Mediating Collection and Community: Conclusions and Further Reading
I want to extend a huge thank-you to my interviewees and the colleagues, mentors, and peers who assisted with this project. As stated in our project description, “this project is not a static publication; it is an evolving dialogue.” This post will summarize conclusions from the Mediating Collection and Community project on the impact of COVID-19 on social media management, synthesizing both recurring themes and suggestions for “next steps” in our interviews. I would like to highlight inter-departmental collaboration, adaptability, and balance as key considerations for the future of social media management in museums.
The “Integrated” Social Media Professional
Throughout the interviews with industry professionals featured on this blog, we came back time and time again to the importance of an integrated social media team. This means consistent collaboration and communication between social media managers and all other departments across a museum. As the digital landscape continually evolves, museums can best utilize social media tools to forge relationships only when social media managers feel connected to the institution’s staff, mission, and overarching goals.
Julie Arrison-Bishop spoke about how museums can support social media managers who may face challenges like dealing with hate-speech online. She emphasized the importance of inter-departmental communication to allow social media managers to do their best work.
At the Wocester Art Musuem, although the Higgins Team maintains independent social media feeds connected to a historic collection and community, collaboration with the WAM feeds has been key to their content curation. Through Natasha’s explanation, I learned how “the Higgins pages highlight the curation and care from WAM staff in all departments while maintaining a dedicated space for arms and armor enthusiasts. In essence, the ‘separate’ feeds actually strengthen the bonds between WAM and the Higgins legacy.”
Dune Alford similarly underscored the power of inter-departmental collaboration. During the initial shift into lockdown, she noticed how other departments began coordinating closely with social media managers as online communication became the sole route to reach audiences. This has been a productive shift for institutions to newly recognize the value of digital content curation, fostering both collaboration and transparency.
Flexibility and Balance
The second theme I saw reappear throughout our conversations was the need for flexibility and adaptability while making sure social media doesn’t “take over” a person’s job operations. It is important for digital content creators to have a “pulse” on an institution’s audience, keeping current with new trends and current events while also maintaining inter-departmental communication and building transparent relationships. However, the desire to constantly check feeds—sitting up late in bed scrolling through Twitter—can quickly become overwhelming. From the perspective of a social media professional, having an adaptable, innovative mindset is key, but we also need to be reminded to “unplug.”
Natasha spoke to how the Higgins Team’s flexibility helped them adapt to new changes in the digital landscape, leading to successes like evaluation recruitment. Now that museums have reopened in-person, Natasha shared that “[the team’s] pages are here to stay. But we’re trying to maintain a balance between social media and other job functions without letting social media take over… because it can really quickly take over if you’re really focused on what everybody thinks online!”
Dune Aldford echoed the idea of the pandemic’s changes as a silver lining. In her account, she noticed institutions beginning to tap into social media as an agent of justice-focused work and a tool to build transparency. However, managing social media in the initial lockdown period was often “very difficult because we were gaining information and figuring out what we were doing in real-time.” She noted that collaborations with other departments, community organizations, and museums have all helped build support systems for social media professionals.
For Julie Arrison-Bishop, the lockdown also led to increased flexibility and a more innovative style of content creation. She shared that the pandemic “threw careful planning and content schedules for a loop,” inspiring new strategies like Instagram Live sessions. But although these changes towards spontaneity and innovation have been exciting, Julie stressed the amount of labor that truly goes into social media management—the work is “incredibly time consuming,” and professionals in the field need “focused time to sit and post and write.”
In Lockdown and Beyond
The interviews conducted for this project illuminated how unanticipated shifts during the pandemic have inspired positive change in the field of social media management, from innovation to transparency to trust and collaboration. Coming into the later stages of the pandemic, we are now also cognizant of how these positive lessons intersect with the work that still needs to be done. It is my hope that these insights can help future professionals recognize the wealth of experiences of change, both positive and negative, that the museum field has brought out of the pandemic.
Further Reading
Museums, Social Media, and COVID-19:
Castro, Juan Carlos. “Learning and Teaching Art Through Social Media.” Studies in Art Education 53, no. 2 (2012): 152–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24467884.
McGrath, Jim. “Museums and Social Media During COVID-19.” The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (2020): 164-172. muse.jhu.edu/article/772894.
Giannini, Tula, and Jonathan P. Bowen. “Museums and Digital Culture: From Reality to Digitality in the Age of COVID-19” Heritage 5, no. 1 (2022): 192-214. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage5010011.
