Guests strolling beneath the Cutty Sark

Many guests took the opportunity to explore the ship, discovering the history of the world’s last surviving tea clipper.

Fun in the Hold

Thanks go to David Taylor from Royal Museums Greenwich, who welcomed us aboard, and everyone from the Cutty Sark team who made us feel so welcome.

Above deck on the Cutty Sark

Culture24 CEO Jane Finnis spoke about the Museums at Night Festival, and the ways in which it creates new partnerships, and builds new audiences.

Culture24 CEO Jane Finnis speaking at the launch

We are very grateful to Ampersand, who enhanced the ambience of the evening with canapés flavoured with various kinds of tea, and to Summer Chimney for providing delicious wine and champagne.

Launching Museums at Night under the hull of the ship

The highlight of the evening had to be Joyce Falconer’s performance of Tam O’Shanter, the Burns poem from which the Cutty Sark takes its name. Seeing half of the Culture24 team encouraged at the point of a hobby horse to pursue poor “Tam” up a staircase, whilst dressed in long witchy noses and wigs, was an experience none of us will forget in a hurry.

Joyce Falconer performing Tam O'Shanter

The light shining off the copper hull of the boat gave the performance a certain devilish light, and our own Museums at Night project manager Nick Stockman was presented with a pair of devil horns to complete the image.

Culture24 staff joining in with the Tam O'Shanter fun

Music beneath the Cutty Sark

We are also very grateful to photographer Aniko Boholy for all of the beautiful photographs in this blog post, which she took at the Museums at Night launch. Further examples of her work can be found on the Aniko Boholy Photography Facebook page.

The Museums at Night team by the Cutty Sark's collection of figureheads

This was a wonderful beginning to the Museums at Night festival, and we’re looking forward to the many exciting events planned for May 16-18. We hope to see you there: you can find events near you on the Museums at Night website.

At the beginning of March I travelled to China with ‘Crossing the River’, a British Council-led delegation tour to exchange insights on how UK organisations are using digital innovation to support cultural programmes and projects. 

The last thing I was expecting to find was the fact that one of the main government-funded websites for museums was inspired by our own Culture24 website that I have spent 10 years nurturing. In fact, sitting in the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (a sort of Hong Kong equivalent to the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport) on a warm sunny afternoon, meeting all the top Chinese civil servants was a very odd situation. Mostly, as it was strangely foreign to be discussing investment strategies and opportunities for the creative economy with civil servants and policy-makers who were not looking for ways to implement funding cuts.

We talked about the intellectual capital of UK cultural venues, cultural start-ups, cultural publishers and content-makers. We talked about changing user behaviours online, social media and ways to develop the skills of cultural professionals. Our hosts listened and were eager to know more, to connect and learn. We drank our green tea and felt the warm glow of possible partnerships, collaborations and new ideas.

It was very inspiring to be in the middle of so much explicit and practical commitment to the creative economy, and the offer of cultural heritage and the arts. How about a digital literary platform in Shanghai? What about an online service to sell thousands of artists’ works? How can we create new spaces for learning about classical music? What about a central data aggregation service for cultural events in Hong Kong? My fellow UK cultural experts were much sought after for questions and answers throughout the whole week of our visit, and the conversations were personally and professionally invaluable.

I have to admit that I did fall a bit in love with Hong Kong and the incredible density of the people, buildings and opportunities. The night-time skyline on the waterfront was magical if like me, your fantasy city is heavily illuminated by neon and painfully contemporary in its architecture.

Over our eight days, five flights and slightly too many late nights, we met Chinese colleagues working in the digital teams in museums, performing arts venues and galleries. We visited the only digital art museum in China, the ancient emperor’s palace, and met professors, artists and thinkers from universities and contemporary media organisations.

