This article is part of the “Communications 2022” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

We posed four basic questions around the use of social media among children’s museums around the U.S.  Responses from the museums listed below left reflect the new and ever-changing territory navigated daily by staff charged with communicating in an increasingly and pandemic-accelerated digital world.

PARTICIPATING MUSEUMS

Amazement Square (Lynchburg, Virginia)
Morgan Kreutz, Vice President

Brooklyn Children’s Museum (New York)
Winston Williams, Manager of Communications

Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose (California)
Joey Sanchez, Director of Marketing & Communications

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (Dover)
Neva Cole, Communications Director

The Children’s Museum at Saratoga (New York)
Ben LaPoint, Digital Media Coordinator

Discovery Center Museum (Rockford, Illinois)
Ann Marie Walker, Director of Marketing

Greentrike (Tacoma, Washington)
Rolfe Bautista, Communications Manager, and Rebecca Schrack, Communications Coordinator

The Iowa Children’s Museum (Coralville)
Amanda Thys, Director of Marketing & Communications

KidsQuest Children’s Museum (Bellevue, Washington)
Melissa Berger, Digital Marketing Manager

Mighty Children’s Museum (Chillicothe, Ohio)
Kelcie Pierce, Executive Director

Mississippi Children’s Museum (Jackson)
Clara Williams, Digital Media & Website Coordinator

The Peoria Playhouse Children’s Museum (Illinois)
Jada Culberson, Community Engagement & Marketing Manager

Please Touch Museum (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Amanda Mahnke, Director of Marketing & Communications

 

BIGGEST SUCCESSES

Amazement Square
Over the last two years we have exponentially increased our social media presence and audience and have “found our groove” with content that resonates the most with varied audiences.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum
In winter 2021-2022 we opened our rooftop ArtRink: a synthetic-ice skating rink meets winter wonderland meets visual arts exhibition. A little out of left field from our typically offerings, this complex concept also faced a well-established competitor with both a polished message and faithful audience.

First, we designed it to be as visually appealing as possible, with strategic branding placement throughout the experience to increase word-of-mouth when shared.

Opening into the headwinds of Omicron, we also invested in collateral advertising and doubled down on targeted advertising on social. Rather than launch it as the big holiday experience we originally envisioned, we positioned ArtRink as a safe, smaller-scale opportunity for families to play outside and where children could learn to skate. To emphasize the “wow” factor of the physical space, we hired an agency to produce a couple of high-impact videos including some drone footage of the rink with the NYC skyline in the background.

It was a huge hit. Thousands of families from Brooklyn and beyond came to the museum just to experience it during its three-month run; plans for a bigger, better 2.0 version are slated for the end of this year.

Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
Our year-end performance on social, and in particular, Instagram. Two giveaways that included museum tickets and a family membership generated significant excitement, engagement, and follower growth. It was so successful that we plan to integrate giveaways into our quarterly strategy. We’ve also seen a lot of success with photo carousels and user-generated content on our social media pages.

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire
With a robust YouTube page and educators willing to make videos, since March 2020, we have created 155+ educational videos that have been viewed across all our platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram) a total of over 225k times (as of January 2022)! This growing library of videos makes excellent social media content throughout the year.

The Children’s Museum at Saratoga
Spending more time developing and making consistent posts as well as making efforts to increase engagement, our social media analytics have shown positive growth.

Discovery Center Museum
For Discovery Center Museum’s 40th anniversary in 2021, we had anticipated a huge celebratory public event, a private event for donors, an event for members, as well as other happenings. Then COVID hit. With Illinois’s COVID restrictions and locally high case numbers, for months our capacity was limited to 50 guests. Large events were out of the question, but we still wanted to share this milestone and feel the gratitude we had for our members, guests, and supporters over the years. Through a social media campaign, we solicited photos, favorite memories, and testimonials from the public with fantastic results. Through social media and our website, we shared user-generated content and created an anniversary video. Connecting with current members and volunteers as well as many from decades past, we now have a wonderful collection of digital images and testimonials to use in the future as well!

Greentrike
Over the last six months, we have integrated a variety of scheduled updates. The regularity and transparency of these communications have built expectations among our audiences for what kind of information and resources they can expect us to provide.

The Iowa Children’s Museum
Our education and exhibits team created a puppet version of our mascot, Pete the Turtle, which provided new social content and opportunities to collaborate with community partners. In the last six months, ads, giveaways, and special discounts for memberships have been crucial to rebuilding our membership base post-pandemic.

