I was recently interviewed by Terence Eden for his About a Minute podcast, which is a short burst of someone sharing their enthusiasm for a project they think is interesting.
We were delighted to work with the BBC to raise awareness of the Museums at Night festival this year: here’s a brief roundup of the coverage that went out on on BBC1, BBC2, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, local radio and television and BBC ARTS Online.
The programme was a truly nationwide event, presented by Will Gompertz with Mat Fraser at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
There were also short films presented by Frank Cotterell Boyce, Andrew Graham-Dixon and Simon Armitage from Liverpool, Cardiff, Nottingham, Cornwall, Yorkshire and the National Gallery in London.
The on-site panel in Edinburgh included Jude Kelly, Bettany Hughes and Amit Sood from the Google Art Project.
Also on television,
Museum at Night was profiled on Breakfast where Culture24 CEO Jane Finnis joined hosts Charlie Stayt and Sally Nugent and enjoyed the VanGoYourself game, taking ‘selfies’ imitating famous art works
BBC Breakfast presenters Charlie and Sally recreate Two Women from Naples by Guillaume Bodinier. Image shared under a CC-BY-SA licence
The One Show promoted the programme off the back of an item with Arthur Smith at the Black Country Living Museum on Wednesday 14th May
Blue Peter did a piece with Museums at Night author Damian Dibben from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on 15th May
Radio
On Radio 2 Chris Evans had Will Gompertz on the show to promote the festival, and Claudia Winkleman’s Arts Show ran a package with Andrew Graham-Dixon from the National Gallery
On Radio 3 The Verb commissioned writer Phil Smith to do a night time walk
On Radio 4 You and Yours
On BBC 6 Music, Lauren Laverne interviewed artist Fred Deakin about his event at The Wilson, Cheltenham
On BBC Radio Scotland, MacAuley and Co interviewed Will Gompertz
BBC Radio Wales Arts Show had an interview with Connect10 artist Janette Parris about her project at Cardiff Story Museum
There was also a significant amount of local radio coverage, including interviews with many participating museums and representatives from Culture24.
Nations and Regions
More than seven TV regions covered the weekend, either live or as a package on the Thursday or Friday 18.30 news.
Events at the Horniman Museum in London, the Wilson in Cheltenham, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Plymouth, Exeter Art Gallery, and one Sunderland museum sleepover were featured. News teams from Manchester, Southampton, Leeds and Hull also covered the event.
BBC Northern Ireland’s Arts Show produced a feature from the Titanic Museum, Belfast.
Each transmission also referred to the BBC2 show.
Online
The newly launched BBC Arts Online focused on Museums at Night over the weekend.
Martha Kearney picked up from Will Gompertz, continuing the broadcasting at 8pm after the BBC2 show. There was a complete live stream of Russell Maliphant’s ‘Second Breath’ with English National Ballet at the Imperial War Museum North.
The website also featured the ‘VanGoYourself’ project which encourages people to take a photograph of themselves as they restage well-known paintings. The Last Supper was re-staged with a group of dinner ladies in a Glasgow primary school.
Clips from the online coverage, including English National Ballet and Public Service Broadcasting, can still be seen on the BBC Arts Museums at Night page.
Posted onMarch 25, 2014byCulture24|Comments Off on Press Release: Museums at Night 2014 kicks off major new BBC Arts strand
Culture24 are proud to announce that Museums at Night, the UK’S annual night-time festival of arts, heritage and culture, is to be the opening subject of the new topical arts strand, BBC ARTS at…
Coverage of the Museums at Night festival, which takes place over the weekend of Thursday May 15 – Saturday May 17, 2014, will be broadcast from museums and galleries across England, Wales, and Scotland with BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz presenting an hour-long programme on BBC Two.
BBC Arts Online will host exclusive coverage including a live stream of key events featuring leading contemporary artists at venues across the country, along with highlights from the BBC archive. There will be coverage of the event on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show (BBC Radio 2) and The Verb (BBC Radio 3) as well as regional and local news across the BBC.
