case study: University of Cambridge Museums
A five-star campaign to boost pandemic recovery in the cultural sector
Sectors: Arts and Culture, Leisure and Tourism, Education
The client
The eight University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden represent the UK’s highest concentration of internationally important collections outside London.
With more than five million works of art, artefacts, and specimens, the collections have supported nearly 300 years of investigation into the world around us.
Campaign: #ComeOnInCam
The services
Copywriting
Paid and organic social media
Training
Video
The numbers
Impressions: 800k across Cambridgeshire
Reach: 115,000
Clicks to website: 5684
Post reactions: 988
Video views: 19,000
21 Instagram Reels
4 videos
3 animated idents
8 training sessions for comms teams
The challenge
With the arts and cultural sector being hit so hard by enforced closures due to the pandemic, when things began to open up again in summer 2021 it was vital that visitors were encouraged to return.
We also wanted to reach residents who had never previously set foot in local museums and cultural venues.
The group of museums partnered up with a theatre, concert hall and two further local museums to bid for funding from the Cultural Recovery Fund.
This money was to be spent as efficiently as possible on marketing activities that would get measurable results.
The approach
We developed the five-month #ComeOnInCam digital marketing campaign which ran over late summer, autumn and in the run-up to Christmas.
The simple tagline and messaging was designed to beckon people through the doors of the cultural venues on their doorstep.
In particular, we targeted specific communities who are traditionally hard to reach, to widen participation in arts and culture across Cambridgeshire.
These museum doorways can be intimidating, even for members of the University let alone the general public who might feel these historic buildings just aren't for them.
The focus of the campaign was largely Instagram Reels, with targeted paid activity on Facebook and Instagram to residents across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
We also created a fun animated ident to run across all the video content, which was adapted for each season with falling leaves and pretty snowflakes.
A series of eight training sessions with marketing teams in the partner venues were designed to give them lasting skills in social media, writing for the web, and visual content which would help them promote their venues and collections even more effectively.
We wanted to ensure as much value for money from the Cultural Recovery Funding grant as possible.
The results
Across the advertising, we generated 5,684 clicks to the UCM website where potential visitors could find out more about the museums offer.
More importantly, we generated over 800k impressions across Cambridgeshire with 988 post reactions (including likes).
Some things are harder to measure but still have value - for the cultural sector a moment in someone's head can be as valuable as a click to the website.
The biggest outcome internally was the confidence comms staff gained from taking part in the digital marketing training sessions and creating content.
The campaign also had an affect on the wider staff base as they saw the University beginning to open its doors again.
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If this was an exhibition review, it would be five stars all day long..
Sookio worked with us to pull together messaging, create content (magic), manage our social media advertising, and provided training for staff across the city's cultural spaces to ensure the work had life beyond the campaign budget.
A note on the content (magic). Sookio helped us create a huge number of reels for Instagram. This was an area the museums hadn't played with much, so the learning from the campaign has been really pleasing.
Sookio has that strange mix of feeling like a safe pair of hands, but also highly likely to take you to exciting places you hadn't considered before.
They didn't charge in. They took time to listen to our staff, consider the best approach and utilise their team to get the best results for us.
Marketing & Communications Coordinator, University of Cambridge Museums