Leading Better in Digital
Digital leadership in the sector is about:
understanding the opportunities digital presents in relation to the organisation’s mission
being able to inspire, structure and operationalise the changes required to actualise those opportunities across the organisation effectively
There are four main ideas I’m talking about today, these are:
Understanding that Digital Content Strategy is part of Audience Development Strategy today, you can’t do one successfully without the other
How you structure your digital team in the wider organisation matters
Social media is the direct expression of how well aligned your organisation strategy is with your approach to audience development, particularly the development of younger and non-traditional audiences
You are not the authority here – we’re coming to digital content late in the game and the audiences we meet there won’t simply be impressed by our brand name. In the next 5-10 years heritage leaders shouldn’t merely be followers of digital trends but be able to engage creatively and intellectually with technologists and digital content professionals to redefine what digital leadership in the heritage sector looks like and how that translates into the media we tell our stories in and who we engage
First up,
I. Understand that Digital Content Strategy is Audience Development Strategy
I took a look at the published priorities on the websites of the 47 Arts Council England (ACE) National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) that are museums. They boiled down to:
Increasing audience engagement
Improving understanding of our collections in context
Developing sector partnerships and or recognition
Becoming more financially sustainable
Improving and diversifying learning reach and outcomes
Norfolk Museums’ Mission and Vision is a representative example in this regard.
This reads:
Engaging and inspiring the widest possible audience, both across Norfolk and beyond → Increase audience engagement
Enriching people's lives and creating a sense of place and identity
Ensuring all Norfolk residents, especially children, experience high-quality learning in the museums we care for and through the collections in our trust → Improve learning reach and outcomes
Contributing significantly to the visitor economy of Norfolk and contributing to the development of sustainable tourism partnerships → Financial sustainability
Developing our staff and volunteers to improve services and support wider employment and skills agendas
Collecting, preserving and interpreting the material evidence of Norfolk's past → Improve understanding of collections in context
Stimulating creativity, inspiration and enjoyment through the museums and collections in our care
(Italics; my addition)
So, to take the first item – increasing audience engagement.
Digital affords unprecedented opportunities to reach and engage an audience that hasn’t heard of you before or wouldn’t – by default – consider their organisation as ‘for them’.
To ignore digital as part of your audience development is to be left behind. This is my first idea for ‘leading better in digital’ – digital is part of reaching, engaging and retaining audiences.
But different digital media do different things for your audience development.
Above is a matrix that’s designed to plot out what different kinds of digital content do in terms of playing to specialists vs generalists, and broadening the audience or playing to the base.
You might be most familiar (and comfortable) with the types of digital activity on the left - this is activity that mainly plays to your existing audience. These are important - digital has a fantastic role in retaining and developing existing audiences.
But to develop new audiences - going back to the strategic objectives - we want to be looking at the right segment. What types of media bring in new audiences? Just because you put new content designed for a particular audience online doesn’t automatically mean you have a good distribution mechanism for that. Digital leadership in 2024 should understand what good content looks like and how digital discovery works in the different algorithms (organic versus paid ads, social media versus Google, Meta versus YouTube).
Further reading on this point
II. How you structure your digital teams affects the likelihood of success
In 2018 two sector leaders - Daf James (Head of Digital at Amgueddfa Cymru / National Museum Wales) and Kati Price (Head of Digital V&A) set out to answer a question.
They wanted to know how GLAM organisations structured their digital teams in relation to the wider organisation.
They wanted to extrapolate how to structure for digital success.
They found there were five different models for structuring digital teams.
Figure 3 / centralised is probably the most common in the sector. Here a distinct ‘digital’ team exists to co-ordinate activity. However, there are risks of this team becoming siloed, or being seen by the wider organisation as responsible for bug fixes rather than reatively re-architecting organisational wide strategic work like growing audiences.
The paper looks to ‘Hub and spoke’ and ‘Holistic’ as examples of more integrated activity - where digital activity is more central to core work and there are more reporting and dialogue structures between departments.
Further reading on this point
III. Social media can go wrong if there’s a lack of understanding, or trust, between senior leadership and digital natives
One of the more visible areas of your output to suffer - or be a source of stress - if there is a disconnect between the wider organisational strategy and digital strategy (or misalignment on tactics about how best to grow audiences) is social media.
Digital leaders should understand that successful organic social media is one of the most difficult communication tasks to get right. Social media companies make money based on brands spending money on ads to become more visible. If your non-paid / organic content is generating a large amount of attention, you’re both cutting above the huge amount of noise on social media and bypassing what the companies want you to do (pay for visibility).
Being interesting, being provocative, stimulating engagement using free social media is a hard job. It can become even more stressful if the team responsible for it have been given very little directive from the wider organisation about how social media fits into a wider audience development plan and how far it’s acceptable to take the tone.
Further reading on this point
https://georginabrooke.medium.com/dont-be-crap-be-good-1b5571becde7
https://medium.com/@RussellDornan/museumpersonality-87ab2112ee9e
IV. We are not the authority here (yet)
The final point is ‘we are not the authority here’.
In an analogue world, heritage institutions have a lot of kudos. We have big collections and historic monuments that have stood the test of thousands of years.
But online, we’re small fry. Kim Kardashian > Stonehenge on Instagram.
What that means is we can’t afford to be complacent, and rest on our offline reputation.
It’s not enough for heritage organisations to simply follow trends, to simply consume digital culture. Heritage organisations that want to be at the forefront of digital culture want to think creatively about how they can be a part of a media landscape that is currently running on without them, how they can creatively and meaningfully engage with technologists and digital creators to tell human stories across time and space. To redefine what storytelling about our cultural heritage looks like in a multiverse world – and perhaps to land us in a place where we see a few less Kim Kardashian selfies in our feeds!
Further reading on this point
This text originally appeared in a leadership training module for INTO Heritage. Many thanks to Miki Lentin and the INTO heritage team for allowing me to republish it here.
In other news, I have a cover for my new book!
It’ll appear in the Museum and Gallery essentials series, part of Facet publishing.
Would you like a discount code once I have a publication date? Put your name down for one here.