Digital Heritage Hub Search

CollabArchive is a digital volunteering project led by the Nerve Centre and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of the Digital Skills for Heritage initiative. The project connects new and diverse audiences with archive heritage through creativity and digital technologies, leading to sustained volunteering opportunities at PRONI.

The Coleshill Auxiliary Research Team (CART) are a group of volunteer researchers and supporters who investigate and record the World War II Auxiliary Units across the UK. Working with volunteers this project created 360-degree virtual tours of the underground Operational Bases and other structures used by the Auxiliary Units digitally capturing many of the remaining sites in various states of preservation.

Museums visitors are now much more willing to use their phones to access digital content to enhance their visitor experience. The technology to deliver this can be cheap and easy: a simple mobile-optimised website will do the job. But creating engaging content that’s tailored to visitor needs and attention patterns is challenging. Brighton and Hove Museums worked with volunteers to create a new audio guide for Preston Manor and a digital storytelling experiment in Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.

In this recording from the Digital Heritage Hub launch event, Trish Thomas explores how digital engagement can help your heritage organisation build audience loyalty. This session will help you understand how to interpret the value of an in-person versus online audience; how to make content decisions based on the needs and motivations of your audience; the lifecycle of your audience and why lifetime value is important; end-to-end user journeys and the many touch points that they can involve; and how to engage audiences long term and build loyalty.

Your digital strategy should provide an overarching vision to guide the use of digital in the different areas of business within your organisation. Underneath this, you will need additional strategies relating to digital content and digital marketing. This guide explains their relationship and provides examples from other organisations on how these strategies have attracted wider and more diverse audiences.

Digital is a great way to help you identify those people who don’t engage with your organisation. In this resource, Christina Lister looks at the role digital marketing can play in audience development and the ways in which digital can help your organisation reach new audiences and visitors.

In this resource Edward Appleyard looks at the practical ways you can capture visitor feedback online, from emails and a feedback form on your website, through to online questionnaires, focus groups and customer circles.

In this resource Edward Appleyard looks at the different approaches to segmenting your online audiences including personas and empathy mapping, and how your organisation can use that insight to develop new audiences and improve your digital engagement.

Building and managing an online community can be challenging and time consuming. This resource by Christina Lister provides practical tips on setting up online communities utilising existing platforms such as Facebook. It offers ideas on how to nurture and build an online community without having to spend too much time managing or administering it.

The move towards digital has opened up many great opportunities for small to medium-sized heritage organisations to make a big impact, but also presents some challenges. Many heritage organisations rely on volunteers to operate and the digital skills of a volunteer team may be limited. This resource by Dig Yourself provides guidance on how to identify the digital training needs of your volunteers and how get started with digital upskilling with limited resources.

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed heritage organisations into re-evaluating their digital engagement strategies with key audiences, with online events and activities allowing for greater inclusive access. This resource by Dig Yourself explores the key elements you need to think about to make your online events and activities as safe, accessible and inclusive as possible.

The case for using evaluation to gather data and insights to analyse and shape your future digital marketing is a must. In this resource Ranjit Atwal explains why and how you and your heritage organisation should be spending time tracking, evaluating and applying insights into your digital marketing plans.

Digital marketing is key in connecting your small to medium-sized heritage organisation to new and existing visitors and audiences. This resource by Christina Lister provides an introduction to what digital marketing is, where you can start if you want to develop your activities, and the benefits of doing so. It links to many of the other guides in the Digital Engagement theme so you can explore more about the topics summarised here.

This case study is based on an original conversation with Celia Gilbert from The Rose Playhouse as part of the Digital Heritage Lab. Cause4’s Rebecca Ward caught up with Celia to talk about how the success of their online engagement during the pandemic has impacted their digital fundraising plans.

When making a decision about which platform(s) will best suit your organisation, you should consider two main factors: the different social media platforms available and your audiences. This guide will outline some considerations regarding the skills and capacity of your organisation, and the needs of your audience.

Digitising your archive can enable more people to engage with your content and heritage organisation. In this resource, Sarah Saunders looks at the ways digital archives and collections can be organised so that visitors can engage more deeply with them online. She explores the importance of keeping the user front and centre to ensure that your online archive reflects the engagement you want for your users.

Social media enables heritage institutions and practitioners to participate, preserve and interpret heritage content and practice. It can also support your heritage organisation to market itself and raise awareness of its practice to local, national and international audiences. This guide will provide a brief overview of social media platforms, tips for using them effectively to encourage participation and how they can be used to improve marketing and fundraising in your organisation.

In this guide Christina Lister takes a closer look at what we mean by digitally excluded audiences and how we can reach and engage them. The guide starts by setting out key definitions, explains how and why people are digitally excluded, and the impact of this. Christina shows how you can identify and understand your organisation’s digitally excluded audiences, and shares ways organisations can be more digitally inclusive.

People come to websites looking to complete a task — whether that’s to plan a visit or to learn something about your heritage organisation. In many cases it’s the first experience someone will have of your organisation. In this webinar recording, Nicky Hand covers important principles and practical tips for managing a website and making it user-friendly for online visitors.

In this resource, Katie Parry from digital agency and arts sector specialists, Supercool, provides a selection of practical actions to help you make your digital engagement activities better for the environment. Katie provides tips and suggestions that will help you make your organisation’s website, social media channels, emails and computers more sustainable.