"As the UK emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and looks to the future, it’s clear that Britain’s genuinely world-beating creative industries can play a vital role both in rebuilding the country’s economy and helping communities emerge from successive lockdowns.

Many of the creative industries have been hit especially hard by lockdown and the ill-effects will last longer than for other sectors of the economy. Before the pandemic, the creative industries were one of the fastest growing sectors, contributing £115.9 billion to the UK economy in 2019.

But, crucially, the creative economies can help breathe new life into our local communities, helping councils address the long-term decline of town and city centres which has been accelerated by the pandemic. The output of vibrant creative industries will also create a focus for people to rally around and rebuild the confidence of communities whose rhythm has been disrupted by multiple lockdowns.

Using this toolkit will help you:

1. Know what’s happening in your area

2. Design a programme of support

3. Set goals

4. Harness local levers for change

This toolkit provides a four-stage process to help you structure a programme of support for the creative economy in your area. You can use some or all of it as best meets your needs."

— Excerpted from https://www.theaudienceagency.org/resources/build-back-creatively-toolkit

"A visitor journey map is a diagram or visualisation of the steps a visitor goes through in their interaction with an organisation, helping the organisation to understand the journey a visitor takes and the quality of the experience. In a purely commercial world customer journey maps are used to map the route to sale, identifying critical interaction points. Journey mapping is not new in museums (Chan 2015, Devine 2015, Grohe/Mann 2019, Paqua 2018) but sometimes the term is used to focus on how a visitor moves through a physical space or their engagement with a particular in-venue experience.

Digital journey mapping in this context, is an attempt to combine physical journey maps with digital interactions, to more accurately reflect the modern visitor experience which is likely to include digital touchpoints, not only during a physical visit but also before and after. In addition, for many museums, a visitor may only ever visit online and therefore understanding “typical” online-only journeys can be valuable to inform priority planning, website development, and marketing."

— Excerpted from https://mw20.museweb.net/paper/digital-journey-mapping-at-the-national-gallery-understanding-the-role-of-digital-touchpoints-in-a-real-world-or-online-only-visitor-journey/

"This is a guide to help you develop a digital or transmedia project for your museum or gallery. A transmedia project aims to enable museums and galleries to tell the story around their exhibitions or collections using different media and platforms - both analogue and digital - utilising interactive devices, smartphones and tablets."

— For more info: mgnsw.org.au/resources

"Digital, Online, Physical We like to say that digital is where the online world of information and the physical world of people meet. It’s an exciting place full of rapid developments, fresh insights and rediscovered values. It’s also a complex place: to understand it you need to know about tons of things, from smartphones to big data, from social media to the semantic web.

We believe the digital world offers tremendous opportunities for institutions working with heritage, culture and the arts to connect with audiences and achieve our missions. Yes, there are serious challenges, but an institution that strategically embraces the digital revolution will be better off. The world has changed and it’s time to change with it.

The digital world excites us. We also know, however, it is not always easy for professionals and organisations to figure out the best way to approach digital and online media. That’s why we composed this book. It summarises over 10 years of experience working with institutions from all over the world. The objective is to help you design and implement successful and sustainable digital engagement strategies that will make you and your organisation thrive in the digital age."

— Excerpted from Digital Engagement in Culture, Heritage and the Arts

WAVE 1

"The study aims to shed light on how arts and culture organizations can address the hopes, fears, and needs of Americans during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. This report offers early findings from the first wave of this national survey, fielded from April 29 to May 19, 2020, which became one of the largest arts and culture studies ever undertaken in the U.S."

— Excerpted from the WAVE 1 report, pdf linked below. Online version and accompanying tools and materials: https://culturetrack.com/research/covidstudy/

"This guide is intended for anyone planning to use digital technologies to enhance the galley or museum experience and needing to engage external resources/contractors to do so.

A digital project is about audience and community engagement through the creation of interactive storytelling, immersive environments and broader transmedia experiences. There are several basic steps in the development of a digital project.

• The brief

• Find a digital company or developer

• Use your brief as the initial ‘conversation’

• Work through the brief with your developer

• Formalise the project

• Run the project

• Sign-off"

— For more info: mgnsw.org.au/resources

"As COVID-19 - and the resultant lockdown - forced us into physical distance from one another, digital tools and online engagement became key to maintaining connection, communication and friendship. For many CPP Places, what followed was a steep learning curve - an intense live experiment in the online delivery of creative projects. The urgent drive to move engagement online has been an opportunity to investigate the role that digital engagement can play in place-based projects, and to explore the factors that can best enable effective online delivery. We’ve been looking back on what’s been learned through this intense period for digital engagement:

1 MOVING PROJECTS ONLINE BROUGHT NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR REACH AND ENGAGEMENT

2 DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT HAS SHAPED COMMUNITY CONSULTATION AND CO-PRODUCTION

3 DIGITAL EXCLUSION WAS A KEY CONCERN

4 ATTRACTING (AND MAINTAINING) PUBLIC INTEREST CAN BE CHALLENGING

5 REAL-LIVE CREATIVE ACTIVITY OFTEN BRINGS UNEXPECTED POSITIVE IMPACTS

6 ADAPTING DELIVERY TO SUIT NEW CONTEXTS IS AT THE HEART OF THE CPP MODEL OF DELIVERY"

— Excerpted from: https://www.creativepeopleplaces.org.uk/2%C2%A0-role-digital-engagement-place-based-projects