Global events like the World Cup are a great opportunity for anthropology museums – with collections objects from cultures all around to world – to engage audiences.
During the 2014 World Cup (held in Brazil), the Horniman Museum and Gardens ran two social media campaigns: #WorldCups and #MuseumMatch.
On the day the World Cup began, we shared cups from our collections using the hashtag #WorldCups. Cups came from all around the world, made from a variety of materials, sizes, types.
We encouraged other museums from all around the world to also take part.
You can see a round-up of the tweets here:
https://storify.com/HornimanMuseum/worldcups
We also shared a slideshow of their cups: http://www.horniman.ac.uk/collections/stories/world-cups/
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Later, during the the knockout stages of the World Cup, we took to Twitter to share objects from the competing countries using the hashtag #MuseumMatch.
Our collections contain a wealth of objects from around the world, including all the countries which made it to the later stages of the tournament.
We paired up some of the most interesting, intriguing or inspiring objects from our stores and asks our followers to pick the one they’d like to find out more about.
By asking our followers to make a choice allowed us to get some idea of which objects able to spark their interest, and what information they most wanted to learn.
Once our followers answered the question, we followed up with a range of other questions – in an attempt to stimulate longer, deeper conversations about our collections. We were hoping to mimic the obejct-based learning approaches used by our colleagues in our Learning department and seeing if these could be applied to online social spaces.
See these links for some examples or search the hashtag #MuseumMatch