Picture courtesy Bath Museums
Museums at Night is a national campaign encouraging visitors into museums, galleries and heritage sites on May 13th – 15th 2011, 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, 47% 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. 85% 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? Picture 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 13th-15th, 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 Churchill War Rooms’ 2010 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! Museums at Night 2011 begins on the highly marketable date of Friday 13th, so if you have objects in your collection associated with luck or superstition, why not theme your event around them?
9. Music can attract a younger crowd: do you have the space to showcase local bands and DJs?
10. Everyone likes to get involved and meet new people. How about running hands-on craft workshops, a quiz, or speed dating sessions? Last year the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons invited their local Stitch'n'Bitch group along: visitors could learn surgical suturing from medical students as well as having a go a knitting and crochet.
Spooky goings-on drew in the crowds to the Benjamin Franklin Museum last year. Picture courtesy Benjamin Franklin Museum.
Working together
For Museums at Night 2010, museums and galleries in cities like Newcastle, Stockport, Liverpool, Norwich and Dorchester 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 clusters of events in 2011. Why not design a passport that visitors can fill out with a stamp from each venue they visit?
Many people who ran city events last year are willing to offer advice based on their experiences: if you'd like to be put in touch with them, please contact Rosie on rosie@culture24.org.uk.
If you're unable to open your venue late, but you'd still like to be part of Museums at Night, could you work with other venues from your area to create one focal point? For example, 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 Rosie Clarke, on 01273 623336 or rosie@culture24.org.uk.