Over dinner at the famous Foreign Correspondents’ Club, we explored what we can learn from the only two industries that are actually making money online (gaming and porn), and challenged the notion of ‘easy’ income generation as a solution to funding cuts in the UK. We admired the scale of ambition and vision of the West Kowloon Cultural District and the exquisitely beautiful use of serious digital animation power in bringing to life Chinese social history in ‘A Moving Masterpiece – The Song Dynasty As Living Art’, a huge, computer-animated mural reproduction of a 12th-century painting.

Our Chinese equivalents were insightful and it was clear that many are struggling with the same issues as we do in the UK, when it comes to genuinely integrating digital output into their organisations’ overall mission. There was much interest in the Culture24 Let’s Get Real action research in the UK, and its open call to try to define success online. Why don’t more countries pick up this approach?

We explored the notion of a digital research and development fund that might, like us, ‘cross the river’ and unite UK/Sino developments one step at a time. What a brilliant idea, and what better way to plant and water the many small seeds sown over our trip.

Thanks to the British Council, their Creative Economy Team and all my new friends.

Crossing the River’ was organised by the British Council’s Creative Economy Unit, in partnership with Nesta and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It was developed in response to the Nesta report – ‘Crossing the River by Feeling for Stones’ – which suggests that there are strong opportunities for the UK’s creative industries to increase their collaborative work in countries such as China and develop bigger audiences for UK content.

In February the Arts Council and VisitEngland got serious about working together to nurture cultural tourism and the ways in which it can add to local economic growth. They published this joint partnership agreement which states…

“Arts Council England and VisitEngland recognise that through partnership working and alignment of their activities at local and national level greater benefits can be realised for the economy, as well as increasing the effectiveness and impact of their funded activity.”

This is good news for everyone who, like us, see the possible links and synergies between the activities of cultural organisations and local artists and a vibrant visitor economy.

I was at the Destination Management Forum at the beautiful Luton Hoo Hotel to hear James Berresford (VE) and Moira Sinclair (ACE) talk about the plan but also to share Culture24′s experiences of running the Museums at Night festival. The festival is an existing example of a successful national cultural campaign working to achieve the priorities of the joint partnership statement.

My presentation looked at how the festival is working to develop new audiences, how it crosses the boundaries between culture and tourism, how it forges new partnerships and suggests new ways of working. Interestingly, a case study of the festival was written up in the recent VisitEngland ‘Evening and the night-time economy report‘ that is focussed upon realising the potential for destination organisations.

Museums at Night is a campaign that works for local venues, local tourism and local audiences.  Its USP is to ‘Do something different’ – a very simple idea to open late at night over one weekend, do something different and attract different people. Over the last few years the campaign has seen a growing and interesting trend in local partnerships. We call these clusters and it is not a coincidence that many of the clusters have destination organisations and managers who understand the potential of creativity. In 2012 there were 12 clusters that accounted for approx 40% of total events. This is local delivery of a national campaign.  The focus here is local tourism to local and regional audiences.

But how can projects like Museums at Night help to actually support and create economic growth as the partnership statement seeks? In my presentation I highlighted three things:

- Our cluster strategy can help to identify destinations that could lead successful collaborations to exploit their own unique local offer. Key here is the presence of local champions who understand local needs.

- Evaluation of clusters can reveal local insights. Close contact with venues on the ground, provides in-depth case studies of real-world practice and can showcase local delivery that works. Things like transport problems in Birmingham and their solution of an Art bus or family tickets in Dorchester with multiple entry to encourage people to move between venues.

- Clusters can provide a meaningful focus for new investment based on realistic local delivery and informed awareness of audience needs.  We know from our experience over the last four years that genuinely doing something different (the USP of the festival) can attract new audiences and sometimes new money.

You can find out more about the impact of Museums at Night over the years from our published evaluation and don’t forget that you can experience it for yourself in May.

You might also want to check out our recent research report Moving Targets which explores the complex and changing user needs within the cultural tourism information landscape.

You can download the report here or read this article  “Museums connecting cultural tourists: more substance over style” on the Guardian Culture Pros website.

I have a problem when I hear a lot of talk of digital innovation, new business models and technology solutions. I feel that digital technologies are often sold to the cultural sector (particularly by policy makers) as solutions for lack of growth, audience impact or financial sustainability of services.

