This week’s feature is from Royal Academy of Arts – but it’s not their laudable Art is a serious subject campaign.
No.
It’s about a woman called Jennifer and her 1,100 pencils.
I’m not featuring it necessarily for the content design itself – though I do like the RA’s New Yorker-style storytelling for their Instagram carousels. As Twitter dies its death I think we’ll all have to be more creative with storytelling on other channels, and this style of overlaying text on images and dedicating slides to text feels like a visual version of Twitter’s threads.
It’s also impeccably branded, but that’s reliably standard for the RA.
No. It looks nice, but that’s not why I’m talking about it.
I’m talking about it because of two things:
- User-generated content
Reddit recently overtook Twitter as one of the most-used social media channels in the UK, and is composed of a ton of individual subreddits (think: forums) dedicated to every single hobby, interest and community imaginable.
It’s here where Ed Bankes, the RA’s Website Content Manager, has been experimenting with crowdsourcing art-related content, and it’s where he found Jennifer Park.
Jennifer has been collecting museum pencils since 2008, mainly from North America and Europe – and yes, she has catalogued them.
The post itself did well – sitting at nearly 8k Likes – but for me the true impact of the post is within the comments. Here you have people praising Jennifer, asking her if they need pencils from their regions, and sharing their own collections of museum-related tat.
I spent the day yesterday at the Museums Computer Group Museums + Tech 2024 conference, and one of the main themes of the conference was designing content for impact that makes sense for your institution’s values.
The RA represents artists and art, and part of that mission means going beyond the institution’s collections, exhibitions and walls to engage with how real people make and think about real art.
When I worked at the RA I always felt this was their underutilised super power. We’d done the daily doodle, asked people what was on their walls and covered the kind of art we can all connect with (even if it wasn’t in the RA).
Social media is for sharing, and people want to share when they’re given a good enough opportunity.
And on top of that, it’s a case study for how to engage with Reddit. Another classic theme of the conference was to Go Where People Are. People are on Reddit, and have been talking to each other, sharing content and their stories for a long time. Few museums and galleries have figured out how to grapple with the platform, but like with every platform you have to play by their rules.
That means engaging meaningfully with the community, and not just posting what you want people to read, consume or do. It means being upfront about who you are and why you’re on the channel. It means talking to people.
The RA currently doesn’t have an official presence on Reddit – Ed is doing this with a personal account (but makes his affiliation clear, almost using it like a journalist) – but maybe that’s the right way of going about it. Reddit is about individuals, and not big organisations.
What else I’m thinking about
After two weeks of not posting, I recognise it was hubris to call this series ‘Content of the week’.
Sometimes life and work is going to get in the way. I’ll also try and finally set up a newsletter.
I’m also staying at my parents, and as we’re talking about art I thought I’d share one of my teenage creations:
I don’t think I’ll be giving up the day job.
Reach out
Interested in what I do and how I can help? Chatting to me is free, and I can work to your budget :)