The Challenges to Plan for When Launching a Digital Storytelling Program

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Rachel Cristine Woody. My name is Bradley, and I will be your moderator for this webinar titled The Challenges to Plan for When Launching a Digital Storytelling Program.

Before we start, I would like to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions, as well as knowledge management and library automation systems.

Our brands include Sydney, Presto, Argus, ArchivEra, Eloquent, and CuadraSTAR.

Now I would like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Rachel Christine Woody. Rachel is the owner of Relicura and provides services to museums, libraries, and archives. She specializes in museum collections management systems, digitization technology, digital project management, and digital usership. During the course of her career, she has successfully launched multiple digital projects that include advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management systems. She is also a popular guest author for the Lucidius Think Clearly blog and has provided us with many great webinars that are listed on our website. So please feel free to check those out after today’s session. Take it away, Rachel.

Great. Thank you so much, Bradley, for hosting us today and and to Lucidea as well. And thank you for joining us on another digital storytelling program webinar.

Today, we are going to focus on the challenges piece. So we’ve gone over some great, infrastructure in previous webinar series as well as some great examples. Today, we’re going to tackle challenges and all with a mind towards building that business case.

So for us today, we’re going to first take a look at a decision point, which if you’re entertaining digital storytelling in general, it’s a helpful guide to indicate like is this more experimental, more of a one off versus ongoing program.

We’ll take a look at considering resource needs. So if you are going more towards a digital storytelling program, something that is ongoing.

There are resource needs to consider.

We’re going to dig into some of the technical infrastructure because well some of it can be obvious to those of us who work in digital collections all the time. It’s good to have an outline of all the pieces to consider especially if they are technical pieces not already currently in your collections management area.

We’ll also talk about project inertia that can be one of the main challenges especially when you have something like a new program or a new project idea.

Getting over that inertia can be part of the the hurdle.

There’s also a lack of peer examples. We do have webinars that we took a look at examples in the field, but they are admittedly, not as often or not as frequently found and certainly not as freely available publicly as some of the bigger examples we take a look at. And then sort of piecing that altogether, building that business case, knowing that you’ll need to do some sort of persuasive effort usually to the decision makers, the, you know, whoever is higher up.

We need to take into account the challenges that we’ve covered today and then how we could help address those challenges or at least be knowledgeable about them as we try and persuade, our museum to embark on a digital storytelling program.

Alright. So first up, decision point. And so this is for us to to think about when we’re thinking about doing digital storytelling, are we thinking of it as more of like a one time project or perhaps like a very infrequent special case scenario sort of individual effort versus are we thinking of it as an ongoing program where dedicated resources are needed consistently.

So when we’re thinking of that effort of the one off project, it doesn’t mean you necessarily only do it once and that’s it. But knowing that you may do it so infrequently and it may be such a special case, this is typically true if you are pairing a digital story with a special exhibition.

For example, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in the United States is a big anniversary in this current time frame to celebrate. So usually some special effort is made. And so perhaps your museum is, considering doing a digital story to accompany your two hundred fiftieth exhibit as an example.

And then that ongoing program piece, that is the key to the challenges that we’re gonna take a look at. So for the one time storytelling, yes, it still requires resources, but those resources can be on a smaller scale or can perhaps be substituted out or acquired but very short term. Whereas this ongoing program is going to have ongoing and consistent costs typically, as well as non sort of financial line kind of costs for us to consider.

So if we are thinking about more of the ongoing program piece though again this can certainly help inform your more special scenarios is considering those resource needs. So as an overview the big buckets of resource needs tend to be staff first and foremost.

Even if you have staff in place, we have to keep capacity in mind.

Digitization equipment specifically and for your museum, this may already be something that’s in place, which if so, amazing.

However, you may find that you want to incorporate objects that require slightly different or more specialized digitization, equipment that you may not have already in house. So just a little flag here that even if you’ve got a camera or a flatbread scanner, there may be digital stories that you hope to tell in the future that may require more advanced digitization technology.

Another main component and one that can really help and be leveraged is your collections management system. You have such great information and data in your system already made that you can draw upon.

In addition to often when you have digital surrogates of the objects in your collection quite often it is paired and placed in your CMS.

