Creating catchy content formats: beyond the online collection

A creative workshop with Fabrique and the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) to discover and prototype new content formats, based on 4 simple ideas:

1 A room full of art doesn’t make an exhibition.
Is bringing your collection online enough to draw visitors? Will it make them discover the stories behind your collection? What form seduces visitors to scroll, click and share?

2 What works for the National Gallery doesn’t work for the Van Gogh Museum.
Which formats fit you, what storytelling comes natural to you? Quick or deep, visual or textual, serious or tongue in cheek?

3 Different person, different conversation
Audience insights make you change your online dialogue. It’s no use showing a history in a timeline if that reminds your intended thirty-something audience of homework!

4 The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Prototype! Feel what your ideas would look like, gather feedback and improve on them.

An active workshop
This workshop was conceived as the RA and Fabrique worked on the online RA Collection. Audience research inspired three different formats – showing the unique 250-year-old RA in different lights.

We’ll do more than share project insights, and let you create catchy content formats. In small teams you start from your brand and collection, generate concepts and prototype them. The results may range from focus for your digital strategy to practical ideas you can start working on directly after MW2018. As such this workshop is useful for communications and digital managers, editors and creatives.

Moderators
Martijn van der Heijden is Senior Strategist at Fabrique, the strategic design agency which created such diverse formats as an interactive documentary about Hieronymus Bosch, ‘scrollytelling’ stories about Van Gogh and personal collections for Rijksmuseum.

Kate Huckle is Senior Product Manager, and Louise Cohen is Head of Digital Content and Channels at the RA in London. They are responsible for the RA’s website and social presence.

Bibliography:
The RA’s online collection can be found at https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists, you can find some background here https://www.fabrique.com/portfolio/museums-and-heritage/royal-academy/.
The workshop also builds upon the workshop element of a 40 mins talk that was very well received at Museumnext Rotterdam 2017. See https://www.slideshare.net/fabriquenl/fabrique-talk-the-secret-digital-formula-for-museums-museumnext-2017-rotterdam-77306312 for the introducing presentation, and https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=museumnext%20fabrique&src=typd for some reactions.