Friday Five - communities
For the second in my Friday Five series, I’m sharing five communities to join if you’re interested in museum, heritage and arts marketing.
There’s a mix here: four are free, three are in the sector and one is what you make of it…
The Arts Marketing Association. Membership costs, but for me it offers good value as it provides access to all their live training webinars and on demand videos across the year, as well as various networking groups – you can join one in your region as well as ones by job seniority and theme e.g. early career, theatres, museums. The AMA also does lobbying, various benchmarking surveys, and there’s a Facebook group members can join to pick each other’s brains. There’s freelance and individual membership from £79/89 +VAT, a free quarterly between-jobs membership, and various group and team memberships which also offer great value.
Museum Social Media Managers group on Facebook. Free and a great source of interesting Q&As with members sharing generously. Topics include algorithms, ads, social media policies, and how to deal with criticism online. My sense is that membership skews American, but challenges social media managers face are universal, and on some culture wars issues, American colleagues have arguably got more experience at the coalface.
The Museum, Gallery and Heritage Marketing Collective. A free community which delivers monthly virtual meetings for networking and sharing, quarterly in-person meetings, invites to exhibition views, an email network, database of recommended suppliers and regular socials. It’s aimed at marketers of Assistant / Executive / Manager / Senior Manager level and is open to both employed and freelancers and people on temporary leave of absence. I’m not eligible so I can’t fully vouch for it, but I’ve seen people get value from it and I LOVE that this was founded by a marketer – Siobhan Sharp – out of a desire to connect with other marketing managers in the sector.
The Marketing Meetup. A sector neutral community for marketers, with loads of free online and in-person events dotted around the country, a podcast, e-news and an online community space Hive. Event examples coming up online in May are Short form video for busy marketers: a 2 hour weekly workflow and Stop the slop: How creative teams can work beautifully with AI; and in-person Marketing in the age of the (social) lurker in Manchester and From Followers to Friendships – Building a Real Community That Shows Up in Edinburgh. I find it refreshing to hear from marketers in other sectors.
Create your own! No, this isn’t a copout from me, just an encouragement to develop your own community that works for you. It can be something very light touch and ad hoc like grabbing a coffee with someone, co-working with someone, or arranging to meet-up at a sector event; or something more formal or a little higher effort like organising a Zoom sharing session with a handful of others once a quarter, setting up a What’s App group, or sharing regular e-newsletters.
And in case you missed it, here are my Friday Five websites I recommend with free resources.