Ennes, Megan. 2021. “Museum-Based Distance Learning Programs: Current Practices and Future Research Opportunities.” International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 22 (2021): 242–60.
Kist, Cassandra. “Museums, Challenging Heritage and Social Media During COVID-19” Museum and Society, Volume 18 Number 3 (2020). https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/3539.
Noehrer, Lukas, Abigail Gilmore, Caroline Jay and Yo Yehudi. “The impact of COVID-19 on digital data practices in museums and art galleries in the UK and the US” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00921-8.
Morse, Christopher, Blandine Landau, Carine Lallemand, Lars Wieneke and Vincent Koenig. “From #MuseumAtHome to #AtHomeAtTheMuseum: Digital Museums and Dialogical Engagement Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage Volume 15, Issue 2 (2022): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3480955.
Online Publications and Resources:
IMLS: Facing Challenge with Resilience: How Museums are Responding During COVID-19
IMLS: COVID-19 Resources for Libraries and Museums
AAM: COVID-19 Resources & Information for the Museum Field
ICOM: COVID-19 Page
UNESCO: Museums around the world in the face of COVID-19
Smithsonian Magazine: How Will Covid-19 Change the Way Museums Are Built?
Exhibitions and Initiatives:
Brooklyn Museum: A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing COVID-19 Memorial
CHALLENGING COMMUNICATIONS AND BUILDING A FUTURE: Insights from Julie Arrison-Bishop
With 15 years of experience in the museum field, Julie Arrison-Bishop describes herself as an “early adopter of social media.” She is a recipient of the New England Museum Association’s excellence award and an expert in digital content creation. Having recently transitioned from her last full-time role in a museum, Julie now works as a marketing and content manager for the Massachusetts-based company Copyright Clearance Center. Far from leaving the museum industry, Julie has shifted into a consulting role after founding her business MuseumTastic, which provides fantastic project support for small museums, historic sites, and nonprofits. I spoke to Julie about her work as a consultant and the lessons she’s bringing into the future of museum social media management.
Meeting Your Audience Where They're At
Julie and I started off talking about her core philosophies for managing social media creation. While social media transformed rapidly in the pandemic, it’s important to also remember that social media’s complex network of systems has constantly evolved ever since its inception. To achieve effective communication, institutions need “meet audiences where they’re at”; to Julie, this means thinking about how to reach communities through digital tools while centering transparency and clarity. Specifically, Julie emphasized the importance of always using multiple routes of communication.
Q: “[In your different roles], what platforms have you used, and how do your priorities guide your curation of an entity’s online presence?"
Julie: “I think the most important thing to think about when you think about social media… is that you need to meet your audience where they are. So, in my corporate marketing job, a lot of our work has really focused on LinkedIn and because that’s where our audiences are… so thinking in that role, that’s where I go. But thinking about [museums]... our people are really on Facebook and Instagram, so that’s where a lot of that work was focused.”
Julie spoke to the importance of utilizing different platforms based on your institution's key audiences. In the pandemic, multi-channel communication not only became best practice; it became essential for disseminating crucial information. Juggling more than a dozen forms of digital and analog communication can be challenging for even the most experienced multi-tasker, so Julie and I discussed the limitations of social media-based messaging.
Julie: “The caveat with social media is that you can’t expect that everybody’s going to see your message. People use the internet differently. Some people will go to Google to check stuff, some people will go to Facebook, some people are going to pick up the phone and make a call. It's important to think about social media in crisis communication… as one tool in the toolbox, but not having the expectation that it's going to solve all of your problems.”
In other words, putting too much faith in social media as a central communications channel can limit a museum’s reach. Thinking of social media as a flashy notice board, or as a crisis management tool, may undermine some of its greatest potential uses. Anyone familiar with operating a small or mid-size museum can easily understand the idea that social media is best used as only one of many communication channels. Newsletters, physical signage, and online tools separate from the major social platforms (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) are all important means of communication. As Julie says, “If you want to meet people where they are, you’ve got to be in multiple places at once… There’s just no magic bullet to get out the communication that you want to get out to your people.”
Progress Over Perfection
Moving into our discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic, Julie and I discussed how the principle of “meeting you where you’re at” informed her social media work during lockdown. Julie emphasized the massive change institutions experienced when moving to digital-only communication, which threw careful planning and content schedules for a loop.
