Let's Get Real: 10 years on and just in time
Ten years ago, Culture24 ran the first of their Let's Get Real action research projects. They brought together seventeen cultural organisations and gave them time, space, and a supporting framework to explore how they might evaluate online success.
This year, Culture24 are revisiting the topic and I’m really excited to be playing a part.
I’ll be supporting the content design, webinar programme, and the participants’ self-directed learning.
Let’s Get Real 10 Years On: How to evaluate online success starts soon and will run through until September 2021. The deadline for signups is 1 February 2021.
Looking back on the first Let’s Get Real
Ten years is a long time in digital but, reading back over the first report, it's impressive how many of the key findings still stand up today:
Be clear what you are trying to do online and who it is for
Focus your online investment
Recognise the value, and the limits of social media
Question whether the web is enabling you to reach new audiences
Standardise methods of reporting online metrics to external stakeholders
It’s also notable that many of the organisations that took part back then (the RSC, Tate, Science Museum, Watershed, National Museums Scotland, and others), are the ones that you might think of as being most digitally ‘successful’. They do say that what gets measured, gets managed…
I didn't play a role in that project but it was incredibly timely all the same. I was working as an Account Director at an agency that built websites for cultural organisations. To a greater or lesser extent, every day was about understanding how to improve some aspect of what those organisations did online.
I spent a long time staring at Google Analytics, hoping that the data would reveal something to me. Slowly, I started to understand the various metrics and dimensions, learned how to track different types of interactions, and figured out how to make some sense of it all.
Let's Get Real's report came along in the middle of all of that. I remember feeling very envious that a bunch of interesting people were getting the time to figure out some of these issues as a group.
This year's iteration is just as timely. Perhaps more so.
Developments in digital analytics
From an analytics and measurement perspective there are all sorts of interesting areas to explore.
Ethics: are the big tech companies responsible stewards of our data, and the data that we have about our audiences? Are there any realistic alternatives?
Privacy: GDPR updated PECR (the cookie law) to require hard opt-ins to cookie-based tracking. Some web browsers are now making privacy a selling point too. What options should cultural organisations offer their audiences and how does this impact the ability to measure and improve experience for those same people?
New tools: a new version of Google Analytics is now available but is yet to be adopted widely. The past ten years has also seen the rise of big data with associated tools and techniques (AI and machine learning) made more accessible to lower budgets. What can be gained from using these tools?
And then there's the question of what we're trying to evaluate.
Evaluating the new cultural landscape
There’s lots of online activity in need of evaluation right now.
The hardy perennials: marketing, content, and website performance are more important than ever but not every organisation has their thinking, tools, and processes in order.
Visitor research: previously the domain of in-person exit interviews, surveys, and focus groups. There's a dawning realisation (well overdue) that website and social media analytics should be in the mix too.
New forms of digital activity: there's been an explosion of the types of digital content, experiences, and activity that cultural organisations are involved in producing and presenting. What's working? What does ‘working’ mean and how do we know?
New platforms: who would've guessed that videoconferencing services would be used for delivering cultural experiences on such a scale? The past ten years have also seen new social networks and the rise of messaging apps.
We're at an important point right now. This project has come along at just the right time.
As you might have gathered, I'm really pleased to be part of this next Let's Get Real project. The team at Culture24 have developed a new model of delivery (forced by the current situation) that has made it more financially accessible than ever, and there’s already a great cohort of organisations taking part.
If you're an organisation that could benefit from taking part then please don’t miss out. The deadline for applications is 1 February 2021. Sign up here.