Sharing heritage is caring for each other: discover Collections of Ghent, a multi-partner project

January 1, 2021

min read

Collections of Ghent is a project with no less than 12 partners, including museums, heritage institutions, tech companies, researchers, City of Ghent and many more. When we began our task as partners to create an explainer video and take over management of the project's social media, we knew we were up for a challenge.

The project

Collections of Ghent is a cross-pollination of Ghent citizens, museums and heritage institutions that enables creative use of each other's objects, documents and stories. On the one hand, it ensures that valuable knowledge about Ghent's heritage spreads beyond the walls of the museum, but also that the people of Ghent are heard about how they experience heritage and what stories they have to tell. In this way, Collections of Ghent hopes to strengthen social cohesion.

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These two worlds will be brought together in a spectacular high-tech way. Starting in the spring of 2022, the CoGhent Box will land in three neighborhoods in Ghent, and the space will allow thousands of objects and photographs from the museums and institutions to be visualized while bringing people's stories together. Ghent residents are encouraged to add their own stories and objects to the Box. After touring Ghent, the CoGhent Box finds its way home at DING, the new wing of the Design Museum Ghent.

Collaboration

We started a collaboration with Pieter-Jan Pauwels(District09) and Olivier Van D'huynslager(Design Museum Gent), the two founders of Collections of Ghent, and Ilse Devroe, marketing campaign manager at the City of Ghent and head of communications at CoGhent. In making the explainer video, it proved to be a challenge to explain the entire project on the one hand while introducing all the partners and their role in the project on the other - an explainer video should be no longer than two minutes. After a few rounds of feedback and editing, the video was ready.

You can see the final result here:

In defining a social strategy, we had to consider a number of goals. On the one hand, we need to tell stories about heritage. We do this by working closely with the participating museums and institutions. During a monthly calendar meeting, we assess whether there are overlapping topics that we can tell a coherent story about and discuss the content calendar for the coming month.

Our social media manager prepares this by adding some topics or topicals to the calendar, and determines what format and platform to use for this topic. Then the partners review their collections to see what they can find about it. During the calendar meeting, all the puzzle pieces are put together. In addition to stories about heritage, we need to make sure we communicate about the progress of the project.

We need to tell people what is going on, what events are happening, how we get the name of the project out, and how we make sure that people know what we are doing. Name recognition is therefore an important factor in our social strategy. Now that the project has also taken off offline, we are going to focus on a comprehensive branding campaign in the coming weeks. This campaign will be placed organically, with an additional push through social advertising. Finally, it is important to activate the Gentenaar.

The project will succeed only if they too start participating. This is a challenge because Collections of Ghent was totally unknown before April and there were no social channels in sight. Therefore, daily community management is essential.

It is important to create a clear funnel for Collections of Ghent, in which we reach out to Gentenaars and introduce them to the project. We then want to trigger them with our stories about heritage on the social media channels Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and eventually convince them to become active participants in our community who add their own stories to the Collections.

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