Q: “How would you describe the shift in your social media strategies… from pre-pandemic to immediately after lockdown?”
Julie: “I would say that social media in my last full-time role turned very multifaceted very fast. Where before I kind of had a planned out social media calendar, I was able to do posts in advance, I knew my target messages that I wanted to send out on a daily basis… The pandemic certainly blew that up. In a lot of ways I think it was a huge silver lining, the ability to think about progress over perfection in terms of social media.”
Julie spoke to how the rapidly shifting situation and impulse to forge digital connections with a now-isolated community inspired innovation. This new attitude of “progress over perfection” allowed Julie to take more risks, become more creative with content creation, and reach a much wider audience.
Julie: “What I think is so interesting is prior to the pandemic, even myself, being in marketing, it was so much like… ‘If it's not perfect, it's not happening.’ And I think one of the things that you had to do is you had to get yourself out there, you had to be out there in front of your supporters, your members, your future potential visitors, and be sharing things. I did my first Instagram Lives during the pandemic out of a post-it note stuck to my hand! I think prior to the pandemic I would have been very fearful about putting out anything in that kind of methodology… The pandemic just allowed us freedom.”
Julie witnessed a huge leap in terms of geographic diversity and size of virtual audiences engaging with small museums. This allowed museums to extend their educational mission even further into the realm of social media. During the pandemic, people were especially reliant on social media to enrich their daily lives. Julie was excited to see museums stepping forward to engage people’s curiosity online, just as they strive to engage curiosity in-person.
Julie: “We wouldn’t have had people from Utah, Wyoming, California, New York, Florida coming to a lecture. But you know who came to an Instagram Live? People from all of those places. Which from an education perspective ties into that mission… 99% of people don't want to go on social media and be miserable. They want to be informed. The pandemic has shown us that museums are one of the most trusted institutions out there. We as an industry have an obligation to share good educational information and social media is an awesome place to do it.”
Julie also connected museums’ educational missions to current events. Especially during the Black Lives Matter movement, content creators from museums and other historical cultural institutions could “use the opportunity to tie in a history that’s still being written, in some ways, to a larger social movement that’s happening.”
Julie: “You kind of had this forum to get out there, and you would have three, four, five hundred people tuning in watching [on Instagram live]. And all of a sudden you also have all this data coming at you about who’s engaging with you, who’s engaging with your museum or historic site, and how do you leverage that data to continue building on and doing that kind of work.”
Challenging Communications
Continuing our discussion, Julie spoke with me about a NEMA presentation she conducted around the topic of “challenging communications.” For Julie, this means rethinking the field of communications to innovate and tackle global challenges. She stressed the importance of consistent collaboration between social media managers and other institutional staff. Even amongst other museum professionals, digital content specialists are still putting in the work to demonstrate just how complex communication strategies have become in their everyday work.
Julie: “There’s this expectation from people that don’t [create social media posts] that’s like… that’s so easy, that should take you 5 minutes! But with all of these tools, to get it right is incredibly time consuming. It’s not just what you see online, it’s all the work that went into the thing you see online. There’s just so much planning and so much thought that goes into it.”
Expanding on our theme surrounding museums as supporters of or contributors to social justice movements, Julie talked about the backlash and hate speech that occurs online. Even impersonal institutional accounts see the effects of hate speech on their own communities. For many social media managers, cleaning up hostile reactions online can take an emotional toll, especially when it feels like other staff haven’t “witnessed” the events the same way they would witness an in-person act of aggression against employees.
Julie: “We had done a post around election time… It was very much a women's history-oriented post. I knew it was going to ruffle some feathers, there’s no surprise there, but I was shocked after I put out the post… The amount of work I had to put in deleting comments, deleting derogatory language… I thought about deleting the post itself—But then I was like, 'No. You don’t get to win this argument.'
[So], it’s really important for social media managers to have outlets and places to talk about the things they see, hear, and deal with online. It’s really important for leadership staff… to give people the opportunity to step back and take a break.”
In summary, Julie extended her heartfelt support to social media managers who have dealt with aggressive hate speech online, especially those whose identities may be underrepresented in the field and who might have trouble finding support in their institution. As I have heard echoed in other interviews, Julie highlighted how crucial it is for administrative staff to include social media managers in conversations whenever possible. For her, this means “thinking about making sure your social media manager is engaged with everything appropriate they should know that's happening in the organization.” As a positive example of inter-staff communication, Julie spoke about an experience at her last full-time role. The museum was tasked with selling one of their buildings; a difficult decision that ultimately made a positive difference, and was handled with the utmost care for staff and communities.