And then finally the storytelling platform. So there are a number of creative ways you could do it on a more sort of shoestring type budget. You don’t necessarily need to buy into a storytelling platform subscription or tool.

However, if you are thinking of doing a storytelling program that is more of an ongoing effort and or you are considering a really big storytelling project where it leverages quite a bit of more advanced presentation than perhaps your website or your CMS is used to, then knowing what that cost might be is another consideration for your resources and as you’re building your business case.

So technical infrastructure, it includes both people. It includes technology both in terms of like digitization technical tools and includes systems.

One additional, specific piece that is built in here to think about is the digital storage piece. So while you are doing digitization, hopefully, you would already have digital storage in place.

However, with digital storytelling, you may find that you are digitizing things differently or, creating different digital files, perhaps is like a culmination of different digital media put together, for example. So as we think about people, as we think about tools, we also need to think about storage, especially as that may increase or differ from your normal usage and the different systems that are in place.

So just to dig into detail for a little bit. So and knowing that you’re building this business case, it’s often not enough just to be like we’re gonna need stuff, in terms of thinking about the effort.

And especially if you are new to digital storytelling, thinking through the staff that may be needed can be difficult if you’ve never been through it before. So I’ve outlined here examples of different staff type roles to consider that are typically involved in a digital storytelling effort.

This is somewhat subject to the size of the digital story you’re telling as well as whether it’s a one off or a program And it may also be that some of these staff roles are combined and held by one person. So it’s not to say that you need a staff person for each of these roles, but they should be represented as part of the capacity that at least one of your staff members holds.

So roles to think about digitization first and foremost.

Hopefully for many of you, you have digitization in place already in terms of there’s a staff, there who are digitizing your collections, creating those digital surrogates, and the logistics and administrative data pieces that go with that.

If you do not have staff in place already, you would need digital assets and so digitization is going to have to be a role for at least one of your staff members.

Also, even if you have digitization staff in place, if you are increasing the amount of digitization that needs to happen depending on what your story visions are for your program, you may actually find you need to increase your existing capacity.

Another staff role is digital asset management. So as things are digitized, digital surrogates created, as you create digital media specific for the story, there needs to be asset management in place, at least according to best practice. And for everyone’s sanity, there should be digital asset management in place and often that needs to be spearheaded by at least one staff person in terms of where things are going, what the standards and best practices are for how files are saved, where they’re saved, digital file naming conventions.

So having a staff person whose purview is that is a key role for successful storytelling.

We need to think about data capture. So yes, if you have a collections management system, you have at least some data about your objects in the system that you can use.

However, you will likely find that depending on the stories that you are telling, you want to capture additional information whether that information is solely for the story or if there’s a secondary it’s in, you know, info for the story, but it’s also information you can add to your collections management system.

Regardless, you need somebody to do that data capture. So whether that’s gathering that information or if it’s information that needs to be researched and then synthesized or created, having at least one person whose purview is that data capture for those pieces in the story is key.

Then shifting more into story creation. So we’re moving sort from the like digitization digital asset piece, data creation piece of storytelling to the actual story narrative creation.

Sometimes if your staff is large enough, you’ll find staff that have storytelling backgrounds and expertise on the exhibitions team.

That is typically where they’re housed though in your museum they may be housed somewhere different, but essentially you need storytellers.

Now it is true that we can all be storytellers so you this is by no means indicating that you have to have past experience as a storyteller to do it, But if you are building a digital storytelling program, something robust and ongoing that requires consistent effort, it may not be enough that it’s just you as storyteller. You may need additional storytellers.

And in addition to creating the story, it’s not just the the writing, it’s editing and the production. So there’s several elements to the starting and ending of story production where you will need at least one staff person present to help with those different lifts of labor.

So a few different elements to consider some of them are a little unusual for us at least in application for storytelling and certainly helpful to think through if you’re moving more towards program where the staff resources and the consideration of staff capacity is going to be required to be successful, in having those adequately measured for your program.

So one of the other challenges is the project inertia piece. So we’ve got sort of a part one part two.

When you are starting a new program, any sort of new effort is going to have some inertia, especially if it’s something new completely to the museum and or yourself.

So some things to think about is who is a part of the digital storytelling program team.

