Developing creative making activities in museums to reach and engage new audiences. Here are four practical tips to guide you through the whole process, from concept to impact assessment.
More and more cultural organisations are adopting an audience-oriented approach: they plan their activities with a focus on reaching and engaging new audiences and improving their established relationships with existing audiences. For BAM!, Audience Development is an approach with which we tackle each new challenge, a method to which we devote entire training modules and which we try to transfer to the staff of the cultural organisations we work with.
Since joining the CREMA European project partnership, we have managed to add a new element to these practices, which may be less well known. We are referring to “creative making”, a phenomenon that is spreading in cultural institutions in Italy and Europe and which involves the integration of traditional manual activities and new technologies, the interweaving of multidisciplinary knowledge and experimentation.
What happens when you put these two practices together? Audience Development on the one hand and Creative Making on the other? It was in fact the CREMA (Creative Making in Lifelong Learning) project that allowed us to test creative making activities on two occasions: “Museo Fuori” at two museums in Turin, where the collections inspired the development of prototypes to promote cultural integration outside museums, and “Making al Museo”, a workshop involving pottery, textile restoration and 3D scanning developed with the Musei di Imola. From this experimental phase, we then developed guidelines in English, accessible online, which can be adopted by any museum wishing to test itself with this type of approach!
For those who, before getting hands on, would like to have a smattering of knowledge about the subject, here is a summary of the four practical steps needed to develop creative making activities in museums, from the concept phase to the assessment phase, putting audiences at the centre of the whole process:
Understand your audiences
Who frequents the museum’s activities and spaces? Who, on the other hand, does not frequent them and why? Are there barriers that prevent some audiences from enjoying what the museum has to offer?
The first fundamental step in any Audience Development activity is to establish which audiences the cultural organisation, in this case the museum, already caters for, and which ones it could potentially reach. This is what we did within the framework of the “Museo Fuori!” and “Making al Museo” projects, through strategic workshops in which the personas tool was used to help the participants start thinking about the audiences and identify their main characteristics.
Identify objectives and targets
What do we want to achieve through creative making activities? What impact do we want to have? Which audiences to we want to reach and engage?
Reflecting on the goals and targets to be achieved through creative making activities can help to plan them appropriately. These objectives should be SMART, an acronym that identifies the 5 key characteristics of perfect goals:
- specific
- measurable
- achievable
- relevant
- time-bound
In the “Museo Fuori!” example, the target audience is made up of migrants. The SMART objectives that emerged as priorities include the involvement of at least two museums and three partners; the participation of at least two migrants; the creation of three prototypes; and reaching at least 100 people who had never entered a museum before.
For “Making al Museo”, on the other hand, the Musei di Imola identified two target groups, both belonging to the local community: young students and professionals interested in local history and women aged between 40 and 60 who are passionate about crafting.
Plan creative making activities
How should creative making activities be implemented to achieve the desired results? Which organisational aspects most influence target audience participation?
When organising creative making activities in museums there are several factors that should be taken into account, notably:
- the timing, since the duration, the time of year and the day of the week on which the activity takes place can strongly influence public participation. In the case of “Making al Museo”, all activities took place on Saturday afternoons to meet the needs of students and workers and thus enable audiences to take part easily.
- the costs involved in planning and implementing the activity, which will also influence the price people will have to pay to take part. In order to take part in the “Museo Fuori!” workshops, participants were charged a symbolic fee of €25 to prevent anyone from dropping out at the last minute. However, the fee also included meals and a card to access all museums in the region free of charge.
- communication and promotion of activities not only before they take place, but also and especially afterwards, to continue to build and nurture the relationships already established with the relative audiences.
Measure results and impacts
Why is it important to measure results? How can we assess the impact of creative making activities?
Assessing the impacts of creative making activities aimed at reaching and engaging new audiences must be planned from the beginning, even before the project is implemented. To do this, it is necessary to collect information and data at different stages of the project.
For example, for “Making al Museo”, data were collected during the booking phase, using Eventbrite, to understand the effectiveness and results of the communication campaign deployed, and at the end of each activity through questionnaires issued to participants. Also in the case of “Museo Fuori!”, data were collected during the various project phases, such as the membership collection and prototype testing phases, and through social media and web analytics.
You can find further insights in the guidelines we produced, which can be browsed and downloaded online. If you are interested in the project, you can read more about it here… enjoy!
