Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with Angelica Bomford.

Angelica Bomford, Communications & Content Manager at Creative Industries Federation

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☕ Tea or coffee?

I’m drinking a rose Yogi tea: I love these – they have little quotes on the label, and today’s is “The principal ingredient of life is love” which seems like a good mantra to live by. I’ve got an extensive collection of herbal teas.

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

Probably accidental with a bit of intention: I went to university wanting to be a film composer, so I studied Music. I was passionate about it; my dream was to be the youngest woman to win an Oscar for a film score! Throughout my studies at Cardiff University, however, I got more and more interested in the wider cultural and creative sectors and started taking more theoretical courses like Music and Philosophy. That’s how I got interested in opera and other disciplines that comprised multiple art forms in one.

After my undergraduate degree I did a Master’s degree in Cultural Policy and Management at City University in London. That’s where I started developing my passion for digital technologies, and specifically how they can help the creative sector, so I focused a lot of my research into how digital technologies have helped democratising opera and classical music. 

During my MA, I worked for a streaming company, then moved to PR before joining the English National Opera where I was their Digital Communications Manager. It was an amazing role, it was basically my MA dissertation in a job: working in democratising opera and breaking down barriers. I moved to the Creative Industries Federation a few years later where I’ll be until July when I’m moving to another job! 

📚 Describe your current job

I look after Communications and Marketing at the Creative Industries Federation: we are the UK’s membership organisation for the creative industries. We do a lot of lobbying on behalf of the sector to government, and we act as a convener for the creative sector. We span all the sub-sectors of the creative industries.

My role has a lot to do with rallying our membership, bringing them together on the campaigns that we run. It’s been important – especially over this past year – for the creative sector to feel like they have a voice. So much of the creative industries has been hit so hard by the pandemic, and the Federation has an important role in communicating just how vital the sector is, and will be as we build back post-Covid. 

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

I’ve just finished a campaign I was really passionate about called the #DiscoverProperJobs campaign. The Federation is a partner in the Creative Careers program, which provides information about creative careers and how young people can access those careers. 

The #DiscoverProperJobs campaign ran in March and was intended to break down common myths and misconceptions about creative careers: we had 20 young people who had started out in different jobs in the creative sector, who busted myths about those careers. 

We did interviews and ran a social media campaign where we used statistics to break down those myths: for instance, there is a misconception that there aren’t a lot of jobs in the creative sectors, but there are more than 2 million jobs at the moment. Another one is the salary: actually, the average salary in the creative industries is £30k, whereas the UK national average is £25k. It was a meaningful campaign for me because when I was young I didn’t know much about jobs in the creative sector, and wished there had been more information out there. 

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

There’s the online version of Romeo and Juliet at the National Theatre that I absolutely loved. A lot of people are talking about the move over to digital for theatre especially, and I think it’s a very exciting area (especially with my background in streaming, and in using digital technologies to make the arts more accessible). The National Theatre managed to take it up a notch because it wasn’t just a streaming of a theatre production, it was a film, created specifically for an audience in a pandemic, which was absolutely wonderful.

I also really like the Digital Culture Network, who are a brilliant network to keep you up to date with the digital things going on in the industry. Google Arts & Culture are also doing very cool things. 

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

Two books I’ve been loving recently are The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia Sinclair, which talks about the history of hues and colours, and The Importance of Music to Girls, by Lavinia Greenlaw, which is a collection of stories around how music matches with our lives and its stages.

I’ve also enjoyed listening to the podcast OneOfThe8, which is about real life people sharing their stories from across the globe. And finally, I like the Reply All podcast, which is about how people shape the Internet and how the Internet shapes people. 

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

One of the most important professional skills to have is empathy, especially with the cultural and creative industries, which are all about people. I think being able to relate to people, and have a good relationship with them is so vital to be successful. A lot of what I do is talking with people – finding out their story and being able to put yourself in their shoes is so important for creating strong, meaningful, and effective content and campaigns. 

Also, being able to roll with whatever life throws at you and being open to possibilities is important: I would never have thought that I would be where I am right now when I wanted to be a film composer, but I’m so happy that I am. 

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with #CuratorBattle creator Millie Carroll.

Millie Carroll, Digital Communications Officer at York Museums Trust

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☕ Tea or coffee?

I’m having green tea. 

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

Definitely accidental: I did a degree called Managing Performance, which was about the business side of theatre. It was about fundraising, arts marketing, stage directing, etc. 

I wanted to go into theatre, and event management, so I volunteered at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in their Events department for a couple of weeks. I absolutely loved it, and that made me think I wanted to work with museums. When I finished my placement with them, I pestered them for months to obtain a position there. After a couple of months, somebody from their marketing department got in touch about a 1-day a week position to sort out their image archive. I did that for about six months, and then stayed in the marketing team and helped out with updating their website, their filing… The position then evolved to a 3-day a week job when I graduated, and I became Marketing & PR Assistant. I absolutely loved it, and I couldn’t have asked for a better first proper first job. 