The truth is that problems online go much deeper and often reflect a lack of clarity in the online offer of cultural organisations, a wishful hope that online is a road to democratising their assets and that through the web they will reach everyone and bring in new income streams easily.

I feel we are all rather guilty of fetishising technologies, when it is the culture itself that we should obsess over. As organisations we need to go back to our mission, find clarity of purpose online and get real about what is actually happening on the web.

We need to know ‘What is it and who is it for?’ and we need to unpack what we are doing and understand its value better. Basically, we need to be able to answer the question ‘Who cares about what we do online?’

There is a big issue with cultural websites and attention share online. We all know the truth about the web and how it is dominated by social media, sport, shopping and porn. Cultural websites are nowhere when it comes to attention share of visitor online.

Data from Hitwise in June 2011 showed that the percentage of web traffic to a cross section of 40 cultural websites (in fact the top 40 biggest museums, galleries and venues) represented less than 0.04% of the total UK web domestic traffic, or 5.71 million visits. This is equivalent in the same period to the traffic to littlewoods.com.

Pause for thought …

Looking at the data from the DCMS’s Taking Part survey published in 2012, on the surface it looks as if web visits to museum/gallery/theatre sites went up between 2005/06 and 2010/11.

However, if you map the growth in the percentage of the population looking at these websites against the growth of the population online you see a different picture. The percentage of the population online is growing much faster than the number of visitors to cultural websites, which means in reality that their attention share is shrinking.

Culture24 is investigating this through our collaborative action research projects, Let’s Get Real (LGR). These started two years ago with a group of people who wanted to know how to evaluate success online, how to understand what success is and how to improve their online work.

In 2011, Phase 1 involved 24 organisations (logos below) and we produced our first report: download Let’s Get Real: How to Evaluate Success Online here.

For Phase 2 in 2012 we are working again with 24 organisations, some different, some the same (logos below) and the final research will be finished with a report published in April 2013.

From our work so far, we know that organisations in the project are all struggling to:

- Work out from the mass of analytics and data the difference between what is interesting and what is actually useful.

- Find the right data to tell the right story, and to drive organisational change from within, to offer informed evidence to their leaders, and to reflect on what works and how to improve it. Crucially, digital needs to be part of every organisation’s overall strategy as a tactic that supports their core mission.

- Understand their constraints and how these contribute to failures. These might include a legacy of disconnected technical systems; internal politics; procurement procedures; or the lack of an agile, iterative approach to development. Remember, these are only failures if we don’t know they are happening! If we pay attention, then they become learning opportunities. With public funding, honesty about failure is not welcomed, but we need to have honest evaluation if we are going to get better.

With LGR we have sent everyone back to their mission to seek clarity of purpose: it is not good enough to say something generic such as ‘great art for everyone’ or ‘inspire learning through collections’. It needs to be specific, focused on a target audience / impact / learning. Importantly, you need to know what kind of behaviour you want to engender, and in who, specifically.

Within LGR we have also been trying to understand the difference between popularity and engagement online. By popularity we mean brand searches and likes. By engagement we mean conversations and participation.

The LGR research showed that there was a direct relationship between those organisations with the most popularity and those who spend the most money/staff time. However, this was not the case when it came to engagement, where success was not related to spend but instead to publishing specific targeted content at targeted audiences. In other words, niche.

On the whole, as a sector, we are not good at popularity (unless of course you have an existing real world brand such as TATE, the V&A or the British Museum). Therefore, we need to either:

-  Get better building brands online. This unfortunately needs money, which is in short supply, but it is also difficult to do – even for those brands that are born digital.

OR

- Work together to build shared brands around our stuff. Maybe the brand isn’t our individual organisations but archaeology, photography or porcelain? Culture24 has had some success at doing this with the Museums at Night festival. This brand is a shared umbrella, built around a clear USP of doing something different in arts and heritage venues after hours, which is free for organisations to participate in.

