Uncategorized | Frankly Green + Webb

Measuring digital impact in museums: a practical approach

13 October 2025 by Alyson Webb

All the organisations we work with are purpose driven. Income matters, but only because it sustains the bigger goal: creating impact. Funders, donors and governments increasingly want to know not just what you’ve delivered, but what difference it made. That makes measuring success complicated — especially for digital teams, where outcomes can feel hard to pin down.

How can we demonstrate the value and impact of our digital work?
How can we make a case for greater investment in digital content?
How can we stop or change what isn’t working?

Through a series of research projects – including an evaluation of 57 digital initiatives across the UK, USA and Asia for Bloomberg Philanthropies – we set out to answer these questions. Our aim was clear: to create a practical way to design for, and measure, positive impact. We wanted a method that was evidence-based and easy to use. Something simple enough for content teams to use day-to-day, yet robust enough to stand up in strategy papers and funding cases.

One thing became clear early on: “impact” can feel abstract. It’s a term often used without a shared understanding of what it means or how to spot it in the wild. We realised that impact is a combination of two things:

Reach x Effect = Impact

Reach is about how many people you connect with. Effect is about the change you create for those people. Some projects reach a lot of people and create a small change. Others reach a small group but make a big difference. Both have value – what we all want to avoid is low reach and low effect.

Measuring effect

To understand the impact of digital content, we separated reach from effect. While many studies look at effect from a community or societal perspective, we wanted to focus on the individual. What effect does digital content have on users and followers? This helps us understand not just scale of effect, but also whether some audiences are experiencing more (or less) benefit than others.

We aimed to capture both the outcomes most cultural organisations typically seek—such as improving understanding or creating enjoyable experiences—and a wider set of effects that might also hold value for audiences and organisations.

We also wanted a consistent set of measures that could be applied across organisations, enabling comparison and shared learning across the sector.

Finding a model

In our research around different models and ways to measure impact, the New Economics Foundation’s Five Ways to Wellbeing stood out. First developed in 2008, this evidence-based framework is widely used by the NHS, charities, community groups and funders. It’s simple, flexible, and easy to adapt.

The Five Ways are:

Keep learning: Trying/learning something new or discovering an interest builds confidence and enjoyment.
Be curious: Paying attention to the world and noticing the beautiful, the unusual, what has changed, helps people appreciate what matters to them.
Connect: Building relationships with people and organisations enriches everyday life.
Give: Helping others—whether by volunteering, sharing skills or giving time—creates purpose and belonging.
Be active: Movement in any form, from walking to dancing, supports wellbeing and is accessible to most.

What struck us is how effective this framework could be as a lens for digital cultural content. We can ask: Did this content help someone learn, notice more, connect, give, or get active? Each action has value and relevance to both individuals and organisations, but together they offer a powerful way to understand how digital content can contribute to wellbeing.

Creating a Sector-Specific Tool

Using the five ways as a foundation, we developed a set of simple, user-friendly statements for surveys..

We’ve now used these indicators across multiple surveys, covering web and social media channels for a wide range of museums and heritage organisations, building a dataset of nearly 40,000 responses.

I’ll share some key results in a future post around how they’ve helped teams to develop content but also revealed some of the biases within our sector – types of content and effect that we rely on and while others are less well used but could, nevertheless, be powerful.

Putting it into practice?

If you’d like to see what this looks like in action, read how the National Trust for Scotland used audience insight to transform their social media engagement.

“Since this research, which has completely changed our approach, we’ve seen a noticeable, positive impact against KPIs: reach, engagements, audience growth rate, amplification rate—all have increased significantly.” Read the case study

Curious about how the Reach × Effect model is being applied and what results we’re seeing?
Book an UnOffice Hour to talk it through.

Or sign up to our newsletter for more on what we’re learning and how others are putting these ideas into practice.

Why digital content teams feel stuck and how to fix it

26 September 202525 September 2025 by Alyson Webb

Feeling overwhelmed? You're not alone. Alyson explores why.

Many digital teams we work with find themselves stuck in reactive mode—juggling constant requests, high expectations and limited capacity. If that sounds familiar, it’s not just you.

Do any of these ring true?

Most of our work comes from other departments
We’re always busy, but never caught up
Everything feels urgent—and equally important
It’s hard to make the case for more resources
We’re ambitious, but we feel stuck

These aren’t just frustrations. They’re signals pointing to deeper issues we’ve seen time and again in digital teams across the UK and US.

What’s really going on?

It could be any or all of these

Activity is mistaken for impact
If you’re measured by how much you do, the answer is always to do more. But impact often comes from doing less—just better, or differently.

It’s hard to show what’s working – and what isnt
You might know what’s effective, but without evidence, it’s tough to get others on board or change direction.

