Bumpy rides and dead-end streets

Photo by Auntie G on Flickr.com

Those of you, who know a bit about the history of the museum I work for, know it has always been a topic of national debate. Ever since the project started, it has known times of fierce debate between opposing parties in the government. It has been a bumpy ride.

Has been, indeed, as over the past weeks the secretary of state responsible for culture decided to stop funding for a considerable number of arts and culture institutions. Almost every organisation that dared to be different, to educate future generations or discover the future of arts and culture suffers, greatly. There’s also a VAT increase on tickets and other cultural products, making arts and culture less accessible to the general audience.

My employer, the Museum of National History, is one of the institutions that will not get funding anymore. January 1^st of 2012 the museum will cease to exist. It’s a pity, and a loss, but there’s nothing more we can do about it. The adventure is over.

The museum had been my home for over two years and I do believe we were still only at the beginning. Projects like xwashier, 100m2NL and our INNL network showed our thoughts about the future of museums, but in themselves were only steps towards the realisation of our vision. We could have done so much more. Read the rest of this entry »

Putting xwashier on the map

Over the last months we’ve been busy with the launch of xwashier, our physical and digital network of historical places. In my presentation at MuseumNext and in a recent blogpost I advocated the use of integrated media strategies to make your product (exposition, activity, app) known to your audience. In this post I will share some of my experiences with the xwashier campaign that is currently unrolling.

(Despite our best intentions, in the end the media campaign accompanying the launch became the happy chaos communication tends to be. So, copy and steal ideas, but do so wisely.)

Message, target groups and designing the campaign

Xwashier is about the experience of history on the location where it actually happened. The relevance for the potential visitor/user therefore is local. Also, xwashier is a platform for local history, getting together many different organisations from around the country. Thirdly, xwashier is personal. A location is especially relevant to somebody, if s/he has a personal relation to the location.

Although we want to reach everybody (of course), from the general target groups in communication we identified opportunities online to reach day trippers, iPhone users and the networks of local institutions as well as increase our reach within our network (people enjoying history and heritage). Read the rest of this entry »

A broader perspective on participation – 5 things I’ve picked up outside of museums

Photo by kagey_b on Flickr.

In a few weeks my girlfriend Suzan will move to London to do a masters in Applied Drama. Applied drama is, amongst others, theatre aimed at social empowerment and often participatory by nature. When Suzan discovered Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum, she quite correctly observed that if you search and replace “museum” by “theatre” in the book, the lessons in it are still true.

In fact, many of the participatory theatre book lingering around address the same issues, give the same solutions and occasionally go beyond what we in museums know about participation.

Lessons about participation and community work are not unique to one sector, I believe. They’re universal. A broader perspective to other sectors might help us to get further, sooner. Therefore I’m quite happy Suzan will be blogging about Applied Drama, so I can learn from what she learns. Maybe you’ll learn from it too. (This is shameless publicity, I agree.)

In the mean time, I’d like to share with you these 5 things I’ve picked up about participation along the way. I’ve learned them far from museums, but somehow they’re still useful (and probably utterly cliché).

Read the rest of this entry »