So in the end, it wasn’t theatre, and it wasn’t events, but it was better than what I could have imagined. 

From there, I worked at the Tetely Art gallery in Leeds, as a Marketing & Press Co-ordinator. That involved a mix of traditional marketing and digital marketing. It was my first time tweeting professionally, and doing social media for a gallery. I also launched their new website. I loved it! 

I saw the job I do now advertised, and I decided to apply because I love social media and digital marketing, so I fell into it and honestly it was the best thing that could have happened. 

📚 Describe your current job

I am Digital Communications Officer at York Museums Trust. This was a new role when I started, which was very exciting, because I could run with it and do things that had never happened at the Trust. Website and social had been run by different people but never really had a focus. When I started I tried being more playful, and then… Coronavirus happened! Within a couple of months in this new job, I found that digital was the only way to communicate with people, and suddenly that new role was a really important part of the Trust. 

I run social media, manage the website, and also manage digital newsletters for all the parts of the Trust (York Castle Museum, the Yorkshire Museum, York Art Gallery and York Museum Gardens). It’s a lot of digital stuff, but at the same time it’s very exciting because it means I can do a bit of arts, a bit of history, even some garden content, etc…

Lockdown has meant that we’ve done a lot online, and we’ve actually had a lot of fun. The biggest thing I’ve ever done is probably #CuratorBattle, but we’ve also done “Judi Dench as objects in our collections” (and in January, “Bridgerton as objects in our collections”) we’ve done mad things! My job is to get people exploring Yorkshire Museum Trust collections in fun and challenging ways. 

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

We’re in a planning stage because we’re exiting lockdown. Every week we publish the #LieToMe game on Twitter (where we ask people to lie about our objects), and we want to bring that from the digital realm to a physical presence (documented digitally of course). There are a few things like this that we are doing online, and we’re hoping to start planning more physical things. 

Otherwise, I’ve been doing a “Museum clickbait”: we’re trying to replicate the traditional “clickbait” experience (where there’s a bad picture and cheesy headline) with our museum objects, which is fun and exciting. Clickbait is usually very negative so we’re trying to transpose it into a positive experience. 

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

TikTok: it’s been around for a while but some museums and galleries are doing brilliantly on there. Black Country Living Museum is phenomenal, and so is the Old Salem Museum in the US. It’s something we haven’t done yet, mainly because I haven’t been able to go in to the sites this year. 

Some museums have found incredible results on that channel, and it’s a whole new audience to tap into (especially a younger one). Museum TikTok is going to take off soon, and I definitely want to be a part of it as soon as I can get into the museums and film some fun things…! 

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

I digest content in small quantities so newsletters is the way I do that: I recommend MuseumNext’s newsletter as they are excellent for all things digital; I love Alec Ward’s Digital Things because they’re nice digestible things; andMaxwell Museums. 

Also, I’ve recently joined the GLAM Society on Clubhouse: it’s an engaging conversation twice a week, it’s quite in-depth. 

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

Social media is for everybody and can be by everybody. You don’t need to be in a marketing position to start exploring this world: do it personally, do things that you’re interested in personally. Create a podcast, create a TikTok account, you can build up a profile online that shows what you’re good at. If you want to make it your job afterwards, you’ll have a backlog of amazing skills to show. Anyone can do it, so get out there and try! Being social on social media is what every organisation should do, and it’s not a one-way stream of conversation, so do get involved. 

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with Ester Balint.

Ester Balint, Audience and Communications Manager at Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures

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☕ Tea or coffee?

Homemade iced tea with lemon, as I don’t like hot drinks. 

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

I’d describe it as purposeful but with happy accidents. Purposeful in the sense that I’ve always been very driven, with goals and a path set out to where I want to get to, but what stops I’d make  along the way hasn’t always been clear. I’ve always focused on what sort of work I’d like to do in terms of tasks, projects or team (rather than focusing on working my way to a specific organisation). Happy accidents come from being in the right place at the right time, or meeting certain people and getting opportunities from there… For instance, my current job is at an organisation who are a client from my previous job! Those accidental connections have guided my journey.

I graduated doing a Bachelor’s in Drama & Theatre at the University of Kent, and from there I wanted to do a producing degree so I went to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. I chose that specific institution because they did 6 months of placement during the Master’s year. That was crucial for me and I saw it as a great opportunity to get my foot in the door in London, network and get to know people. 

My first placement was at a company called Emma Brünjes Productions, where I worked on the immersive show, Alice’s Adventures Underground. I was very interested in immersive theatre and events. I wanted to improve my skills in marketing (as I thought I would need to know something about it as a producer), so for my second placement (which then turned into a proper job) I applied for a Marketing Officer role at the Churchill Theatre. I lucked out because I still had 3 months of university left! But they took a chance on me and I ended up staying for a year and a half, and the role evolved to a more senior position. 

