Pop Up Virtual Museum Tours

You may be aware that Google offers the opportunity to take virtual tours of museums, world heritage sites and other landmarks. This past summer, Wang Yuhao, the CEO of Aha School, set out to provide 100,000 children in China an opportunity to tour 10 different museums around the world.

All Google owned sites are blocked in China so that option wasn’t available to him, but he also wanted to offer the type of experience that went beyond what the Google tours could offer by having their team members provide commentary. They ended up enlisting 150,000 participants by tapping into social media.

Many people were surprised by our business model. How could we offer our product for 19.9 yuan in a world where the average cost of attracting a new customer online exceeds 100 yuan? … We took advantage of WeChat’s built-in relationship networks to offer group deals for our broadcasts. In this way, we could turn one user into 10, 10 into 100, 100 into 1,000, and so on, with our longstanding customers demonstrating an incredible willingness to introduce the product to their friends on social media. By offering our service at such a low price, we were able to maximize sales volume.

Wang and his team’s process was light on planning on heavy on faith, some things didn’t work out for them but their method provided a degree of authenticity for participants.

“Our greatest challenge”, Wang told me, “was uncertainty. When we launched, we had confirmed nothing. No museums were confirmed, no anchors, we hadn’t decided which exhibits would be discussed, nor the script or how we would deliver”.

The project was very much a living one, an educational practice in itself, from idea to execution. While children were guided virtually through each museum, parents simultaneously wrote reams of commentary, which Aha School then used to improve the broadcast for the following day. “My daughter is transfixed and we adults can enjoy it too!” wrote one parent, “We’d like to see more of the museum itself and the beautiful architecture”.

[…]

“Our task was to piece together these fragments of information and to allow children to digest them”, said Wang. “The key to our broadcasts was to enthuse children, to make them interested.”

They did so, not by filming after hours in search of the perfect silent shot, but by filming from bustling museums where ordinary people walked through the screen, sometimes even blocking exhibits, giving viewers a sense that they too are there. In one case, the Guggenheim in New York showed such great support that they offered to film after closure and arranged a curator to explain the artworks through a translator.

The practice of revising as you go pretty much embodies the concept of failing fast and revising. While it does increase the possibility people will find the initial product to be of such low quality that they won’t continue with the program, there is an element of nimbleness that allows you to avoid the cost of the planning phase and offer the product inexpensively.

If they had a large number of people who shared the sentiment of the one commenter who noted they enjoyed the experience and were pleased their daughter was transfixed, they probably retained enough people to support the next iteration which is supposed to happen in February.

Read up a little about what they did, maybe your conscious or subconscious mind will absorb it and spit out some inspiration. There are some real short videos about the project available

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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