Your workload is invisible
You’re juggling multiple audiences, channels, platforms, venues… and few people can see the full picture and, therefore, the scale of work. That makes it hard to say no—or to ask for help.

There are gaps in digital understanding
People often come to the Digital team with a solution already in mind, rather than a clear sense of what they want to achieve. But gaps in understanding of digital affordances can mean that their chosen solution may not meet their goals. The result? Confusion, delays and frustration.

Too many priorities, not enough focus
When every department has its own goals—and every goal involves a digital output—you quickly end up with a long list of ‘must-dos’ and no room to breathe.

How to start shifting the balance by mapping your content eco-system

You don’t need a total overhaul to start seeing improvement. Here is one simple high impact activity to get you started.

Make the work visible
Try a visual mapping exercise. One we love (adapted from Brain Traffic) maps audiences, channels, services and tools, and how they connect. You can do this alone but doing it with stakeholders creates a shared view—and usually a moment of real clarity.

Example
One client discovered they were trying to serve 21 audiences across 26 venues and services. They had six web and social channels — and were using each to reach all audiences and promote all services. Seeing this laid out was a powerful moment.

Want to try mapping your content?

Click here for a simple mapping exercise.

If you’re still feeling stretched, stuck or need a critical friend in the process —we can help. You don’t need all the answers to start the conversation. We’re here to help you get clarity, build a plan, and start making space for the work that really matters.

Audience-Centred Content – why it’s so hard for museums and how to make it easier

5 September 20245 September 2024 by Lindsey Green

“Becoming more audience-centred” is now a critical goal for most museums. But there’s often a moment in a museum where people sit around in a meeting room to discuss a piece of content—a website, a newsletter, or a series of social media posts—and no one can agree on who the audience is or what great content would look like for them. Even with access to data and analytics. Why is it so hard to create audience-centred content? And what can you do about it, no matter your role?

Our experience is that the cause is often a series of nested issues, each of which can look very different for the different teams teams that need to be engaged and involved in creating great audience-centred content. This post is about one of the steps you and your colleagues can take to transition from subjective opinions to objective facts, gaining confidence in making more of your content. If you find this post helpful, consider signing up for our newsletter.

If you’re a content creator…

You might find yourself constantly feeding a “hungry beast,” churning out content for various departments and audiences. Despite your best efforts to produce high-quality, targeted content, you’re inundated with requests that you feel lack focus or strategic alignment. You might suspect this scattergun approach isn’t the most effective for delivering the audience-centred ambition. However, persuading colleagues to adopt a new strategy can be difficult, especially when each department seems to have its own agenda.

If you’re in a department that needs to share knowledge or promote programming…

Your frustrations might lie in the lack of control over publishing. You’re often met with delays, logistical challenges, or a disconnect between the content provided and what’s possible to publish effectively. This can create tension, as your department’s goals are bound by what feels like an inflexible system and set of rules.

If you’re a leader, director, COO, or board member, you might face a different dilemma…

You see significant resources allocated to the web and social media but can’t tell if it’s having a positive impact. Does digital content convert people to become visitors? Is it diversifying the audience? Are there more cost-effective methods? These questions often go unanswered, leaving leadership uncertain about the true impact of their investment into digital content, seeing them as an unnecessary cost centre and looking to scale back teams or resources.

For us, this is a a bit like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, with the digital content producer describing the elephant’s trunk as a giant snake, other departments describing its enormous body as a wall, and the leadership team perceiving its legs as tree trunks. When developing an audience-centred digital content strategy, we often have to take a collective step back and examine the whole elephant.

Thorough audience research provides a comprehensive understanding of your current audience, their needs, and the impact of your work. However, the internal dynamics— how you allocate your time, the unique skills each department contributes, and the balance between bias and strategy—genuinely shape the success of delivering audience-centred digital content. This is where internal research and data points play a similarly crucial role, empowering us to understand why this is so hard and what is holding us back.

We use many tools to do this but, the one that appears to be the most simple, is our exercise in mapping the content ecosystem.

We use the following questions to explore the key elements of the system:

Which audience(s) are you trying to serve using online platforms? How do you describe them?
What services do you offer, and which audiences are they aimed at? (Finding objects online, blog posts, visitor information, exhibitions, events, member renewals, etc.)
Which teams are commissioning, producing or publishing content?
What type of content are you producing? (Images, scans, maps, text, video, etc.)
What online content platform/channels are you using?
Which tools are you using to create content?

If you work in an institution and need to see the whole elephant too, see if you can answer some of the questions above. Capture the answers on paper – grouping them and connecting them using lines to show relationships to reveal the whole content eco-system then take a moment to look at what the system tells you.

