What's Coming Up, What Happened, How Can I Help, And What The Heck Is This E-Blast For, Anyway?

Like a lot of organizations, our museum sends out a weekly email to folks who are interested in upcoming events, exhibitions, and happenings at our museum. We are sensitive to keeping it short, interesting, and readable. We mostly focus on sharing what exhibitions are on and which events are coming up that week. Just the facts, ma'am.

At the same time, we generate some pretty great digital documentation (mostly photos and videos) from recent events. This documentation often languishes in corners of the social web. We capture the moments, post them online, and that's it.

In the past few months, we've started to experiment with sharing documentation on the e-blast. We've known for awhile that the most clicked-on part of our e-blast is often the Wishlist--a simple call-out for stuff we need for programs and exhibitions. As a community-based museum, it makes sense that we actively solicit participation through the e-blast when we can.

Bolstered by the power of the Wishlist, we decided to explore other non-announcement-y content to add to the e-blast.

Here's a recent e-blast we sent. It features:

• an event & exhibition announcement
• an opportunity to apply for our teen program
• an instagram video of a ten year old who did a spontaneous performance at a recent event
• a wishlist request

This e-blast had a surprising surge in clicks. Our average e-blast has a click rate of 1-2%. This one clocked in at 3%. The only other blast that has ever had this 3% clicks offered two job announcements.

Of those clicks, the vast majority - 44% - were on the video of the singing girl. Triple the number of clicks that anything else got. Documentation trumped announcement. An exciting moment captured digitally was more interesting than the promise of future exciting moments. 

A crass way to look at this is that the video was link-bait. Of course people will click on a video of--as we put it--"a 10 year old crushing a surprise performance at First Friday." But this documentation is also a direct showcase of our mission to ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections. I was in the room when Lily got up on stage and belted out a song she wrote. It was extraordinary. It brought the room together. It was a mind-exploding, unexpected moment of connection. It's the kind of magic that sometimes happens at the MAH.

If we wanted our e-blast to be as reflective of our mission, programming, and values as possible, it would primarily feature:

• invitations to get meaningfully involved
• documentation and celebration of community members who have gotten involved, shared experiences, made unexpected connections, or experienced moments of ignition
• clear and welcoming language about a diversity of available experiences where you could have these experiences too

We're moving in this direction, but we could probably do more. I'm a bit embarrassed at how simple this seems and how we had to wander into discovering it. We thought the e-blast was prescriptively for one thing. Our visitors are reminding us that any communication can and should be mission-oriented. Thanks, visitors.

If your e-blast was written in the language of your mission, how would it be different? What would it feature?