E6: Small Museum, Big Impact: The Creator Economy Playbook for Underdog Institutions | Nik Wyness

Warren and Andi talk with Nick Wyness, Head of Marketing at the Tank Museum, and his insights into digital engagement were truly impressive. The Tank Museum has successfully cultivated a vast online community of military history enthusiasts through platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

By creating high-quality and informative content, they've fostered trust and credibility, ultimately leading to increased support and donations. Additionally, their strategic use of brand partnerships and e-commerce has been instrumental in monetizing their online presence.

The key takeaway here is that museums and cultural organizations have a significant opportunity to connect with broader audiences and share their unique stories through digital channels.

Creators & Guests

Host

Andi Graham

Host

Warren Wilansky

What is The Digital Stage?

Join Andi Graham of Big Sea and Warren Wilansky of Plank as we explore the future of cultural engagement through the lens of museums, arts centers, and cultural institutions, talking with innovators crafting unique digital experiences that inspire and transform the way we connect with our communities.

Andi Graham (00:04.023)
Good afternoon and welcome to the digital stage. We are here with Nick Wyness and I am so excited to chat with you today. I have such an endless list of questions. I've been digging so deeply into you, but welcome to the conversation, Nick.

Nik W (00:19.408)
Thank you very much for having me.

Andi Graham (00:21.27)
Yeah, I was connected with you on LinkedIn through Hayden, who always points me to the most interesting people doing work in cultural organizations. And I have to tell you that specifically your content is relevant to me because I just spent the past three months doing a marketing strategy for a small maritime museum in rural Maryland. That's a good hour and a half drive from any major metropolitan areas.

but they have this incredible niche audience of shipwrights who just love to learn about like the building of ships and all of that stuff. And so one of the things we talked about was building out Patreon and building out all kinds of different channels for their niche content. So, my gosh, Nick, this content you have been doing for the Tank Museum is just endlessly fascinating and I cannot wait to learn more about it. So my first question is,

Tell me how this started. Like you've been there for a while. When did this begin?

Nik W (01:21.584)
I have been there a while. I think it would probably be helpful if I just put a little bit of information out about the Tank Museum and what we do and where we are and how we got into all of this. So the Tank Museum is, well, it is what it says it is. We're a military museum. It's military tanks, not fish tanks or petrol tanks. Other types of tanks are available, of course. But we are in a very rural area in the county of Dorset. It's about two and a half hours, three hours away from London.

Andi Graham (01:27.35)
Yes, sorry.

Nik W (01:50.416)
and it's an hour away from the nearest town of Bournemouth. So if it wasn't for the fact that Dorset as a county is where a lot of Brits go and spend their summer holidays, I don't think the museum would have survived at all. So it's very, very seasonal or it has been in the past. August when the school holidays are on is always by far our busiest month. But yeah, we have this problem that we are by historical accident really in the middle of nowhere. The Tank Museum has...

been on the site it is now for literally 100 years we just celebrated our centenary last year and the reason we're there is because in the first world war when the tank was invented the British government was looking for a place that was quiet and out of the way where they could test this new secret weapon and train the crews before they were sent over to France to fight so quiet out of the way location that's where we found ourselves as the Tank Museum. So far from ideal far from ideal so as you say I've been at the Tank Museum for a long

Andi Graham (02:43.222)
Yeah.

Nik W (02:47.408)
It will be 20 years actually in July since I first walked through the boy. Yeah, practically my first sort of job as a graduate. And so the Tank Museum has been on this really interesting journey of development in that time. You know, we've been redeveloping. We were fortunate enough to get a very large grant from something called the Heritage Lottery Fund, which in the UK, this is a big sort of almost kind of largely government run.

Warren Wilansky (02:52.003)
wow.

Andi Graham (02:54.198)
Yeah.

Nik W (03:15.28)
grant making body which raises money through a lottery basically. So we got a very large sum of money to modernize the museum and start bringing it up to modern standards. So the visitor experience would be improved, the exhibitions would be modernized and so on and so forth. And since then, of course, we've had a responsibility to try and, like all museums, we've got to get the word out. We've got to try and attract people to come. But...

