Report by BAM! Empowering Italian GLAMs

November 2023 - June 2024. BAM! Strategie Culturali

Introduction

Starting in November 2023, BAM! Strategie Culturali has been involved as a partner in Empowering Italian GLAMs (in Italian “Tutti i musei italiani su Wikipedia”), together with ICOM Italia, the Italian chapter of Creative Commons, and the Department of Economics and Statistics "Cognetti de Martiis" of the University of Turin, with co-funding from the Wikimedia Foundation.

From this moment, until the conclusion of the first phase of the project (June 2024), BAM! has been working alongside the Wikimedia Italia team to reach out and engage Italian museums and encourage them to join the initiative.

To this end, the BAM! team structured its intervention into these three macro-actions:

Engagement and networking: creation of a specific database of museums and institutions and direct email marketing (DEM) campaign.
Communication campaign: design and implementation of a digital communication campaign, which also included a paid sponsorship campaign on selected channels.
Preliminary workshops: design and implementation of strategic workshops to guide and support joining the project.

The BAM! and Wikimedia Italia teams have collaborated well over the course of these months. Regular meetings were held beginning on November 8, 2023, to plan the work, and weekly meetings took place beginning in January 2024 to ensure that all project actions were in line with the goals.

Engagement and networking

BAM! worked on developing a database of museums and institutions (single organizations, networks, and systems) that could potentially be interested in the project, including both established contacts and new contacts identified as potentially interested through research and mapping.

Overall, the contacts of more than 200 Italian museum institutions were collected, selected among those that had not already initiated the process of participating in the project, distributed in particular over eight Italian regions.

Note that most of the contacts gathered are individuals who hold managerial positions or supervise the departments of communication and/or education at the respective institutions.

Among the contacts collected, in agreement with the Wikimedia team, 35 direct emails were sent to selected contacts. These were intended to inform them about the new collaboration between BAM! and Wikimedia, as well as the project Empowering Italian GLAMs (in Italian "Tutti i musei italiani su Wikipedia"), and to raise awareness of the possibility of taking strategic workshops with BAM!, directing them to the dedicated page wikimedia.it/musei.

Of these 35 contacts, activated starting from March 2024:

5 decided to take part in the preparatory workshops;
11 were recalled in the following months;
3 declined due to institutional limitations.

Communication campaign

In order to spread the word about the initiative and increase its base of participation, BAM! designed and implemented a web and social media communication campaign, with a particular emphasis on the recently introduced opportunity of preliminary mentoring workshops.

In particular, BAM! has:

designed and developed the creativity of the campaign, matching the naming and visual identity to the digital communication materials already in use;
published a dedicated article on the BAM! Strategie Culturali website, with the aim of describing the planned activities and how to join the project;
boosted the project with a feature in issue #2/2024 of Indigestione Culturale, BAM!'s newsletter;
prepared a shared editorial plan with visuals and copy designed for the Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts;
set up an ADS campaign, with a dedicated investment budge, to promote the initiative on online platforms.

Preliminary workshops

From May to June 2024, the BAM! team conducted and facilitated five online workshops, each lasting two hours and intended as a moment of confrontation in support of joining the project.

The institutions involved in the workshops include:

Musei Civici di Imola | May 2
Fondazione Brescia Musei | May 8
Muse - Museo delle Scienze di Trento | May 13
Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta | May 22
Mart - Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto | June 10

For each institution, an average of three resources attended, mostly those involved in the educational and communication areas.

It is worth mentioning that the institutions differ also in their level of experience with Wiki projects and, in general, Wikimedia as an organisation. It is the case of the Mart, which was the first Italian museum to host a Wikipedian in residence (WiR) in 2014, or the Musei Civici di Imola, actively involved in projects and initiatives such as Wiki Loves Monuments and wikigite.

Digital engagement was the lens through which each workshop was designed, with the aim of helping museums identify potential audiences to reach and regular audiences to engage, better define their positioning goals, and match them with the opportunities given by Wiki projects, including Wikipedia and in particular the project Empowering Italian GLAMs.

The workshops were structured in two parts:

the first one, facilitated by the BAM! team, focused on audience and stakeholders and the core issues and content for the organization, with the aim of identifying content and resources relevant to the Wikipedia project;
the second part, led by an expert figure from Wikimedia Italia and facilitated by BAM!, aimed at presenting the Wikimedia projects, in order to identify resources and opportunities in line with the organisation's objectives.

The meetings were conducted using a digital board, which was given to the attendees as a helpful resource along with the meeting recording.