Our inaugural Marketers’ Masterclass was hosted by expert trainer Jasper Visser, change agent, innovator and facilitator in the cultural and heritage sectors, and co-founder of the Digital Engagement Framework.

Jasper’s Framework helps organisations and individuals identify the value creation opportunities of digital engagement, and develop the strategies, processes and technologies to structurally engage their audiences.  At the Masterclass participants focused on step one of the Framework: Value and Co-creation.

The value creation model is the first step towards a digital engagement strategy. It helps you define the value that your organisation and audience will co-create through digital engagement activities.

The Masterclass emphasised the significance of digital engagement in driving benefits for both professional organisations and their audiences. Jasper shared real-life stories of digital engagement activities that have enabled cultural organisations to reach beyond their traditional settings and make a difference to whole communities. One such example is the Rhapsody project; a multi-stakeholder cultural collaboration with the NHS at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The hospital was awarded museum status in 2009 thanks to its extensive collection of over 1,000 artworks and regular concerts. The Rhapsody project brings this cultural activity together in an audio guide app that can be enjoyed by both the patients and their guests. A few simple statistics illustrate the benefits of this simple digital engagement project:

• 100% of patients were relaxed by the guides
• 100% of patients had boredom alleviated
• 100% of patients experienced a psychological lift

Jasper stressed the importance of fully understanding your audiences. Before you can start following the Digital Engagement Framework, you first need to identify who your audiences are; what their objectives are; what interests they have; what resources they have; and how they can create value for you. This is crucial as digital engagement is ultimately about reaching and interacting with people – and engagement is always a two-way process.

Participants explored the impact of ‘digital’ on audience behaviour. Through multi-tasking, we now squeeze 31 hours of activity into just one day, and digital attention spans have dropped to just eight seconds. Arts organisations need to ensure that their content is good enough to capture and hold attention in this competitive environment.

Jasper outlined three key aspects of providing cultural opportunities in a digital age:

Digitising what you already do. Think about which services, content or experiences you already provide that could be easily digitised. For example, providing an online box office for ticket sales.

Creating digital unexpectedness. The next step is to provide services or content that can only be done digitally. For example, using Augmented Reality on posters or brochures.

Digitally different. How can you use digital tools and thinking to address real challenges for your organisation and audiences?

Following a series of practical exercises, participants ended the session with a ‘bagging’ and ‘binning’ exercise, identifying activities and behaviours that each organisation would pledge to stop doing, as well as those that should be developed and continued. Examples included:

Bin

• Doing things because they are digital not because they are ‘us’
• Using digital channels purely to sell and advertise
• Telling people things (rather than asking questions)
• Focussing on followers and returns (rather than people and connections)
• ‘Because we’ve always done it that way’ mentality

Bag

• Co-creation
• Digitising things we already do and doing only the digital things that help us be us
• Defining audiences before building digital engagement
• Segmenting online audiences
• Aligning digital objectives with audience objectives
• Asking for something if you want it
• Involving the whole organisation

The next in our series of Marketers’ Masterclasses takes place on 26 January 2016, when expert trainer and self-confessed data geek Brian Tait will reveal how to get the very best from your Google Analytics.

Main image credit: (C) Culture Republic