Museo Senior: Audience Development and Digital Strategy

Savona’s local area stands out for its unique ceramics tradition that has been explored by great artists over the centuries, but has also been the focus of production for small local businesses.

Thanks to this unique feature, the Museo della Ceramica di Savona, the MuDA Museo Diffuso di Albissola Marina (Casa Museo Asger Jorn, Centro Esposizioni, Fornace Alba Docilia and Lungomare degli Artisti), the Museo Manlio Trucco di Albisola Superiore and the Museo Civico Villa Groppallo di Vado Ligure, updated their offer completely in 2014, coming together to create an authentic museum district and highlighting the great arts and crafts tradition that the local area has to offer on both a national and international level.

The newly created museum district has great potential, which is still partly unfulfilled. It could turn the local ceramics tradition into a real asset, using it to create fundamental networking and sharing projects that could help to build the cultural identity of the Province of Savona.

Over-55s are the most frequent visitors to museums in the local area, demonstrating a great interest in local history. This is why the Associazione Amici di Casa Jorn and BAM! created Senior Museum, one of the winners of Open 2015, a competition organised by the Compagnia San Paolo, which aims to involve this target audience in making museums a place for coming together, getting involved and sharing.

The project will involved a group of senior citizens, who acted as spokespeople for the community throughout 2017, developing new forms of sharing, coming up with new activities and new ways of communicating that were put forward to the institutions. These activities were open to any local residents who wanted to contribute their ideas and creativity.

The main project activities were:

• A seminar and guided tours that enabled an initial group, contacted through the Università della Terza Età UniSabazia and Uni Albisola, to find out about the project and its context and to get in touch with the museums
• Questionnaires and focus groups to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the museums involved thanks to the senior citizen team
• A workshop: this was the most active and tangible phase, planning activities and events, as well as coming up with a specific communication plan to present to the museums
• Pilot Event: organised in one or more museums in the district

At the end of 2017, once the collected data had been analysed, the senior citizen team was called back to plan new activities for 2018 and set up an advisory committee to work closely with the museums.

BAM! is one of the project partners and is responsible for coordinating aspects relating to communication, as well as organising audience development processes, together with the Associazione Amici di Casa Jorn.

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