Reviewing and planning your digital engagement

The sector has seen a huge growth in provision and uptake of virtual, digital engagement over the past year, as pandemic closures necessitated different approaches and experimentation for arts and heritage organisations, and left audiences with few or no alternatives during lockdowns.

We’re now re-opening after lockdown three and I’m speaking to a lot of organisations looking at whether to continue with their digital engagement, and what form it should take.

The majority of organisations favour a blended approach, recognising that digital will never be a full substitute for an in-person visit to the theatre, a gallery, a museum or heritage site, but it can still have a really valuable role to play – both for those organisations and their audiences.

Below I summarise a few key challenges to consider with digital engagement, and suggest four questions you can work through to help with your planning.

Digital engagement challenges

It’s not a panacea to all your problems, and being online and having a substantial online following, doesn’t automatically equal success. Like any type of audience development and marketing, it’s worth have a strategic approach to what you do.

Although digital engagement can offer many opportunities outlined below, it’s worth remembering some of the key challenges with it:

1.      Competition

Whilst it can give you access to huge audiences well beyond your locality, it also opens you up to enormous global competition, fighting for audiences’ attention online.

For example, I can choose to view online content from my local Norwich Theatre Royal’s Digital Stage but equally I can choose to view content from the National Theatre (London), Sydney Opera House, watch TV or a streaming service, all from the comfort of my home.

During lockdowns audiences were restricted with what they could do in their free time and organisations were largely competing against other digital output. But as restrictions are lifted, digital output is also competing against cultural and heritage experiences audiences can have “in real life”.

2.      Exclusivity

Whilst giving you access to huge audiences, digital engagement doesn’t reach everyone. This can be forgotten in a scramble to adjust to the pandemic and a rush for a digital-first approach.

There are a range of reasons for digital exclusion, from a lack of access to devices and/or data, to motivation, confidence and skills. This thought-provoking infographic from The Good Things Foundation captures key stats around this.

I’ll be exploring digitally excluded audiences more in a free webinar for small and medium-sized UK-based heritage organisations on 26 May, organised by the Arts Marketing Association.

3.      Resources

Delivering something virtually still takes resources. You will need to consider your time available, budget for tech if needed, as well as staff or volunteer skills and interest.

If you’re adding in digital programming as well as expecting to return to your full pre-pandemic in-person programming – where will the capacity come from to deliver this?

Planning your approach as we re-open and beyond

Here are four questions you can ask yourself to help you review and plan your future approach:

1.      Who are your digital audiences?

What can your website, social media analytics and data from any digital events you’ve done tell you about who your digital audiences are and where they are based? How are they similar or different to your in-person visitors / attendees?

I’ve developed this matrix as a way of considering and mapping audience groups against their uptake of digital engagement and likely interest in in-person visits when we re-open. I think it’s useful to ensure our approach works for our audiences. For example in the coming months it makes sense to focus digital engagement initiatives on interested audiences who can’t or won’t return in-person in the short-term but are interested and comfortable with digital engagement. 

 I’ve just put in a few examples, but most organisations are likely to have several audiences groups in each box and they may be different to the ones above.

You could also adapt this matrix to cover in-person visits in the longer-term, beyond the pandemic too.

If you don’t know who your digital audiences are, or haven’t yet explored digital engagement and want to understand who your likely audiences may be, you can look at some of the great sector research that’s been shared over the past months, in particular:

• The Audience Agency’s Covid-19 Cultural Participation Monitor which looks at digital engagement in lockdown – who has been engaging with digital content, by age, ethnicity, region and Audience Spectrum segment (see slides 10-14)

• The Audience Agency’s Digital Audience Survey which looks at website and social media audiences. Results include age, gender, ethnicity, disability, location (UK or overseas), cultural engagement levels.

2.      What do they want?

One of the advantages of doing things digitally is that you often get data thrown in, and it’s worth looking at what you have.

What has been most popular from what you’ve been doing:

• What online talks have the most views?

• Which events raise the most money (whether through ticket sales, donations or sponsorship)?

• What type of social media post gets the most interaction?

If you’re doing digital events which require pre-booking, can you ask any additional questions in your booking form – for example where people found out about the event – and can you follow up with any evaluation questions?

You can also ask your audiences for input, whether in the form of a quick poll on your social media, or something more substantial like an online focus group or survey.

There’s also a lot of great research about digital audiences and what they want available in the sector you can glean insights from. In particular:

• The Insights Alliance’s Culture Restart audience trackers cover digital audiences and their likely interest in digital culture in future (see slides 45-53 from their latest March wave of research)

• The Audience Agency’s Covid-19 Cultural Participation Monitor looks at digital engagement in lockdown – what’s been the most popular types of digital content (see slides 10-11)

• The Audience Agency’s Digital Audience Survey looks at website and social media audiences, including frequency of engagement, in-person cultural engagement, motivations and activities undertaken.

3.      What is the purpose of our digital engagement?

Whilst for a lot of organisations the last year has been full of experimentation and digital output has evolved fairly organically, it’s now a good time to consider what you want the purpose of it to be more strategically.

A year ago it may have started off as a way to keep in touch with your audiences, remind them of your existence and also to serve them during a difficult time.

But perhaps now the purpose has evolved. For example, do you want and/or need your digital engagement to:

• Deepen your relationships with core audiences?

• Help you grow new audiences?

• Drive in-person visits / attendance?

• Reach audiences who will never physically come to you?

• Be an additional income stream?

• A combination of the above and/or something else as well?

Other questions to consider at this stage

How does digital engagement fit in with your broader audience development strategy and activities, and how can it support your organisation’s mission and goals?

And what will count as digital engagement in your organisation? A social media interaction with an audience member? Or does it need to be something deeper? Does it need to be “meaningful” engagement? And if so, how do you define “meaningful”? And how do you measure it?

There’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer for any of this, the key is it’s intentional and works for your organisation.

4.      What should we do?

This one’s up to you! The answers to the first three questions should give you a good steer on what there is demand for and what you want your digital programming to deliver for you.

You will need to consider your time and budget available, as well as staff or volunteer skills and interest.

You might also want to look at likely competitors and how your offer is distinctive from others’. Can you plug a gap in the provision for a particular audience group?

Of course I’d always recommend you build in some kind of monitoring and evaluation in what you do so that you can learn from your experiences and improve in future - that warrants a separate blog of its own.

So finally, for some inspiration of what other organisations have been doing, you could check out these resources:

• A blog post I shared in November 2020 with examples of online engagement that have caught my eye

• This webinar recording on YouTube from London Museum Development on Engaging audiences during lockdown – Great examples from the heritage sector

• This list of digital responses to Covid from arts, culture & heritage sector crowdsourced on Twitter from Katie Moffat of The Audience Agency

• The Digital Culture Network’s series of recorded webinars on YouTube on topics including Getting started with live streaming and Earning revenue from live streams

• Museum Next has a three-day online Digital Income Summit coming up on 28-30 June with case studies and topics including digital fundraising, digital gift shops, virtual programmes, online learning and much more.

Resource cover photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash.