Conference Summary

Ylva French
Conference Director and Executive Director
Campaign for Museums

Introduced the day and welcomed the twelve speakers each outstanding in their field.

“ This is a huge subject”, she said, “and we cannot cover the whole field of learning in one day. Today will be mainly about formal learning, but that doesn’t mean that we will not discuss adult and informal learning, or that the principles we discuss cannot be applied to other forms of learning.”

Sue Underwood
Chief Executive
NEMLAC

Opened the conference with a presentation on Museum and Learning – the next five years. She said that museums had always had an education purpose but over time this was overshadowed by other priorities. It was not until 2001 that the Museums Association redefined Museums as:

" Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society."

The investment in education now taking place is being accompanied by a reskilling and re-education of museum and gallery staff to maximise on museum’s expanding role in formal and informal education. Marketing and education had to work hand in hand to achieve this goal. The Inspiring Learning programme provided the road-map.

To Sue Underwood Notes

Sue Wilkinson,
Director, Learning
Access and the Regions, MLA

Sue Wilkinson outlined the Inspiring Learning for All programme launched earlier in the month.
The key principles are to develop services based around community and individual needs, as follows:

• The need to consult, involve, collaborate, pilot and test initiatives
• A focus on outcomes not outputs and on continuous improvement
• Evidence of achievement coming from users of the service

She stressed that these are the same principles which underpin strategic marketing .
Inspiring Learning for All has been designed: to stimulate discussion, to audit services and plan improvements, to build partnerships, to prepare a design brief, as an advocacy tool and with funders. The web-based programme has been tested and was designed for institutions of all size.

Sue outlined research carried out in the Phase One hubs last Autumn, showed an increase of 28 per cent in the number of school children visiting museums and galleries.

To Sue Wilkinson Notes

Amy De Joija
Director of Development and Communications,
National Museums Liverpool

This presentation “Getting to the Heart of the Matter”described the evolution of learning in museums and how they became less for learning and more for “the learned”. This had changed and institutions were embracing the learning agenda and at NML specifically addressing the question of sustainability.

Amy introduced the National Museums Liverpool - the only national museum service in England based wholly outside London, and, as such, with a unique fourfold role, local, regional, national and international – particularly in relation to Liverpool becoming the European Capital of Culture for 2008.

Amy outlined the research programme carried out across all venues which showed up gaps in services and audiences and also a ten-point strategy for developing sustainability in learning, including:

• Making the most of the project work through effective and intelligent marketing
• Take lessons learned into the core marketing
• Communications activity of your museum.

To Amy De Joija’s Notes

Nick Fuller
Chief Executive
Educational Communications

Nick introduced EdComs – an educational marketing consultancy based in London. His presentation examined some of the activities and promotions undertaken by museums and galleries and some of his personal experiences. The bad news for museums and galleries is the intense competition from others in the sector but more importantly from other activities including cinema and shopping. The good news is that people are richer, more educated and more travelled and looking for things to do.

Museums have what people want today – people want experiences; this is a very valuable market. Museums should be innovative in their marketing and use sound principles of proposal – development – audience – education - communications – content and then back to development. Segmenting the product, telling stories and be experiential were the final messages.

Nick Fuller’s Notes will be available shortly

DISCUSSION:
The morning session ended with a lively question and answer session. Amy de Joija reinforced her tips for sustainability by suggesting ways of building in the project team as part of core staff and building in marketing strategies. Nick Fuller mentioned the experience and the importance of non-visitor research. Look at what others do – create a shallow entry point. Often museums missed a trick with their visitor services. Perhaps they should have a teaching background. Learning should be involved at all levels including devising exhibitions.

Introduction to the afternoon session.
Ylva French outlined the afternoon session which would look at traditional marketing as well as the marketing of e-learning resources.

Barbara Hope
Head of Marketing and Public Affairs
National Museums Liverpool, introduced the session:

She focused on the importance of market research in supporting sustainable learning programmes. She said that NML knows a great deal about its general audience but knew least about the formal education market. Centralised data had not been collected and information was fragmented across the sites. This was identified in the review referred to by Amy de Joija. A massive mapping exercise was undertaken which involved cleaning the data over a three year period so that the groups fitted with 14 different DfES group types. This provided trend data including how many groups visited, the composition of the groups and educational categories. They found some very useful trends across National Museums Liverpool - there has been a steady increase in the number of primary school visitors but a steady fall in the number of secondary school visitors, for example.

What does this tell us? Valuable information on where our educational ‘offer’ meets the needs or not of the different educational target groups. How to streamline the ‘offer’ so it is more accessible. Barbara said: “We are working in a very competitive field with every cultural organisation in competition for educational visits>””

“ More importantly the research provides the basis for a carefully structured marketing campaign, the success of which should be measurable against the trends established by the mapping exercise.”

To Barbara Hope’s Notes

Alison Gilbody
Head of Marketing, Development and Public Programmes
The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester

Alison Gilbody, gave a quick overview of MSIM's experiences in terms of education marketing. A market research study was carried out in 2000 as part of a collaborative project between Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Museum and The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. All three venues had found that visits from Manchester schools were dropping. One of the striking things to come out of the survey was that there was a lack of baseline data about education visitors and no plotting of long term trends.

Alison then went on to say that this research suggested that there was a need for education and marketing departments to work much more closely together, not only at MSIM, but at other institutions.

To Alison Gilbody Notes

Sandra Stancliffe
Outreach and Programming Manager
Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery

Sandra outlined the work carried out in her region as Phase One Hub to plan and implement the first year education programme under Renaissance in the Regions.

