Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Last week I was honored to be a counselor at Museum Camp , an annual professional development event hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Nina Simon, the executive director of the museum, is an expert in participatory design and fantastic facilitator. Teams worked on their zines until the end of the camp.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. A strong participatory process is not a loosey-goosey, open the doors and do whatever strategy. It''s not a question of the participatory process being unidirectional, something that we are doing for you the community.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 27, 2010

There were a number of online/offline participatory visitor experiences. At the Natural History Museum, we visited the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins , an immersive, interactive journey through the origins of human beings and the dramatic stories of survival and extinction in the midst of earth’s history of climate change.

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

One that has found remarkable success is California’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Simon knew something had to change. “We We changed our museum by reorienting on our community and really saying we exist to be of, by and for you, and to help build a stronger community.” The impact was dramatic.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

Last week, the local newspaper did a really generous front-page story on my museum (the MAH) and the changes here over the past eight months since I started. Our team focused this year on just three things: making the museum more comfortable, hosting new participatory events, and partnering wherever possible.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2012

But we've just compiled all our attendance data for the past year at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (our fiscal year ends on June 30), and several people have written to me asking for the numbers behind our turnaround. design new programs with a focus on history. I promise--after this post, I'll stop writing about this.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 7, 2014

Here’s another example of how Billboard is using nostalgia in its tweets: This Week In Billboard Chart History: TLC Takes ‘No Scrubs’ To No. Use Participatory Research Techniques To Discover Engagement Topics. For instance, you can change the photo that goes with your article. Be visual. “If

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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 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Ze Frank is a participatory artist who creates digital projects that are explicitly about creating and enhancing authentic interpersonal connections. How will it change the way we see online and onsite interactions?

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

I''ve seen participatory artworks that lay untouched by visitors because the invitation to participate is not explicit enough. Throw in a few participatory elements, and suddenly you have visitors trying to arbitrate amongst themselves. institutional change Museum of Art and History risk'

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 4, 2012

Museums have been grappling with this question for years ( here's a 2007 roundup of such projects ), most aggressively in zoos and natural history museums where staff hope to inspire conservation and in history/concept museums that focus on civic engagement and activism. There was no specific instruction with the dots.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We went through a dramatic financial turnaround and redefined our relationship with our community through a series of experimental participatory projects and new programmatic approaches. Everyone made sacrifices.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. What started as a fun personal project for her will hopefully become part of our permanent history gallery--a space we are trying to make more interactive over the coming years. Visitors can comment on how we can improve or what they would like to see.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 25, 2011

The system of making and distributing documentary films is changing rapidly. The creative process of making films is opening up and the outreach efforts to spark social change through documentary media are becoming much more dynamic and collaborative. Guest Post by Vincent Stehle. But that is only the jumping off point for the inquiry.

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 19, 2012

We're looking for an Exhibitions Manager to join our team here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We're toying here with switching from a format where we change all of our exhibitions four times per year to something more flexible throughout the building. Will it give a sense of energy and change?

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad). In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what."

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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. Our most commented-on change by far is the brightly painted chairs in the elevator. It's just fun.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

Museums can be incredible catalysts for social change. We can change that by embracing participatory culture and opening up to the active, social ways that people engage with art, history, science, and ideas today. But they're not there yet.

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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? History Museums OPPORTUNITIES - History museums are in many ways the best-suited for visitor participation.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 30, 2009

A Learning History of the CARE LAC - Institute for Strategic Clarity Guatemala Poverty Project. He agreed to write a four-part primer on a visual diagnostics, mapping, and social networking analysis primer and how nonprofits might use these tools for social change. Key is a participatory development process.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive. We''re working on a theory of change. I know that all of these are healthy, creative tensions that come with change and growth. We have to change it. She is right.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection. Successful” artworks draw out qualities in the collection, reflect material histories, and show the artists’ process and conceptualization. Restoration is a formal gesture for most museums.

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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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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Here's the short version (read the whole thing here ): The Museum of Art & History is committed to creating exhibitions that inspire our diverse audiences to engage deeply with contemporary art and Santa Cruz County history. It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

It felt like change was breaking through. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum. This is the participatory platform model. It advances our theory of change, by empowering locals and bridging their diverse communities. They shared their hopes. This was not an event orchestrated by the MAH.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

When the music video was not focused on Mexican culture, no such change occurred. Our theory of change posits that when we develop projects that bridge “unexpected connections” between diverse people and ideas, people build understanding and social capital with community members from different cultures, generations, and backgrounds.

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Things must change. Yet our posts contain similar phrases such as “21st century museums,” “changing museum paradigms,” “inclusiveness,” “co-curation,” “participatory” and “the museum as forum.” We are not enough on our own. I hope you will join us with your own words and actions.

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Museum 2.0

APRIL 11, 2012

Once there was a project to design a national history museum in the Netherlands. The team developed some highly innovative digital projects and approaches to history. While not wholly explored, that question reverberates throughout a new book, Blueprint , that shares the plans for the Dutch Museum of National History.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 20, 2015

Note from Beth: I went to my first Games for Change Festival ten years ago, in 2005 and have been a fan and supporter ever since. government and encouraging participatory democracy. The game will also be playable at the Games for Change Festival, where its creators will engage in an in-depth discussion of their process and purpose.

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out. An unnamed art museum once created an incredible interactive and participatory installation related to a temporary exhibition.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2015

Designing A Participatory Hook for a Virtual Meeting. Guidestar has a history of doing walking meetings, especially one on ones and at its Williamsburg location. How have you changed your organization’s meeting culture to be better? Design must comes first. Finally, you identify next steps and follow up.

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

There are many participatory kiosks that are functional black holes--visitors make videos or draw pictures or write stories, drop them in a slot, and. Such participatory activities would be seen as a waste of time. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way many museums approach participatory projects. nothing happens.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

This project wove together many different participatory threads. It empowered our partners, deeply touched our visitors, and catalyzed real community change. Short story: we learned a lot. We wrote a toolkit about our process. You can download it for free right now. What did we learn? There were over 100 partners.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 14, 2017

This is the second installation in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square , a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz. The MAH fundamentally has two jobs: we bring art and history out into our community, and we invite our community in. We want to break out.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Attendees brought up questions about how they can get more involved with financial discussions in their institutions, how we can change the ways we approach fundraising, how we can think about earned income differently. In particular, we had a great group of 15 talking about participatory history experiences on Sunday.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2017

A cheerful curly-haired deli owner stands in front of 30 of us and shares a quote he loves: "Artists live in the present and write detailed histories of the future." It was even more useful to learn how participatory writing visions can be. Writing a vision can empower you, clarify your thinking, and help you change the world.

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 26, 2012

This article sparked some interesting discussion online with colleagues from natural history museums, which deal with damage and touching very differently than art institutions do. I'm sometimes wary of studies of "innovation," but I like how this one could be used reflectively within an organization to assess openness to change.

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