Wired reporter Liz Stinson published a February, 2016 article about the February 2 #MuseumInstaSwap where 18 visual arts museums in New York City swapped social media content for the day.
Most organizations are all about promoting their own exhibits/performances/artists on their social media platforms…nothing wrong with that. But, this InstaSwap gave museums the opportunity to find common threads between their own collection and their partner organization’s collection. And, I suspect, was a great opportunity to cultivate new audiences for both organizations.
Each of the 18 museums was paired with another museum in the city by “a selection process in which each museum created a ranked list that was then fed to an algorithm that did the final choosing”. So, “The Museum of Art and Design and the Whitney Museum of American Art, for example, have plenty of common ground to draw from. Others like the the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art and the Neue Galerie New York (a museum for German and Austrian art) are connected in their cultural mission, if not in their geographies.”
As summer comes closer and many organizations take a break from regular season programming, an InstaSwap with another local organization might be a great idea to generate content in a lean programmatic stretch, to cultivate arts-loving potential audience members for both organizations, and create some arts community goodwill in your city.