We got a nice little preview of staff roles that are typically used or present at least when we’re in that story creation mode. So having to think through with your own museum in mind and staff present and thinking through who needs to be on that project team. So very first part, who needs to be involved essentially is like step one of getting over that inertia.

Step two is how do you even know or choose what story is going to be told?

If you’re doing a program, of course, you can do many types of stories, but having that slate of stories selected is another sort of first step in terms of before you embark on story creation, you first need to know what sort of story you are hoping to tell. So having that decided will also help get over that inertia piece.

Some infrastructure pieces that can help with inertia is project timeline and breaking down that project timeline into activities that could be assigned to individuals, especially as you’ve already identified what sort of of staff roles you would like present as part of a storytelling program.

So using that prior decision making and using, even if it’s your first time, sort of a first draft of what the project timeline would look like and then having those staff roles assigned will be in other, even in draft form, another vehicle to help move through this initial inertia.

Another item, objects selected from the collection to help illustrate the story. So once you’ve sort of decided what type of story or like the rough sketch of the first story you would like to have told, having objects or examples, visuals, whatever that looks like for your story, having some of those picked out doesn’t have to be all of them but at least some of them can help serve as further inspiration and can help further flesh out the digital story idea which can also be particularly helpful for other people on your team or if you’re still in that persuasive case mode with your higher ups at the museum administration having examples to help fill out the story idea can be incredibly helpful.

And then of course choosing a digital story pathway type So in some of our previous digital storytelling webinars we focus quite a bit on the infrastructure that tends to be present within digital storytelling and so you’ve got some great examples you can choose from there.

But typically you want to think about is this a one way through straight storytelling pathway beginning to end? Is this a there’s no particular pathway to the story? You can experience it in any sort of order and you still get the sense of the story.

You also can choose additional things like what sort of senses do you hope to engage? What sort of visual tools can you help implement for engagement? So there’s additional details that you could choose and further flesh out as you think about the actual infrastructure of the story that you are telling.

So project inertia part two. So identification of storytelling performance and sensory types. So we touched on the infrastructure on our last little bullet point on the last slide. So this gets into, the performance piece, whether you are including performance type of text or audio or both, for example.

Sensory types in that case means you’re engaging sight, but you’re also engaging our auditory senses. There can be some additional sensory things you can play with as well through digital storytelling, which you can see in some of our previous examples. But even just having a rough sketch of what sort of performance type will be present, what sort of senses you hope to engage will all help.

These little micro decisions all help to get you through the bigger inertia.

Another thing to consider content to incorporate into the story. So having a sense of what you want the story about, having a sense of the objects you might include, making some decisions on storytelling infrastructure, and then getting through to what sort of content that you would like to place within that story. So you can see we’re starting to put additional detail onto our story framework as you sort of move it through this draft mode which will lead us to somewhat of a story outline. And regardless of whether it’s like a start to end story, very linear, or like a multiple pathway story, having a story outline even in draft form will help to communicate the idea, especially if it’s coming from your brain and you need to communicate it to a dozen other different brains.

Having that outline piece will help make all of the other pieces understandable and it will be more actionable for the actual actionable for the actual storytelling construction.

So digital storytelling framework ready for content and then decisions on color lighting font. So you get to see we’re moving more into those actual production elements based off of the decisions and the information that you’ve gathered in this sort of previous inertia addressing.

So some advice to sort of take away as we walked through sort of how to work through the various inertia.

Creating a project framework and addressing pieces outlined that we just walked through can be incredibly helpful, even if it’s just like a one to two page sort of project memo framework. And in fact, shorter is often better especially if communicating with other people.

Also, copy and adapt and exhibit project management template or whatever sort of project management template or sort of storytelling template that may already be in place at your museum can be incredibly helpful. One, not to recreate the wheel, but two, it’s something that’s already somewhat familiar to other people on the team.

Three, begin a story outline on paper. Sometimes it’s helpful just to like brainstorm and just start getting ideas on paper. So you don’t necessarily need to walk through each step of inertia as I outlined it in this webinar. You are welcome to tackle what are the areas of inertia that seem the easiest for you to tackle things you may already have answers for. And the more you can start filling in on paper, the more concrete and cohesive your idea will be.

And then also brainstorming possible story elements with the team. Sometimes the hardest part is to know what story you’re telling, like where do you even start with what story you want to tell.