Julie: “My executive director and I at the time had to work together with our community and we talked a lot about proactive communication. Like, before that “for sale” sign goes out in front of this piece of property, we need to be the ones to share that narrative upfront. And a social media manager understands the pulse of [those] people. Respecting your social media manager's voice to listen in on the community… Is a really important part of this job.”
MuseumTastic Consulting
I spoke to Julie about the transition to working full-time in the corporate world while also remaining a consultant in the museum industry. Julie’s consulting business MuseumTastic has enabled her to utilize her incredible skill set to provide focused attention to a wide array of museum projects. Since founding MuseumTastic, Julie has worked on projects anywhere from strategic planning to evaluation support. About her consulting role, Julie said:
Julie: “Working in museums for 15 years… I absolutely love museums, I love historic sites. For me I never thought I would leave museums. Unfortunately, as much as [the pandemic] brought out the best in some situations, it's also brought out the worst in some situations. [But] I didn’t want to give up museums completely. It’s a part of who I am. So starting up consulting on the side has allowed me to keep working with the people I love. I feel really fortunate that in my first year of business I’ve gotten to work on some really cool projects and gotten to know some really cool people.”
In addition to her projects with clients, Julie publishes a MuseumTastic blog which is chock full of fantastic resources for small museums. Some posts include: 5 Tips for Social Media Planning, Tap & Track: A small museum toolkit for getting started on IPM on a budget, Creating a Social Media Calendar, and Hurricane Prep Resources.
Image from MuseumTastic’s Instagram post highlighting their in-progress project, the Salem Heritage Trail.
Attracting the Next Generation
Julie and I concluded our interview talking about the lessons we’re bringing into the future of social media management. I asked how Julie saw social media shifting to further support the following four aspects in the near future: education, dissemination of information, connections between institutions, and connections between institutions and their communities. Julie emphasized the work already shaping the field of social media management. In her view, the pandemic has in some ways brought to light the increasing need for equitable pay and inclusivity for digital content specialists, who form an essential part of any cultural institution’s staff. Still, museums have a long way to go in order to ensure widespread equity and support of social media managers.
Julie: “There is a lot that needs to happen to make this field more equitable, to make it more inclusive, so that we’re able to attract the next generation. If we don’t make some changes, we’re already facing a crisis right now with staffing… It’s only going to get worse.
Julie also mentioned some key suggestions for institutions looking to move forward with their digital presence. She recommended institutions who haven’t done so yet to invest in a third-party posting software, like HootSuite, to more effectively organize messaging across multiple channels.
Julie: “I’m a big advocate of… investment in a third-party posting platform. It feels like a scary financial investment, but the tools that a lot of these programs supply [are really useful]… just having focused time to sit and post and write [is so important.]”
I asked Julie for her final thoughts on the future of the industry. Above all, we talked about the importance of valuing social media as a crucial aspect of institutional operations. This means building relationships between digital content specialists and other staff members, ensuring a museums’ digital presence can evolve in sync with all of its other parts. Since the digital landscape is ever-evolving, close collaboration is essential for success.
Julie: “Where we are with social media… there’s no turning back. We don’t know where we’re going to be even a year from now with social media. That’s another one of the challenges. Institutions need to invest in a social media plan, policy, and training for their staff. Those four aspects that you talked about.. they are all crucial areas for social media to have an impact.”
REINTRODUCING THE MUSEUM: Insights from Dune Alford, Social Media and PR Manager at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
When you visit the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Instagram account, this call to action stands out and rings true: “Join us as we explore the power of art to ignite imagination.” For Dune Alford, Social Media and PR Manager at SBMA, social media has always meant engaging the imagination. I spoke with Dune about her work at the museum and how, in her experience, COVID-19 has ushered in a radically new way of thinking about social media.
Dune comes from a photography background, having completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Art, and she brings this lens into the field of social media management. She explained, “My skills from being a photographer and an artist really naturally lent themselves to being in social media and digital content creation.” Viewing content creation as an artistic process guided Dune in her role as Media and PR Associate at the Santa Fe Opera, where she worked in the early pandemic to create digital materials despite the opera’s summer season cancellation.
