Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 26, 2006

" Taking it a little deeper, organizations should not go in the other direction - and be strategic in friending people. Another point of intersection here for me is Henry Jenkins recently published 72-page white paper " Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. More here ). *

Participatory 50

Participatory Teen Vlog Mashup 50

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 29, 2009

It's my "artistic rendering" of one of the most inspirational participatory projects I know of--the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book drops. To do this, the library didn't create a complicated computer system or send people online. She said that it gave them a good understanding on what the people in the neighbourhood like to read.

Participatory 40

Participatory Project Library Museum 40

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they learned some unexpected lessons along the way. We imagined an cart at the farmer’s markets where people could record stories. These really informed the project, and helped get the word out about the gallery.

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Museum Story Project Design 43

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. Forrester created the “social technographics” profile tool to help businesses understand the way different audiences engage with social media (and you can read more of my thoughts on it here ). Consider a mural.

Participatory 44

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2011

It was Friday, a few hours before the drawing activity, and my colleagues were worried that it would be too challenging for people to draw the icons and landmarks selected. These are both busy people, and while they are very artistic, neither is a crack drawer. The problem?

Participatory 43

Participatory Classroom Help Artist 43

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2015

And so, one of the most successful, accidental, and fraught participatory projects of the past decade comes to an end. The "love locks" are not a project with an institutional or artistic director. So many participatory projects do the opposite, requiring you to take a dozen tricky steps to no meaningful end. it is durational.

Participatory 20

Participatory Project Artist Instruction 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

The man is artist Rocky Lewycky , whose work is part of a group show of visual artists who have won a prestigious regional fellowship. If an artist can come into a museum and smash stuff, what does that tell visitors? It is not acceptable to walk into a museum and destroy another artist''s work of art. Definitely.

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Museum Arts Artist Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. Many people would look at the world''s oldest mechanized silk mill and say that the core content of the museum is silk. Everyone in the community helping out. Imagine a historic site. It has an incredible story. What do you do?

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. Deeper community relationships through focus groups or community advising committees can further help museums connect with issues relevant to their communities while also hold the museum accountable for their responses.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Media Cause

AUGUST 9, 2021

While much of the branding and design inspiration we run across is either from consumer brands or individual artists, it all provides us with the opportunity to discover new principles, practices, and approaches that we can incorporate into our nuanced nonprofit world. This is key to building relevant brands. What would the structure be like?

Design 52

Design Experiment Nonprofit Collaboration 52

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Over the past year, I've noticed a strange trend in the calls I receive about upcoming participatory museum projects: the majority of them are being planned for teen audiences. Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects? The first of these reasons is practical.

Teen 24

Teen Participatory Experiment Museum 24

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above). He is an authoritative artist of the social web with a slew of accolades and a suite of diverse projects under his belt.

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

She says that the museum made changes in hiring and board recruitment practices, and invited the community in to help reshape the facility into a place that reflected and represented its people and their interests. The impact was dramatic. Within three years, attendance tripled.

Audience 49

Audience Washington Museum Intergenerational 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. If all museums get better, we have more people who like going to museums, which increases museum revenues, and makes the field more stable. People go to school because they have to or want to in order to get to their goal.

Museum 35

Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2011

We've been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at the Museum of Art & History this season. I loved Jasper Visser's list of 30 "do's" for designing participatory projects earlier this month. If you want people to write and/or draw, encourage them to draw. If you don't need them, dump 'em.

Design 45

Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. As the museum's website puts it, "this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process."

Participatory 20

Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

We wanted to share with people, in as clear and transparent a format as possible, our approach to developing exhibitions. In particular, we want exhibition collaborators--artists, researchers, historians, collectors--to understand our goals and how we intend to steer the exhibition development process.

Museum 38

Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations. Part of our approach to community involvement in planning Spun had to do with necessity; we needed help to pull this off. What inspires them?

Denver 35

Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog. Why should institutions engage with people in this way? The Museum 2.0 Yes and no.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2011

I'm also making the 2011-2012 budget, getting to know our terrific staff and volunteers, and starting up a few small participatory projects to launch us into being a more community-driven institution. Unlike people with paid positions, you will have the opportunity to focus entirely on creating a killer project. Please help us.