Launching in May, BBC ARTS at will give audiences a front row seat at cultural events across the year – exhibitions, performances, festivals – showcasing the energy and excitement of Britain’s vast cultural landscape when and where it happens. This ambitious new strand will, for the first time, bring TV, radio and online together under a single banner, BBC ARTS at…
Jane Finnis, CEO, Culture24 says, “On behalf of the hundreds of museums, galleries and heritage venues that take part in Museums at Night, Culture24 are absolutely delighted that the BBC are using this unique festival to launch its new topical arts strand. The coordinated cross-platform coverage will significantly raise the profile of the festival, giving millions of people the chance to get involved and highlighting the amazing work going on inside our arts and heritage institutions – above all emphasizing the importance of Museums at Night as the UK’s annual festival of culture.”
The Museums at Night festival offers the chance to experience culture and heritage in a totally unexpected way. Over three nights in May, hundreds of museums, galleries and historic spaces all over the UK will open up late and putting on a dazzling array of special night-time events: from unique literary talks in castles to star gazing in historic houses; sleepovers in palaces to city-wide culture crawls; bands playing in amongst museum exhibits to science fiction life drawing in galleries.
Now in its sixth year, the Museums at Night festival ties in with the European initiative La Nuit des Musees. It is run by non-profit cultural publisher Culture24 and designed to attract new audiences into museums and galleries, via a whole range of exciting experiences and events.
Posted onFebruary 23, 2012byCulture24|Comments Off on Further tips on raising awareness from museums and galleries
This is the fifth in our series of posts highlighting how venues vying to win an artist in our Connect10 competition are raising awareness about the public vote among their local communities. If you’re involved in audience development or marketing, the ideas we’re sharing may be useful!
The three venues competing for installation artist and sculptor Susan Stockwell are Wolverhampton Art Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery.
Elaine Lees, Communications Officer at Creativity Works reports on Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery‘s Connect10 publicity:
To drum up support we’ve taken a digital approach, mainly posting news stories on websites and using social networking and email to spread the word. Old friends and new are showing their support, and local newspapers and BBC Radio Lancashire have also encouraged people to vote.
News of our Susan Stockwell bid has appeared across the websites of Creativity Works, Artsmap, Blackburn Life, the local council Chief Executive’s blog, the council intranet, the Perspectives of Pennine Lancashire Visual Arts network and more!
Now we just need to enlist the help of the hundreds of thousands of Blackburn Rovers supporters…
Lucy Theobald, Marketing and Press Coordinator at the Fitzwilliam Museum, reports:
We’ve sent out a press release about our bid for Susan Stockwell, together with the bid of one of our partner museums: the Polar Museum are also in the running to win novelist Jon McGregor. Combining the two bids makes more of a story for local media: here’s an article that appeared in Cambridge News.
There’s a news story going out in our local paper, and we’ve also been pushing the story online through our social media channels, Twitter and Facebook.
Wolverhampton Art Gallery report:
We’ve also sent out press releases to the local media, and are raising awareness online through our own website, Twitter and Facebook.
We’ve also added a line about the competition into our email signatures, along with a link to the voting page!
We’re not running a Flickr competition for Museums at Night photos this year – the spirit of the campaign is about collaboration, not competition! However, there is a Museums at Night 2011 Flickr group here http://www.flickr.com/groups/museumsatnight2011/. Everyone who took photos of any Museums at Night events this year is warmly invited to click through and share their pictures: we’d like to use some of them to illustrate articles about this year’s campaign, and to promote Museums at Night in future.
Posters and surveys
Thanks to everyone who’s already posted their visitor survey forms back to us – and to Anson Engine Museum, who also sent us a copy of their A5-sized poster:
Anson Engine Museum's promotional poster
In return, here’s the mini-poster I designed and put on display in our office building’s shared noticeboard. We share the building with a number of very technical companies, so I hoped that including a QR code might pique people’s interest. If you haven’t used QR codes before, the black and white pattern can be scanned by people with smartphones: it takes them through to a website, in this case the Museums at Night homepage. You can generate your own QR codes for free using websites such as http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
My own attempt at creating a Museums at Night poster, featuring a QR code
And the latest reason on my long, long list of Reasons I love working with museum and gallery folk – today I’d like to thank the four thoughtful people who, on trying to fill in our survey for venues who ran Museums at Night events, took the time to send me a polite email letting me know that one question didn’t quite make sense. You’re completely right – the logic of the question wasn’t set up correctly, but we’ve now made the change.
If you ran a Museums at Night event, we’re keen to find out how the experience was for you. How many visitors came along? What went well? How could we improve what we offer you next year? Please let us know by filling in our venue survey here.
