Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 23, 2008

I'm prepping for a workshop on Social Media and wanted do a round up of recent compelling examples of arts organizations using social media strategies and tools. I was particularly interested in examples using blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, and Facebook. The art will be displayed in order of the average juried scores.

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Arts Social Media Examples Artist 74

Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2014

Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. People were spending a long time working on them. Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff.

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Participatory Evaluation Project Museum 52

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 3, 2015

They started WAKE after working together for 15 years designing and leading global programs at the intersection of technology, civil society and women’s empowerment. It is always challenge to use participatory techniques when your participants are not native English speakers and you don’t speak the language.

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Facilitation Training Train International 50

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2012

What happens when you let visitors vote on art? Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. Each of these invited members of the public to vote on art in a way that had substantive consequences--big cash prizes awarded, prestige granted, exhibitions offered.

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Arts Artist Museum Award 47

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2010

As many of you know, I've been working for the past year+ on a book about visitor participation in museums, libraries, science centers, and art galleries. The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to visitor participation. The Participatory Museum is an attempt at providing such a resource. Want to buy a book ?

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Participatory Museum Vietnam Netherlands 30

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. There were times when coordinating a fire art festival while researching social capital theory made me want to burn my computer. I learn a ton from her every day and wanted to share her thinking--and her graduate thesis--with you.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

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? Here are three of my favorites.

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Arts Museum Artist Tucson 45

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

George is a stranger I met last week at SFMOMA’s new show, The Art of Participation:1950 to Now. The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. Here are two pictures. The first one is me.

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2019

As I imagined a world without Nina Simon ’s Participatory Museum , I felt sad about all the visitors whose voices (and post-it note comments) weren’t honored. Giant collaborative tweetups show we like to work together. This work might have seemed easy, but I assure you, being a museum social person is exhausting.

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Museum Work Social Media History 21

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2015

Last week, the international press lit up with a story from Paris : the city is removing the "love locks" from the Pont des Arts bridge. 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.

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Participatory Project Artist Instruction 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 1, 2010

I am putting the finishing touches on another social media lab designed for arts organizations. So, have been updating arts 2.0 I had too look no further than Shelley Bernstein's blog over at the Brooklyn Museum to find some thoughtful experimentation and useful examples.

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Museum Mashup Badge Participatory 97

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

I'm a huge fan of work and the way she thinks - especially after she road the Scare House ride on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with me and did a brilliant reflection on its design. Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. One colleague suggests that users should be able to contribute original work.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

I am just starting to dive into the science of intergroup relations (psychology-speak for social bridging), and I greatly appreciate these individuals who are working to popularize and open up what could otherwise be esoteric research. My biggest question for these social psychologists is this: how do we apply their lessons to our work?

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

NTEN

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

Today, we want to introduce you to Leah Horn , Director of Marketing and Communications at the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF). WESTAF''s mission is to strengthen the financial, organizational, and policy infrastructure of the arts in the West. What is your organization''s mission? Plus, my track facilitators were great!)

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Donation Impact Share NTEN 64

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation." In the first case, you are making the design process participatory. The exhibit opens.

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

The whole second half of the article was dedicated to our work: Smaller museums can be especially scrappy in finding ways to connect with the community. One that has found remarkable success is California’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. It’s something that any museum, of any size, can work toward.

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Audience Washington Museum Intergenerational 49

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 4, 2010

It's rare that a participatory museum project is more than a one-shot affair. Wikipedia Loves Art, Take One The first version of Wikipedia Loves Art first took place in February 2009. Other challenges derived from the complicated and shifting setup (see, for example, this discussion about clarifications to the rules).

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Wikipedia Arts Museum Images 40

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 22, 2010

While there are some kinds of participation that are not language-based like making art or voting, most participation is lingual. Many fabulous participatory projects--like the Johnny Cash Project or the Art Gallery of Ontario's " In Your Face "--don't require language. What have you seen work? What have you tried?

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Museum Work North America Language 38

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean''s book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

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. Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others?

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. Awards can show higher-ups the value of our work and they can be important tools for showing funders results. We should see ourselves like those board games, where all the players have to work together to win.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 29, 2006

I met Janet Salmons many years ago while I working on various arts and technology projects in New York State for the New York Foundation for the Arts. Tell me a little about your professional background, particularly the work you do with nonprofits? To celebrate this accomplishment, I interviewed her!

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Arts Community Online Intergenerational 50

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 3, 2009

On Friday, I offered a participatory design workshop for Seattle-area museum professionals ( slides here ). We concluded by sharing the tough questions each of us struggl es with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. Examples Here are some questions that I've seen work marvelously well.

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Technique Question Design Develop 50

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. They can contribute their own stories, objects, and creative work to exhibitions. Riding the art couch through downtown Santa Cruz with two visitors and a dog while blasting the Jackson 5 was one of the highlights of my year. Happening Couch.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 23, 2014

They were “preaching the museum gospel” in NYC via alternative tours at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We interacted with the art and with each other through dynamic photo challenges, kinesthetic activities, and conversations. Here’s an example that I experienced on that first tour of the Met. How do you advertise Museum Hack?

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Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. 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. Who was there?”

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Museum Story Project Design 43

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

MARCH 27, 2009

This week, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) opened a new temporary exhibition called The Psychedelic Experience , featuring rock posters from San Francisco in the heyday of Bill Graham and electric kool-aid. I happened to be at DAM for work and got to experience this amazing exhibit. We’re all together, man.

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Denver Museum Arts Remix 21

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 9, 2017

Hosted by a sound art collective, Ultra-red, the 2015 event promised "to investigate listening as a political activity and to interrogate the stakes of participation in neoliberalism." I've met too many young, talented people of color who want to work in museums but feel belittled, tokenized, or unsupported in their careers.

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Participatory Museum Voice Press 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults. There's a huge difference between the edgy, DIY beauty of Candy Chang 's participatory urban artworks and the dayglow colors, exclamatory language , and preschool fonts of most museum interactives.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 21, 2015

The book offers best practices, examples, and frameworks for leaders who want to nurture and develop a deeper connection with their stakeholders. As she points out, these three steps work together to help executives use engagement to reach their goals. .” For example, “Use people as filters.”

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Digital Strategy Chapter Advice 50

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

The Leading Change Summit was more intimate (several hundred people), participatory and interactive, intense, and stimulating. A good facilitator knows how to shift or tweak the lesson plan in real time if it isn’t working as planned. However, it is harder to make pivots when you have a team that has not worked together before.

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Reflection NTEN Change Facilitation 124

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

What does the word "participatory" mean to you? The various definitions of participatory projects can lead to confusion and misunderstandings. In the co-creation model, visitors and the institution work together from the beginning to define the project's goals and to generate the program or exhibit based on community interests.

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Public Research Participatory Report 36

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

And this works pretty well in science museums, where designers talk about "hardening" exhibits to withstand the more aggressive touchers among us. Art, however, does not come to museums pre-hardened. The level of touching, especially of art, has increased. This was amazing. It also made visitors feel like they could do it too.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

I spent last week in the glorious country of Taiwan, hiking, eating, and working with museum professionals and graduate students at a conference hosted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. It's not topic-specific; I've done these exercises with art, history, science, and children's museums to useful effect.

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Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2010

Last week, I gave a talk about participatory museum practice for a group of university students at UCSC. I immediately flashed to my work with art museums and staff members' concerns that older, traditional audiences will shy away from social engagement in the galleries.

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Teen Social Museum Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51