And that can be a great opportunity, especially if you’re building a new team for the storytelling effort to start that brainstorming and sort of story dreaming with additional members from that team. So, outsourcing and brainstorming ideas together is always another great way to tackle that inertia.

Another challenge for us is the the no peer examples and certainly lack of examples in general. In some of our previous webinars there were like a couple museums that we were able to show you efforts for. They were mostly special case sort of, story examples.

And then we also showed you some examples that weren’t strictly museums but could certainly be informative to how you approach your storytelling program.

So places like the sphere in Las Vegas, for example, as a digital storytelling space where inspiration could be derived.

So knowing that there’s sort of a lack of peer examples of peer in the sense of either museums that are also local in your area or peer museums that have similar collections that you do, that are perhaps not in your local city but are considered sort of your peers in terms of collection and museum type and shape.

Digital storytelling because it does take additional resources, which is the focus of this webinar, not a lot have, had the opportunity to dabble in it fully and so having that sort of lack of example can be difficult when making your persuasive case, especially since those peer examples can act as the visual aids. So, knowing there’s a lack of examples, it can also make it difficult for museum staff, especially if you’re trying to introduce the concept of digital storytelling to staff who may not be as aware of some of these efforts or tools available.

And that also those pair examples can help act as benchmarks for reference. So like how big do you go with your digital storytelling? What tools do you use?

How many stories do you produce a year? These can be harder to sort of, ascertain at the beginning because you’re just starting and if you don’t have pure examples to reference like oh you know such and such museum just three stories a year and they’re similar size that seems doable.

So it can create an inertia of a different kind in terms of just that lack of example.

So looking towards some of the examples we covered in webinar series previously can be helpful and then of course always keeping your eye out for examples of what you’re seeing your other museum peers do or even people in an adjacent field not necessarily a museum, but doing something similar in terms of that storytelling piece.

So advice for the no peer examples challenge is it it will get easier digital storytelling is becoming more common especially as the technology is becoming even easier to use and cheaper to acquire.

And there’s some good like free to low cost subscription examples that we’ve covered in the past that can certainly help at least get your to cut your teeth on so to speak and test whether or not that’s the tool you want to use.

And then look at examples in other fields. As I had mentioned, specifically the Tulsa Race Massacre of nineteen twenty one is a digital story that the New York Times put out, so NYT and New York Times obviously newspaper journalism field not a museum and yet the story they tell is obviously a historical story. They draw, the story draws on collections from museums and archives.

So the materials used and the story, the type of story being told is very similar and very applicable. You can see the application to a museum considering it. So if you look to look at any example, I suggest that one in terms of getting some ideas and inspiration from.

Alright so now that we sort of chewed our way through the various challenges that we can be present and how we might think about those challenges and address them.

We want to start building that business case and part of that is addressing challenges. Another part of that is thinking about benefits.

Benefits, we will talk about in the next webinar. So definitely tune in for that part of the business case. But first up is challenges. And so I’ve put together a few prompts for you to think through.

We’ll go through these in a bit more detail in terms of talking through some examples in just a moment. But I wanted you to have a slide of prompts to think about as you consider the challenges and how you may write about those as you begin to open up and build that business case. So, first part of the prompts are the typical prompts we would think of regardless of what type of project or program we’re about to embark on. And that’s thinking through what is produced, what is what is the point, what is coming out of this particular effort we are proposing.

And then how does it exemplify the museum mission? And then of course how does it connect to the museum strategic plan? Those are two questions that are usually always on any sort of why are we doing this sort of proposal and so should definitely be considered and at the top of your business case.

And then it gets into the familiar challenges that we’ve talked about today. It asks what sort of personnel tools and other resources are needed.

So very much thinking through both people but also perhaps the digital tools and then any other sort of maybe not directly known resources.

The typical how much money does it cost, knowing what sort of costs are involved are always a decision factor for many museums, the majority of museums in terms of what they’re able to commit to and take on.

How much money will it bring in if this is a project or program that brings them money?

That is always a question that’s asked even if it’s not a project that brings in money directly.

Speaking to the indirect benefits can be incredibly helpful.

