Picture courtesy Bath Museums
Museums at Night is a national campaign encouraging visitors into museums, galleries and heritage sites on May 14th – 16th 2010, by opening up late or putting on special evening events.
Why take part?
Museums at Night can get new audiences into your venue: last year, 61% of people surveyed were first-time visitors.
It’s a flexible event, so you can do whatever suits your venue, collections or visitors, offering something unique and unusual.
Visitors really enjoy being in a museum or historic venue after hours. 80% of visitors questioned last year rated their experience as 8 or more out of 10.
It is a great opportunity to work together with other museums, galleries, libraries, archives and heritage sites in your area to appeal to locals and tourists.
You’ll benefit from the publicity of our national marketing campaign, incorporating online marketing, social media & PR. On a local level, our downloadable marketing materials will make creating posters, leaflets and press releases simple and easy.
Have you got an interesting collection you can open up after dark? Courtesy Hatworks Stockport
You may be wondering how your venue or organisation can take part – so we’ve come up with some ideas based on last year’s successful events.
Ideas for Events:
When planning an event, think about what kind of audience you’d like to attract.
1. Simply open your doors until later: visitors appreciate the chance to enjoy the calmer atmosphere of visiting an interesting venue at night.
2. If you’ve already planned evening events taking place over the weekend of May 14th-16th, simply add the Museums at Night badge to them and enter them into our DDE system, to benefit from the associated publicity and marketing. Or, if you’ve got daytime events planned for this weekend, why not add an evening element?
3. You could offer behind-the-scenes tours and talks from curators and other experts, opening up parts of your venue that are not normally seen.
4. If you’d like to get more families through your doors, hands-on activities and trails to follow are always popular. You could even run a sleepover event – the Cabinet War Rooms’ 2009 sleepover sold out weeks in advance!
5. If your venue has a garden, you could offer nature walks by moonlight, look for bats, or lay sugar trails to attract moths.
6. Scientific collections can be brought to life during the evening - for example, you could set up telescopes to look at the night sky, or power up your steam engines.
7. Could you re-create night-time events which took place at your venue in the past? Why not involve your local history society, amateur dramatic company or re-enactment group to perform, read poetry, or run a period dance?
8. If there are spooky stories associated with your building, you could work with a local paranormal group and offer ghost tours!
9. Music can attract a younger crowd: could you showcase local bands and DJs?
10. Everyone likes to get involved and meet new people. How about running craft workshops, a quiz, or speed dating sessions?
Spooky goings on at Benjamin Franklin Museum in 2009 drew in the crowds. Picture courtesy Benjamin Franklin Museum.
Working together
For Museums at Night 2009, museums and galleries in cities like Newcastle and Stockport worked together to create a joint programme of events, attracting new audiences to all of their venues. We’d like to build on this success and encourage more city-wide programmes in 2010.
Alternatively, could you work with other venues from your area to create one focal point? Last year, venues around Bath created a successful event in the city centre by bringing in highlights from the collections of various outlying museums.
Museums at Night in the UK takes place on the same weekend as the Europe-wide celebration of museums, La Nuit des Musées. Would you like us to link you up with similar museums across Europe? Could you reach out to venues in your twin towns? Through webcams, you could give visitors to your venue the chance to greet people at cultural events happening across the continent.
If you’d like to discuss your plans, or if you’d like help in logging in and listing your events on the Culture24 website, please call me, Rosie Clarke, on 01273 623336 or rosie@culture24.org.uk.