This had proved hugely successful with an expansion in school visits across the region. Plans for the future included an outreach programme to secondary schools – proving particularly hard to attract for school visits, due partly to the tight timetable and curriculum demands.

Sandra Spoke Without Notes.

Jean Hunter
Head of Marketing and Corporate Affairs
Harewood House Trust

Jean outlined the challenges for Harewood House where financial objectives always had to take precedence. Her presentation focused on a corporate sponsorship programme which developed into an educational programme. It was based on a corporate sponsorship of a Royal Academy exhibition at Harewood which had surprising results, as the marketing team seized the opportunities it offered. It resulted in postgraduate students whose work was in the exhibition coming to Harewood to speak with PGCE trainee art teachers.

The programme was hugely successful – evaluation required is still being completed, but feedback was uniformly positive from the artists; the pgce students; the established teachers; the secondary school students; the sponsors employees; visitors to the exhibition. A CD Rom is being produced to go onto the Harewood website to extend access to the project even more widely.

It created a framework for an extremely exciting intervention into art teaching practice; and has provided a case study for other similar projects (both at Harewood and elsewhere). All from an initial simple corporate hospitality enquiry – but built via close marketing/educational teamwork, into a major educational initiative.

To Jean Hunter Notes

DISCUSSION:
The discussion focused on some practical issues relating to booking systems. Some had introduced sophisticated purpose built booking systems; others had developed efficient booking systems from Access. There was a general sharing on the difficulties of attracting secondary schools and a great deal of interest in Bristol’s plans for outreach programmes targeting this age group. Others suggested developing cross-curricula visits which would appeal to secondary schools.

Marketing E-Learning.

Carol Rogers
Head of Learning
National Museums Liverpool

Introduced this session by focusing on the huge competition from commercial and other not for profit organisations. One major portal featured 40,000 web based learning researches.

David Dawson
Senior ICT Adviser
MLA

David outlined the development of portals to guide teachers to museum and gallery resources. EnrichUK.net is the portal developed for NOF digitised programmes, featuring 152 projects and over 1,000 learning journeys; this portal is used by libraries, schools and UKonline centres. A new learning guide is being distributed by BECTA to all UKonline centres. The 24 Hour Museum is another effective portal www.24hourmuseum.org.uk with rising visitor numbers.

Curriculum Online was launched to increase the use of digital learning resources in schools. MLA has set up cultural sector pilots to stimulate and promote best practice in content creation for schools. Four have gone forward, British Museum, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, Royal Shakespeare Company and Shrewsbury Museum Service. A series of workshops are now being held across the country to help museums and galleries to get on to Curriculum Online. What it will do is to drive traffic, boost real as well as virtual visitors, help meet educational aims and use the technology.

A great deal of funding had been committed by DfES to e-learning but currently no funding for museums to create e-learning resources.

To David Dawson Spoke Without Notes

Martin Bazley
e-learning Consultant
SEMLAC and Ict4learning.com.

Martin focused on the product – what makes a good e-learning resource and what are the mistakes that people make. The three key factors in marketing e-learning are to understand the audience, define the learning experience and learning outcomes; evaluation in classroom or home. Most people learn effectively collaboratively or as part of a group. Successful elearning websites address these issues: Who is it for?; How will they use it? And what are the real world outcomes?

Often there is a lack of awareness about the importance of defining the audience - “it’s really for anyone and everyone”. There are not enough models of good practice – we need more case studies. There is not enough priority given to research which takes time, money and expertise.

E-learning sites are current for two to three years. Their success depends on a degree of involvement. There is a misconception that e-learning means distance/independent learning. The experience should not imply solitary learning.

Martin has incorporated his presentation on the elearning group website.
Go to:http://www.elearninggroup.org.uk/IML_elearning_session_notes.htm

Tom O’Leary
Head of Education and Interpretation
National Archives

Tom O’Leary provided information on marketing e-learning and as a case study used the popular Learning Curve website launched by National Archives. He stressed that you need to get enough visitors from your target market, show them how they can benefit, persuade them to use your content and that your service is long term.

He stressed the importance of research and knowing your audience (which may be worldwide), clearly define what you want your website to do and remember that Contents is King. He gave a list of marketing activities undertaken for the Learning Curve:

• Monitor your Search Engine Position
• Build Link Popularity
• Post Messages in Newsgroups
• Submit your Web Pages to the Search Engines
• Write and Distribute Press Releases
• Online Advertising
• Viral marketing
• Understand your web stats
• Get on the road - exhibitions
• Email news letter
• Site maintenance – particularly front end
• Use meta data to increase Search Engine Rankings

He concluded by outlined the difference between hits, visits and unique visitrs which can provide these very different statistics:

4,371,906
632,907
117,441

They should be used with caution and an understanding that a lot of the information you might want will not be revealed. They are also not fool proof and will quite often provide misleading data. But….do contain a lot of very useful information and should not be ignored. They can significantly help you improve your site and your approach to marketing.

Tom O’Leary did not use notes but his powerpoint presentation will be in the conference pack

DISCUSSION:
The discussion at the end led by Carol Rogers focused on the duplication of resources. How can we find out what others are doing. David Dawson referred to Curriulum Online and other teacher resources (Education Fact Sheet) to check where the gaps were in teaching resources. Do we have the skills? Martin Bazley said that there is a big skills gap and that it was essential that staff were trained and used external resources where necessary. What about the constant updating? Many e-learning resources are out of date within two to three years. It was essential to keep web-learning resources simple so that they can easily be updated and that project funding is managed in such a way that it can include updating. Using student or college facilities to build websites and elearning resources could produce a future problem when the site could not easily be updated by someone else or production qualities were low.