Transmedia Marketing Strategy
Partnership with David Owsley Museum of Art

Design Brief

This creative project is designed to explore how multi-platform storytelling can help the David Owsley Museum of Art (DOMA) increase audience engagement, as well as generate awareness and attract potential visitors. This creative project has three goals:

1) identify and understand the demographics of the DOMA audience through ethnographic research;

2) evaluate DOMA’s existing programs, events, and offerings through surveys of attendees;

3) develop a transmedia marketing campaign that includes digital and physical platforms to increase audience engagement.

Ideally, after the completion of the creative project, there will be an increase in DOMA visitors, as well as greater diversity among audience members who participate in DOMA’s events.

Problem Statement

This creative project addresses two problems:

P1: DOMA struggles to reach out new visitors from the Muncie community to visit the museum.

P2: DOMA struggles to determine how to promote its museum and program.

The Stakeholder Matrix describes the six user personas defined for this project. The primary personas are people connected to Ball State and the local arts community, such as Ball State art students or art professors. The secondary personas may be connected to the university but not through the arts. The last persona describes members of the community who are also not usually patrons of the arts.

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Demographic and Empathy Research

A DOMA event called Final Friday was chosen for this study. This survey is produced on November, fall semester of 2017. The participants were randomly selected to survey at the entry of main events activity. 50 participants answered the survey. Three participants were under the age of 18 and seven participants left more than 50 percent of survey blank were excluded from analyses, leaving 40 respondents.

Table 1: Demographic of samples (fall, 2017)

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Demographic analyses were conducted to understand the characteristics of visitors. The results indicated that the majority of visitors are people age 18-25, female, and Ball State related.

Table 2: results of participants’ abilities from Final Friday (fall, 2017)

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Next, the results of participants’ abilities indicated that Final Friday provide fair opportunity for the participants to learn, network, and express their views. However, the standard deviation shows that some participants have less abilities to network and express their views from the event. Therefore, improving the abilities to network and express their views could be two aspects to engage the participants.

Table 3: results for Final Friday rating by categories

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Results show a high level of approval from survey respondents, with a reasonable deviation from the mean.. This results shows the Final Friday perform in a good way to deliver the experience to the participants, therefore, the strategy framework was designed based on the other data from this analysis.

In order to better understand how museum outreach and promotes its events, the analyses were conducted from a self report survey of Fall 2017 and two surveys from museum of spring 2017.

Table 4: results for event outreach

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Compared the results to explore how the participants heard about Final Friday, as shown in Table 4, word of mouth and social media were the major ways that DOMA reach out the participants. The results from museum’s surveys from spring 2017 agreed with the self report survey that conducted in fall 2017. Therefore, the word of mouth and social media were chosen as outreach channels for the following strategy framework.

Table 5: results for events visit frequently

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The results show that from spring 2017 to fall 2017, the participant start visiting the museum more frequently. In spring 2017, 25% of participants are the first time visitors of DOMA, however, in fall 2017, only 3% were the first time visitor to DOMA. Meanwhile, 45% of participants visited the museum more than 7 times, it is highly increase from spring 2017. This result claims that once the participants visit the museum for once, there is a higher chance for them to visit again. Therefore, reach out to the new visitors could help the museum to engage more audience.

Table 6: Affinity diagram of improving the event

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Also, the study explored why people don’t participate in the events. The results indicated three main reasons. 1) people general don’t know where the art museum located, what it costs, and what kind of exhibits exist. 2) people just not really thought about visiting the art museum. 3) people who are not from art community feel uncomfortable to be involved in the art events.

Table 7: Affinity diagram of low-fidelity prototyping

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Based on the results, it suggested that social media, promotion, and activities are the three components for this strategy framework.

Define the Problem

People who live in the community don’t realize DOMA is open to public for free.
People generally don’t know where the art museum is located, what it costs, and what kind of exhibits exist.
People have not thought about visiting the art museum.
People who are not from the arts community feel uncomfortable being involved in art events.