We never had huge budgets. We never had huge sums of money. Advertising, as we all know, is very expensive and the results can sometimes be rather unpredictable. So when social media was about 10, 12 years ago, when brands started to really jump on social media, I thought this was a great way to almost extend our PR activity online and help us.

Andi Graham (04:06.55)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (04:07.056)
reach and connect with people who would be interested in the kind of information and stories that we had to tell. So that's how it began. It was just about using content marketing to get out there to sort of reach new audiences who would be interested in the Tank Museum and that hopefully we'd be able to drag them down to Dorset to get them to come visit us.

Andi Graham (04:27.254)
So go ahead, Lauren. I know.

Warren Wilansky (04:27.279)
So I, we're both super excited, obviously. I mean, I'm really excited to hear about some of the specific things you're doing for a couple of reasons. First, we actually work, my team works with a World War II museum that has called Juno Beach Center that's based in France over there. Yeah, so beautiful, wonderful space to settle, you know, to, I was gonna say celebrate. That's the wrong word, to commemorate the situation that happened there.

Nik W (04:43.216)
in there.

Warren Wilansky (04:52.911)
And the other reason is a couple of years ago, I wrote an article specifically about museums and as much as a museum and in your case, you want to try to get as many people there as you can. There's the reality that a lot of people are never going to make it there. And the online social media, like social media posts that you're going to put up or any kind of content or any kind of virtual exhibitions are going to be the way that the majority of people interact with you. And, you know, and so I'm excited to hear.

about the things you're doing and the effect that you've had with what you've been doing online.

Nik W (05:25.584)
I think what you're saying there is absolutely right. And I think it was about 2017, we were spending quite a lot of our marketing resource, if you like, on content marketing and building these online communities and online audiences. And of course, the objective have always been about, we want to drive these people to the Tank Museum. But when we looked at the analytics, we were saying, well, actually, the vast majority of our audience, they're not even based in the UK, let alone being within driving distance of the Tank Museum. So we had that moment of asking ourselves, well, what are we going to do?

What's the point here? What's the point? The biggest slice, the biggest segment of our online audience, actually based in the USA, not even in Europe. So, it's very unlikely, although we'd love, of course, as many people to come over as possible, it's very unlikely in reality that those people are actually going to be able to practically come and visit the Tank Museum. And that's when our approach changed really. That's when we realized that maybe there is something in this, maybe we can use this for...

traditionally what museums will call fundraising activity. Maybe we could use that as a basis for advocacy and building support. And it might not just be about trying to get people to come through the front.

Warren Wilansky (06:33.487)
Yeah, that's it.

Andi Graham (06:33.654)
I think that, yeah, I think we, Warren and I talked to a lot of museum folks and that's a, I think it's a hard thing, well, especially when we work with performing arts centers, but it's a hard thing to get a lot of museums to understand. So when you, in the 2017s, you were doing traditional sort of content marketing. When did you switch to this sort of creator approach where you were really starting to produce a lot more content? I mean, what was the...

Nik W (06:58.028)
Yeah, that was basically it was it was all it was basically at that time it was it was sort of based around a conversation we were having with our board of trustees and they were sort of saying, you know, what is the what's the point? What are we going to get out of this? You know, you know, what's the justification, if you like, for putting the time into this activity over this activity? And so, you know, it was around the time there were, you know, quite a lot of YouTubers, for example, were finding that they were able to sort of earn quite a decent amount of revenue. They were becoming

Andi Graham (07:11.03)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (07:22.422)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (07:26.832)
self -supporting in fact from using the content they create to build audiences and then basically you know to use that kind of slightly crude term monetization monetizing those audiences so it was simply a case of just kind of going to look at what some of those really big youtubers were doing and taking those strategies off the shelf just applying those to us as the Tank Museum as the as the non -profit organization and that's when we did things like launch the Patreon that's when we

Andi Graham (07:36.791)
Yeah.

Nik W (07:54.576)
actually start, you know, we turned on the advertising revenue for our YouTube channel. That's when we started thinking about how we could monetize through brand partnerships and how we could sort of use that disparate remote audience to promote our e -commerce activity and sell merchandise in the same way that, for example, Mr. B sells t -shirts, maybe we could sell Tank Museum t -shirts to people wherever they are in the world.