During my time at the Churchill Theatre I worked a lot with an agency called EMG Media & Marketing on campaigns we had at the theatre. Their Director actually got in touch with me to offer me a position at EMG, so that’s one of the happy accidents I’ve had in my career, and so I moved from in-house to the agency world. I worked there for 2 years, and I am now at Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures, a dance company.  

📚 Describe your current job

I am the Audience and Communications Manager for Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures: Matthew Bourne is one of the leading choreographers in the world, and the company has both the production side staging work around the world as well as the charity side, which is all about working with communities, developing talent and making our shows accessible to as many audiences as possible. 

I work across both strands, managing relationships with our marketing and PR agencies, advocating for the work we do, as well as running our own communications like social media, website, emails. In my role, there is also a strong drive for audience development, looking at both national and international audiences: it’s all about fostering the relationships and communications with existing relationships as well as bringing new audiences to the world of dance. 

We are an unique dance company in what we do, because it’s not just ballet or contemporary dance, our productions are what we call “dance theatre”, which is essentially storytelling without words. It can be an easier starting point for people to experience dance for the first time through one of our works, than through say classical ballet. So in my role, it is about ensuring that we are reaching all sorts of audiences from different backgrounds and ages to us and bringing them into the world of dance. 

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

We just launched something called “Friday Funnies”: we’ve been testing out new things on different social media platforms, including Instagram reels (which is something we haven’t done before). So every Friday we release a short segment of a funny moment that happened during one of our productions. As we’re not on stage at the moment, we’re trying to keep our productions alive and bring some joy to our audiences.

Otherwise, we are building a new CRM, which is a new project for us and something I am leading too, which makes it all the more exciting. We’re building something quite bespoke with a company called Good CRM, who is building new capabilities into the platform so it’s very interesting to feed into that and talk about functionality. 

Finally, we are launching our podcast Bourne to Dance this month (on the 29th of April), which I’ve spent a lot of time on! 

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

The re-opening of theatres is a big one for me. We have not had live performances for the past year, so we’ve looked massively into how to keep things going on digital platforms, and explored new ways of using digital, but now it’s all about gearing up for the return of live shows. We’ve got Matthew Bourne’s version of the Nutcracker coming out this winter for the 30th anniversary of the production, and we’re hoping it will still go ahead (as it was rescheduled from this past Christmas). So we’re looking forward to that! 

I’ve also been watching the seminars by Indigo, Baker Richards and One Further and using the Culture Restart toolkit. It’s been very useful to keep up to date with what’s happening in the industry, it’s helped us plan for several scenarios in terms of reopening and understand issues around audience concerns and confidence in returning to venues, which helps us tailor our communications and also support our tour venues in reopening.

And finally, I’m interested in how we will keep the digital work that we’ve been creating once we are back on stage: it should not be just a response to COVID but be reflective of what we have learnt in the past year and a half. So, it’s about looking beyond the pandemic. For instance, we’ve partnered with loads of theatres around the world (Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, New York City Center, LG Arts Center in Seoul…), and it’s been nice to reach audiences that we might not have engaged before, and to bring them the shows that might have toured there otherwise. 

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

Listen to Bourne to Dance! It’s conversations between people in the dance world, their journey through dance, why they love it, etc. Our first guest is Sir Matthew Bourne, we’re also interviewing principal dancer Ashley Shaw, arts and culture broadcasters Brenda Emmanus, West End star Layton Williams, theatre maker Kane Husbands and award´winning lighting designer Paule Constable … It’s a nice creative thing to listen to with a bit of music in it as well. That first series is composed of 6 episodes, and the first one is out on the 29th April. 

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

Be curious and genuinely interested in people. It’s an industry that is a bit of a calling, so you need to have a passion for what you do, but you also need to care about the people you work with. You never know when or where you will see people again: someone you may be working for might have an opportunity for you down the line, someone you line managed might hire you in the future… So forge genuine connections with the people you work with. 

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with Rachel Cartwright.

Rachel Cartwright, Digital Engagement Officer at South West Museum Development

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☕ Tea or coffee?

Right now a cup of Yorkshire tea with milk though I am a morning coffee drinker.

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

Possibly a bit of both I think – I have intentionally moved around in location and roles but it was never mapped out so definitely elements of the accidental. I graduated in History of Art and at first was not quite sure what pathway I could take but was aware I needed experience so I earned money through hospitality work in order to do internships / traineeships. I had always been interested in books, archives, preservation of heritage, so got a traineeship in an academic library about a year after my degree. Through this experience I applied for a summer traineeship at the Guggenheim in New York in the Library and Archive. It was an incredible opportunity and this definitely fuelled my interest contemporary art museums and specialist libraries.