KidsQuest Children’s Museum
Reaching out to patrons to ask them to submit names for our two exhibit animals, a sheep, now called Lady Baba, and a cow named Mooriah. Fun and playful, comments and likes were up more than 50 percent.

Mighty Children’s Museum
Capturing 10k followers in roughly fifteen months through our story, which began on Facebook and then expanded into other platforms (Instagram and TikTok).

Mississippi Children’s Museum
Our announcement that the museum had won  the 2021 National Medal for Museum and Library Service organically reached over 2 MILLION people on Facebook!

The Peoria Playhouse Children’s Museum
Experimenting with contests, videos, staff stories, and sharing mission-related posts from other sources, the staff stories and mission-related posts seem to be doing best.

Please Touch Museum
The name recognition alone of our next traveling exhibit, The Wizard of Oz Educational Exhibit, guaranteed excitement. But we were still surprised when our Facebook announcement post reached 23,475 people, with 131 likes, 62 comments, and 53 shares! Our highest reaching post in the past two years.

BIGGEST CHALLENGES

Amazement Square
Getting our constituency to commit to attending events. While we have an abundance of interest and “virtual confirmations,” the translation to physical attendance has been difficult.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum
Communication of multiple goings-on across many channels on a tight budget with a team of limited bandwidth. It’s a constant balancing act to maintain a consistent message and presence.

Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
Having enough capacity to create new content for the website/blog, which can then be repurposed and promoted on social. With programs moving from all virtual, to hybrid, to all in-person, the pandemic also provided a whole new set of challenges in representing content visually. Masked vs. unmasked photography of our activities made a big difference in the way our audience perceived us. Gauging their comfort level to return was difficult, and we took—and continue to take—a lot of criticism from the anti-mask side.

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire
Switching to an online registration/pre-payment system, which we love, but communicating the ins and outs of that system is still prone to misunderstanding. From finding the right ways to spell out reservation steps to ensuring that the process doesn’t actually prevent people from visiting is a big concern. We try to mitigate any difficulty by making sure guests can reserve their spots quickly and easily over the phone. We also offer a $0 option to simply reserve a date and time online and then pay at the door upon arrival making the museum more accessible to people using EBT cards or free passes.

The Children’s Museum at Saratoga
Money. Social media basically costs time and is accessible to everyone, but content can easily get lost in the ocean of posts, especially ones with broad and popular appeal. Utilizing other forms of communication, such as radio ads that better target our core demographics would be great, but many of them are out of our price range. We have explored the idea of geofencing, but again, the cost of initiating and running both options long enough to gauge response is an investment outside a budget focused on the more immediate needs of our audience, donors, and sponsors.

Discovery Center Museum
Internal: Training new staff and keeping them up to date as our policies change. Several key staff positions vacated during COVID have not been filled. It has been challenging for our small staff, often taking on new duties, to get the communication they need to be effective and feel well connected to the organization.

External: With a reduced budget, maximizing communications to help rebuild our membership base, communicate changing mask, capacity, and reservation policies, and marketing classes and events.

Greentrike
Reaching new audiences in an increasingly crowded digital communications space. We have revitalized existing communications methods and launched new systems, but new audience growth is happening at a slower pace than pre-pandemic levels.

The Iowa Children’s Museum
Sharing our nonprofit mission and looking for more ways to communicate all the ways we serve our community. Many local residents see the museum as more of an “indoor playground in the mall” and are unaware that we provide accessible, educational play opportunities in our museum and outside our walls.

KidsQuest Children’s Museum
KidsQuest is much more than just a physical space so it’s tough to keep our followers up to date on all we have going on—from in-museum programs, to outreach, to our work in the community and with community partners—without confusing or overwhelming them with messages.

Mighty Children’s Museum
Attracting new visitors! We hear the phrase “I didn’t even know this place was here” far too often. In a small town, this comment makes us wonder how we can attract (and keep) our online visitors, but we would like everyone who is liking or following our pages to step foot inside our doors!

Mississippi Children’s Museum
With so much happening at the museum, it can be difficult to find the line between keeping our followers informed and overwhelming them with too much content.

The Peoria Playhouse Children’s Museum
Staff time. We are only seven years old and lots of people in our community don’t know we are here, or even what a children’s museum is!

Please Touch Museum
Keeping up with changing social media algorithms. Right now, Instagram Reels are important for engagement, but will they be in six months? Reels require significantly more work to create than photo-driven posts, which formed the majority of our previous posting plan.

Getting engagement on our posts, particularly when we ask viewers to share something in the comments. We have a significant follower count on our platforms, but they are not active commenters, which hurts our organic reach.