In November of 2021, Dune shifted into her role at SBMA, bringing with her a wealth of knowledge about the change in social media practices from pre-pandemic to the present. Dune and I started off by discussing this radical change: a change she has noticed across many intersectional nonprofit organizations in the arts and culture field.
Reintroducing Museums - Social Media’s Transformation
Q: “So, how would you describe the shift in your own work and in the field of social media as a whole from pre-pandemic to after the lockdown?“
Dune: “I’m very passionate about this… So, I was in the unique situation where I was hired full time [at the Santa Fe Opera] in May of 2020, and then just three months in everything shifted. [Before the pandemic], social media really was just a tool to be used as an events page. It went towards “fluff” - which is totally valid and wonderful in its own way, but it was connecting with people in a surface-level way. And then overnight we had to throw away this type of content and rebuild.”
With the sudden shift into lockdown, Dune emphasized how social media became an essential link between an institution and its public. Pre-pandemic, an institution could disseminate value-driven messaging through different forms of communication, including in-person experiences. Then the lockdown converted social media into the go-to channel for reaching audiences. Social media managers were tasked not only with distributing important information about COVID-19, closures, or refunds—institutions also wanted to transparently communicate their values through their digital presences, honing in on community outreach and activism.
This fundamentally changed the style of social media posts institutions were putting out, Dune noticed. In many cases, before this shift, arts institutions viewed social media as an extension of their marketing efforts—they focused on announcing events, promoting exhibitions, or pushing calls for membership. All of these are excellent practical uses for social media—but because of COVID-19, Dune saw institutions embrace new directions on their feeds.
Dune: “So, from a very basic level, social media went from being fluff and happy to being transparent. Now, people want to see institutions being authentic and sharing what's going on [behind the scenes].”
Specifically in her role at the Santa Fe Opera, Dune discussed how the need for transparent, authentic social feeds encouraged inter-departmental collaboration. Balancing transparency with the desire to make plans, post announcements, and provide answers became a challenge for arts institutions during the pandemic’s early stages.
Dune: “Social media overnight became a platform for messaging… which was such an unbelievable shift. Everything that we shared was very specific; it was talked over by multiple people from the company. [Everyone was thinking], “let’s make sure that our messaging is correct.” It was very difficult because we were gaining information and figuring out what we were doing in real-time.”
Dune also spoke about her passion for ethical social media. During the initial lockdown period, the Black Lives Matter movement and initiatives like Change The Museum sparked industry-wide conversations about racial justice. Due to lockdown restrictions, these conversations were often necessarily conducted through social media.
Dune: “It’s impossible to talk about the lockdown without talking about Black Lives Matter and the social justice movement that happened around the same time. [Since] we were already using our social media platforms for PR messaging, it shifted to ‘what is your institution doing towards these social justice movements.’ So I think that that was the main shift, that everything became about trying to build transparent content.”
Dune views the increasing valuation of transparency, authenticity, and accountability as a hugely positive step for arts institutions. While there is much work still to be done, holding institutions to these values will help ensure that museum staff can back up their values with tangible actions. For social media managers, the hope is that digital platforms can catalyze change, and in turn can be used to spread that change.
Summing up the shift in social media practices, Dune said:
Dune: “[Before the pandemic], social media was very much used as a digital marketing tool… it was like, ‘this is the event, this is the time.’ It was really not personal, and it wasn’t really inviting a community with the individuals that follow it. So my focus has been introducing the museum in a new way.”
Van Gogh All Over Santa Barbara
Two years later, these transformations have changed social media for good, even as institutions open back up to the public. I asked Dune about her transition to working at SBMA and how the revaluation of social media’s purpose has affected the Museum. Dune describes her work as “introducing the museum in a new way” because SBMA (somewhat fortuitously) had already planned to partially close for a major renovation prior to COVID-19. Thus, reopening the museum has been a process of “re-introducing” SBMA as a newly refreshed and invigorated institution.
Dune discussed her experience producing digital content as SBMA reopened in-person in Fall 2021:
Dune: “We’re in a unique situation where we are actually doing very well after our reopening, because we had already been closed for renovations. We had a big reopening in August, and pretty much right after we had a big blockbuster show with Van Gogh. Which was kind of unusual - we don’t usually do such a blockbuster name at our museum, [since] we are a smaller museum, but it brought in a ton of interest and it was just the best possible way to layer those things. With those factors already there, it was the best way to reintroduce ourselves as a museum.”