Listen to Rosie ramble!
Here’s a link to my extended interview about Museums at Night with Paul Mex of Radio Reverb (my bit starts at 25:54). I was determined to stay on track and plug every single Museums at Night event in Sussex – but somehow we also ended up discussing James Brown, Motorhead and messages from beyond the grave. It was lots of fun chatting away and attempting to return to the key points I wanted to make!
Posted onMay 14, 2011byCulture24|Comments Off on The latest Museums at Night roundup – it’s all go!
Want to see and hear some of the coverage the campaign has had so far?
Here’s what went out on ITV’s breakfast show Daybreak yesterday morning: http://www.itv.com/daybreak/lifestyle/familiesandparenting/museums-at-night/ – I think we should all give Nick Hewitt from the Explosino! Museum of Naval Firepower a big pat on the back for his enthusiasm and for saying such wonderful things about Museums at Night!
We’re delighted that Museums at Night was a lead story in Time Out magazine (and apparently also became the top story on their website – Londoners love their after-hours arts and heritage!), and I’ve lost track of the amount of newspaper and magazine coverage we had too!
I was interviewed chatting enthusiastically for Radio 5 Live – my interview begins 24 minutes in. The radio piece I’m most proud of is this interview with Radio Devon: I’d prepared ahead of time, and the interviewer, David Fitzgerald, let me get into my stride. My part begins at 2:06:40, and after me, you’ll hear Dee Martin of Torre Abbey going in to more detail about their Live Action Cluedo event.
Nick was interviewed by the unusual DJ double-act of Ken Livingstone and David Mellor on LBC Radio this lunchtime, talking about Museums at Night happenings in the capital tonight. One of the events he gave a plug to was the bat walk at Whitehall, Cheam: and now we know that radio publicity works, as just a few minutes ago their local museum service Sutton Heritage proudly tweeted that this event had sold out!
Radio publicity is instantly effective!
We’ll also be on Radio 5 Live from 8pm tonight. It’s all very exciting!
Posted onMay 13, 2011byCulture24|Comments Off on Urgent Museums at Night PR opportunity: want extra publicity?
URGENT: An extra, last-minute opportunity has come up for one lucky Museums at Night venue to get some major publicity tonight: but the conditions, (as always) aren’t easy to fulfil.
IF you’re a regional (non-London) venue that’s putting on a Museums at Night event tonight
AND you’ll be open to the public between 10pm and 10:30pm tonight
AND a BBC radio crew are already covering your event
please call PR wunderkind Pandora George right now on 07729 469220!
Posted onMay 12, 2011byCulture24|Comments Off on Museums at Night – coming soon to TV and radio near you!
Just a quick heads-up about some of the upcoming publicity for Museums at Night that our fantastic PR guru, Pandora George of Bullet PR, has managed to drum up.
Nick recorded a brief interview with Radio 4 this afternoon, and another for Radio Cornwall which will go out at 11pm tonight. I was taken off-guard tonight and ended up recording another for Radio 5 Live, which will go out at around 5AM as part of the Friday morning breakfast show. Nick will be interviewed again for Radio London at 7:25 tomorrow, and will be talking with Ken Livingstone on his Saturday afternoon show.
I’ve already recorded one extended chat with Radio Reverb, the Brighton station, about all the events taking place in Sussex (and my love of Motorhead). And tomorrow afternoon I’ll be in conversation with Radio Devon, along with Dee Martin from Torre Abbey who will be discussing their Live Action Cluedo event!
If anybody else would like to interview us, please contact our PR goddess Pandora on 07729 469220 or email pandora@bulletpr.co.uk. We are both very chatty and would be delighted to discuss any aspect of the campaign! Meanwhile, if you have the chance to be interviewed, that’s great – all we ask is that you try to mention the address of the Museums at Night website, www.museumsatnight.org.uk,
Tomorrow is a big day: I’ll be manning the @Culture24 twitter account and livetweeting along with the ITV Daybreak programme tomorrow morning. The Museums at Night venue the crew will be reporting live from is Explosion! The Museum of Naval Firepower in Gosport. We’re expecting this feature to start at around 7:15 in the morning – so if you’re awake at this shockingly early hour, please do tune in to support the Explosion staff!
Museums at Night Blog 