After this I applied for a Europa scheme to work in Italy, Padova, to learn the language and receive a work placement (in an office) and a shared apartment. I wanted to stay in Italy so applied and got a paid traineeship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice during the Biennale. As well as general gallery duties I worked with the conservator and my placement was extended for another term to work on a project. I then returned to England and got a position in the library and archive at the Royal College of Art. After 2 years I started the role of Archivist at Damien Hirst’s studio Science Ltd. Here I worked on a wide range of things: publications, exhibition support including the retrospective at Tate Modern in 2012, image licensing and collections management. 

After two years there I had an itch to travel and, after some alignment of other factors, I left London with my partner and moved to Australia for 6 months to earn money to travel Asia for a year. Whilst travelling we couch surfed, worked on farms and vineyards, taught English and had some of the most incredible and memorable experiences. I wholeheartedly recommend those starting out to also take time to travel and experience things that aren’t as available once you are on a pathway… (and if there isn’t a pandemic restricting things).

I moved to Bristol in 2015 and worked freelance on public art projects including cataloguing the wood collection for Katie Paterson’s Hollow. I continued my freelance work for an Art Council England funded project with a focus on Cultural Tourism, where I project managed the website build GoBathBristol. Another strand I led on was to support the consortium of 25 cultural organisations across Bristol and Bath with a digital optimisation programme, led by Creative Tourist. After this temporarily funded project I came to this role as a Digital Engagement Officer for South West Museum Development. 

So it was never a straight pathway, and all the different experiences I’ve had I believe are benefiting me in this position today as I bring lots of influences to the table.

📚 Describe your current job

I have two jobs – I work for South West Museum Development 4 days a week, and one day a week I work for the contemporary artist, Richard Long, on their archive. 

South West Museum Development is part of the Museum Development Network funded by the Arts Council as a sector support organisation: we support museums with all elements of the accreditation standard. The organisation is hosted by Bristol City Council and our office is in Bristol Museums and Art Gallery. We work with mostly small to medium museums in the South West, non-NPOs, non-nationals, (it’s currently197 museums, 34% of these are volunteer-led). I support those museums with their online audience engagement: websites, social media, digital strategy, collections online and all things related to those topics. 

Every day is varied because I work on emerging trends, enquiries, projects and develop and deliver training.

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

There are lots of different things happening at the moment! I am traditionally more of a do-er and I like to implement things and get stuck into projects, this role is different as it is more advising and supporting. Since the pandemic started, there has been a huge shift in our museums thinking about online engagement and an emphasis to create and publish more content. I have recently been supporting some museums who have received recovery / emergency funding and this has been great to see them bring in extra support and investing in longer term strategy with online audience engagement.

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

There are so many things changing continually and it is so much to stay connected with. I’m really interested in rights management, particularly in museums that are using their out of copyright works (CC0), making them available to everybody in high resolution. Birmingham Museums springs to mind here, with the work they have done with Cold War Steve: the way they have been rethinking how they’d use those images, and encouraging the engagement and reinterpretation of those images. Also, the National Lottery Heritage Fund has new criteria requiring open licenses to be made on any digital outputs created from funded projects, I think it’s a really bold and positive move for the sector. 

NFT’s have really caught my attention recently and I am fascinated to watch this unfold in relation to museums – the article in Museum Next is a good introduction.

There are so many great digital support unfolding for the cultural and heritage sector at the moment: the investment from the Arts Council with the DCN Tech Champions has been a huge and welcome shift, and the NLHF Digital Skills for Heritage programme over the past year. On the museum level, things I’m looking at with a keen eye are the Vagina Museum, the Happy Museum Project, and the Refugees Exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum. 

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

I recommend The DO Lectures: I volunteered for their yearly gathering, Do Wales, in 2019 and it was a real shift for me in thinking about our approach to the world, our lives and our decision making as humans… all big stuff! Their newsletter always brings light to my inbox and they have a series of ‘Do’ books, all on themes of personal development.

There are some really good museum podcasts: The Uncomfortable Truths from Bristol Museum, a great project and really worth a listen. And there is also the Museums n’That podcast, developed by Leeds Museums & Galleries, which is composed of nice conversational pieces. 

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

Having varied experience can be a real bonus: coming to a role with a wide perspective (like mentoring others, how you work with people, soft skills) make a real difference. Don’t think of your career as linear: go for opportunities when they come up, you never know what elements from your wider experience might pave the way for what comes next. So don’t worry if you feel that you are currently in a position that doesn’t seem to add up to your dream role. Balance work with life and make sure you have a good time along the way.

Digital engagement is moving very quickly, and much innovation is coming from outside of the sector, so I’d say it can be useful to have a varied experience and not necessarily solely in this sector. 

Don’t compare yourself to others: take pride in what you do, let it bring you some joy, and good things will come. 

Network, but I don’t see it in a strategic way, get to know people well, making meaningful connections and support people where possible – it definitely makes a difference.

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with Rafie Cecilia.

Rafie Cecilia, PhD candidate at UCL, and Accessibility & Inclusion Consultant at the Wellcome Collection

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☕ Tea or coffee?