The insights unearthed from this exercise often catch teams off guard. Leadership may be surprised by the scale and complexity of the content ecosystem, a realisation that only dawns when the details are laid out. Those responsible for commissioning content may start to see the challenges of pushing diverse content for varied audiences through limited channels. Content creators might recognise their blind spots, such as allowing certain types of content to dominate due to internal biases or pressures. However, there are three universal insights we often hear across institutions as they review their content eco-system

Cultural organisations have both commercial and social or mission-based goals. They offer multiple products and services—from online collections to visits to venues, visitor experiences, programming and membership, and retail—to numerous audiences. These characteristics mean that the online content system for cultural institutions is always complicated. This exercise makes visible where there is tension and where there are bright spots. What is often revealed is an institution trying to serve too many people, with too many services, across too few platforms and with too few resources, highlighting the need for coherence and communication.

We frequently hear broad terms for audiences like “international, national, and local” or specific groups like “families, members, funders, the general public, under-25s, and academics.” Different teams and departments use different definitions based on their goals—age, how they visit, and relationship to the institution. These different definitions add to the complexity of communications between departments but can also mean the institution is literally competing with itself for resources and audience attention.

Mapping out the internal system starts to help teams see the whole institutional—digital content—elephant. Seeing different departments or colleagues have varied—often contradictory and competing—beliefs about audiences can open up the conversation. Seeing it all written down moves teams from judgments on people’s behaviour or attitudes to facts about what you are trying to do and why it feels so hard for everyone. It can open up conversations about what is most important to the institution rather than individual departments and how scarce resources could be used more productively.

The power of internal and external data to support content strategy

It is an uncomfortable truth that simply providing audience data is rarely enough to change hearts and minds and take the uncomfortable steps needed to be audience-centred. Mapping the eco-system can help us to see the whole elephant – the systemic issues the scale and complexity, the need to work as an organisation and prioritise. This can be the critical shift in an institution’s beliefs about digital content. It can open up teams to discover audience needs and the need to design new ways of working together – decision-making, processes and systems – that support an audience-centred practice.

Of course, audience research still has a critical part to play in helping organisations reach and serve new and/or under-represented audiences. But we have learnt, on its own, it isn’t enough. Taking a moment to understand the internal blockers is critical to delivering actual change and organisational objectives.

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Join our “Grow Your Digital Community” Webinar Series

1 September 20231 September 2023 by Lindsey Green

Do you work with heritage? Are you looking for new ways to work with partners, volunteers and grassroots communities in Heritage? Interested in how digital tools and platforms might help?

Over the past two years, The National Lottery Heritage Fund has supported 25 digital projects as part of the Digital Skills for Heritage initiative. The funding has helped projects innovate how they work with volunteers and community partners.

Join our two FREE webinars to hear from these projects as they share practical insights, advice and takeaways. They will help unpack and demystify “digital” approaches and the tools they used for working with volunteers and partners.

The webinars are being run on behalf of the Heritage Fund by digital mentors John Coburn (Wild Museum) and Lindsey Green (Frankly, Green + Webb).

Webinar 1 – How to work with partners and volunteers to improve capacity and quality of heritage data collection and interpretation

Thursday 21 September, 10am–12pm

Ticket price: FREE

In this webinar you will hear about:

The benefits of working digitally with volunteers and partners to improve heritage data collection and interpretation
how to overcome challenges when collaborating with partners and volunteers digitally to improve data collection or use of heritage data
how to get started with the right digital tools and platforms when collaborating with volunteers and partners

Who is this webinar for? 

Anyone working in or with heritage organisations, particularly:

heritage leaders and managers with responsibility for digital
people establishing or leading volunteer initiatives or teams
learning, community and engagement leaders and teams
curatorial, archives and collections leaders and teams

Speakers and topics include:

Royal Horticultural Society on how to recruit and manage remote digital volunteers to transcribe, geotag and creatively interpret heritage collections
University of Exeter on developing volunteer-led heritage mapping of places using open-access software and remote sensing data
VocalEyes on accessible and inclusive approaches to digital volunteering to increase the diversity of your volunteers
Butterfly Conservation on collaborating with volunteers and expert users to improve the quality of a data collection tools
Wikimedia on working with organisations and volunteers from under-served backgrounds to close the content gaps on Wikipedia

Register for Webinar 1

Webinar 2 – How to engage grassroots communities and build local relevance using digital technologies

Thursday 28 September, 10am–12pm

Ticket price: FREE

In this webinar you will hear about:

the benefits of working digitally to connect more deeply with grassroots communities and ensure content and programming is relevant to their needs and interests
common challenges when collaborating with partners and volunteers digitally to improve interpretation and grow public engagement
how to get started with the right digital tools and platforms when collaborating with volunteers and partners

Who is this webinar for? 

