1stfans: Shifting Focus and Moving to Meetup.com
As originally conceived, 1stfans was designed to engage both near and faraway supporters, but having run the program for almost two years, we’ve been seeing what works and what doesn’t and it’s time to respond and change the program. So far, members are having a great time at the Target First Saturday meetups and we’ve seen a high renewal rate from the ones who’ve attended those events. Simply put, the in-person benefits rock—people socialize and meet new friends while attending awesome meetups around museum content. By contrast, the online benefits have not worked as well and when we talked to our far-away supporters informally they indicated they were joining (and continuing to renew) out of general support for the museum, not necessarily to obtain a tangible benefit.
It’s because of this all of this that we are shifting focus to better accommodate the in-person meetup and changing the use of technology to support that goal. At the end of November, we will be discontinuing the use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr groups for 1stfans and we’ll be moving our online operations to Meetup.com.
At the 1stfans meetup in June 2010, Tash managed to get a Key to City and we all got to open the secret door on the 5th Floor.
This is a long story of creating a program, learning as you go and finding the right technological fits along the way. I’m going to run down the specifics after the jump. If you are one of our readers that is new to 1stfans and would like to get caught up, you might check out Will’s introduction to the program and Nina Simon’s interview with the two of us during early days.
Twitter Art Feed:
As much as we loved the Twitter Art Feed, it wasn’t working and we were not seeing much user engagement. You may remember one of the artists, Joanie San Chirico, actually created an entire project to try and engage the folks that were quietly lurking in the background—a direct response to the issue at hand. In some ways, since many of the artists featured were 1stfans, the feed provided a way to get to know certain members through their projects, but overall user engagement was low and if the point of 1stfans was to socialize and get to know one another, Twitter didn’t work. Why? Well, simply put, Twitter is setup for a one-to-many communication and while it’s possible to have a many-to-many communication there, it’s not the norm and is difficult on the scale we need. Compared to what we were seeing in the building, the feed felt alien—like it wasn’t part of the program. Though we are sad to see it go, we couldn’t be more thrilled that Dennis Bass is going to send us off. We got to know Dennis after he became our Foursquare Mayor and he’s been a great supporter of ours—his project, which looks at our permanent collection, tagging and his own photography, is going to provide a lovely close to the feed. We’d like to take this time to thank the artists who contributed to the feed over the past two years—they created some amazing projects and utilized Twitter in very innovative ways. If you are curious for more, each project has its own blog post detailing the project and to celebrate them, we are making the feed public so you can scroll back through and take a look at these projects before the feed is deleted entirely.
Communication:
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