PhD student starts digital marketing internship with Experience Heritage

Experience Heritage is excited to welcome Owen Burton to the team throughout June as our digital marketing intern! Partnering with the University of York and Santander Universities SME Internship Programme, we are lucky to be able to access the amazing talent emerging from the U of Y and we are excited to be a part of Owen’s career journey. We asked Owen a few quick questions about him and his project.

What are you doing at Experience Heritage?

My role is to help Experience Heritage develop their ongoing marketing campaign during their second year in business. This one-month placement involves building their social media profile and helping them communicate their niche in the digital heritage world as a company that combines the latest techniques in 3D digital modelling, mobile app development and mixed reality technologies with knowledge of archaeology from a research perspective. I’m looking forward to helping kick-start a monthly newsletter, creating videos about the company and posting regularly as the company continues to move forward!

Tell us about your background

I’ve just completed a PhD all about Finnish music, so this placement is definitely something new and challenging, but I’ve always loved heritage sites and museums. I was able to combine my passions for music and heritage back in 2018 when I had the opportunity to complete a project with the National Trust at Lyme Park all about the social musical history of the house. I have also worked with arts and music organisations in North Wales where I really enjoyed engaging people in the world of classical music and I look forward to doing the same with digital heritage. 

How did this internship come about?

This internship is part of the Student Internship Bureau which sees collaboration between the University of York and job sectors in Yorkshire for project-based placements. Having just finished my PhD, this was a great opportunity to gain more experience of a public-facing role, the heritage sector as well as working within a small team.

What’s it like starting an internship remotely?

Another reason I applied for this placement was to gain more experience of working in an office and a small team. Having spent the last three-and-a-half years doing a PhD, working remotely and in isolation is something I’m pretty familiar with! In that sense, starting to work for Experience Heritage from home hasn’t been too difficult to adjust to and, like everyone else at the moment, contact with team members has just moved online. But it’s been exciting to see how resilient the heritage sector has been over the past few months with COVID-19 and I’m looking forward to exploring how the digital focus of this company can help overcome some of the challenges in the sector as we look to what the heritage world will look like post-“Lockdown”.

What do you do in your spare time?

As a musician, I spend a lot of time playing, writing and listening to music, but I also love getting into the outdoors, walking and visiting heritage sites, so this placement is pretty exciting for me! I also enjoy learning Welsh (having lived there for six years), as well as cycling and cooking.

Experience Heritage selected for Santander Emerging Entrepreneurs Programme 2020

Santander Universities Emerging Entrepreneurs Programme 2020

We are very excited that Experience Heritage has been selected to represent the University of York in the Santander Emerging Entrepreneurs programme for 2020! This program, taking only one business per partnering university, provides business support, workshops and a chance to win £30,000 equity free funding, a fully funded intern as well as other prizes. A two-day national final with pitches from the selected business will determine the final prize winners.

Chosen as one of 80 business selected out of 2000 business applying across the UK, we are very honoured to represent the University of York and look forward to the support that it will provide in the coming months. If successful, we hope to use the seed funding to create the framework for an Augmented Reality heritage trail app.

Discover Tang Hall heritage trail app launches

For about a year now, we’ve been working with Tang Hall Big Local, Tang Hall Local History Group, St Nick’s Urban Nature Reserve & Environmental Centre and members of Digital Creativity Labs at University of York to develop a heritage trail app for the Tang Hall district of York. Today, we are proud to announce that the app has been launched and is now available for download in iTunes and Google Play stores.

With content created by Tang Hall locals, including members of the groups mentioned above, this app provides 3 heritage trails - People, Places and Green Spaces - as a way of exploring and learning more about the historical and natural features of the area. It also includes ‘Pick a Character’ section where you can delve deeper into some of the interesting characters from the area.

Download it today!

iTunes

Google Play