We’re recruiting! Could you be our new Digital Audience Development Officer?

Are you passionate about culture and heritage?
Can you develop and deliver engaging stories using museum objects?
Would you like to create memorable digital experiences for all ages?

 
If so, then this job may be for you.

We are looking for a dynamic individual to develop, embed and expand our newly developed digital strategy and action plan within the operations of Wakefield Museums and Castles. You will be working across teams within the service. The role will see you taking the lead on implementing the strategy and action plan across the team and integrating digital into the ethos of the service.

 

We would welcome applications from people with proven experience in managing, producing, organising, delivering and evaluating digital engagement content. The role will require you to research and create new and innovative ways of increasing access, and developing engagement opportunities that showcase our sites and collections.

 

This role is essential to our vision of providing a representative, accessible and community-driven museum service, which engages and connects people of all ages with the varied and fascinating heritage of the Wakefield district.

Please see Jobs at Wakefield Council for the full job profile and person specification. 

The closing date for applications is Friday 14th January 2022.

Interviews will be held in February 2022.

Should you wish to discuss this post, please contact Louise Bragan, Senior Officer: Programming and Learning 

lbragan@wakefield.gov.uk

Digital Engagement Consultancy Opportunity

Wakefield Museums & Castles is looking to appoint a freelance digital consultant to develop a digital engagement strategy and action plan for the next three years. We want to review our current position, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the heritage sector, and develop an ambitious yet realistic strategy that will enable us to engage people with our collections in new and innovative ways.

In 2018, Wakefield Museums & Castles became a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) funded by Arts Council England, to help them deliver their goal of ‘great art and culture for everyone’. Our current funding is in place until March 2023. One of the key aims of our NPO Business Plan is “to build a strong and diverse digital offer to raise our profile and improve the visitor’s experience and access to our collections and sites”. 

Over the past two years, we have made progress in achieving this aim; developing content for a new stand-alone website, developing the digital skills and expertise of our staff, and starting a programme of digitisation for our collections and historic documentation. However, it was the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closure of our museum sites that really pushed us forward in our use of digital. We quickly transitioned to a virtual offer, repurposing our Discover the Extraordinary blog to serve as a central hub for all our digital resources, and significantly increasing our social media output. We experimented with different types of content and platforms, always with the aim of maintaining access to and engagement with our collections and sites and keeping them at the heart of all of our content.

We would now like to undertake a review of our progress and use the valuable lessons and skills we have learned to develop an ambitious yet realistic digital strategy that will focus on digital audience development and engagement with our collections in new and innovative ways, over the next three years and beyond.

We want to:

• Understand, increase and diversify our digital audience;
• Increase engagement with, and accessibility of, our collections and sites through digital and be able to measure this;
• Encourage creativity and community involvement with our digital activities;
• Explore how we use digital interactions at our museum and castle sites;
• Provide an online museum experience for those unable or unwilling to visit our sites in person;
• Enhance the digital skills, expertise and confidence of our team, and effect a culture change in our organisation whereby digital becomes part of everyone’s role.

We are looking to appoint a consultant to help us devise a digital strategy and action plan, including:

• Analysis of our current and target digital audiences (as distinct from our footfall audiences), and a methodology for measuring and evaluating digital impact, which might include benchmarking, analytics, KPIs etc.;
• A strategy and streamlined process for developing and creating collections-based digital content, to reach new and more diverse audiences. This could include virtual tours, digital exhibitions and learning resources, videos, podcasts, games, mobile apps, live-streaming etc., featuring on our own website and/or third-party websites, including social media platforms;
• An options analysis for future use and development of our Collections Online facility, including the introduction of open licensing;
• The potential for user-generated digital content, including curated collections, exhibitions, tours, contributions of memories/information;
• Digital interpretation techniques for use at our museum and castle sites, or at alternative sites in our communities, which could be anything from virtual reality experiences to touchscreen kiosks, and may involve third party developers;
• The technology, hardware, software, tools and equipment needed to achieve our digital goals;
• Staff training and skills development, ensuring everyone has the right level of digital capability and competency.

For more information, please click here to see the full brief.

How to apply:

Please submit to lmellors@wakefield.gov.uk the following documentation:

• A CV or resume of your previous experience, qualifications, skills, references etc.
• An indicative project plan, showing how you would meet the objective and outputs of the project. This should be no more than 4 sides of A4.
• A simple budget showing how you will be using the available budget and how you will fit the timescale for delivering the project.
• You may also include photographs or testimonials from previous projects if you feel they will be relevant to your application.

If you are shortlisted, you will be asked to attend an interview, via Skype, where you can expand upon your proposal and give a presentation to the project board.

Closing Date: Monday 15 February 2021, 9am

Interviews will take place in the week commencing 22 February 2021.

Curating Spend, Spend, Spend

A new exhibition has opened at Castleford Museum, documenting the life of one of Castleford’s most famous women, Vivian Nicholson. The display was curated by our Front of House staff at Castleford Museum, Danielle and Sarah. 

In this blog Danielle and Sarah share their experiences of curating the exhibition.

Viv Nicholson and her husband with their cheque. With thanks to the Football Pools.

Way back in early August 2016, whilst planning for the following years workshops, Danielle and I were thinking of themes, relating to our collections, that we could turn into activity workshops. Through this discussion we realised that apart from Jack Hulme, there was no collection or mention of other famous people from Castleford. So, out of interest, we googled ‘famous people of Castleford’ and the results returned many, many images of Vivian Nicholson; a lady famous for winning (big time) on the football betting game ‘The Pools’.