Anyone working in or with heritage organisations who is responsible for or interested in:

working to engage grassroots communities or people living locally to their venue
delivering community-led digital programmes
developing heritage related content or public programming

Speakers and topics include:

Portland Museum on mobilising local communities to 3D digitise local historical collections
Nerve Centre on digital volunteering supporting under-served communities to creatively interpret archives material
Glasgow Women’s Library on building a network of digital volunteers to interpret collections through podcasting and writing
Museum of London Archaeology on developing a network to grow public engagement with archaeology
Lancashire Textile Treasures on collaborating with communities of volunteers through Whatsapp and other digital tools to interpret collections

Register for Webinar 2

How to join for FREE

Register here for webinar 1: How to work with partners and volunteers to improve capacity and quality of heritage data collection and interpretation

Thursday 21 September, 10am–12pm

Thursday 28 September, 10am–12pm.

Format

Each session will include an introduction to digital volunteering and collaborating using digital tools, plus five 15-minute case studies, followed by a Q&A.

Accessibility requirements

Let us know if you have any accessibility requirements so that we may make reasonable adjustments. You can contact us by clicking the “Contact the event organiser” button below and completing the online form.

This webinar will be recorded

Please note: this session will be recorded and may be shared by the Heritage Fund, Frankly, Green + Webb and Wild Museum.

For more information about how we will process your personal data, please read the privacy policy on the Heritage Fund website.

We aim to make a recording available after the event. Sign up to the Heritage Fund’s email updates and select the ‘digital’ box, or visit the Heritage Fund website to stay updated.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Since 1994, it’s awarded £8.8billion to more than 51,000 projects across the UK.

Digital Skills for Heritage is the Heritage Fund’s initiative designed to drive up digital capabilities across the UK’s heritage sector. It offers guidance, resources and opportunities to develop digital skills.

Six questions to ask yourself when designing an online survey.

24 February 202124 February 2021 by Lindsey Green

Guest post: Adam Pearson

It’s never been easier to create a web survey, with lots of different platforms specifically designed to help you get feedback from your audience.

It’s harder to get robust data and that’s what you need when you’re bringing about change and basing decisions on research, you need to have confidence in it.

Whether you’re looking to run a research project yourself or thinking about getting some help, here are some questions you should be asking as you go through to make sure the you collect the right data to get to the right actions.

1. Are you asking the right questions?

Take the time upfront to find the right questions and you’ll have a better chance of delivering on your research objectives.

Ask them in the right way by following best practice question design. Think about using simple language, keeping questions and options neutral, avoiding double-barrelled questions and using balanced response scales.

Look for proven questions from industry and national surveys, such as ONS studies or DCMS research. These will have already been tested and offer contextual or comparison data to your research. You might also have questions you can take from past projects – the more you do, the more you build up an understanding of what works.

Work with and involve the right people at the right time to co-design your research project – who will use the data to make decisions and what will they need to do next. Make sure your questions work by testing them with the end user, giving you an opportunity to make those final tweaks. Once it goes live, you’re stuck with it.

2. Are you confident in how your data has been collected?

Once you have some questions, it’s then about building a tool to collect quality data. It goes without saying how important it is to base decisions on accurate data. What the tool looks like will depend on the aims of your research. In this article we’re focusing on online surveys.

There is a wide range of online survey platforms to choose from, but what they can do for your research varies. Whatever you use, get to know the technical features and how they can improve both the quality of your research and, importantly, the quality of experience for your audience. This might involve building routing and logic rules, setting limits on multiple choice questions, considering when to make questions ‘must answer’ or piping fields based on answers to previous questions.

Be careful of poor-quality data sneaking into your sample. For example, ‘speedsters’ who race through a survey or unreliable response patterns such as always selecting the first option in a question. You can use algorithms to quarantine these so you can be confident that you’re working with clean data.

Thinking about the experience of your audience, don’t forget about data privacy. If you’re asking for any kind of personal data in a survey, you need consent from the respondent. You should also make it clear why you’re collecting data and how it will be used. Developing a Privacy Notice for your survey can be a good way to explain all of this.

3. Is your data fit-for-purpose?

“How many responses do we need?” is probably the question we get most at the start of a survey project. But it’s not all about sample size.

Make sure you collect the right data to understand if your sample is representative of the audience you are trying to reach. This might include questions in your survey such as key demographics or how often they visit or use something. But it might also involve using some hidden or url variables in your survey – data that the respondent doesn’t see but that you can use for analysis. An example of this might be tagging the social platform you share the survey on.

When considering a reliable sample size, think about the ability to look at different groups and audiences within it. Have you got enough responses within these groups to run some effective analysis? For example, 1000 responses might sound great until you look at it by age and find it is dominated by one group.

