Let’s Get Real 7: Developing deeper human connection across digital channels
Culture24, in partnership with the Carnegie UK Trust, Common Cause Foundation and Wellcome Collection worked collaboratively with 19 arts and heritage organisations to understand how to generate stronger personal connections and more meaningful relationships through their digital work.
Read the findings of the project in the Let’s Get Real 7 report
Culture24’s newly published Let’s Get Real 7 report contains strategic insights; case studies from the participating organisations; and reflections on how values-led design and thinking can nurture deeper and more meaningful connections both within our organisations and with our audiences.
It explores and unpacks the following:
- where is the sweet spot between digital, people and values?’
- ‘how can digital help us express and enact our organisations’ values in compelling and relevant ways?’
- ‘how can we promote truth and authenticity online?’
With the LGR7 collaborative research project, it felt important to create a space in which our participants could delve more deeply into the values-driven and human side of their digital work because it lies at the heart of cultural organisations’ raison d’être. The participant organisation’s experiments felt to us like the wider sector in microcosm and their findings will have resonance for many.
Download colour version of report
Participating organisations
Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections
Museum of Barnstaple and North Devon
Museums Partnership Reading (The Museum of English Rural Life & Reading Museum)
Tiverton Museum of Mid Devon Life
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
What did Let’s Get Real 7 focus on?
Let’s Get Real 7 (LGR7) tested ways participants could use their existing digital channels in more thoughtful and socially purposeful ways, to foster more meaningful connection between people and communities. We did this by exploring how cultural organisations could align their digital activity more closely with the values-led practices that are beginning to happen more overtly in their physical spaces.
We supported participants to test out small scale interventions to their existing activity on digital channels, which prioritise and respond to human purpose, meaning and values. For example, facilitating conversations or campaigns on social media that aimed to do more than sell tickets, but rather nurture particular human values like curiosity and creativity – familiar ground for many cultural practitioners – but also deeper and arguably more personal values like kindness, integrity and forgiveness.
These changes can be small and cost nothing, but their impact can be huge, not only in human and societal terms, but also in how we as cultural organisations approach, and get value from, our existing digital work.
Why does this matter now?
Read about why we think this is an important area, in these blog posts by our Research Manager Sejul Malde:
- Why should the cultural sector change their existing digital practices to prioritise deeper human connection?
- Taking a values-orientated approach to redesigning our digital practices
What were the timelines for the LGR7 project?
The project ran from March to November 2019.
How do I find out more?
LGR7 is part of Culture24’s series of groundbreaking collaborative action research projects, building on our recent work exploring the relationships between social purpose and digital practice for arts and heritage organisations. To learn more about the Let’s Get Real approach and the type of learning it generates, please read our report Let’s Get Real 6: Connecting digital practice with social purpose.
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