9 principles of digital curation that will amplify your audience engagement

Our UK-based staff member, Alex von der Becke, attended the online MuseumNext Digital Summit held in May 2023. He attended a very practical presentation by Johan Lindblom and Klas Grinell of Gothenburg Museums, entitled ‘9 principles of digital curation that will amplify your audience engagement’.

Klas started the talk by framing the work they are doing with the 3 Rs:

• Relevance: How are we relevant to our audiences?
• Resonance: How do we create meaningful and valuable experiences?
• Relations: How do we develop sustainable relationships?

Klas and Johan then broke this down further by outlining nine useful principles.

1. Focus on the audience

Meet them in different formats, each with its own benefits. Understand what they want, need and desire. Then prioritise content that is relevant to them. One way of doing this is to have a digital strategy that connects to a content plan, making sure all your content is accessible and user friendly. Overall it should be easy and engaging to get in touch with the content of your museum.

2. Tone of voice

This could be described as the museum’s/brand’s personality. Keep the tone of voice personal and at eye level with the visitor. Try to use emotions and senses that can amplify our own tone of voice. Tone of voice creates a museum atmosphere in digital channels. Try to lower barriers with a more personal approach rather than only an institutional voice. Adapt your tone for different groups: be “adaptive not schizophrenic”. The most important thing is to lower the barriers.

3. Create value

To create relations with the audience we need to communicate valuable content that also meets the museums’ social mission so it is not only valuable in the moment but creates broader values in society. To connect with having the audience in focus is also to understand the needs and motivations of the audience and how they relate not only to the museums’ mission but also to its content.

4. Promote interactivity

Being relevant and creating value that the audience can be actively involved and co-create in different ways which is almost fundamental if we want to create relations in digital media. One easy way is to invite partners, artists and people who have a special skill of some kind to participate and co-create content with you.  

5. Think transmedially

All the platforms and channels have their specific conditions and strengths. They are like different branches in the digital transmedial system. We should make strategic choices of channels based on how can interact with each other and with the physical environment to create a transmedial visitor experience. Don’t let the digital become a separate part of the activities of the museum. Instead, use the museums’ entire transmedial opportunities: artwork, objects, exhibitions, websites, all the big digital social media platforms and so on to create a context and then atmosphere of the museum. A sort of world-building with all the museums’ outlets.

6. Curate with themes

It’s often effective to create a series of presentations based on a clear and easily understandable theme that can be distributed across the various channels you use, that can deepen and explore content but also build content and in the end can become exhibitions, program events or similar things. Take advantage of the unique strengths of all the media types. Use a dynamic mix of media types and formats, text, images, films, sounds, illustrations and make the content more dynamic and engaging.

7. Dramatise your stories

Dramatise your stories, regardless of medium or format. Stories have a unique ability to capture and interest recipients and museums are, of course, filled with stories and should flood the internet with them. Storytelling can be done in multiple ways. Storytelling as a method is a way to create target group adapted stories with a message. But you need to dramatise them and tell stories with a commitment, passion and use both rational and emotional arguments and make sure the story connects with people and make it shareable, a story that people want to share and talk about.

8. Experiment and evaluate

As museums we should learn to experiment more with different ways to present our work and not be afraid of making mistakes but be open and willing to try new formats for different types of content and collect data to evaluate how it works. We need to constantly ask ourselves if we are reaching our target groups and always find better ways to create engagement and digital relations.

9. Prioritize your own platforms

Content on social media has a very short lifespan and many museums spend a lot of time on content that only lives for a few hours. So we should rather prioritise content for our own platforms: on websites, in collection databases and in newsletters. From there you can cumulatively make content available through your platforms. The danger is to overproduce content to social media. You should think in a more sustainable way and use your website as the main channel for stories and different kinds of content and use social media as distribution channels much more.