Digital: How to get your GLAM organisation to invest in digital
Digital: How to get your GLAM organisation to invest in digital
By
Trish Thomas
Head of Digital Innovation at London Museum, Trish Thomas details how they made the case for investment in digital and how they brought their digital transformation plan together.
My job here has been to make the case for investment in digital and to put in place the specialist team and expert partners to deliver it over a five-year period. In most other organisations this would probably have been one of its biggest areas of investment ensuring the full attention of senior stakeholders. But at London Museum digital transformation is dwarfed by the gigantic capital project to build our new museum in Smithfield! Time and resources are spread even more thinly than usual so it has been paramount at all times to be able to clearly demonstrate the value that digital transformation brings. Here’s how we’re doing it.
When is digital transformation not digital?
Firstly we needed to get a handle on the current digital maturity of the organisation. Being new to the museum meant I had carte-blanche to ask ‘daft questions’ without judgement, so I took full advantage of this blessing! I met and interviewed around 25 key stakeholders across the museum all using digital solutions - the people at the coal face as well as the decision-makers.
Sometimes that was the same person and sometimes it was different people. Sometimes when it was different people they had different views about what solutions they needed to do their jobs well. Sometimes the problem was technical and sometimes it was workflow related - mostly it was a combination of the two.
It became clear that this ‘digital’ transformation was not just about technology. It is about ways of working, it would need to run as deep as cross-departmental skills training and changes to job descriptions and personal objectives in order to stand any chance of success.
Forrester Model of Digital Maturity
In order to communicate the level of digital maturity to the Exec Board I used an independent framework. There are lots of these but I like the Forrester Model - it splits business into four different levels of digital maturity based on their characteristics. From my assessment the Museum profiled like ‘Adopters’ (Level Two). One of the main characteristic of Adopters is that they approach digital on a project by project basis, so you get little pockets of innovation but there’s no lasting legacy - digital is never baked into the business and as a result the core experience doesn’t improve over time. Everyone recognised this scenario when I played it back to them which was reassuring!
Underinvesting is losing you money not saving it...
Next I commissioned an external agency to carry out a digital systems audit and review. This revealed lots of legacy systems that were often either end of life or not fit for purpose. Amongst other key insights, the review estimated a 30% inefficiency in staff productivity caused by poor workflows and systems. Like many cultural organisations making challenging decisions with budgets in the last few years, the default view has been to save money by not investing substantially in digital. But a more appropriate question might have been: "How might we be limiting our potential for revenue generation and audience growth by NOT investing in digital?” If your purchase path isn’t optimised then you’ll be losing income as people abandon their baskets in frustration. If your CRM is not fit for purpose you will be losing income because you won’t be optimising the revenue potential from every person in your database based on what you already know about them. If your DAMS isn’t fit for purpose and embedded in workflows, staff will be wasting time searching for the same images again and again. And so on. By calculating the potential losses we were able to estimate the potential gains and make a strong case for investment.
Your physical and audience are not the same. Discuss.
Then the focus turned to the audience. The museum has huge amounts of data about its physical visit audience, but was it safe to just assume the digital audience had the same make up? We needed to understand who your digital audience was and who they could be in the future. So we commissioned a piece of research that, in the end, reached over 4,000 participants in London, the wider UK and some key cities in the US, Canada and Australia. The research was a mix of surveys, depth interviews and focus groups. The aim was to understand the appetite, motivations and drivers that made people engage with us digitally and to understand the blockers that put people off. We learned things like unsurprisingly, they were majority white and 45% of our existing digital audience were unaware they could access our collection online - many struggled to find a reason why they would even want to! Hence the strategy to create 1,000 London Stories as an SEO-friendly way in. I’ll tell you more about this in a later post.
Some people had deep existing knowledge of specific areas of our collection and they wanted to dive even deeper specialist knowledge and insights. Others wanted more light touch engagement, content that was fast and easy to consume and share and didn't require any pre-existing knowledge. We needed to appeal to both ends of the spectrum and those in between.
Motivations to engage
Audience motivations to engage
Out of this research came some KPIs around reaching younger and more diverse audiences. And most importantly the understanding digital channels did not solely exist to drive audiences to make physical visits to our museums. Digital audiences are important in their own right. They are not limited by physical boundaries and are already 3 x the size of our physical audience and growing (reality check - tick). They can be vocal global advocates, endorsing our brand and content in real time (attractive to sponsors - tick). They can buy tickets for online events, shop and donate online without ever physically visiting our museums, making a direct contribution to the bottom line (attractive to the Exec Board and especially Finance - tick). Triple threat.
London Museum Physical vs Digital audiences
With the insights from these three pieces of research it was possible to put together recommendations for a 5-year transformation plan. The Foundation Phase (2023-2024) focused on the five digital systems that would deliver the most value whether that be in terms of financial return, audience growth or staff efficiency. For us the systems we have chosen to focus on are: the website and collections online, the purchase path, the CRM, the DAMS and the online shop.
So what does innovation look like?
The Innovation Phase of the digital transformation plan will be designing the digital experience in our new museum at Smithfield. Predicting what shape this should be in 2026 is a hell of a challenge. Let’s face it, we might be posting social media content with our eyeballs by then - who can predict?! The key for us so far has been to ensure that what we built in the Foundation phase can plug and play in flexible ways. So we’re approaching this next phase in a human-centred way - asking the questions: What do people want and need and how might digital help us to give that to them to enhance their experience or solve a problem? As technologies evolve and become available along the way, we just need to ensure we can leverage them.
What are the main challenges you've come up against when trying to make the case for investment and how have you navigated them? Message Trish here - because a problem shared is a problem halved and all that jazz...
Trish Thomas, Head of Digital Innovation, London Museum