I’m having a nice cup of Earl Grey tea.

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

Intentional: I started a PhD 4 years ago and have finished the final draft (I’m very happy with it). I say my career was “intentional” because at the same time as my PhD, I’ve always worked as a consultant and audience researcher on the side for institutions in London and Cambridge, because I always valued having both the practical and academic sides. It means it’s a lot of work, but at the same time it’s really helpful to be in constant conversations with practitioners and academics, and to get a bit of both into my research project.

I went straight from my Master’s degree to a PhD, but at the same time I was working as an Audience Researcher for the British Museum (which then evolved to Accessibility & Inclusion Consultant). During my PhD, I also worked for the Wellcome Collection and the Fitzwilliam Museum. 

📚 Describe your current job

My PhD looks at the experience of blind and partially sighted people: I explore at the way they use their bodies, how they use objects and resources such as technology to make sense of the collection and the space. 

My job at the Wellcome Collection, which is related to my PhD, is consulting with 2 exhibition teams on upcoming exhibitions, and looking at strategies to overcome the newfound barriers that COVID has brought, such as social distancing, and the difficulty to offer tactile/hands-on opportunities. We’re currently figuring out ways to work around the restrictions and make the exhibitions as accessible as possible, especially for blind and partially-sighted people: when museums re-open, how will their experience be? What will it be for the general public, but mostly what will it be for those people if we take away multi-sensory opportunities and accessible services? We’re developing both physical and digital strategies to let visitors experience exhibitions, such as audioguides, audio-descriptions, or single-use tactile material. 

I think it’s extremely important at the moment, because accessibility has suffered with the impact of restrictions imposed by the pandemic, and it’s something that needs to be thought through within museums. The pandemic can’t be yet another excuse to offer disabled people even lesser experiences.

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

I’m looking at the possibility of using different materials for 3D printing, and how it can be cheaper without impacting the quality, and if those can be used as single use resources for exhibitions. I find it very interesting to think about how the intangible value of an object can be communicated through a 3D-printed replica. It’s such an evolving technology that opens up so many opportunities. 

I’ve also just published a new article in the Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies on COVID and accessibility in museums.

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

A lot more conversations about accessibility are starting: museums have always been good at talking about it and implementing simple measures, but the pandemic has raised awareness about how we need to listen to the voice of disabled people more. It’s always been difficult to bring those people to museums to participate in focus groups or audience research but with digital platforms there’s been a surge in those conversations, and it’s actually easy to reach out to those audiences and easy to create online user research that can inform practice.

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

My PhD! Otherwise, the Wellcome Trust’s blog about the way people have started re-thinking health-related themes is very interesting. It sheds some light on disparities the pandemic has highlighted, and that is not only related to museums but to everyone.

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

Always listen to disabled people, and put their voice first: constantly let their voice challenge your assumptions, and don’t give in to an institution asking for a shortcut. If someone approaches you with a simple easy solution without bothering with research, say no: disabled people deserve to be heard. This is something nobody should ever compromise on.

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with Adam Koszary, who went from writing sheep tweets at the Museum of English Rural Life to setting daily doodle challenges the Royal Academy of Arts.

Adam Koszary, Social Media & Editorial Content at the Royal Academy of Arts

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☕ Tea or coffee?

I am currently having builder’s tea (I have a single coffee in the morning, I’m slightly addicted and don’t want to make it worse).

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

A mixture of both: I wanted to work in a national museum in London, but how I pulled that off was semi accidental.

I came in at the bottom at The Museum of English Rural Life: I started as a Project Officer for a National Heritage Lottery Funded re-display of the museum, which then evolved to Project Manager, and there was a pattern of going from project funding pot to project funding pot. During my time there, my sheep tweets (along with other campaigns like the Absolute Unit, Chicken in Trousers and Museum Ducks) raised The MERL’s and my own personal profile. After that, I wasn’t afraid to apply to jobs in national museums (everyone shouldn’t be afraid to apply to national museums jobs either, don’t worry if you only match two thirds of the job description). 

The accidental part comes from my brief job for Tesla (about 5 months) after I left The MERL: I had to turn the Royal Academy down to start at Tesla, but quickly realised it wasn’t for me. The Royal Academy actually took me back after I re-applied for the job there, which was a massive stroke of luck. 

📚 Describe your current job

I am Social Media and Editorial Content Manager for the Royal Academy of Arts in London. That’s a mixture of day-to-day content and coordinating social media for the organisation, as well as setting up the strategy for our editorial content. I am part of a team which includes a website content manager, a head of content strategy, a part-time digital assistant and a couple vacant posts for video, website and social content. 