OR

- We need to focus on engagement, and identifying the specific kind of engagement that we want to create which actually fits user behaviour and is meaningful to the target audience.

So, can we fix this attention share deficit? Here are my three tips that I would like to advocate for – and they’re all simple, back-to-basic stuff.

1.      Examine your core purpose and clarify it online. Define your specific audience segments, find your niche and make sure it is genuine, reflecting the actual content your organisation has. That way it will be easy to explore stories and interpretations that will ring true for audiences.

I think we need to be bold here, finding our own style, editorial voice and personality. Be confident about choosing your key online audience, just like you do in the physical world. This might be local, small, social, age specific or subject specific. You need to think about planning online content as you would in your venue, for example targeted exhibitions or shows offering something special primarily for a particular group of people.

2.      Think about SEO. Research shows that search engines still drive between 50-70% of traffic to most websites. But this art is often neglected: very few cultural organisations think about it or spend money on it. Crucially, once you have defined your niche, you will find it much easier to optimise your online content to reflect that.

3.      If you are planning an app, stop it now! If the answer is an app, then what was the question? Apps are complicated, they eat money and are often driven by brand aspirations rather than user need.

Research tells us that growth of traffic to cultural websites from mobile rose by around 150% in the last year. So sort out your mobile friendly site first – that way you are solving a problem, not creating a new one.

For me, getting this basic attention-share stuff right would be real innovation!

Remember that yes, technology has changed the way we do almost everything but the transformative power for audiences is in the content we have, not in the technology we use.

__________________________________________________________________

 If you are interested in staying in touch with developments in our action research then you can sign up to our newsletter here.

Young visitors enjoy a museum sleepover with Wallace the Lion (c) Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens

Top line statistics

In 2011, 352 venues ran 467 events as part of the festival, but this year 416 venues participated by staging 537 creative events. The number of visits to Museums at Night events rose from 105,000 to 120,000: 43,000 visitors were new to the venue they went to, while 5,000 had never been to an arts or heritage venue before.

The PR campaign, shining a positive spotlight onto participating museums and galleries, was a runaway success. Media coverage of the 2011 campaign was valued at £1.1 million, but in 2012 over 2,000 pages of cuttings and a Sky Arts documentary about the festival led to coverage worth over £3.4 million. Culture24′s partnership with the BBC was also a key contributor, as the value of each Museums at Night activity fed through to the BBC websites was approximately £32,000.

Get your free copy of the evaluation

Download the Executive Summary (3 page PDF, 414 KB)

Download the full Evaluation (22 page PDF, 3.8 MB)

Museums at Night 2013

All arts and heritage venues are warmly invited to take part in Museums at Night 2013: Project Manager Nick Stockman and myself look forward to working with you in future!

Following feedback from hundreds of venues, we have shifted the dates of the festival for next year – it will now run from Thursday 16 – Saturday 18 May 2013.

To receive monthly newsletters from the Museums at Night team, letting you know about new festival partnerships and promotional opportunities your organisation can take advantage of, please sign up here.

Nick and I would like to thank all the organisations, staff and volunteers who made Museums at Night a success by programming exciting events and by contributing feedback and data to the evaluation. We’d like to thank the festival funders, sponsors and partners, our campaign ambassador Lauren Laverne, our independent evaluator Cath Hume of Cultural Consultancy, and our hard-working campaign interns Beth Hogben and Rosie Gore.

Rosie Clarke, Campaigns Officer

The starting point for this next phase of work is to consider what building engagement like this really means; to consider changes in audience behaviour as a result of mobile devices and to understand how to integrate digital tactics into your overall strategic mission.

The project follows on from our ‘Let’s Get Real’ report and findings, published in 2011. This report was the outcome of our first collaborative action research project ‘How to evaluate online success’ which took place between June 2010 and Sept 2011 and involved 23 UK cultural venues and organisations.

The frankness of this report and its openness to speak about the failure in the sector to really capture the attention of online audiences has been met with a very positive reaction. The report itself has also been shared widely with over 6,700 downloads between September 2011 and June 2012.

