National Museum Wales and Arts Council of Wales have been supported by Y Lab's Digital Innovation Fund Accelerator to collaboratively develop and pilot new data systems that provide new insights into the cultural sector and enhance customer communications across both organisations.

National Museum Wales and Arts Council of Wales are essentially exploring how we might collaborate better in engaging with cultural audiences and what part digital can play in telling us about these audiences, deciding how best to communicate digitally and what to communicate.

Obviously this presents a huge range of possibilities so we have focussed on two similar data sets (each organisation’s Mail Chimp Data) which our tech partner Nuance & Fathom have analysed. The first thing that we have learnt is that there is a very small overlap of subscribers. This was a bit of a surprise but presents opportunity to look at how we might look to expand the overlap through creating and coordinating rich content around shared themes (and in the future possibly creating themes).

Rather than ‘invent’ a theme, we have decided to work with Artes Mundi - the contemporary arts prize that exhibits at National Museum Cardiff and is revenue funded by Arts Council of Wales. Rather than assume that there will be overlap in their mailing list, we’re running the same analysis on their Mail Chimp data too.

What we have also established is that Artes Mundi haven’t deliberately targeted older audiences with bespoke content before. ACW and NMW are rich with subscribers in this demographic and we know from behaviours research that they are more likely to get their information from email rather than social media so this seems a logical place to focus our A/B testing of content to see if, initially, we can grow the overlap in our subscriber bases. We need to create content that is bespoke to this audience. Artes Mundi will be running workshops for older people for the first time so this is timely, but we need to think about the style of content, the type of images and the fact that they are most likely to be using tablets to access it.

It‘s worth pointing out that much of the learning between the two organisations has come about through this project but is not directly related. Having something specific and tangible has given us reason to meet regularly and share our experience around digital. We learn about each others’ processes and approaches, discuss similar challenges. Share best practice (and failings!) and future opportunities. Connect colleagues in different teams.  This  has all been invaluable.

Challenges ahead are bringing in another partner and managing the expectations or  what can be delivered in the research projects. Creating the content for the A/B testing. How we measure success through just a few email campaigns (probably through click throughs and cross subscribing) and the longerterm challenge of how we adopt the lessons learnt (wider than just Mailchimp) into ongoing practice.

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