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

The Royal Academy of Arts runs the Summer Exhibition every year, which is a beautiful thing because anyone can submit their artwork for it. The organisers this year and their vision for what they want to do with the Summer Exhibition is very exciting, and might involve commissioning many more outsider voices and bringing in different perspectives, different kinds of artists…

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

TikTok! Social Media has settled a bit in the sense that everyone basically understands how the main ones work (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), in that it’s a mixture of resources you can apply mixed with your imagination. TikTok is still the “Wild West” for a lot of people. What the Black Country Living Museum have been doing, as well as places like Carnegie Museum of Natural History, is absolutely fantastic. I’m aware it’s not a skillset I have (yet), and that we need new resources for that because it’s a new type of content for us. 

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

It’s not really culture-centric, but I’ve actually really enjoyed The Clone Wars (Star Wars cartoon), and I’m on the last season. In terms of reading, I’m still waiting to receive Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museum in the post to start reading it.

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

Always be working on your skills and creating things: there is no course out there for social media, but there are a lot of free resources to practice your graphic skills, photography and video skills, and particularly writing. It always helps for jobs when you can show that you have that kind of creativity, but it’s also not just for your CV, it’s for everything in your life. 

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with Larissa Borck.

Larissa Borck, Digital Curator at Sörmlands museum

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☕ Tea or coffee?

I’m having a delicious Jasmine tea.

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

A bit of both: I started studying Cultural Anthropology, and when I read the descriptions of the subjects taught in that programme, I realised I could maybe work in museums with that background.

During my Master’s degree, I focused on digitisation and digital transformation within museums. The biggest impact was having a network to get in touch with people to find jobs and internships. 

📚 Describe your current job

The main field that I am working in is supporting cultural institutions in becoming digitally open and advanced institutions, doing outreach to digital audiences, and catering the needs of their target groups. 

My last job was at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz): I was building up a lab to on the one hand raise example case studies of what open access can do for cultural heritage institutions, and sharing their data openly; and on the other hand, getting external users, their feedback, and their work into the institutions.

My new job will be at the Sörmlands Museum in Nyköping, a regional museum south of Stockholm, as a digital curator: I will be working on their collections, but also collections data, and putting the digital development of their work and outreach to the forefront of their activity.

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

A very typical thing for this sector is that people are very enthusiastic about their work and then have a lot of activities related to their jobs that they do on the side (independently from their employer). I am in that situation: I love taking care of my newsletter Dig It with Medhavi Gandhi! I am also looking forward to the university seminar I will be teaching next semester on digitisation of and in museums. 

For my newsletter, I sit down once a month with Medhavi and we talk about the issues in the sector, things that are heavily discussed in the sector, or even trends outside of the sector (but that should be discussed more in the cultural industry). It’s an engaging conversation. 

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

One thing is always on my radar: I hashtags on Twitter and LinkedIn such as #OpenGLAM, which is about openness in digital data and collections in Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums, and how openness can also act for these institutions to become more relevant and resilient in the future. That’s an overarching strand in my career and as such I do my best to be as updated on it as possible.

An important topic right now and will have to become much bigger in the future is how post-colonialism can actually influence and become an important question in digital culture. There is a very important question of digital ethics, and we have to become more aware of what we share in regards to collections that are hosted and preserved in European institutions, and we have to have that conversation with original communities. 

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

I’ve been reading Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museum, which has been all over the news and even trending on Twitter. Another great book at the moment is Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein

In terms of what to watch, I’ve seen and enjoyed the Restitution Dialogues by Open Restitution Africa.

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

Network as early and as much as possible during your studies: often in this industry, who you know and which conversations you take part in is much more important than what your studies were.

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with Flo Carr, whom I’ve been working with for about a year on the Insights Alliance.

Flo Carr, Associate at Indigo

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☕ Tea or coffee?

Coffee, sadly instant (usually it would not be!).

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

Probably accidental!

My approach to a career has always been to be happy in my job, and if something comes up and feels right, to trust my instinct. I’ve never really had a long term plan – but I do have some long-long term goals, but to get there I prefer to trust my instincts and be happy with what I’m doing.

Theatre has always been a hobby for me, even before I graduated. I studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, but I was not a very diligent student because I spent all of my time in the amazing student theatre. My first job was working there (ADC Theatre at the University of Cambridge) as a Marketing and Front of House Manager, and then Theatre Manager. It’s an amazing place, and brilliant people have come out of there. It was my dream job!

I then worked for Cambridge Live as their Press & Marketing Manager. It was brilliant, I got to work on the Cambridge Folk Festival, and it’s where I stepped out of the student world to go into a broader range of cultural events and city-wide programmes. 

I then moved to London and became the English National Opera’s CRM Executive: that gave me lots of experience of working in a much bigger company, it was in the opera world, and I specialised in CRM & email strategy and marketing for 3 years, which I really loved.

I moved to the Arcola Theatre, a brilliant off-West End producing theatre, as Head of Communications & Marketing in 2019, but unfortunately with COVID, I ended up furloughed in April 2020. During that time, I started helping Katy Raines at Indigo on the After the Interval national sentiment survey. A year later and I’m now working full-time for Indigo!

