MW2015: Museums and the Web 2015

Over recent years, Tate has sought to develop a digital roadmap that is aligned to audience needs by improving understanding of digital audiences and by developing a shared language around those audiences. To achieve this, Tate is building a resource containing evaluation reports, audience research and set of tools for the organisation (and hopefully others) to use.

Realising that such work was increasingly of interest across the sector, Tate decided to make this work was public as possible to generate discussion and to foster greater maturity in approaches to digital metrics. Furthermore, Tate felt that it was appropriate for it to share it’s work other museums who do not have the luxury of being able to put dedicated resources into this area.

The Tate Digital Metrics online resource features:

• A digital metrics dashboard Excel template which is used by Tate and is Creative Commons licenced for others to use and build on. It includes instructions for other organisations to use and customise. The template has been downloaded over 1,300 times.
• Audience research and evaluation reports for individual initiatives and projects, including a variety of user generated content projects and the usage of Tate’s online collection.
• A blog sharing the team’s thinking around the of ongoing audience research and inviting comments from the community.
• A website audience segmentation based on over a year’s quantitative and qualitative analysis of Tate’s website users. The overview page is supplemented by a downloadable leaflet which provides more indepth information. The page received over 870 visits in the first two months.

There has been national and international interest in this work, resulting in an informal international network of museum professional practitioners and regular enquiries from post-graduate students.