Andi Graham (08:14.582)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Andi Graham (08:20.086)
It's a thing, I think a lot of organizations don't think about as much as they should, but the monetization of things that are outside the institution for certain. I'm curious what the team looked like. How did you build a team that was going to be able to do this? There's definitely a science to building videos that get that level of engagement. And I can't imagine you get access to top tier talent where you are. A lot of times with remote location comes a very, a smaller employment pool.

Nik W (08:38.448)
Yeah!

Nik W (08:47.152)
Definitely. I think I have to say that the Tank Museum as a whole is a very entrepreneurial and very energetic organization. We're very ambitious. And I think that is driven by the fact that we don't get it handed to us on a plate where we are to work very hard for everyone that comes through the door. And we're very proud of what we've achieved. But we're very fortunate in having...

Andi Graham (08:55.862)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (09:05.206)
Yeah.

Nik W (09:14.384)
very dedicated and talented people who are keen to come and work with us. So it did start slowly. So initially when I go back to 2017, for example, the team was very small. It was just myself and a couple of other people. But as we started to show what was possible, we were kind of backed with more and more support and more and more resource. And now, of course, the team is much, much bigger. Of course, we're responsible not just for the online activity, but we're also

as I've already mentioned, responsible for making sure that the visitors are coming in through the door, you know, Monday to Sunday and, you know, coming to our events and that kind of thing. So we try and kind of, I wouldn't say that there's a team which is purely focused on the online activity, you know, we all kind of dip in and do what we sort of need to do as just part of the overall, you know, this is what we do as a museum. And of course, we've got a very large e -commerce site now as well. And of course, you know, we've dealt with,

we run the website and send the traffic to it, but of course, you know, that's run effectively by our existing retail team, which of course had to grow considerably in order to cope with the demand as well. So, I mean, that's the other great news about this, is that, you know, in our rural location, we've managed to create jobs, a time when a lot of museums have been struggling as well, particularly sort of since the pandemic.

Andi Graham (10:17.686)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (10:37.584)
And we're also lucky as well that we've got a local in Bournemouth, which is the nearest town, there is an arts university there as well. And they're sort of pumping out graduates every year with there's a film studies degree course there. And we've been very fortunate to grab a couple of graduates out of that institution as well. It's been actually fantastic.

Andi Graham (10:45.75)
Ugh.

Andi Graham (11:01.622)
that's a great way to -

Warren Wilansky (11:02.031)
It's amazing, like, hearing these stories, like, I think it's not even a lesson for small museums. I think it's a lesson for any arts organization or any museum. Like, what you're doing is unique and a lot of people can learn from it. So I'm curious how much of your revenues now as an organization are as a result of online efforts.

Nik W (11:24.208)
So last year it was almost 30 % and that's just the revenue that was generated online from people who weren't visitors. And that was through the advertising revenue, through the Patreon, through the membership sales and through the brand sponsorship activity and of course the e -commerce. And the e -commerce is the biggest slice of that. That's certainly the largest in terms of turnover. But of course, things like the advertising revenue, the Patreon, that's all 100 % profit if you like.

which goes directly into the charity, which ultimately improves the visitor experience. That's what we're doing this for, right? It's to raise money for the Tank Museum.

Andi Graham (11:53.558)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (12:03.574)
And you've got close to 785 ,000 subscribers on YouTube I was just looking at. I mean, that's astronomical. There's that many people interested in the topic. That's crazy. Yeah.

Nik W (12:12.464)
It is, I mean, it's absolutely fantastic. It really is. That's, I think, the power to go back to where you started. You can take something which is niche. We don't get that many visitors in a year. Last year was a record year for us. We had 225 ,000 visitors. And that's more than it used to be, for sure, which is fantastic. But we don't have that central metropolitan location. We're in no way comparable to those big, what we call, national museums in London, for example.

But it just shows that with these niche interests, the internet is a fantastic tool to help you find people who share that interest. And the internet is a big ocean. There's always plenty of fish.

Andi Graham (12:59.574)
So aside from YouTube, where do you find these communities? I mean, Reddit has to be on your list, right? Do you have team members who are sort of active in the chat communities?