Often when running surveys, you will find certain groups are over- or under-represented. If this is the case, you could look at weighting your data. This is a statistical technique where you apply a weight to your data based on one or more questions. For example, you might weight your data by demographics like age or gender, or key behaviours linked to your research such as visit frequency or website usage. Ultimately, the purpose of weighting is to ensure overrepresented groups in your sample aren’t skewing your findings.

4. Are you making the most of your data?

Your data is in and the temptation is to jump straight into pulling out the key findings and analysis. But the chances are you won’t be getting the full picture. There’s work to do first to get your data into shape so it reveals extra insights and depth to your analysis.

Look at how your data is structured. Just because you asked questions in a certain way, doesn’t mean that’s how they need to be set up for your analysis. Explore how you could group response options or combine responses from different questions to create segments.

The chances are you will have included an open question or two in your survey. At first glance, there’s a lot of information in these and it can be difficult to understand what the patterns and common themes are. You can code comments into key topics or analyse them by another question to break them down.

Most online survey platforms will offer some basic analysis tools. But if you want to get more from your data, consider running it through specialist analysis tools such as SPSS. This will allow you to recode variables, run statistical tests, apply complex filters, cut your data by key questions and more. If that doesn’t feel like something within your reach, get to know pivot tables, filters and lookups in spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets.

5. How do you make your analysis meaningful?

You’ve done as much as you can with the data, how do you present it in a way that tells the story of your research and reveals key insights?

Think about different ‘views’ of the data. If you ask the right questions and gather a reliable sample, you should have the luxury of cutting up your data in different ways. For example, you might want to build some motivation groups or home in on what a particular demographic group are saying.

You will probably want to visualise your data in some way. This isn’t just about making it look good, but how you start to bring out the patterns in your data. Make sure you pick the right charts for the right data points. This Chartmaker Directory gives you an idea of just how many different options there are.

You’ll likely want to report on your data in one way or another too. This might be a written report, summary slides, infographics, online reports or maybe even some kind of interactive dashboard. The way you report should have your intended audience in mind. Not just finding a format that works for them but guiding them through your work and how the analysis you’ve undertaken relates to the research aims.

6. How will you get to action?

You’ve done the thinking, gathered your data, got it into shape and turned it into something that is meaningful. Now it’s about returning to the reason for doing the research in the first place: to make a difference.

Get it in front of the right people. Show them what you are seeing. Use the data to back this up. Did you know that 95% of CEOs feel more confident about a decision if they have the data to back it up? (This is made up, but you get the idea)

Use those key facts and figures to raise awareness of your research and then work with your team to co-analyse the data and understand how it effects what they have to do. Data literacy is one of the biggest skills gaps in the Museum sector but taking time to review, understand and action the data will build those muscles.

It’s not unusual to find your research leads to more questions. Quantitative data doesn’t always give you all the answers, but it will help generate facts that help you to ask better questions.

About Adam

We’re partnering with Adam Pearson from Pearson Insight on Insight For Change our package of research and support to deliver robust insights to the cultural sector.

“In a nutshell, we have a lot of museums who have website analytics and social media stats but don’t know who their audience are. Insight For Change helps us go beyond knowing that 10 percent of web traffic is from over 50s. It tells us about those over 50s. What is their motivation to support the cause? Why are they visiting the website? What do they pay for? What are they looking for? It's the missing pieces of information that teams need in order to design their digital content well.”

Adam Pearson, Pearson Insight

You can find out more about the Insight For Change package of research and support here and find out how we can help you to understand online audiences and inform your online content strategy.

Museums making money from online content: Might our beliefs be holding us back?

3 December 20203 December 2020 by Lindsey Green

Producing effective online content is neither easy nor cheap despite what is sometimes suggested.

It takes time and it takes skill. To work, it has to reach its intended audience, meet their needs and interests and support the organisation’s goal. That’s a lot to deliver and as such, it needs to be supported by long term, consistent planning and investment.

Working in museums, what we often see is small teams with limited funds trying to do too much – too many projects, too much content – for ‘all audiences’. Very few organisations have the mechanism to evaluate the value of online content and say – actually no, we can’t do that. Or, if we do x – we won’t be doing y.

At the root of this problem is money: How do we spend the small budget we have in ways that reflect our goals and values? How do we limit what we try to do so we can do it properly and not exhaust ourselves and our teams? How can we increase our funding and what we can achieve? In other words, how do we thrive?

How has Covid changed things?

As the pandemic hit, online teams across the world tried to keep pace as web and social platforms became “the museum experience”. We can’t have been the only ones hoping that the true value of online would be demonstrated in these months and proper funding might follow. Many museums have missions that include engagement, participation and inspiration, all things the web is consistently used for, surely this was online’s time to shine?