Continuing the work of her predecessor at SBMA, Dune was able to support the Museum’s widely successful exhibition “Through Vincent's Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources.” The quality of the exhibition and the “blockbuster” artist name generated renewed interest in in-person visitations—but Dune especially wanted to emphasize the community partnerships that contributed to the exhibition’s success.
Dune: “Not only was it the Van Gogh show at the art museum—it was also the Van Gogh show all over Santa Barbara. Everywhere you went there were Van Gogh themed cocktails, Van Gogh themed flags everywhere… which was so incredible for us because it was just bringing more and more people into the Museum. So that was the way that we rebranded. [Now] Van Gogh is over, but we still have so much to offer.
[The exhibition plan] was already established before I started… So it was really fun, because I got to actually get photos of those specialty cocktails, and post them on our feed. So it was connecting with local businesses, but it was also creating content for the Van Gogh show, which was amazing.”
Exhibition-inspired flags for “Through Vincent’s Eyes”
Specialty Cocktails for “Through Vincent’s Eyes”
Features and Collaborations on the SBMA Feed
Dune also spoke to numerous other digital initiatives she has worked on at SBMA. She found that audiences engaged positively with behind-the-scenes posts that gave insight to the people at the heart of the museum—so she helped pioneer the Instagram and Facebook series “SBMA Staff Selects.” These posts feature SBMA staff members and their favorite works of art from the collection. Audiences can get a sense of who works at the Museum, feeling more connected to the institution. This also allows staff who aren’t usually public-facing to share the joy they find in the collection with the Museum’s audience.
The first #SBMAStaffSelects feature
Dune also currently serves as co-chair of the Digital Marketing Committee for an online SoCal museum marketing group. The group works to put together seasonal collaborations between a variety of institutions. Dune explained one recent collaboration, a Twitter-exclusive “gift swap” post series which connected institutions’ exhibitions and missions.
SBMA participates in a Twitter #MuseumGiftSwap with the LA Zoo
SBMA participates in #LAInstaFling Day by highlighting MOLAA
MOLAA participates in #LAInstaFling Day by highlighting SBMA
These collaborations, alongside behind-the-scenes content and other curated messaging, allows visitors a unique window into an institution’s collection and surrounding community. Dune added: “[Of course] it’s hard to track whether that more emotional or crafted content is truly helping… but I definitely think it is.”
Lessons from the pandemic: transparent and ethical social media
Dune and I concluded by discussing her key observations about the shift in the field, and how her work at SBMA has shed new light on what institutions can do to preserve the important lessons learned during the pandemic.
Q: “What lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic do you think your institution will bring into the future of its digital presence?”
Dune: “The main thing for me has really been transparency. I really do feel like the scope of social media and PR really changed overnight, with the pandemic, to being about transparency and accessibility and being authentic as an institution. Just being aware of your impact, too. That’s been the cultural shift. That work still needs to be supported in a lot of ways, but at least from a PR perspective, it has already changed the language we use with our audience.”
Dune urged institutions to support work like ethical social media. Developing authenticity and transparency requires participation from all museum departments, and Dune stressed the importance of each department maintaining a close working relationship with social media managers.
Dune: “I really am passionate about ethical social media, and I think that’s kind of the future of social media. And that was really started with COVID and with the social justice movements. This is how we communicate to people who are interested in our Museum… You have to be really mindful of the message that you’re bringing out. Trying to make sure that your content is not projecting a lifestyle of exclusion - that is another thing we’ve been trying really hard to do, and without being tokenizing and without virtue signaling. It’s a really difficult balance, but I think that’s what the future of social media and PR is going to be, for arts institutions.”
While social media practices have already shifted significantly from the effects of the pandemic, Dune highlighted ways that these new directions will carry museums into the future. Going forward, I learned from Dune that museum professionals will be looking to center transparency and to develop a range of digital initiatives, authentically crafting value-driven messaging. Our interview illustrated how social media functions not only as an extension of marketing and PR, but as an essential branch of museums’ public missions. Marketing and PR are never separate from a museum’s values—they are integral artistic practices in their own right, crucial for connecting institutions with their communities in the digital age.
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You can find the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on the following platforms:
SHARING ARMS AND ARMOR WITH OUR COMMUNITY: Insights from Dr. Natasha Mao, Interpretive Fellow at the Worcester Art Museum
Have you ever wanted to see a 3D model of a suit of armor? So did the Higgins Team at the Worcester Art Museum - this exciting project and others have inspired their robust social media feeds since the beginning. Having worked as an intern at WAM during the early days of the pandemic, I was eager to reconnect with the Higgins team about their evolving digital initiatives. I spoke with Dr. Natasha Mao, Interpretive Fellow at WAM, to learn about the Higgins Armory Collection’s social media ‘origin story’ and future.
