Culture 24 hosts Let's Get Real
Marking the launch of it's report Let's Get Real: How to Evaluate Online Success, Culture 24 brought together people from across the cultural sector to talk about how to get real about measuring and evaluating online activity.
With involvement from across the cultural sector, Culture 24's Let's Get Real report shines a light on the challenges in measuring online performance. It highlights the lack of clarity within the sector about how to measure the behaviour of online audiences and offers some practical suggestions for addressing this.
The conference itself, with keynotes from Google's Tom Uglow and Storything's Matt Locke, was an opportunity for everyone to really get under the skin of the issues raised in the report and to share experiences, good and bad.
The predominant themes of the day that resonated were emergent strategy, understanding attention share, and failing quietly and often. As Tom Uglow so nicely put it, we must take a "dignified journey to a digitally immersive culture sector".
And while we were there principally to talk about metrics and analytics, the message that came across strongly was that we all need to make the leap of faith and try things. How else can we learn and and what will there be to measure if we don't?
The Failing Forward session took up this theme with the British Museum, National Museum of Scotland, Kew Gardens, Design Museum, National Maritime Museum and Watershed all sharing their experiences. Their level of openness is truly to be welcomed and led to some good discussion both in the Q&A and throughout the afternoon.
In the afternoon, delegates could choose to either submit their site for a crit session, or use the time to talk to a variety of experts about any specific questions or problems they might have. Cogapp"s own Gavin Mallory was answering questions and giving advice on user experience.
Understanding users was a much talked about topic of the day, with speakers and delegates alike reiterating the importance of understanding what people want.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment - it's at the heart of Cogapp's methodology. But if I were being just a little bit picky, there were times when discussion seemed to focus (with some notable exceptions) on talking about users rather than on talking to them. This is a trap that is surprisingly easy to fall into, especially when we start thinking of people in terms of numbers and segments and demographic, but it must be avoided at all costs if we are to succeed.This conference was a first experience for me in the cultural sector but I was struck by the common themes it shares with both charity and public sectors. The constraints of legacy technology, institutional politics, economics and experience are all ones faced by digital teams across all these sectors, and one way or another, must be overcome if these organisations are to make a successful transition to what Tom Uglow described as the "post-digital age", where for most, digital is not shiny and new, it just "is". In that respect, Jane Finnis is absolutely right, it's time to get real.
