The Dock, Carrick on Shannon – photo by Rós Kavanagh
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Scope of the mentoring
A team of mentors from Google Ireland is mentoring Michelle Dillon in the Dock, to assist her to evaluate the organisation’s online presence, with a view to (a) building the Dock’s online community, (b) bringing increased visitors to the Dock’s website, and (c) ultimately driving sales.
This process will involve an analysis of the Dock’s website analytics, it’s use of various social media platforms (in particular it’s use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube), and the development of a plan as to how to use these social media tools to drive traffic to the website.
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sharing the learning
A key aspect of this scheme is that all participating mentees will write a report which will be posted on this site, so that others working in the arts can benefit.
Michelle’s report will be a useful ‘how to’ document for organisations looking to increase traffic to their website through the use of google analytics and the use of a number of different social media tools.
This mentoring will be complete on the 3rd of May, and Michelle’s report will be posted on this website on 17th of May. Following this, those who are interested in finding out a bit more will be able to ask Michelle about the process on the Arts Ireland LinkedIn group.
Arts Audiences is happy to announce that 8 mentoring relationships are now underway on the New Media Mentoring Scheme. In this scheme, individuals from a range of arts organisations from across the county will receive expert mentoring in the area of new media and audience development. On completion of mentoring, these individuals will produce reports for online publishing and discussion, in order to share their learnings with the wider arts community.
The mentoring relationships
With the most welcome late addition of a team of mentors from Google Ireland, the mentoring relationships are as follows;
Sharing the learning
Each mentoring relationship is structured around a specific piece of work in the area of new media, and each mentee will produce a short report on completion of their mentoring. This report will be published on this website, and on the Arts Ireland group on LinkedIn, where members of the arts community will be able to address questions to the mentees specific to what they have learnt during their mentoring.
Areas covered in mentoring
Over the coming couple of weeks, a description of the areas being covered by each mentoring relationship will be published here. For the moment, suffice to say that there will be a wide range of areas covered, from the use of Facebook and twitter, to website optimisation, the use of Google analytics and Google ads, to website design and the development of a digital marketing strategy.
timeframe
Publication of mentoring reports will begin in early April, with the final reports being published by the end of May.
Finally to say…
Many applications were submitted from across the country last December, and it is regrettable that we were unable to provide mentors for all applicants. Fully aware of the widespread appetite for arts-specific knowledge in this area, the evaluation panel endeavored to assemble a shortlist of organisations from a wide range of sectors and backgrounds, so that the learnings, when published, would be of value to the broadest range of readers from across the spectrum of the arts in Ireland.
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Are you looking to bring your organisation’s online performance to a new level?
Looking to harness the power applications such as Facebook, YouTube, Google Analytics, WordPress & Twitter to better engage with your audiences?
Would you like expert guidance to assist you along the way?
Arts Audiences is pleased to announce details of the New Media Mentoring Scheme, in which experts from a variety of organisations offer their time, for free, to mentor arts organisations seeking to build relationships with new and existing audiences online.
Individuals from 6 organisations will be mentored in this scheme (RTÉ Publishing kindly offering to provide mentoring to three), and participating organisations will produce case studies at the end of the mentoring, to share lessons learnt with the wider arts community.
For more information about the mentors, suitable projects, the workings of the scheme, how to apply etc., please click here!
In case you don’t already know, Take Your Seat is the name of the nationwide, weeklong arts and performance promotion.
We’ve been delighted with the take up on this, and readers should know that the promotion ends on the 14th of November, so at the time of writing, there are only 3 days left to get your hands on some great deals!
To avail of Ticket Discounts, Special Offers and Free Tickets to Surprise Events register with Take Your Seat and go visit your local theatre, arts centre, or music venue.
Arts Audiences’ Customer Service Project is now half-way through its work programme for 2009. The teams from Temple Bar Cultural Trust (TBCT) and Project Arts Centre (PAC) have completed the first two phases of their work:
Phase 1 involved mapping out ‘customer journeys’ for every part of their business where staff interacted with audiences. These journeys were agreed with key members of staff in each organisations, and then plotted out on simple diagrams created using MS Excel. (This phase lasted c.3 weeks in June)
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‘Culture Night ‘ – photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh
Phase 2 involved an external consultant, Knowledgeworks, using these customer journeys as a road map on which to base a series of mystery shopping exercises.
Mystery shopping took place in July for both organisations. Staff in both organisations knew this was happening, but didn’t know when they would be ‘mystery shopped’. Both organisations chose a particularly busy business time in July for this exercise.
Mystery shopping involved the consultant posing as a range of customers who wanted to either FIND information, ASK questions, SURF websites about the organisation, or GO to an event hosted or organised by TBCT or PAC. Each interaction was then graded from 1-7 according to agreed parameters for assessing quality customer experiences.
The results the Mystery Shopping conducted on both organisations was presented to both teams at PAC and TBCT in September.
The next phase, currently underway, involves staff of both organisations absorbing the results from the Mystery Shopping reports, and deciding what steps to take next to improve the customer experience of their organisation.
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The Dock, Carrick on Shannon – photo by Rós Kavanagh