📚 Describe your current job

Indigo is a cultural sector consultancy specialising in all things marketing, fundraising and data. We work with a range of cultural clients on audience development strategy, CRM, fundraising, systems, business strategy… In the last year we have also moved more into large scale national cultural audience sentiment tracking with the COVID recovery surveys (After the Interval, Act 2, and now Culture Restart): we have been tracking audience sentiment around COVID, intention to return, and consumption of digital. The Indigo team are fantastic, I love the variety of projects I get to work on and it has been amazing to be able to provide this vital audience data to the sector during COVID.

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

I’m working on a project called Tramway Revisited: it’s different to anything I’ve worked on before. It’s funded by Innovate UK: the goal is to develop a toolkit of some kind to support venues, producers and audiences to return to live events after COVID.

It has involved so far developing a ‘digital twin’ of Tramway in Glasgow: we’re looking at how we can do different outputs for audiences to explore this virtual space, to understand COVID measures that are in place, how producers can use that to plan shows, how venues can use it to plan their audience management…

We’re also exploring how that might work post-COVID, and whether there are possibilities for widening access, using it to push the idea of a full ‘relaxed’ venue where anyone could understand what the venue would be like ahead of their visit.

Indigo’s bit in that project is all about understanding the audience appetite for this.

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

At the moment it’s the hybrid between digital and live experiences. I’ve got tickets for Dream Online at the RSC, which I am so excited about. I think a lot of people are really excited to see what this digital disruption time will bring to the industry, and how that’s going to change things in the future. There is a lot of potential for more hybrid experiences in theatre in the future.

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

I’ve been listening to a podcast lately called More or Less on BBC Sounds: they’re 10-minute episodes looking at a statistic or figure from that week and breaking it down, so it’s about helping people to understand data and what it means in different contexts. In just 10 minutes you get a really interesting and entertaining deep dive into it.

I’ve been reading a brilliant book called Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries written by Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor: it challenges all the things we tell ourselves in the industry about the power of culture and examines who is currently working in the sector, looking at race, class, gender, who is being excluded from these occupations and what that means about the work being produced and who then goes on to consume that. So it’s about a cycle of exclusion and inequality in culture. 

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

Never be nervous about trying something new: whether it’s a project, a system, a piece of analysis, do not think that you can’t do something. Have a go and normally you find that you can do it! Especially if you’re willing to ask for advice from the right people, then you can do anything. 

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with “that museum guy” Alec Ward.

Alec Ward, Museum Development Officer Digital & Communications at Museum of London

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☕ Tea or coffee?

I’m actually having a Minestrone Cup-A-Soup in a tea mug – it’s a good way of hiding the fact that you’re having lunch during meetings.

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

Intentionally accidental!

When I left university, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and recruitment seemed alluring at first. I was fortunate to have some time to volunteer at a (very) small museum (The Museum of the Order of St John) in London. A few months later, a paid museum part-time position came up (Museum Assistant). There was real flexibility in terms of tasks and I was able to explore different parts of working in a museum (collections, exhibitions, etc.). When I started there in 2015, there was no social media presence, so I took care of these and became the “digital guy” in the team. So when anything digital came up, I was the go-to person (I got to help out on a project where we digitised a WW1 scrapbook, which was really cool!).

Then, the job at the London Museum Development as the Museum Development Officer came up. My manager Tom thought I should go for it as I would be very good at it. At the time I hadn’t really thought about supporting museums, I’d always thought about working IN museums as opposed to working WITH museums.

📚 Describe your current job

The role developed over the years and became full-time. Now I manage the team’s communications, the social, the website, and the core of my role is supporting London’s non-national museums with their digital work, and helping particularly small museums on anything from social media to digital strategy.

It’s a varied role with a lot of moving parts: I help with national projects like One by One (a digital literacy and skills project), sector support organisations like Culture24, or the Collections Trust.

I always thought of my dream job as working in a museum, but before I had the experience of working in a small museum, I didn’t really know what you can do in a museum. The idea of “museum work” was “a curator”, but I hadn’t really thought about what that is or what it might entail. Working in a museum gave me the perspective of what museums professionals do, and especially for small museums where you can be the Collections Manager, Volunteer Manager and Social Media Manager.

Small museums and museums professionals need a variety and range of skills to be able to function in their roles, which is why I thoroughly enjoy what I do!

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

The role is super varied so I can’t even put my finger on something specific!

In March 2020 because of the pandemic, we launched a YouTube channel for the team, because we moved our development programmes online, and we had the opportunity to record some Zoom training sessions. Because I run practical sessions on everything from video editing to making 3D models from photogrammetry, I managed to turn these into small tutorials, which I’m quite proud of and pleased that they are doing well.

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

Lots! My role requires me to keep in tune with everything going on in the sector, particularly with a digital focus. The Digital Culture Compass is a really exciting tool and all the work that has been done by the National Lottery Heritage Fund too, like the Digital Skills for Heritage programme.

