Good morning content pals,
Today I’ve got a guest post with Ed Bankes.
Ed is the Website Content Manager at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London, where he works with lots of brilliant colleagues across the RA to maintain a website which delivers for their audiences. It’s a role which involves copy editing, content design, applied UX skills and a bit of cheerful diplomacy. He was previously Studio Manager at (the wonderful) Cog Design and he’s a member of the Museums Computer Group committee.
Over to Ed…
Role: Website Content Manager
Age: 25
Where can we find you online?
I’m on Linkedin and tweet occasionally
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Pirate (age 7), spaceman (age 10), writer (age 12), architect (age 14), artist (age 16), graphic designer (age 19), Website Content Manager (age 23 and a half).
Could you give us a whistle stop tour of your career to date?
I studied English Literature at uni and designed a lot of posters for student theatre, spending my summers messing around at the Edinburgh Fringe.
When I graduated I got a job as Studio Manager at Cog Design – an amazing creative agency that works exclusively with arts and culture organisations. Six months into that role the country went into lockdown, which was a bit of a curveball.
I learnt so much at Cog – about websites, admin processes, book keeping and how different arts organisations work.
After Cog I joined the Royal Academy of Arts as Digital Assistant, supporting the team with admin processes, content creation and product management.
And last year I became the RA’s Website Content Manager.
In November I joined the committee of the Museums Computer Group. I’m working with the rest of the committee at the moment to organise our annual conference, Museums+ Tech.
Proudest moment of your career?
At the RA we announced our 2024 exhibition programme last month. I’m hugely proud of the work so many folks at the RA did to put that programme live.
I worked closely with colleagues (shout out to John, Helen and Meena) to write for the exhibition pages. We distilled exhibition briefings down into punchy web copy.
Exhibition copy should answer the question: why should I spend my money on this thing? It should explain why this show is interesting or exciting or funny or important enough for someone to part with their cash or buy a membership to come and see it.
It should also give visitors an accurate sense of what they are spending their money on – how many works are there? Who are they by? Which media has been used? Is it old stuff, or new stuff?
All of that in 150 words or fewer, please.
What project/idea has got you really immersed/excited at work recently?
We’ve been thinking a lot about our article strategy this year. Once that work has progressed further I’d love to come back and tell you all about it.
One aspect of that work which is already bearing fruit is our approach to ‘user journey content’ on web.
Previously we served all of the articles which we wrote for a particular exhibition on the exhibition page, in a carousel module. This module showed the latest four articles related to an exhibition.
After they were published, these articles didn’t see much organic traffic from visitors to the page. Most of their traffic (about 60%) came when the article was served to our audience through email marketing and on social media.
Recently we’ve introduced a featured article. This content design change gives greater prominence to one piece of content on the page. It tells users to “read this one thing” rather than presenting them with a series of equally-weighted options.
Our featured articles have seen steady organic traffic throughout the run of an exhibition. For our ‘10 artists you need to know in the Spain and the Hispanic World exhibition’ piece saw 66% of its page views outside of the first week it was published (and included in email marketing).
Having seen an increase in traffic to our featured article, our next step was to finesse the content which we serve to our users here.
Users who are clicking on our featured article are likely to be thinking about booking tickets for an exhibition. They will have already been served the exhibition description, a gallery of images and a video introduction to the exhibition, but they are still keen to find out more.
Enter our ‘start here’ articles.
These adapt the gallery guides you get when you visit the exhibition into digestible, listicle-style content. They’re designed to give a user who is unsure whether they’d like to book a ticket to an exhibition a clearer sense of what they will see.
I’m just starting to plan our next ‘start here’, for our Marina Abramović exhibition this autumn.
If you had a £10k grant to spend within your department as you pleased, what would you spend it on?
I’d love to find out more about how our audiences read our articles and what they want from our digital content. A £10k research project ought to do the trick.
If I had £1,354,999 I’d buy this piece by Joe Lycett from the Summer Exhibition for the office wall.
A tweet/blog/book/practitioner that made you think / changed your professional views
Cog Design run Zoom-based sessions with arts leaders and creative thinkers, called Breakfast Briefings.
When I was studio manager I was lucky enough to interview former Culture Secretary Lord Chris Smith for one of these. We chatted about the work he did in the early days of the New Labour government to make museum admission free, and we discussed the political challenges that were facing the arts and culture sector in 2020 (many of which have only become more pronounced since).
It was a fascinating chat. Chris is amazing.
What advice would you give to graduates starting out in the sector hoping to follow a similar career path?
I was on a hiring panel recently. We were always impressed by candidates who had created their own content. And we were much more interested in the quality of their content than the amount of engagement it received.
Go out and make stuff and learn how to do it well in the process.
I’m going to shamelessly plug the Museums Computer Group jiscmail group too. It’s a great way to get a sense of what’s going on in the sector, ask questions and share resources, all of which would be handy for a recent graduate.
If you liked this post, you might like a previous Cultural Content post with Louise Cohen, former Head of Content at Royal Academy (and now a Content Strategist at One Further). In the piece she reflects on her award winning content strategy and some of the content she’s most proud of in her time there.