Improve your Digital Presence as a Small-Medium Museum: a group discussion

ID: WMA2026_627

Track:

Small museums often struggle to compete with the digital dominance of larger institutions across social media and AI. To bridge this gap, join fellow professionals for a collaborative workshop featuring three rounds of interactive table discussions. This session focuses on mutual learning and resource-sharing to help smaller organizations maximize their online impact. Participants will brainstorm actionable strategies to enhance their digital visibility, ensuring their virtual presence is as engaging as their physical galleries. 

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: Communications professionals in small museums often lack opportunities to collaborate. This session provides a space to brainstorm solutions for overcoming museum-specific hurdles to digital growth.

Objectives:

Presenters will share a selection of top level ways large museums are presenting themselves, their collections, and their stories in the digital space. Participants should be able to identify at least two places in their system processes where they want to expand their digital outreach.  Meeting with three different small groups of museum professionals at like-sized organizations will allow the participants to flesh out how they can try out new ideas.  With the help of the presenters (if/when needed), the participants will be able to think of ways to replicate or improve on the methodologies of the larger organizations while staying within financial and staff scope. 

Participants will change tables three times to hear different perspectives and discuss different ways to define their digital presence. At the end of the three rounds, the group will share the ideas they believe everyone would benefit from.

Engagement: Participants will rotate through three rounds of discussions centered on the question: “How do we improve our digital presence?” Facilitators will suggest tables focus on a specific strategy, including enhancing online collection visibility, showcasing exhibits, and leveraging social media to highlight museum personality. This interactive session encourages mutual learning as attendees swap groups to gain diverse perspectives. The workshop concludes with a collective wrap-up where everyone shares their favorite insights and actionable digital ideas.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Curators/Scientists/Historians Marketing & Communications (Including Social Media) Technology 

Professional Level: All levels 

Scalability: Though this session is geared towards small and medium museums, sharing ideas on how to make your museum more digitally present is important for folks from all museums.  With the increase of AI in a visitor’s daily life, being visible within the digital space is more important than ever.  If a visitor turns to AI to plan out a small road trip, or asks AI what to do within an hour of their house, you need to have a presence that is strong enough to warrant becoming part of the AI answer.  It doesn’t matter if you as an organization are using AI, it matters that you are visible and findable in a space that is increasingly curated by algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Participants