Then the scale of the financial crisis became clear and the difficult position of online content – generally offered free – became all too apparent. And so we’ve seen a slew of short-term experiments in online revenue generation and discussions about technologies while staff are furloughed and jobs cut. Organisations need to generate income to survive and, beyond marketing the on-site experience, online content and experiences don’t make a substantial contribution. Tough decisions have to be made.

This raises questions for us about the future of online content and museums. How can we move beyond these small-scale experiments and contradictory actions? What would a more considered future look like that was positive for both audiences and organisations? What would it take to make online content and experiences genuinely sustainable?

What is and isn’t being discussed about charging for online content?

When we started thinking of this series to re-imagine the future for museums and online, we wanted to look at real change – to move away from the endless discussions about technological novelties and tactical solutions and tackle some of the systemic challenges faced by the Museum sector. Dan Hill describes these challenges as dark matter – cultures, processes and assumptions that guide systems that no-one really sees or owns.

Without addressing dark matter, and without attempting to reshape it, we are simply producing interventions or installations or popups that attempt to skirt around the system. This is a valid tactic, but not much of a strategy.

Dan Hill

We felt it was just this dark matter that was standing in the way of positive change around the funding of online content. We thought there were some assumptions and beliefs that limited which opportunities were explored and an over reliance on problematic funding models. So we went out to the community to test that hypothesis and understand the situation better. We posed questions and in response we saw lots of likes and shares, with people keen to see the discussion open up, but little specific feedback. In fact, one anonymous comment suggested that perhaps there is a question about the sectors’ readiness to engage with the dark matter:

“I’ll be interested in what you get back, I don’t think the sector is ready to have this conversation”

Anonymous

Of the handful of people offering something more concrete, Jon suggested:

We wondered if sharing answers in the open felt risky to people – they bring with them compromises that feel difficult or challenging to our core values. Or perhaps as a sector, we have ‘problem blindness’ – we accept the current situation as a given fact of life. But our view is that opening the can of worms and exploring the dark matter is the route to a more positive future.

How do our beliefs shape our actions?

Museums have traditionally favoured three funding models all of which are based on giving online content free to end users. This is the ‘norm’ and it might bring with it some assumptions and ‘problem blindness’. It assumes:

Offering free online content will by default guarantee the widest possible access
Charging for content won’t deliver significant revenue (so why try…)
Existing funding models are doing ok

And maybe, when our confidence is low..

If we charge for it, no one will use it (and then what will we do…)
Charging will alienate audiences and funders

Are any of these assumptions true?

Does free online content widen access?

Aren’t museums and online content places where we give people access to knowledge as easily and economically as possible? Isn’t this time of contested facts and culture wars the very moment when museums should be stepping in to share trustworthy information and support people to reflect on their experiences?

We firmly believe that ensuring access to culture, particularly for those who lack social and financial capital, is a vital service but our research suggests that free online content isn’t guaranteeing this right now.

Our recent research suggests that audiences for free online editorial/collections content don’t just look similar to the people who currently visit museums, they are a more concentrated version of museum goers. They are more likely to be white, more highly educated and more frequent museum-goers.

Currently, we use the online space to provide more content to people who are already over-represented and well served onsite.

It could be that it helps these existing audiences connect more deeply with the topic or the organisation, it could be that it improves their well-being or inspires them. That isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t support the argument that free content means wider access.

Will charging for content ever deliver significant revenue?

We are not aware of any evidence to prove or, in fact, disprove this assumption. And that’s the thing – it’s just an assumption. It needs challenging and testing. Clearly people do pay for online content and experiences – for entertainment and education.

The YouGov research below shows the increase in spending on hobbies, books and digital services. Other research shows a 240% increase in the use of the search term “online learning course” during the pandemic.

So why wouldn’t they pay for Museum content? What would content look like that was so valuable to our audiences that they were happy to pay for it? What investment would it take to deliver? What would the extra income allow us to do?

Are the current funding models are as good as it gets?

Museums have traditionally favoured three models all of which are based on giving content free to end users but they require compromises that affect audiences, our employees and our organisations.

Cross-subsidy – using core funding and income generated by the in-gallery experiences to deliver online means that quite often online content is dominated by the need to promote or mimic the onsite experience. It reinforces the idea that online is ‘less than’ rather than different. While other sectors see online as a tool to deliver new products and services designed specifically for online, museums have maintained a view that online works in the service of the onsite experience. At the best of times funding is limited and, critically, when the museum is in a financial pinch – like now – online will take a hit. Online teams have little ability to control their destiny.
Funding (Foundations, Trusts, Innovation Funds) – this funding often comes with an agenda guided by policy rather than the needs of the organisation and audience. The focus for digital is therefore often on building new and innovative one-off products through short term projects. As a result, the products tend to end up poorly managed or maintained once the funding has finished and the less funder friendly backroom work that would really deliver stays under-funded.
Sponsorship – Support from a commercial – often tech – company to raise or shape their profile. These are often shiny projects that put the need to look new and impressive before providing experiences that are needed by the audience or sustainable by the organisation. They are often led by companies looking to make a splash in the sector and also have a tendency to disappear if they don’t reach the numbers.