And then, of course, who else is doing it? The typical like, you know, well, such and such museum doing it, and for us knowing there’s sort of a lack of example, we might need to get creative there. And then why should we do it? So hopefully some of the other prompt answers have led to a very obvious why should we do it, but it always helps to state that quite obviously when you are doing that sort of business proposal.

So getting into some examples specifically for how you might be able to answer these building the business case what is produced we are producing a story essentially.

Depending on your museum and your higher ups in terms of what sort of language resonates with them, you may wanna tweak the words you use accordingly. But what we’re going for here is a story. And most often the, most similar example can be like the stories we tell through our exhibitions.

While this doesn’t necessarily need to be an online exhibition because that is in fact different than a digital story.

Talking through what that difference is can also be additionally helpful because if your museum higher ups for whatever reason only here like, oh, we’re gonna use, collections. We’re gonna, you know, use them as visuals online and tell a little story.

They may wonder if it is in fact just like, well, we have our objects online. So why do we need to do the story? So you need to sort of bridge the gap a little bit in terms of taking the two things they’re most familiar with, the physical exhibitions and having the collections online CMS access and how the story actually helps better bridge the gap between the two. So telling stories with your collection, leveraging your CMS absolutely, and leveraging usually, exhibitions that have been done in the past or present. But needing to connect that what is produced piece and more specifically how is it different from things that are already being produced with the caveat how you could leverage those because that part’s a bonus.

Alright. The museum mission. How does it exemplify museum mission? How does it connect to the museum strategic plan? For the majority of the museums, the mission is going to be something of providing access and education around whatever it is in our collection.

So telling a story is is a very easy obvious tie for us in terms of it is for the audience, it helps reach the audience, it’s using the collection, it’s providing education and access to the collection, Like the storytelling is very much within a museum mission.

The strategic plan will depend on what is in your museum’s strategic plan, but usually always there are at least one or two strategic pillars or whatever your museum calls them within the plan that are obvious candidates. Usually there’s always an access pillar, broadening access, improving our increasing engagement to access to collections or information.

There will almost always be some sort of education or advocacy component, which of course telling stories is another avenue for providing that collections education, providing information on a subject, that kind of thing. So it may look different depending on what what I call the pillars are in your strategic strategic plan, but there will usually always be at least a couple that you can draw upon.

For the question, will it bring in money?

Directly, probably not unless you are requiring like a subscription to control access to the story.

However, what it does do is ties into all of the indirect ways your museum is already bringing in money. So we know collections online, again, assuming you’re not like gatekeeping collections online with, like, a login, your collections online are freely available and searchable by anybody as much as they want. That is not bringing in direct revenue, but what we do know is that it’s bringing in indirect revenue by providing more access to collections. You’re increasing interest in it. You’re increasing use of the collections and research and education.

You are increasing interest in the collections and people are more often to visit a museum after viewing your collections online.

Many of these statistics you can find on, like American Alliance on Museums.

We know that having collections online can help generate interest and storytelling using collections online is one more tool for us to do that. One more tool that brings in that indirect money by generating interest, by providing education, increasing awareness and the like the golden part here sort of the up level of it is it goes a step beyond just collections online, which is an important piece, but it goes a step above because you’re telling the narrative using your collections online and it’s sometimes that jump to the telling the story piece that is the most critical in terms of efficacy in people paying attention, people, staying with the digital story longer, people remembering the digital story, having to actually drive action to visiting the museum because of the story. So there are some metrics that we can intuit here based on other statistics that we know.

And we can also forecast knowing that a story will have more efficacy more likely knowing that those will likely bring in and drive more indirect revenue.

And then the who else is doing it? So there are a few museums, of course, doing this or at least dabbling in it.

And there are, examples in those adjacent fields. So again, while the New York Times is in the journalism field and not in the museum field, It is like a very clear, like, kindred spirit example of why we do storytelling, what it can look like, what the takeaways are from it. So even if you don’t have a example that’s from a museum down the street, we can get creative here in terms of pointing to examples where it’s very easy to see, how those examples demonstrate the value and potential success if you were to implement storytelling at your own museum.