The Higgins Armory Collection, now housed at the Worcester Art Museum, is the second largest collection of Arms and Armor in the United States. When the collection’s dedicated museum closed in 2013, more than 2,000 objects migrated along with a passionate team to the nearby WAM. Natasha works as an Interpretive Fellow with the Higgins collection alongside curator Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng, conservator Bill MacMillan, and a talented group of interns. She oversees a variety of curatorial duties in her position, but also principally coordinates the Higgins social media feeds.
Natasha explained that she doesn’t manage social media production for the entire museum: just the Higgins Collection’s specialized feeds. How do these channels intersect with the WAM’s feeds, and why are they separate in the first place? Read on to find out how the Higgins team crafted their unique digital presence at the start of the pandemic.
Revitalizing the Higgins Pages
Q: “So, this is a big question… how would you describe the shift in your team’s social media production from pre-pandemic to immediately after the lockdown? Did you use social media to manage this initial challenging situation?”
Natasha: “Yeah, so, quite interestingly, we did not have any social media presence prior to COVID. There was about a three month period where our social media was merged with the museum’s main page, and we produced content once a week. But when the pandemic hit, we decided to really have our own thing. The Higgins collection had an old page before it was moved to WAM, and we sort of restarted that page.”
Before the Higgins Armory Museum closure, the museum’s Facebook page was bustling with community members sharing their love of arms and armor online. Later, that Facebook page was essentially abandoned. Natasha and her team wanted to revitalize old channels for new audiences. Adding an Instagram page and a YouTube playlist (still housed under the WAM’s main account), they started to produce content to keep the arms and armor community in the loop during lockdown.
Natasha: “We wanted to continue to engage with our audience, and we used to do that in-person, but now we needed to find a way to do that online. So, that’s basically the reason that we started this page. And I think it’s a great thing, because now we have a platform for advertising and for recruiting for focus groups and visitor data surveys. So it’s a blessing in disguise for sure.”
While the Higgins team maintains the collection’s feeds separately from the WAM’s accounts, they collaborate for holidays, special exhibitions, and themed months to create crossover posts. The Higgins pages highlight the curation and care from WAM staff in all departments while maintaining a dedicated space for arms and armor enthusiasts. In essence, the “separate” feeds actually strengthen the bonds between WAM and the Higgins legacy.
Q: “So, would you say that both the WAM’s and the Higgins team’s priorities and mission guide your curation of your online presence?
Natasha: “We are in touch with the museum’s marketing department - since we are part of the museum, our missions are similar… We value diversity, accessibility, and sharing art with the community - which is our motto. Through social media we collaborate with the museum’s main page to convey that message, even if we’re not posting the same content every week.”
Natasha added that the Higgins team is “very proud of their collection,” and this drives their mission to share it with the public online and in-person. While the team prepares to install the permanent exhibition at WAM housing Higgins objects, social media has become an important channel through which to share these amazing, beloved objects with the Worcester community.
Flexibility in chaos
Q: “So, [after initially starting the page], how would you describe the shift in your output from immediately after lockdown into the extended lockdown and isolation period?”
Natasha: “I think what guided us was flexibility. During the more severe lockdown period we would post 5-6 times a week, or once daily. But during the less severe periods we could tell that people’s screen time is less, so we reduced it to 3 times a week so that we don’t bombard people… and we’re a little more selective about content as well. We’ve gone through that like 3 or 4 times, depending on the lockdown period.”
With the ebb and flow of the lockdowns, the team shifts their posting output and content curation to match what audiences might be looking for. Natasha noted that these decisions are often based on analytics from Instagram and Facebook.
One downside to this flexible posting schedule, Natasha mentioned, is that the social media feeds can become less engaging for those living outside the Worcester area. Still, most of the account’s followers are local to Worcester or to the state of Massachusetts, so the team is confident they can still serve their main audience to the best of their abilities with every shift in posting.
The team develops a variety of materials to disseminate through their online channels. These include informational object-focused posts; posts themed around holidays or historical events; short videos showcasing collection objects or the history of arms and armor; references to pop culture and video games; and even behind-the-scenes posts. For example, their recent “What is Bill doing?” series showcases the many projects of conservator extraordinaire Bill MacMillan - like restoring 18th century mail pants or collaborating on 3D model photography.