Each of these models brings with it some compromises, but Museums have actively avoided some other forms of business models. And they just so happen to be the ones where content is paid for by the end user:

Donation or crowdfunding – generating income by asking people to buy into and support your mission. For an organisation, it maintains the idea of not creating a barrier between the content and those that can’t afford to pay. However, to succeed you need to demonstrate your mission and focus on the needs of the end users. The Guardian recently announced that it broke even using this model – and it shows how hard it is to get right.
Paid by end user – If we are asking people to pay, we have to understand them – what motivates them, what they value, how they behave. We have to evaluate the cost and the likely return over time. This could lead to a more robust and sustainable service. The compromise is that it limits access to those who can’t afford it unless it can generate a surplus that supports those vulnerable audiences who really can’t pay.

Will anyone pay? Will we lose our audience?

Charging for access to content isn’t new if you look at the physical visit experience – asking people to spend money on-site isn’t seen as a no-go area. It enables our organisations to invest in and deliver some amazing and valuable visitor experiences. We might sometimes hear grumbles around price point or value for money but there is little alienation.

The business model for paid in-gallery experiences has been developed and refined over many decades. And while it too has its flaws, it gives access to audiences to learn and experience new things.

Yet, we talk about them differently for online and in-gallery, Michael highlights here:

What does all this suggest?

It definitely doesn’t suggest that all online content should be charged for but it does highlight the need to investigate the dark matter that sits behind some of the decision making. It suggests a need for more open, positive and productive conversations that challenge and test assumptions and allow us to genuinely thrive.

We believe those discussions need to centre around these three options, for delivering sustainable and valuable effective online content:

Shrink what we do: Understand what we deliver that is truly valuable to the audience and the organisation and focus on it to ensure it delivers. Cut everything else
Invest in what we do: Understand the value it’s possible to deliver, identify the best business model and invest to generate income.
Keeping doing what we do: Carry on as we are, trying to be everything to everyone, exhausting the staff and potentially missing the big prize

This is the moment to challenge the accepted assumptions, and to use these discussions as a catalyst to be able to demonstrate the value of online content. To stop a move to exploit staff by asking them to increase their workload – and to identify realistic and sustainable models that enable museums to thrive online.

Making online content that delivers so much value to users that they are willing to pay for it, could demonstrate that online delivers value to the organisation. And perhaps this moves online from being the icing on the cake of the physical experience, to being part of the cake itself.

What do we do about it?

Throughout this process, we’ve been clear that we don’t have all the answers and more than likely there is no one right answer. What we do want is to support our community to understand the challenge – what has held people back in the past and what evidence will we need to give us a better vision of how to move forward?

When organisations are feeling the need to act quickly and people are in fear of losing their jobs – it is hard to take a moment to question our own assumptions. But seeing things with new eyes, can inspire us and allow us to imagine new ways of doing things.

When we work with organisations, we are often in a position where they are looking to change but the old ways of seeing are getting in the way. A key part of our practice is to begin to ask questions and find evidence that challenge some of those assumptions and move people to new more open conversations.

Here are some questions to help you begin to have conversations with cross-departmental teams in your organisation:

What effects are your current funding models having on your capacity to deliver online content? Aim for an open and honest conversation about how projects and online content is currently designed to meet the needs of whoever/whatever is paying and what the compromises might be.
What would online content look like for our audiences, if it was true to our mission?
What would it take to break even? How many users and at what price point? What are the start up costs to test the idea?
What will happen to the income generated? Can this new income enable you to experiment? Can it help you to invest in content or experiences for audiences who aren’t currently represented?
What do and don’t you know about your potential target audiences? What are their attitudes to paying for online for learning or entertainment? What are they interested in learning or enjoying? What decisions do they make when they purchase? What do they value? How do they find online content they are interested in?
What kinds of service will this online content provide? Will it help people engage with their hobbies? Will it help them to connect with people they care about? Will it help with their well being or to develop new skills?

This is article is part of our The Real Change Series. In this time of crisis we need to re-imagine our future.

At FG+W, we know the Museum community is having to make difficult choices and decisions. Having lost most of their income, organisations will need to decide what is essential and what isn’t. These decisions and choices will inevitably reflect the values and beliefs of the organisations and have long lasting impact.

Over the next 6 months, we’re going to be – with your help – exploring, re-imagining and re-shaping what comes next for cultural heritage online. We’re hoping to work with you, our community, to explore the question, “How might we use this moment of disruption we all experiencing to bring about positive change in the sector?”