Nik W (13:06.992)
We try and be, I mean, obviously, like I say, we don't have a massive team. So it can be a challenge to kind of keep on top of the things. And one of the things I've always noticed, we've always wanted to do far more than we actually can do, if you know what I mean, because there's never the resource to do absolutely everything you want to, which is always quite difficult to deal with. But we started our first social media platform, which did really, really well for us and still does really, really well for us is Facebook. Because Facebook is where most people are.

Andi Graham (13:10.87)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (13:21.142)
Yep.

Andi Graham (13:35.958)
Mm -hmm, yep.

Nik W (13:37.52)
We've branched off. We've got an Instagram now, of course, we're on X, but X doesn't really do a great deal for us. It doesn't seem to allow people to engage as much as Facebook does or as much as Instagram does. And in 20, yeah, just over a couple of years ago now, we launched a TikTok as well, and that's not doing too bad. We've got about 350 ,000 followers over on TikTok. And what's interesting about TikTok as well, of course, is it is, again, it's a very, very different type of audience. So of course,

Andi Graham (13:49.526)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (14:01.718)
Cheers.

Nik W (14:06.)
All of our online audiences have got one thing in common, and that's that they really like military history. They really like the story of armored warfare. But actually what we're seeing on TikTok, and again, this is fantastic, is it's so much younger than our Facebook audience, and it's younger than our YouTube audience. And so, you know, that for us is great to see that, you know, it really is worth using different platforms in slightly different ways to achieve slightly different objectives in terms of bringing in, you know, different demographies.

Andi Graham (14:10.39)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (14:20.566)
huh.

Warren Wilansky (14:35.791)
Have you also found that because of the change of platforms to TikTok, that the in -person people that are visiting the museum now are skewing to a different age, or you find that it's still a similar kind of audience?

Andi Graham (14:35.926)
Is there a?

Nik W (14:45.232)
It's still, it's very difficult to say. So going back to what I was saying earlier, and how I've always considered social media for us, it's a bit of an extension of our traditional PR activity. You know, like we'd write magazine articles, we'd send those off kind of thing. These days we're writing our own stuff and we're putting it out there directly. So like all PR, it's very, very, very difficult to measure. What you tend to see is change and trends over time. This is all about brand building. So it's slow and steady wins the race. For us, one of the key,

completely unscientific ways that we know it's working and it is bringing people into the museum is, for example, the amount of autographs the guy who presents our TikTok has to sign, the amount of autographs and selfies that our curator who appears in the YouTube videos has to sign as well. So it's clear that the recognition is transferring to people who are coming through the doors, but it's very difficult to know whether or not it's a direct driver or not. And actually, I don't really sort of...

think of it like that myself, I do see them, the kind of the potential on -site audience, the potential online audience as being very, very difficult, very different and in very different funnels almost.

Andi Graham (15:59.574)
I'm noticing on this YouTube channel, you have members only content as well, which I think is a neat aspect. How do you decide what becomes publicly available and what's members only content?

Nik W (16:07.888)
So for the time being, at least, because of course you always have to review what you're doing because it depends very much on how the audience reacts. But what we do with the public content is, you know, that is the storytelling. That's the stuff which anyone would like, regardless of what their relationship is with the Tank Museum, if they're into the subject matter. What we've been doing with the members only content is a little bit more different. It's a little bit more personal. So we have a monthly curator's Q &A, which is where you can submit

Andi Graham (16:14.87)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (16:37.296)
a question about anything tank related obviously to our curator and he'll go off and do a lot of research and come back and give very, very detailed answers. And the other thing that we're doing is sort of behind a monthly behind the scenes video as well, which is where we kind of sort of get different departments in the museum to basically give us a little bit of an update of their work, you know, whether that's in the tank workshop, whether that's in the exhibitions department, whether that's in our events team.

Andi Graham (16:38.166)
Hmm.

Andi Graham (16:49.078)
I love that.

Nik W (17:06.832)
whether it's in our own team, whatever's going on that we think our members would be interested in, we would tend to feature. And of course, these are all things that tend to relate directly, if you like, to the mission and the values of the Tank Museum, which is what those people's donations is actually supporting. So it's like how we go about doing our restoration work. How do we go about conserving our artifacts? How do we go about displaying them? How do we go about deciding what new exhibitions and displays we think we might be doing next?