In addition to object-focused posts and other series, using social media as a recruitment tool has proved hugely successful for the team.
Natasha: “For example, recently we had a focus group where we had 17 people volunteer and we were only able to offer 9 spots. So, for us, that traffic is pretty nice.”
Natasha noted that, in terms of promotion, the feeds’ content focuses on events like evaluation focus groups, demonstrations, or talks with experts. While they don’t usually promote merchandise, the Higgins team did get the chance to promote the sale of their recent touring exhibition catalog and a make-your-own chainmail kit. Those kinds of promotions are rare for their collection, Natasha says, and all the more important for their rarity.
Above all, the team’s top priorities are connecting the community with the collection’s objects and following the Higgins’ legacy of education. Evaluation plays a part in that mission:
Q: “Considering your experience before and during the pandemic, how would you describe the effectiveness of social media in ensuring the institution’s community feels connected to the museum, and educating about the collection’s objects?”
Natasha: “We periodically conduct surveys to get feedback on our social media. Recently we asked a question like, ‘how do you feel that the social media content of the Higgins page increased your interest in arms and armor,’ and another asking ‘how do you think the content increased your knowledge.’ So, one is interest, and one is knowledge. And on both statements we saw that the majority of the audience scored it four or five out of five. So, overall, we are confident that our audience’s interest and knowledge increased as a result of our social media content. Basically every part of our social media is education-related; even if it’s a really light-hearted meme. We try to educate people through a variety of styles, you might say.”
Q: “What about creating connections between institutions sometimes? I know that you do reposts sometimes -- have you seen a lot of engagement on those?”
Natasha: “We’ve tried to connect with other museums, but so far this hasn’t been totally fruitful… mostly because people at other institutions are just very busy! Also, we’re one of the only few Arms and Armor museums in the area. So we’re still working on that… something will come out of it, but we don’t have a big presence yet.”
Towards a balanced future
Q: “What lessons from the pandemic will your team bring into the future of its evolving digital presence?”
Natasha: “Our pages are here to stay. But we’re trying to maintain a balance between social media and other job functions without letting social media take over… because it can really quickly take over if you’re really focused on what everybody thinks online!”
Maintaining a social media feed can be time-consuming. For the Higgins team, that time is well spent - but the key word is always ‘balance’. Finding ways to showcase pre-existing team projects, like the 3D models WAM has been working on, can save time on content generation. For their part, it seems like the Higgins team has developed an excellent synergy between social media curation and museum curation.
Natasha: “[We also learned that] we have to pay attention to the news. It’s not just COVID-19 that will change our strategies, but also world events.”
Natasha shared one last lesson the team has learned over the course of the pandemic: staying in touch with their public. Valuing diversity and accessibility means keeping a pulse on the world outside, even when isolated in our homes. For Natasha and the WAM, this means making sure viewers can always feel energized and curious when viewing the Higgins feeds - even when the world goes through harrowing changes.
Flexibility and balance have defined the Higgins team’s social media efforts over the past two years. They have not only designed a wide array of content—from short videos to their behind-the-scenes “What is Bill doing?” post series—but even shifted their posting schedule and content rotation based on demonstrated analytics. Evaluation forms a core part of all of their work, and that extends to social media. Engagement surveys have helped shape their strategies and gauge their success. Though ‘success’ is a tough thing to define, the Higgins team has certainly achieved it with their pages. Born out of quarantine necessity but still ever-growing, the Higgins collection’s digital presence truly is here to stay.
Mediating Collection and Community (In Lockdown and Beyond)
This blog is the product of an undergraduate research project conducted by Kira Houston, major in Art History & Spanish at Clark University. You find Kira’s portfolio and other research publications on his website and LinkedIn.
Mediating Collection and Community seeks to compile resources by and for museum professionals, social media managers, and scholars. The project hopes to present the impact of COVID-19 on museum social media management as a vehicle for exploring the ever-growing importance of a museum’s online presence. Combining insights from interviews with industry professionals and highlights from relevant literature, this blog will serve as an archive for museum professionals interested in examining the impact of COVID-19 on the arts & culture industry. Part time-capsule and part toolbox, this project is not a static publication; it is an evolving dialogue.
Mediating Collection and Community (In Lockdown and Beyond) @mediatingcollection - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