We look forward to these discussions with you and the community to help us all get to some real change for the future.

The Real Change Series No.1 / Money

2 December 20203 November 2020 by Lindsey Green

In our previous article, we introduced The Real Change Series, new monthly series as to how Museums can start to make difficult decisions and re-imagine the future.

First up this month, it’s money. And in particular exploring “What is the hidden price of free online content and are we prepared to pay it?”

We thought long and hard about stepping into this space. Money is a subject that is often skirted around when it comes to Museums and definitely when it comes to digital. We don’t like talking about money but the truth is that money – where it comes from, how we generate it, how we spend it – shapes almost every aspect of what we do.

In the current crisis, when budgets are being tightened, if we don’t talk openly about money we can’t make good decisions. In fact, the decisions we do make with limited funds, at times like these, are often the most revealing about what our organisations value.

What is this to do with online?

Online content is, in the most part, offered free to use because it’s believed to increase access in line with a museum’s mission and maybe also because no one feels confident about a paid model.

But a free service generates no revenue and this limits the funding available – funding that might improve it and promote it so that it reaches the audience and meets their needs. And an online service is all too often seen as the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself so when funds are limited digital often loses out.

In this world, online content/experiences continue to be seen as a cost centre, as a marketing tool for driving people to visit in real life or as a second-best simulacrum of a physical visit.

What do we want to explore?

At a time when budgets have been decimated and physical visits are limited what do we think the fall out might be? As other sectors move their services online and focus on generating income online, can Museums do the same? What are the opportunities and costs of such an approach?

Over the next few weeks we’ll be asking:

What concerns or fears do you have when it comes to asking audiences to pay for online content?
What digital content or experience would be so valuable to our audiences they would happily pay for it?
What could a business model look like?
Will moving to a paid service affect access?
What products and services should be free? What should be paid? And what does that say about what is core to what a museum’s mission and what isn’t?
What would it take for digital to be part of the cake and not simply the icing?
If extra income affords ‘better’ content, what value should we – could we – bring to our audiences and our organisations?

We look forward to these discussions with you and the community to help us all get to some real change for the future.

Lindsey Green, Alyson Webb + Laura Mann
FG + W, Founding partners

Introducing the Real Change Series

In this time of crisis we need to re-imagine our future.

You can find more here – https://www.franklygreenwebb.com/the-real-change-series/

The Real Change Series

27 October 2020 by Lindsey Green

Introducing Frankly, Green + Webb’s new monthly series as to how Museums can start to make difficult decisions and re-imagine the future.

Why does this matter?

In the early months of the Covid-19 crisis online and social was celebrated as a way to support and stay connected with audiences. Some in the sector felt that, after years of online being treated as very much an add-on, it’s time had come. Museum teams were asked to do more — often much more — and in spite of the challenges they took the chance to experiment with content and experiences. But as the crisis continues and organisations plan for an uncertain future, we will be faced with some tough decisions around funding — which digital activities we continue to support and to what extent. No matter how hard these decisions will be, for us this is a chance to imagine a different future and make positive, productive choices for our audiences, our teams and our organisations.

We will need to be clear about the value of digital technologies to our audiences (current and potential) and to our organisations. We will need to move beyond the old assumptions, check in with our values and beliefs and have better conversations.

At FG+W we’re used to talking to both museums and the people who visit them, use their services and consume their content. We are accustomed to working with these differing communities to shape decisions in ways that work for them. We know change is hard but we’ve seen from this work that provocations can help. Provocations initiate curiosity and discovery, challenge assumptions and long held beliefs, open up conversations and support better decisions. Even difficult ones. That is what we will be doing with this new series of articles and online conversations, asking:

How might we use this moment of change we are all experiencing to bring about positive change in the sector?

What

We will be sharing a series of provocations with the goal of opening up a space for curiosity, exploration, the sharing of diverse perspectives and good questions that will help us seek new evidence and ideas.

How

Each month we will announce a theme and in the first half of each month, we will set a couple of provocations. From this exploration of the questions and community discussions we will synthesise the results using our experience and write an article at the end of the month.

This process is what we’re known for but the program itself — reaching out to the community to prompt debate and conversation — is an experiment for us. We’re taking a bit of a risk because we think there’s an opportunity to use the current moment of crisis to drive real positive change in the sector.

What’s holding us back? True stories of user-centred content design at the Science Museum Group.

1 April 202027 March 2020 by bkj5y

“By understanding and listening to our target audience, and incorporating this into our content creation, we have had positive successes in our qualitative and quantitative measures for Science Museum Group story content. With thanks to Frankly, Green + Webb, who helped us to work through this audience research project.”

–Emily Fildes, Website Editor at the Science Museum Group.

Go to full article.

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