Andi Graham (17:30.55)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (17:40.342)
What made you separate it out as a membership on YouTube specifically versus a membership perk as a, say, membership of the museum itself where you've got membership gated content on the website?

Nik W (17:48.816)
So one of the things that I've been really keen to do is try and make sure that wherever you have the membership, by and large, the benefits are broadly similar. So of course, we've got our traditional friends of the Tank Museum scheme. But what I've been trying to do really is just make sure that our Patreon and our YouTube memberships are very, very, very similar. But we've also created this

Andi Graham (18:06.262)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (18:16.336)
this friends members only area on our website so that the friends to, you know, the traditional friends as it were, they can get access to this members only video content as well. And I think in the future we'll certainly be investing far more in that. We still produce a magazine as well. And in fact, what we've seen through all of this is that actually the circulation of that magazine has increased because we're finding that people who join us, I don't know, like $5 a month.

Andi Graham (18:25.11)
Mm -hmm.

Andi Graham (18:33.782)
Yeah.

Nik W (18:42.352)
patrons, they also would like to subscribe to the magazine as well, which is quarterly. So that's another sort of touch point for us. It's very easy for us to send the magazine across the world. It's very sort of inexpensive. And so, so yeah, there's, there's, we're just finding there's more and more demand, if you like, for this very sort of specialized information that we're able to produce. We're very fortunate to have found this, this niche that we seem to be able to serve quite, quite, quite efficiently.

Nik W (19:13.904)
Right. There is a tank talk. Of course there is. Have you not checked it out?

Andi Graham (19:14.102)
Yeah, it's tank talk, right? Is there a tank talk? Of course there is, I know. No, but I keep getting, I have a 15 -year -old daughter, so I get constantly made fun of for the various talks that I find myself deeply dug into. I never know how I end up there, but here I am, so it's fun. I'm curious, do you have any intentional pathways or journeys that you try to craft coming from a marketing perspective?

Nik W (19:27.12)
I'm out.

Warren Wilansky (19:30.255)
Heheheheh

Andi Graham (19:43.702)
between your subscribers across all your different channels and into the paid membership plot, you know, the Friends of the Museum, that sort of a thing where you can actually have a little bit more ownership over that relationship.

Nik W (19:53.52)
Yeah, absolutely. I think with all of this online activity, particularly since we kind of made the realization that actually it's not just about trying to get people to visit, although that is a big part of it. But all of this stuff, all of this communication activity, there needs to be some objective for it. So every Facebook post, for example, should have some kind of call to action in it, whether that call to action is to...

consume more content over here or check out our website over here or look at this event page listing here or watch this video over here. And those pages themselves, for example, those pages on our website might have opportunities to buy something from our online store, might have opportunities to buy a ticket for our big Tankfest event, for example, which is our biggest fundraising event of the year. Or, and really significantly, something you can never ask for enough of is, you know,

gathering email addresses for us is really, really significant as well. So once we've got people's email addresses, of course, they go onto our sort of e -newsletter and then we can talk to them about all of the interesting opportunities that might be suitable for them. And we're always just basically looking to get anyone who follows any of our channels just onto that next step, onto that next step, whatever that might be, you know, whether that is just to buy something from us just one time, that's absolutely fine.

But we'd love them to become a member. We'd love them to become a patron. We'd love them to come and visit ultimately if it's possible. And some people do. Some people, for example, will fly all the way from the US, from Australia, for Tankfest, which is our big event at the end of June. About 25 % of our audience for that particular event does actually come from overseas.

Andi Graham (21:17.078)
Hehehehe

Andi Graham (21:39.574)
that's incredible. Yeah, I mean, I imagine if you're a follower then, and if you just happen to be within the two and a half hour drive, you're going to make a little bit of an extra effort to try to get there. I mean, it's something that's, that seems like a, there's not a lot of reason to visit places in a general sense. If you have that tie to the content and tie to the community, it feels, feels important. That's cool.