This Phase 2 project has again been funded collaboratively by the participating organisations.

Culture24’s role will be to lead and coordinate the project. We will bring in experts as necessary to support all stages of the project delivery – experts such as Seb Chan (Director of Digital & Emerging Media, Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum) and Mia Ridge (Doctoral Researcher & freelance cultural heritage technologist).

The project will retain its link with the University of Leicester and their PhD programme and will also explore ways to continue to work with both Google and Hitwise to ensure useful external reference points.

Full list of those involved:

Tate

Watershed

Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

National Museums Wales

National Museums Scotland

Science Museum

British Museum

Photographers Gallery

Polka Theatre

Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Warwick Art Centre

Wellcome Collections

V&A

National Galleries Scotland

Museum of London

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Wales Millennium Centre

British Library

South London Gallery

Art Co

Globe Theatre

Historic Royal Palaces

Post by Jane Finnis

Before the big weekend though there’s the Museums and Heritage Show – a fantastic opportunity to meet and talk to museum and gallery folk. It’s on the 16^th and 17^th May at Earl’s Court, London and Culture24 is very pleased to be supporting the show again this year.

Our DDE and BBC partnership teams – Ruth, Conrad, Sean and Jack – will be on the Culture24 stand (T3) both days. If you’re going to the Show do drop by and see them, they’re a friendly bunch and will fill you in on the many ways we can help you to reach audiences (for free!).

I’ve also worked with the team behind the Show to curate a stream of seminars on the theme of learning. All day on Wednesday 16th I’ll be chairing sessions across a broad range of topics, bringing together a mix of speakers from nine different organisations, all of whom are working on the front line in cultural education.

The potential of the cultural sector to support teaching and learning, across all age groups, is something that’s long been close to our hearts at Culture24 Towers. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to draw attention to some of the great work going on in the sector already and to explore ways this can be built upon, particularly in the wake of the Henley Review into cultural education.

The programme for the learning seminars looks like this:

10.00 – 10.40: Adult learning & working with volunteers

Essex opens the day with a short journey through the needs of adult learners in museums and current policies which may influence those needs. Then discover how the Manchester Museum, with Imperial War Museum North, developed their award-winning In Touch Volunteer programme as a way to diversify their volunteer workforce and to engage more deeply with local communities.

Essex Havard, Campaigns and Fundraising Coordinator, NIACE; Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes & Kate Glynn, Volunteer Coordinator, The Manchester Museum

11.10 – 11.50: Engaging young people

Teams at English Heritage and The Wolverhampton Art Gallery have been working with young people on a range of projects with great success. Find out how young enterprise students created a brand new retail product for Stonehenge and how the Gallery’s ongoing Artforum project not only attracts young people through the doors but then embeds them within the life of the organisation.

Harriet Attwood, Education Manager South West, English Heritage; Jen Dooner, Outreach Worker, Wolverhampton Art Gallery

12.20 – 13.00: Making the most of Arts Award

Join the Arts Award team to find out how the award’s flexible framework can help you build relationships with young audiences aged 7 -25. Hear from Marina Castledine about the exciting new levels, Discover and Explore and also have the chance to hear from The Holburne Museum (Bath) about their experience of delivering Arts Award.

Dan Ellitts & Marina Castledine, Arts Award; Emma Finch, Holburne Museum

13.30 – 14.10: Open data – what’s the big idea? Plus working with older learners

Two themes for the price of one this time, though both are about more people doing more with more of your stuff! Jo explores how museums, archives and the heritage sector can open up their collections, from APIs to Wikis, and looks at the role education departments can play. John follows with a step-by-step guide to attracting and working effectively with older learners.

John Stevenson, Director, GEM (Group for Education in Museums); Jo Pugh, Education & Outreach, The National Archives

14.40 – 15.20: Schools & museums: a working relationship

The Langley Academy is the first school in the UK to work towards embedding museum learning across the curriculum. Get the inside track on how the school is getting on and the impact of this approach. Also, from the other side of the fence, hear how one of the school’s local partners, the Oxford Museum of Natural History, provides support and how this has impacted upon their working practices.

