By Esther Wilson, digital marketing volunteer at Experience Heritage
With Boris Johnson’s ordering of lockdown on 23rd March 2020, it was clear that the Coronavirus pandemic had become something which would significantly affect our arts and heritage sectors in the UK. Overnight, many sites and organisations lost their main form of revenue for what would turn out to be at least 103 days of closed doors, until museums were legally able to begin reopening procedures on 4th July. This difficult period demanded a rapid reconsideration of how the sector engages with visitors and audiences. The innovative and fantastic moves towards digital forms of interpretation and engagement within heritage sites, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D-Modelling, were already indicators of a vibrantly digitalising sector. But, with closed doors, these would no longer be enough to bridge the gap during lockdown; the new and unprecedented situation demanded yet further innovation in order to engage audiences and try to secure financial support.
The vast potential for using social media to enable public engagement with important heritage work is something which quickly became apparent. With their enormous and easily accessible reach, channels such as Twitter and Instagram have allowed organisations to not only engage their existing audiences barred from a physical visit, but expand their reach by engaging new groups of people.
One of my favourite examples, and perhaps most impressive relative to its size, has been the Yorkshire Museum and its parent organisation, regional heritage group York Museums Trust. At the start of July, York Museum’s Trust themselves had significant engagement success with a series of Twitter posts entitled ‘Judi Dench as objects in our collection – a thread’. Whilst this did not use a hashtag, the en-vogue post itself received more than 8,500 likes and was widely shared across a diverse range of media outlets, including popular international channels ‘Bored Panda’ and ‘Flipboard’. However, this achievement was to be outdone by one of their own sites, the Yorkshire Museum. Back in April, the Yorkshire Museum launched a weekly ‘#CURATORBATTLE,’ inviting heritage organisations from around the world to share their best collection pieces along a given theme. The first major hit was #CreepiestObject,’ which attracted not only 13,700 international ‘likes’ on the original collection-sharing post, but made regional and national headlines, including coverage by the BBC. Yet, this success was arguably modest in comparison to the achievements of ‘#BestMuseumBum,’ launched on 26th June and still being circulated at the time of writing on 27th July. Whilst the original post achieved around 2,600 likes, its hashtag went truly global. For a regional museum, the Yorkshire has attracted incredible levels of high-profile and populist engagement worldwide, from international media companies such as the Guardian and Mashable South East Asia, to specialist sites such as ArtNet and once again the popular website BoredPanda. Surely, the success that York Museum’s Trust has received is not only an inspirational and practical example of successful social media engagement techniques and an indicator of the potential influence that social media holds for the heritage sector when it is used effectively; at a time when the sector faces uncertainty, York Museum Trust’s success has also served to demonstrate the extent to which heritage and cultural organisations are appreciated and needed by the public, especially when physically inaccessible.
Even as the UK lockdown slowly unfurls, the road ahead is set to be difficult. For many organisations, the search for safe and financially viable re-opening practice is set to continue into 2021 and an unfortunate number have already been forced into redundancy talks, including significant players such as Tate and Historic Royal Palaces. Some organisations, such as Birmingham Museums Trust, are reported to face losing up to half of their staff due to a swathe of unavoidable redundancies, news which provoked tragic outcry on social media when it was announced on 24th July. This means that deeper long-term reconsideration of heritage practice has been required, as well as new funding opportunities in addition to the government-backed £1.57bn cultural assistance package announced on 5th July.
Here, the effective wielding of social media channels such as Twitter and digital platforms such as Zoom have proved invaluable means to directly support heritage professionals themselves whilst being reduced to furlough, working from home or in vastly reduced on-site capacities.
Academic players such as the UCL Heritage Science & Engineering Network have been keen to encourage cross-industry discussions through a podcast series on the significance of the pandemic for arts and culture. Both the Museums Association and the Association of Independent Museums have promoted webinar series to help members tackle the specific work-based challenges surrounding existing heritage practice in the ‘new normal’. Online Twitter-based discussions for heritage professionals have also played a key role in promoting active discussion, exemplified by hashtags such as ‘MACoronavirusConverstions’ from the Museums Association, along with ‘#MuseumHour’ from an independent account without organisational affiliation, Museum Hour; both have facilitated enormously popular online discussions around key topics such as museum practice and professional wellbeing. The Museums Association have also utilised social media as a way to reach out to the many heritage professionals facing personal financial struggles, inviting applications to their individual ‘benevolence fund’. Organisations such as Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund have similarly sought to share their news of wider financial assistance packages through social media, as additionally employed by lesser-known charitable players such as the Julia & Hans Rausing Trust. The true practical effectiveness of such support channels is yet to be fully understood, but given their apparent popularity, it certainly seems that such approaches are here to stay.
As early as 30th May, international polls by UNESCO and ICOM were already indicating that up to 1 in 8 heritage sites across the world may be set to close. Even as some countries come out of lockdown, with the uncertainties of how the Covid-19 threat will be diminished, fear still hovers over the future of heritage work which is perhaps more important in the tumultuous and uncertain post-Covid-19 age than ever before. Will the use of social media be a sufficient lifejacket for our important cultural organisations during these rough and unpredictable seas? With the tide undeniably towards the digitalisation of the heritage sector, I certainly think it could have an important part to play. Perhaps dovetailed with already increasingly popular digital techniques such as AR, VR, virtual tours and 3D modelling, social media could be used to both bring truly engaging heritage encounters even closer to home and further encourage in-person visits once the museum doors are open wide once again. Nevertheless, when it comes to digital approaches to heritage, the sector certainly cannot afford to return to the ‘old normal’.