Alright building the business case personnel. I did want to take a moment to drill deeper into the staff piece because that is often one of the more challenging pieces. People are expensive from a budget perspective, and capacity is usually always an issue for staff. So even if you have existing staff in place that can fill many of the roles that we talked about earlier, We need to make sure that we are aware of who is present, what their capacity is, and being thoughtful in whether or not there’s capacity because something else can be sort of deprioritized or if perhaps staff need to be added even in a temporary sense to help with that capacity and staff resource piece.

So curator is usually one of the people or peoples involved depending on how big your museum is.

Curator is typically one that helps to pick and craft a story when we’re speaking in more traditional exhibition terms. So having a curator present is usually helpful in a digital storytelling program.

They are of course notoriously very busy and already have other existing roles, so making sure thoughtful conversation and some balancing is happening there.

Education staff are also another obvious choice of staff to have involved in a digital storytelling program. If your museum is large enough to have an educational staff, amazing.

They’re also typically staff that have quite a bit of work and so working with them to understand what capacity might be available, what interest or resources may already be available through what they’re doing that could help be leveraged.

So thoughtful conversations here.

Then, of course, digitization staff or contractor.

You may have staff in place for digitization and maybe sort of ad hoc, maybe you outsource.

And as you increase, if you need to increase digitization for an upcoming huge story you want to tell, then having perhaps supplemented contractor support or outsourcing to a vendor is a consideration as you’re thinking about that personnel piece.

And then of course collections manager, registrar, collections specialist, whatever the role is at your museum or perhaps there’s more than one of you, which is amazing if that’s the case.

This type of role will almost always be present and is a a linchpin of pulling the storytelling team together, pulling curatorial with education, pulling collections management into it, and getting that storytelling from beginning to end. The collections manager will typically be touching all pieces from start to end where other pieces of or where other roles of staff may only be in certain phases of that storytelling project.

So of course those roles also at capacity, it may be something where you bring on if you’re able to increase staff great, even if it’s temporary with paid internship or a six month contractor, especially if you’re in like an experimental phase, finding ways where you could increase capacity a little bit knowing that you’ll be taking up time from these various individuals with the building of the storytelling program.

Thinking through cost a little bit I wanted to give you some numbers to play with. This will of course depend on your museum and the size of the effort of the storytelling program you’re hoping to build.

We talked about staff and supplementing with contractors. And so thinking through a potential budget of what that might look like, if we’re thinking sort of modest, small to modest sized efforts, small to modest sized museum, I would suggest sort of a finger in the air estimate of fifteen thousand to help with, like, paid internship and or contractor, to help with that capacity piece. Depending on staff capacity and how big the effort is, you may want to increase that.

If you are in fact good with staff capacity, or otherwise don’t need it, additionally funded through the storytelling program. You don’t need to include it but just trying to give you a number to be helpful here.

Thinking through the digital storytelling platform cost itself.

I mentioned many of them have like a free to low cost option.

Several of them it’s one of those like your first story free kind of thing and then if you like it and are doing more stories then it’s like a subscription thing.

From previous examples one of the more popular platforms was called Shorthand, one of the scrolly telling platforms where digital stories are published online.

And if you do Shorthand, it’s four eighty dollars annually And then if you are actually looking to do I think it’s more than three stories a year, so you’re moving more into, like, active robust use.

It does start going up, but you start getting discounts too. So if it’s building a bigger program more than three stories a year, you may be looking at a few thousand dollars a year for that sort of subscription.

But it’s certainly something to test out, do some research on the storytelling platforms you want to use, but helpful to have a number just sort of sketched in here as you put this plan together.

And then, additional digitization or like additional storage for as you create these digital storytelling looms essentially.

If your subscription is not already picking up digital storage for that digital story, that may impact you, more directly. And so thinking about additional storage for whether you’re doing a digital digitization and or whether you need a place to actually store what is the media of your digital story. So, the longer we go on the, cheaper digital storage gets, as we increasingly use it. So even just a couple hundred dollars can usually get you a couple terabytes worth and can often be enough at least for your first few stories as you sort of fill your way through your program and how big of stories you are telling.

Alright, the why piece which is as we mentioned is an important persuasive element to the business case.

So some things, you’re welcome to use these ideas as part of like why why do digital storytelling? Why, and above and beyond things that you’re already doing?