Jenny Blay, Head of Museum Learning, The Langley Academy; Janet Stott, Head of Education, Oxford University Museum of Natural History

So – we’ll hopefully see some of you at the show, you can book here (again, for free). If you can’t make it to London follow the day’s discussions via #MandHShow on Twitter.

Lastly, don’t forget to check out Museums at Night this weekend – find out more at www.museumsatnight.org.uk.

Anra Kennedy, Content & Partnerships Director

Last night Frances Osborne hosted a reception at Number 11 Downing Street celebrating Culture24’s annual festival, Museums at Night.

Arts Minister Ed Vaizey paid tribute to the work of the arts and heritage sector through difficult times, and commented on the fantastic results that happen when the sector collaborates.

We were delighted that so many representatives from museums and galleries came along and shared their experiences of running Museums at Night events, with each other and with our funders the Arts Council. It was lovely to catch up with our partners from Liverpool’s Light Night, Newcastle and Gateshead’s Late Shows, and Scotland’s Festival of Museums.

Lots of our campaign partners attended the reception, including the Sky Arts team who will not only be filming a documentary over the weekend, but are also subsidising museum sleepovers and running competitions to promote Museums at Night.

We were happy to introduce Karen Brookfield from the Heritage Lottery Fund to Laura Crossley, who is coordinating the HLF-funded North Norfolk cluster of Museums at Night activity, Victorian Nights.

It was also good to meet Anne Larouzé from Nuit des Musées, and to catch up with Loyd Grossman, who together with former Culture Minister Chris Smith founded Culture24 (then the 24 Hour Museum) over ten years ago.

The evening offered a great opportunity to show a renowned historic building in a new light – find out more about how we brought Downing Street to life with stories, food and music from the time it was built on the Museums at Night blog.

By Rosie Clarke, Campaigns Officer

Connect10 is a new national competition for cultural venues to win one of ten artist-led events during Museums at Night. We had the good taste to not call it ‘Britain’s Got Cultural Treasures and Very Interesting Artists’ and people all over the country are voting in their tens of thousands for artists as diverse as Claire Barclay, Bompas and Parr and Simon Roberts.

The Connect10 idea is essentially an extension of Chris Pensa’s wonderful Love Art London concept, which takes art lovers behind the scenes with artists to their studios, writ large on a national scale plus a competitive twist. In 2011 Culture24 worked with Chris on an idea to use Facebook to market Museums at Night by devising a series of competitions that Love Art London’s membership could enter culminating in an event with Michael Landy. We at Culture24 wanted to see if Facebook could be used to excite interest in the campaign without using direct advertising. Our PR company Bullet’s hard work attracted £1.1 million worth of PR to the Museums at Night campaign last year, I doubt whether more than a few pence of that was generated by the Facebook idea but it did get us thinking.

What if we worked with numerous artists and venues could compete to win them? Could this be a way to get more artists involved with venues they wouldn’t normally go to? Could this be a way to help venues communicate with their audiences, galvanising them into voting for their local museum and gallery all the time creating an army of advocates? Could this project also help discover the lost city of Atlantis? Well as we are currently not quite half way through the voting period and almost exactly three months away from Museums at Night, Friday 18^th – Sunday 20^th May, we shall have to wait for all the answers but I can tell you a little bit about what we’ve achieved so far.

The first task after getting approval of funding from Arts Council England was to sign-up the artists. This Chris did with aplomb. He found ten people with the right kind of pioneer spirit, willing to cross the frontier from art to museum. The main requirement of any artist getting involved with this project is a sense of adventure: as it transpires artists could be travelling to the northernmost museum in the British Isles in Thurso or one of the southernmost in Guernsey. That spirit is reciprocated by the venues; Polly Morgan will be bringing her live taxidermy demonstration, Jon McGregor his suitcase full of stories, these are no ordinary museum experiences.