Nik W (21:56.784)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Warren Wilansky (22:01.423)
Yeah, the thing that I've definitely I'm learning from from you. And it's something that I think I've talked with Andy and I have talked about on other other, you know, podcast episodes we did is this idea that, you know, as soon as somebody has given you their email and says, I'm a fan, you shouldn't be afraid to reach back out to them. In other words, if I want to develop that relationship, you know, you don't have to be aggressive, but you shouldn't be restrained in what you're offering and what you're asking.

Nik W (22:23.984)
Absolutely right. And, you know, my philosophy on this a bit like it is with the social media side of things is that, you know, we often, I'm sure, see brands kind of using social media as a sales channel. And we all know that's not what it's for. But for me, it's just about every opportunity we have to say something cool about tanks or our subject or something that we think is really interesting. We want to share, you know, that that goes on social media, it goes in the emails. And, you know, the hope is logically that that will lead to an increased

desire for engagement with us and increased desire for more kind of more sense of affinity with us and ultimately if that leads to a donation then happy days. If not we're still doing our job as a charity just by you know sharing our enthusiasm for this particular subject.

Andi Graham (23:06.486)
For sure.

Andi Graham (23:12.662)
And that's my exact point is that the mission of so many of the organizations we work with is really to share that information, right? It's to protect and preserve the history. It's to share the history and the cultural relevance. And that doesn't just mean to the folks who are walking through the door. And so accessibility inclusivity becomes such a big part of that message as well, and of, of sharing and expanding on that mission. I just think it's such a, we're, we're afforded such neat new channels that I wish so many more organizations were really just embracing that.

and this having curatorial support in the content production system, whatever that looks like. I mean, all of that is so vital. That's cool.

Nik W (23:48.272)
Absolutely. And I think a lot of organizations struggle with this idea of getting the organization aligned to sort of create stuff as good, which is as good as the stuff they have on site to go out online as well. And I think that was a journey for us and it'll be a journey for other organizations who have yet to go through it. Believe it or not, even now, even today, we still have those occasional kind of debates sometimes about the idea that...

Andi Graham (24:03.414)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (24:14.224)
If we're giving away all this stuff for free, surely it must devalue the museum experience, right? Sure, if we give it away for free online, why will anyone visit the Tate Museum? Yeah, those sorts of mindsets still exist, surprisingly, even though we've managed to achieve what we've managed to achieve.

Andi Graham (24:38.358)
Yeah, and having been publishing content as a marketing agency for the past 20 years, I can tell you that I can tell people how to do better email marketing, for instance, a thousand times over, and they're still going to hire us to do it for them. So giving things away for free does not prevent people from wanting the actual in real life experience in whatever case that looks like. So if nothing else, you know, I've seen…

Warren Wilansky (24:52.367)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (24:56.144)
Yeah, absolutely.

Andi Graham (25:02.198)
We're traveling to Italy this summer. I've seen 7 million photos of some of the places we're going. It makes me more excited to visit those places. I cannot wait to see them in person. So building that engagement. So Nick, I, you know, we work with a lot of small organizations and midsize organizations, but I'd love to hear what your advice would be to people who want to get sort of started with embracing this sort of creator economy. Where should, where does this thinking like what kinds of teams, what kinds of the.

Nik W (25:08.4)
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Andi Graham (25:29.878)
What kinds of tech and tools, what do you recommend?

Nik W (25:30.16)
So I think that the best advice I could give is, you know, people are thinking about getting started is just to get started, just do it, you know, just get stuck in, experiment. Because, you know, what has worked for us might not work for other organizations. You know, if you have a, you know, we're, I suppose, fortunate in the sense that we do have this very, very niche and it is a very, very narrow sort of set of things that we can talk about.

Andi Graham (25:40.79)
Yeah.

Andi Graham (25:48.534)
Mm -hmm.

