us your best!

Newsflash: the BBC will broadcast Museums at Night 2014

Culture24 is close to reaching an agreement with the BBC to broadcast coverage of the 2014 Museums at Night festival on national & local television, radio and online.

At this stage we are working with the BBC to plan the scope of the coverage, but it is likely that some festival events will be covered by the BBC for broadcast on BBC2 with others to be presented on a special new arts website. 

Vital info

We want to hear about every event that is being planned for Museums at Night but we need to know about it now! We are particularly looking for events that fulfil the following criteria:

• Has a performance, artistic or creative element
• Is  visually interesting and exciting for a TV audience
• Will enable privileged access to parts of your venue or collection that are not normally open to the public
• Demonstrates how you reach out to your local community and invite contributions and participation in new and exciting ways
• Offers an example of how museums and galleries are responding to current issues the sector faces such as changing revenue models, reduced funding, the challenges of the connected world, and the drive to attract new audiences

Plus, do you have a fabulous and fascinating curator who would be engaging discussing their specialist subject on camera? We need to know!

Family craft activities are always popular (c) Oxfordshire Museum

Please either register your Museums at Night event listing in our database ASAP (here’s how) or email Nick or Rosie with the following info:

• Name of venue and location (town, city, village)
• Event title
• Description – no more than 100 words
• When – Thursday 15th, Friday 16th or Saturday 17th May
• Admission – free ticketed, free drop-in or pay-ticketed (if so how much)
• Your target audience; adults, families etc
• Tell us why it fits one or more of the 5 vital criteria above in no more than 100 words
• Main contact details

Send your event details to Rosie Clarke, rosie@culture24.org.uk or Nick Stockman, nick@culture24.org.uk or ring 01273 623279/623336.

The sooner you get us this info the more likely it will be that the BBC can cover your event in some way.

Every year for six years, feedback from participating venues about Museums at Night has highlighted one thing – the need to raise the festival’s profile through national broadcast media. This is your opportunity to make this happen!

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!

Order your free BBC History Magazine Guides to Museums at Night by Wednesday 3rd April!

BBC History Magazine’s Guide to Museums at Night is nearly ready, and it’s going to be very special: this year’s cover design is by top artist Fred Deakin!

The Guide is an A5 glossy brochure with 16 pages of themed editorial roundups and photos celebrating and promoting the festival, giving a flavour of the diverse and exciting events taking place. It’s not a dry series of listings, but is designed to encourage people who pick it up to head to the Museums at Night website to find out more about festival events taking place near them.

Families looking for after-hours inspiration (c) John Rylands Library, Manchester

All the 70,000 readers of BBC History Magazine will receive the Guide, but we’re also having 75,000 extras printed to distribute through Tourist Information Centres and to send out to your venues. For the last couple of years, this has been a key part of the Museums at Night festival marketing at a local level.

Last year, the venues who requested brochures had great success in raising awareness about the festival placing them in foyers and cafes, local libraries, bookshops, theatres, cafes, bars, and supermarkets: you know better than we do the places that people are likely to pick up brochures in your town.

Order your free brochures here now!

If your venue is running a Museums at Night event and you don’t fill in the form, we’ll automatically send you a box of 100 brochures. However, if you can take more than this please use the form to let us know by Wednesday 3^rd April, as you won’t be able to ask for more later. You can request as many large boxes (500 brochures) or small boxes (100 brochures) as you want and we will send them to you completely free of charge.

Alternatively, if for some reason you can’t put any brochures out, please fill in the form to let us know so we don’t send you unnecessary copies.

Last year it was incredibly heartening to see many venues who weren’t able to run events supporting the Museums at Night festival, and other local venues by asking for brochures to put out. It would be wonderful to have your support during this campaign.

Could you do this? Please click here to request your Guides!