Also, there are some resources being developed, the Digital Culture Network tech champions (Arts Council) is doing some exciting work.

Some organisations in the sector are also doing great work, like Culture24 have got the great Let’s Get Real project which is happening at the moment with a lot of museums, and looking at digital audiences.

Outside of digital, there are lots of things happening around diversity, Black Lives Matter, museums thinking more about their impact on the environment, climate change, global warming, and how to inform the public about it.

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

I have just started reading Digital Transformation by Lindsay Herbert, which I would definitely recommend. It’s about digital transformation within organisations, with thoughts and insights about that space.

I mostly get information through newsletters: Chris Unitt’s Cultural Digital, Katie Moffat’s Digital Snapshot, Maxwell Museums (which is focused on museums & heritage). Outside of the heritage sector, I also receive the MIT Technology Review newsletter.

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

For somebody who wants to work in digital in museums, my advice would be to look outside of the sector: don’t focus just on what museums are doing, look at heritage as a whole and even outside of that sector as well. There are many companies doing very interesting things in digital and there is a lot we can learn from them.

I live by the maxim “Saying yes to opportunities and worrying about doing those things later (within reason)”: for instance a few years ago, the MA asked me to chair their digital event, and I had never done that before, so naturally I was terrified! But I thought it would be a great opportunity for me, and I worried about the practicalities of doing later. So far it’s worked pretty well for me to live by that saying!

Each week I spend 10 minutes with someone from the cultural-sector-meets-digital and ask them about their career, opinions, and what’s on their radar.

This week I spoke with my colleague Georgina Brooke.

Georgina Brooke, Content Strategist at One Further

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☕ Tea or coffee?

Breakfast tea with milk, no sugar. My usual 11am drink!

💼 About your career and where you are now: accidental or intentional?

It started off as accidental: I studied classics at Oxford. When I graduated I knew I didn’t want to spend more time in academia, but I didn’t really know what I did want to do. I applied to tons of things, and ended up as a project manager in a multinational digital agency for my first job. 

I was lucky to be asked to move to the Singapore office, and I then moved out of project management into content strategy. Then I came back to London to work with the Government Digital Service on getting their content in order for the new (at that point) gov.uk site. 

I moved back to Oxford in 2014, but I didn’t want to work in agencies anymore. I ended up working at the University of Oxford as a Digital Content Editor.

In 2016 I got my first job in museums at the Ashmolean in Oxford, which entailed redesigning the website from scratch and creating all the content from the ground up. I was then asked to do the same website and content project for the other 4 Oxford University museums, but these were always temporary until I obtained a permanent role at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

In 2020, my partner got a job in Newcastle, so I moved to the North of England and obtained a temporary role at the National Museums of Scotland.

So my career was not entirely planned, and I have been taking things as they come. The last move was definitely accidental! I’ve detailed it in my LinkedIn article Planning a career in the digital sector.

📚 Describe your current job

I’ve only been at One Further since January but it’s great! I’ve been working on strategies for different kinds of content, how to monetise content, how to plan for a digital strategy that outlasts COVID and closure, and plenty of other interesting things.

It has so far been very interesting. We’ve won the 2 pitches that I participated in, and are getting repeat business from the clients I’m working with, which is encouraging and exciting. 

🤩 What are you working on right now that you’re particularly enjoying?

I’m just putting the finishing touches on a report going to Castle Howard that’s looking at their content: getting their website user journeys in order, then thematic storytelling on social, which will, in turn, put them in the best position for monetising content and selling products online.

📣 What’s happening in the industry that’s on your radar?

At the moment, everyone is talking about the usefulness of digital because of the COVID crisis. It’s particularly interesting to see how the performing arts have treated content and haven’t given it for free.

At the start of COVID, performing arts were much less sheepish about asking for money for online content, whereas museums and most other cultural institutions, by and large, give all online content they produce away for free. I think that’s resulted in certain types of online events/content being normalised as free (like online talks and tours), but audiences are still happy to pay for performances because performing arts monetised that type of content from the beginning.

📖 Anything you’d recommend to read/watch/listen to?

I’ve just read The Future of the Museum – 28 dialogues, which contains conversations with culture-facing directors all around the world. I’ve written a book review about it on my LinkedIn profile.

Also lately, I have been listening to Dr Sophie Frost’s podcast People. Change. Museums. 

💡 What advice would you give someone who would like to do what you do?

If you want a job in museums, don’t feel like you just have to go through museums themselves: starting at the bottom at a graduate entry role in a museum is so hard and competitive!

It’s very difficult to distinguish yourself amongst 650 other candidates (true story!), and when there are so many good candidates, interviewers end up having to make the final decision on really marginal and quite arbitrary criteria, because everyone’s ticked all the boxes but you only have one job…

So don’t be afraid of working in the private sector, because personally I’ve learnt a lot of skills there, and I wouldn’t have had for instance my role at the Ashmolean without my prior agency experience, which gave me great training in digital best practice and management skills.