A month later, Danielle mentioned that she had been researching  Viv Nicholson and she was a very interesting character. After hearing about her and reading her autobiography, I was hooked. We both really wanted to share the extraordinary life of Viv with the public so we decided ask our managers if we could curate a case on her. We are currently Front of House staff. As a general rule, Front of House staff are there to welcome visitors, encourage discussions through engagement with the public and facilitate activity sessions, so we were a bit nervous to do something outside our comfort zone and actually curate a case.

Fortunately for us, we have a great museums team. They were all really supportive and readily agreed for us to curate, not just one case but two whole cases! We were delighted…then we realised we needed to start some serious work.

The first step was research, research, research. After making copious amounts of notes on Viv’s book, looking at endless newspaper articles, talking with Viv’s family and generally being a nuisance to the local studies staff, we produced a case ‘Data Sheet’. This document outlined what the key message of the exhibition was going to be, what the public were going to learn from it and which objects would be included to tell her story. 

After this we then assigned ourselves roles to make the process easier; Danielle would be ‘the Collector’ and I would be ‘the Writer’. This generally meant that Danielle would be in charge of finding objects, liaising with museums to discuss loans etc and I would be in charge of anything text related such as the case information panels and object descriptions etc, though we did agree and decide everything together.

Over the following months and with help from the museums team, we were able to secure loans from The West Yorkshire playhouse in Leeds, Sheffield Library and some of Viv’s family members. One of the most exciting parts of the research process was conducting an oral history with Viv’s granddaughter, as neither Danielle nor I had done one before. We organised, prepared and recorded an interview with her, which we hope to present to the public in an audio format in the future.

As well as external associates we also worked closely with our in house teams such as the collections team to make good use of our existing collection; the exhibitions team to design information panels, case backgrounds etc; the education team to discuss interactives through which the public could learn and the marketing team to promote the case once it was completed.

Throughout the entire process we have enjoyed gaining many new skills, from how to curate a successful exhibition and write interpretation text to filling in object loan forms; from how best to conduct an oral history to writing a great press release.

We have had a wonderful experience and we hope to do it again soon in the future. If you would like to know more about the Viv Nicholson exhibition and our experience, please visit Castleford Museum.

The ‘Spend Spend Spend’ exhibition runs until end of August 2018.

West Yorkshire Local Authority Museum Partnership Audience Development Commission

Commissioned by Wakefield Council Museums Service on behalf of West Yorkshire Local Authority Museums Partnership [WYLAMP]

We are looking for an experienced audience development specialist to develop and test a programme of promotional activity working across the WYLAMP group with the aim of sharing expertise and increasing visitor figures.

Context:

WYLAMP

WYLAMP is a partnership between the five West Yorkshire Local Authority museum services to share best practice, encourage collaborative working and promote the value and benefits of Local Authority museums.  The partnership includes Bradford; Calderdale; Kirklees; Leeds and Wakefield.

Starting Conversations Research

In 2016 WYLAMP commissioned some audience development research that investigated what motivated people to visit and then recommend our venues.

A new level of insight into visitor behaviour revealed the building blocks of recommendation, and suggested ways to use these for development. The study describes how a recommendation is formed by many factors; by a great visit; and within that, by something that we don’t always think so much about – the ability to fit into people’s lives. In addition, there are quite separate social factors: the motivations for making any recommendation.

The research suggested that the goal is to ‘start conversations’, with and between visitors. Conversations help museums engage visitors, and reach the depth that museums want to achieve, but it is also a key benefit of museum visiting. Starting conversations also pays back in more visitors: for the WYLAMP group, the majority (around 70%) of its visitors will be attracted in this way, through recommendation, or positive word of mouth.

The ‘Starting Conversations’ report contained eighteen recommendations for action.  As part of Wakefield Museums Arts Council Resilience Round Two project we have secured funding to develop and test some audience development approaches based on the Starting Conversations recommendations.

Purpose of the Work

The purpose of the work is to develop a set of practical audience development approaches that can be used by the WYLAMP group to:

• Increase visitor figures
• Share expertise
• Use existing audience development resources effectively and efficiently
• Develop and encourage cross-over visits

Deliverables

• Work in partnership with audience development and marketing staff across WYLAMP to develop and test mutually beneficial audience development approaches based on the ‘Starting Conversations’ recommendations.
• Evaluation of test approaches.
• Preparation of ‘how to guides’ to ensure a workable and practical legacy of the project.
• Report of findings, summary,  recommendations to be prepared
• Presentation of findings to WYLAMP

Fee

A fee of no more than £9500 (plus VAT if applicable) payable on receipt of an invoice and paid in instalments as agreed.    This includes all costs for delivery of test projects.

Timeline

Jun 17	Jul 17	Aug 17	Sept 17	Oct 17	Nov 17	Dec 17	Jan 18	Feb 18	Mar 18
Selection process	Familiarisation and set up	Develop programme of activity		Test and review approaches				Evaluation, ‘how to guides’ and final report

 

How to apply?

To apply for this commission please send the following information to mayaharrison@wakefield.gov.uk by 12 noon on Thursday 15 June 2017:

• Outline of how you propose to carry out the project including  a timeline
• Budget outline for delivering the work
• Details of your experience delivering similar projects
• Details of two referees for work you have completed recently