So an example, due to exhibit space limitations, portions of the exhibit story, were removed or just couldn’t be included in that physical space. And so being able to tell a fuller story online as a digital version of the exhibit, Having that digital story with those included pieces can be a lovely complement to the actual physical exhibition and can help be a persuasive piece of like we can tell this fuller story in this bigger online space.

Two, digital story helps to reach a more remote audience who aren’t local.

Much of what we’re finding, especially the more we put our collections online is that we’re finding people who are more connected for various reasons, more interested in our collections than perhaps our more local audience.

And both are important, but just now starting to realize in a larger field sense that our digital community, our online community is there and can sometimes be larger than our in person community. It is so important that we start spending time and intention in reaching that online audience and having these digital stories is one way to do that one way to help engage and further attract that remote audience to your museum.

A third item is the digital story can complement k K through twelve curriculum, especially if you’re thinking about, local K through twelve or even remote K through twelve curriculum.

Having your collections with a story being told, it can be very easy to build in some suggested lesson plans.

Stories often lend themselves a little bit easier to existing curriculum than just a physical exhibit does for example and certainly more than just a collections management system does. So leveraging those certainly, but the story itself is actually more easily applied in a curriculum setting.

Fourth, a digital presence will help raise awareness of the Museum and the exhibit. So if your story happens to pair with an exhibit, raising awareness of that exhibit, absolutely.

Your story doesn’t always have to pair with an exhibit, but having that story online often attracts foot traffic, can often attract press, especially if the story you’re telling is of interest, whether locally or nationally.

And so having that digital story, again, sort of more, more than our online collections can, and sometimes even more than our physical exhibits can, can attract the attention and raise the awareness in a bit of a different, and perhaps more efficient way.

And then last, launching a technically advanced and innovative program can be used to attract donors and grants. So using a digital storytelling platform, putting forth, like the scrolly telling stories that we looked at in previous webinar and knowing that our peers aren’t really engaging in it quite fully just yet means that you’re ahead of the curve so to speak in terms of using and testing this concept of digital storytelling and embarking on a digital storytelling program.

I for one as someone in the field for twenty years. I don’t see storytelling going away, not the digital kind and I only see this growing especially given how much more approachable it can be for all ages and sort of all brains.

So that will be very attractive to grants and donors.

You may want to target the more opportunities that focus on like a technical innovation piece first, but the more mainstream these digital storytelling programs become, the more mainstream grants and donor opportunities you could likely use as well.

Alright. So we covered quite a bit today. We covered the first important part of the decision which is is this just sort of a one off or an infrequent experiment kind of thing or is this a digital storytelling program? We are building this program. We will be doing storytelling consistently year upon year. So needing to determine that because that will also dictate then how big the challenges are or if they exist, depending on if you’re in that experimental phase versus moving into program phase where these challenges are very real and need to be accounted for and addressed.

And specifically taking into consideration resource needs, knowing the technical infrastructure, size and shape, and getting into some of the detail as to how those may already be in place that need to be expanded upon.

We took a look at the challenges of project inertia, especially when creating a new program or embarking on this new type of project, not having a blueprint of doing it before you can have some project, inertia there that can be addressed. We gave you some advice. And then we took a look at the no peers examples challenge that can be present, especially since that tends to be a bit of a crutch for higher ups who make decisions. They tend to want to know if other peer museums are doing it. So we gave you some advice, an example to check out there.

And then we went through building a business case, at least the first part. We talked about the beginning of knowing how the digital storytelling program is addressing and supports museum mission and strategic plan as well as covering how we would address challenges, what the costs may be, all of those questions your administration would have that we’re proactively answering and addressing as part of making our persuasive case.

All right. So with that, before I turn it back over to Bradley, I just wanted to plug the latest book collaboration that I’ve done with Lucidea Press, The Discovery Game Changer. This is focused on your museum collections management system and specifically the data and what we can do to enhance our data that increases the discovery and use of our collections. So if that’s something that you’re super interested in, Lucidea Press is offering a free e copy. And so you can follow that link to get a copy of the book.

And with that, I’ll hand it back over to you, Bradley.

Thank you, Rachel, for the wonderful presentation. And if you’d like to learn more about our museum collections management system called Argus, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales at lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

And if you have any more questions on any of our software or our company, our contact details are listed on the screen, and please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to this series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today, and until next time. Thanks.