Make It Count: workshops
Culture24 is partnering with Google to coordinate and deliver a series of workshops for the cultural sector to help them better understand how their online visitors use their websites.
The workshops are being designed to offer both strategic and practical advice and will focus on the use of Google Analytics and how best to relate the information it can provide to your overall business development strategy. There will also be several other inspirational sessions relevant to the cultural sector during the day.
There are a total of five workshops taking place around the country from December 2011 to July 2012. One in each of the following cities: London, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Bristol. Thanks to Google’s generous financial support these workshops will be virtually free to all participants.
The context for these workshops has been a collaborative action research project, involving 24 cultural organisations, lead by Culture24, that has resulted in a published report called ‘Let’s Get Real: How to evaluate online success?’.
The research project and report raise many issues and considerations for the cultural sector and it is hoped that these workshops will begin to help a few organisations put some of the learning into practice. Although there are only 5 workshops, it is Culture24’s intention to disseminate any resources or information from the workshops as widely as possible.
This means in particular how applying a more sophisticated use of Google Analytics (as a freely available toolkit) can help you understand how people use your site now and plan your strategy for improving this in line with goals.
Registration
Registration is now closed for these workshops.
To be eligible to attend you will need to meet a set of simple criteria (see below), be open to sharing your data with others and be willing to put in some time for preparation.
Workshop details
How will the workshop be structured?
During this workshop we will go through the steps to build an ‘analytics strategy’ so that you can implement that strategy in your own Google Analytics account. To help you begin to build an analytics strategy for your site, we will discuss your organisation’s objectives and how this can be translated to the goals of your website. We will look at the types of visitors that come to your site and how they find you online.
We will then delve into the Google Analytics tool itself, whilst touching on its technical implementation. We will finish the day talking about how to deliver insights from the data GA gives you and how to relate this to all parts of your organisation.
Ideally, attendees for this workshop should have a good understanding of what their organisation is trying to achieve, what the website is used for, what online marketing is done (if any) and, if possible, an understanding of how the website is built. A little web development and technical knowledge wouldn’t hurt either, but is not necessary.
People involved
All the workshops will be hosted by Culture24′s Jane Finnis.
Workshops will be led by Kitt Gilbert Scott. Kitt heads the Google Analytics team based out of Google’s London office. He works closely with larger advertisers on their web analytics strategy, looking for ways to help them optimise their implementations. His previous roles have been related to mobile technology, including time as Technical Sales Manager at Motorola and he is a subject matter expert for mobile analytics.
The Birmingham workshop is being coordinated with the kind support of:
The Bristol workshop is being coordinated with the kind support of:
The Edinburgh workshop is being coordinated with the kind support of:
Eligibility criteria
To be eligible for the workshops you will need to:
- Work in a non-commercial cultural sector organisation based in the UK
- Already be running Google Analytics on your website
- Be willing to send two members of staff to attend the workshop. One must be from your web/online team or have some responsibility for the actual delivery and implementation of your website. One must work in some way on your organisation’s strategy and business development.
- Be open to sharing information about your organisation’s work online with others
- Be able to commit to some preparation work in advance of the workshops (2-4 hours).
- Pay a non-refundable fee of £10 per person to confirm your booking.
Details of in-advance preparation work
Before the workshop, it would be great if you could spend a little time thinking about the following questions and maybe keeping some notes:
- What does your organisation want to achieve, as a whole, in the next year? Five years?
- What is the purpose of your website?
- Who are the different types of people that come to your site? What are they there for?
- How do people find your site or organisation?
- What would you like to learn about Google Analytics?