BIGGEST SURPRISES

Amazement Square
We monitor our social media posts and catch problems before they go too far, but it is so easy for messages to be taken out of context and publicly disseminated to hundreds at the click of a button.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum
You have to give people what they want—and quickly—or they move on. At the beginning of COVID we experimented with digital-only programming, including short videos for YouTube and public broadcast television. As wonderful as these experiments were, it showed us that our biggest fans aren’t looking for that, at least not from us. They want one-of-a-kind programs and performances they can experience in-person to form lasting memories and be exposed to entirely new ideas and ways of life. Reopening to visitors and resuming regular hours and live cultural festivals reminded us how essential it is to align all of our content—in-person and online—with our audience’s desires. Don’t fight uphill battles—focus on giving people what they want.

Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
We are more resilient than we thought we could be with reduced staff. Different kinds of content can work well on organic versus paid. For example, text graphics don’t typically do well on our organic social, but event text graphics do very well on paid social.

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire
Spending more time crafting content doesn’t always translate to more views. Don’t be afraid to be silly and human. Not in a million years would I have predicted having to defend a museum health and safety policy like mask wearing. We learned when to respond to comments, when to let extreme opinions sit without response among more balanced opinions from other followers, and when to turn off comments if things get out of hand!

The Children’s Museum at Saratoga
How much tracking of an individual’s habits and locations takes place. Useful from a marketing standpoint, but it really opened my eyes to just how much information about you is out there.

Discovery Center Museum
How TikTok has grown and been utilized by museums.

Greentrike
Although social media has been a primary vehicle for organizations to self-promote and share information for the last decade, the ways in which different age groups engage with it remains incredibly varied. For some, following organizations to stay in the know is second nature, while others need to be directed to our social media accounts by other means, such as televised promotions and word of mouth.

The Iowa Children’s Museum
The quick shift to video content! We have a lot of work to do in order to keep up with this new emphasis on TikTok/Reels videos.

KidsQuest Children’s Museum
Our followers are invested in the community and engage particularly well with posts about Black Lives Matter and BIPOC-focused stories about individuals or organizations.

Mighty Children’s Museum
How accessible we can be. We can post changes to programming and daily experiences virtually; we can even convert programs to solely online offerings through Facebook live or posted videos if we need to. The pandemic accelerated our skills in using online platforms to deliver both messages and content.

Mississippi Children’s Museum
How much things change in such a short amount of time! Staying up-to-date on social media trends is a challenge in this digital age.

The Peoria Playhouse Children’s Museum
The posts that you think would do really well aren’t always the ones that do. Sharing pictures from programs doesn’t do well. Sharing from other sources does (but not reliably). We shared a Cuddlebug post that did really well.

BIGGEST QUESTIONS

Amazement Square
How can we secure nonprofit donor status for our Facebook page so that we can build a donation page? We have provided the necessary information but we keep getting rejected and can’t reach anyone to figure out why.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum
What’s next (besides TikTok)? How to succeed in a digital world that is becoming more privacy-minded, where users are allowed to opt-out of analytics?

Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
Any tips on the fastest and most efficient ways to create blogs and other longer-form content? So worth it, but so time-consuming.

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire
Is it really worth the money to advertise consistently on Facebook and Instagram? Should it be worked into your annual budget or can you get away with “here and there” event-related boosting?

The Children’s Museum at Saratoga
What is the best way to monitor how social media posts impact real world results? How can I find out how many people came to an event because of our social media posts?

Discovery Center Museum
For small marketing departments with limited staff and resources, which social media platform(s) should we focus our attention on?

Greentrike
With social media platforms maturing from purely social networks into ones geared towards monetization, what are your predictions and recommendations for platforms yielding the most organic audience growth, brand content growth, and audience engagement with museums?

The Iowa Children’s Museum
Given the ongoing shifts in social media platform usage, especially for younger generations, what are the most effective ways to reach today’s parents of young children?

KidsQuest Children’s Museum
How to continue to grow our followers and up our engagement with them in an authentic way.

Mighty Children’s Museum
How to reach more followers and keep our news on the top of social media pages. The current algorithms make it incredibly difficult to continue to see up-to-date info.

Mississippi Children’s Museum
Which social media platform do you think is the best to invest in as a children’s museum?

The Peoria Playhouse Children’s Museum
How does social media marketing translate to getting people in the door? How do you know/track this?

Please Touch Museum
With so many social media platforms and limited staff bandwidth, is it better to go wide—maintaining a presence on many platforms with fewer posts—or to go deep—creating a lot of good content for fewer platforms? What platforms are on the horizon to reach young parents that we aren’t thinking about yet?