Museum 53

Museum History Participatory Arts 53

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog. Why should institutions engage with people in this way? The Museum 2.0 Yes and no.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 12, 2011

Fifteen people engage in the prescribed activities. Approximately 100 people walk by while the program is going on. How many people participated? We held a free yoga class in the plaza outside the museum and invited artists to come and draw/paint the yoga-doers in motion. People looked and talked and pointed.

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Participatory Museum Measure Activities 41

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

These are unpaid part-time and full-time opportunities to help design public programs, develop new uses for the museum, perform visitor research, and pursue unusual projects. Community programs interns work with artists and historians, families and adults, to make everything from mini-participatory exhibitions to full-blown concert series.

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

How do you help visitors know what they can and cannot do in your museum? I grew up professionally in the science and children's museum field, where touching is guaranteed and floor staff spend more time helping visitors learn and ensuring their personal safety than they do protecting the objects. Engagement with local artists.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

We''re offering internships this summer in: Participatory Exhibition Design. Help take the participatory elements of this permanent gallery to the finish line. We''re expanding our engagement with Latino families in our community, and we want your help with our partnership programs. You can help make the magic happen.

Participatory 20

Participatory Community Museum History 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

Any place with people working different schedules in different parts of the building suffers from it. Visitor services staff write synopses of weekend days, notable visitor interactions, and events that help me and others get a sense of what''s going on. Would people feel pressured to post and follow?

Facebook 55

Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 15, 2015

Over three days, 52 artist teams erected experimental projects along San Francisco''s biggest thoroughfare. The result was a true experiment in designing the future--right here, right now--with artists and planners and civic leaders at the helm together. A fitness trail for urban life. A soundtrack for the street.

San Francisco 20

San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations. All evaluations are private; all artists are unnamed. They are sensitive to the artists who are being judged. What Should Artists and Arts Organization???s

Arts 74

Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

I've always loved helping run events where participants can really work together on something meaty and challenging. In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition.

Professional 35

Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2011

The best way I can really push my own participatory practice and thinking is to operate an institution and work with a community I care about over time. The more I learned about the Museum, the more I talked with people about it, the more I saw that it was a better fit for my goals than the cafe.

History 55

History Museum Arts Consultant 55

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking: In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?

Arts 45

Arts Museum Artist Tucson 45

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

After several months of planning massively collaborative programs (a typical monthly event might involve 50 partners), we've realized that the people who are best at helping us come up with ideas are not necessarily the people who are best to help us execute them. We made people write things down constantly.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

I was thrilled to work with the Brainerd Foundation staff to help design and facilitate a design lab using techniques based on Luma Institute methods earlier this month. In some ways, a design lab can be thought of as “participatory research and testing.”. The context setting kicked off the lab’s first half-day.

Design 50

Design Strategy Facilitation Advocacy 50

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2011

But the point is that the MAH, like just about every other museum in the known universe, was content to define the museum experience as something removed from the outside world, a rarefied church-like space of refined artistic reflection. Her blog, "Museum 2.0," is one of the leading forces working to remake the museum experience.

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Museum History Arts Work 31

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

LinkedIn has a new feature where people can congratulate each other on work anniversaries. It has some of the same feel as the disconnected affection of people wishing you a happy birthday on Facebook, with professional reflection baked in. I helped them find funding and partners and time to make amazing work happen.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2012

It was fascinating to see people--across social differences--responding to representations of love in the paintings, images, objects and narratives that were part of the installation. It is multi-disciplinary, incorporates diverse voices from our community, and provides interactive and participatory opportunities for visitor involvement.

Participatory 51

Participatory Museum Blackboard Game 51

Museum 2.0

APRIL 29, 2015

But when people told us what they loved about the museum, they didn’t use the word “participation.” It is a group of people connected by something shared. We exist for people who live in Santa Cruz County. Tourists can’t help us build community in Santa Cruz County if they are only in town for a day.

Build 20

Build Community Museum Artist 20