Nik W (25:56.56)
But it's also an international story, isn't it? We talk about the great global conflicts of the 20th century. So I appreciate that a local history museum might not feel like they've got quite the same sort of stage, I suppose, that we have to talk about. But the tools, the techniques, they absolutely will apply, won't they? It's still about really good storytelling. It's still about using the artifacts and the objects that you will have in your collections and the expertise.

of those curators and those experts and sharing that online in a way which an audience will find easy to consume in a way that they'll find original and in a way that they'll just find useful because it's interesting. So it will stop them scrolling through. So that's the first objective, isn't it, is to stop people scrolling and pay attention to what you're putting out there. So I definitely think just getting started, I think you do need to be...

quite curious yourself. You need to be quite curious about the audience, about what their expectations might be, because even if you do have a slightly broader subject area, you still need to sort of figure out what that audience might look like and therefore what they might like. And then you've got to experiment with it and see how they react to it and see what you need to do to adapt it. I think it's always useful to have, as a marketer, it's always useful to have...

allies on that curatorial side as well who can kind of help you out because the other thing that's really important if you're representing a museum is you really can't afford to get the facts wrong can you because we've all done it of course but yeah it doesn't look great.

Andi Graham (27:35.51)
Yeah.

Warren Wilansky (27:35.983)
Mm, that's true.

Andi Graham (27:42.774)
Yeah, it speaks though to, I had done some research maybe a year, year and a half ago about the fact that above all other media outlets, museums are trusted more than any other museum outlets. And then I'm watching as so many museums become media companies and they become publishers. And it's just such, there's so much opportunity and so much space to sort of lead conversations around, you know, international, whatever these things are.

to lead these conversations because of that inherent trust and credibility that come with having been there. So that's cool.

Nik W (28:13.392)
I definitely think that's a big part of why we've been able to build these online audiences as well. With that word museum, that sort of status that we have as an accredited museum, as a not -for -profit organization, it means that people perhaps feel that we're trusted. They can believe, I suppose, what we're saying in an age where there's so much misinformation out there, and particularly on social media, and so many agendas. Whereas that...

Andi Graham (28:21.59)
Yes.

Nik W (28:44.112)
That trust can lead to commitment. Commitment is what ultimately leads you to build a community and that community is how that's how you can turn that community into a basis for advocacy and support. So I think, you know, museums have got it absolutely made because, you know, not only do we have that kind of inherent inherent trust in these potential communities, but we've got the best stories. We've got stories that other brands would literally die for. And it's all there. It's all there. Just all we have to do is get it out there, get it out there.

Warren Wilansky (29:18.479)
Yeah, like brands have to make up stories. You actually are sitting on a vast treasure trove of stories. You know, it's unbelievable.

Nik W (29:20.816)
Yeah, absolutely. It's all there.

Andi Graham (29:21.078)
Hehehehehe

That's so true. That's so funny. I'm like harken back to the squatty putty, the unicorn pooping, like rainbow poop. And I'm thinking, these made up stories are so, they can, every now and then there's some gym, but you know, for the most part, you're like, eh, okay. So that's so true. The stories are just endless. I agree with that. So Nick Warren, do you have any other questions?

Warren Wilansky (29:50.927)
No, I just want to say Nick. Thank you for doing this with us I mean I've come back to the point that I started off with our discussion with which is you know There's a lot of people who may never make it to your museum in person But what you're doing is actually connecting with people who who are getting to understand things that in ways that they might not otherwise And I think it's you know, it's great that you're doing that You

Nik W (30:07.792)
Well, thank you very much.

Andi Graham (30:13.494)
Yeah, I think it's incredible. I've been watching all of your content across all the different going out and speaking, I think is really helpful too, because I think small museums often feel stuck with what they can do from a marketing perspective. And they have such a hard time with even the basics and the foundation of marketing that it's like, okay, I can hardly get my weekly email newsletter out. How do you expect me to go and create all these videos and things like that? But finding student help and internships, you know, there's so many opportunities that, for,

Nik W (30:40.016)
Absolutely.

Andi Graham (30:41.43)
low budget all the way up. So, and technology has made it so much more accessible.

Nik W (30:42.736)
You just got to, I think it's, you know, you can't expect, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day. And it's just that idea of, you know, when you, when you don't have the resources, you just have to sort of like step your objectives. And that's the only way to do it really.

Andi Graham (31:00.534)
I do have questions about brand partnerships, but I'm going to save that for another conversation because we're at time. But I really appreciate you being here with us, Nick. I have so many interesting thoughts around what you guys are doing and I'll be a fan forever. So thank you so much. Yeah.

Nik W (31:10.96)
Thank you very much for having me.

Warren Wilansky (31:17.583)
Thank you.