We received 121 completed event submissions forms in a three work period in January. Considering the short amount of time available to devise and submit ideas this was astounding. At one point it did seem like everyone wanted Bompas & Parr to lead an extravagant, Georgian-style banquet featuring austerity (and belt) busting pies filled with birds, marzipan sculptures and gilded flummery ‘fish’. One venue wanted them to recreate a siege in jelly! As it panned out all the artists received plenty of ideas they were happy with and we were able to proceed to the vote with at least two venues vying for every artist.

The vote is the part of the project that has initiated most discussion and excitement at Culture24 towers and beyond. This is the bit when venues get the chance to reach out to their communities, inspire them and entreat them to vote. It seems to be working, to date we’ve received over 10,000 votes with just under three weeks still left before the polls close. At the start of the project I would have taken 5,000 – 6,000 on any spread bet (Culture24 employees are not allowed to vote or bet on the outcome for that matter!) now it looks like it could top 50,000. Incredibly busy, sometimes under resourced staff and volunteers in 28 venues are pulling out all the stops to win an artist. In doing so they are reaching out to their local networks in ways some of them have never done before.

Once the people have spoken and the winners are chosen the adventure does not stop: all the participating venues in Connect10 will receive some cash support for a Museums at Night event even if they have to look around for another artist or different feature for their night. We are supporting venues through the voting process with marketing and PR tips, information and images from their chosen artist and ‘How to’ event management guides. The key objectives of this project are capacity building and audience development and while we’re learning, building audiences and bridging gaps in the museums and galleries sector look out for a 75 foot jelly King Kong looming from a honeycomb Empire State Building*.

The arts and museums sectors may never get the chance to come together in quite the same way again.

(This one didn’t get through to the public vote!)

For the first time, we’re kicking off an exciting new competition called Connect10 which offers the chance for UK arts and heritage venues to win one of ten adventurous contemporary artists and a share of £7000 for a Museums at Night event.

Join The Art Party, 2011, (c) Bob and Roberta Smith

We’re incredibly impressed with the calibre of the intrepid artists who’ve signed up for Connect10. The ten creatives who could be heading to any UK venue are Scottish sculptor Claire Barclay; Jellymongers Bompas & Parr; installation artist Ryan Gander; novelist Jon McGregor; taxidermist Polly Morgan; photographers Terry O’Neill, Martin Parr and Simon Roberts; and installation artists Bob & Roberta Smith and Susan Stockwell.

We’re inviting all the venues on our database to look for connections between their collections or location, and the work of one of these artists. They can then pitch an exciting Museums at Night event idea involving their chosen artist to Culture24 through this simple online form.

Culture24 will select the two or three most interesting event ideas for each of the ten artists, and open them up to an online public vote to decide, for instance, whether Martin Parr
will be sent to Manchester, Middlesbrough or Merthyr. The sky’s the limit: we’re looking for really creative ideas that will capture the imagination of the artists, audiences and the media!

Bompas and Parr - Courvoisier Lake (Image Credit Barney Steel)

Our goals for Connect10? Well, we’re hoping this will offer a great audience development opportunity for venues to reach out through local and social media channels, motivating their fans and advocates to come together and vote to bring an exciting artist
to their town.

And at last we can offer money as well! We’ve wanted to do this for some time: in our post-Museums at Night venue surveys, every year we’ve learned that even small bursaries would enable more events to go ahead. So for Connect10, each successful venue that wins an artist will also receive a £500 bursary for their event, while the venues who get through to the public vote stage but don’t win the artist they wanted will still receive £100 to support an alternative Museums at Night event.

Want more information about Connect10?

See our 9 top tips for a successful Connect10 event.

Read the Connect10 terms and conditions for venues.

Submit your event idea.

To receive monthly e-newsletters from the Museums at Night campaign, bringing you news of partnerships and promotional opportunities you may like to take advantage of, simply sign up here.

By Rosie Clarke, Museums at Night Marketing Coordinator