 Hello, everyone. I'm very happy to welcome all of you to Nemo's first webinar in 2024. I see a lot of familiar names in the chat. I'm super happy and also new names. The first webinar in 2024, Connect and Grow, effective digital storytelling in museums. I'm very excited to welcome our today's facilitator, Medavi Gandhi from India, though based in Berlin at the moment. Medavi is the founder of the Heritage Lab, a digital media platform where she connects her love for storytelling and the arts. Medavi, we're happy to hear two more sentences from you about the Heritage Lab and your work in a minute. My name is Mira. I work for Nemo, the network for museums in Europe. And one of our main activities is to provide trainings, free training opportunities for our members, such as this webinar. But we also offer trainings and workshops several times a year online and on site. We also offer a mentoring program for museum educators. There's a lot going on, especially this year. So please check out our website or subscribe to our newsletter to be up to date for those events. And right now we have a call for application for a one year free membership at Nemo's. So that's great. Before I hand over to Medavi, I want you the participants to know that we have the opportunity to ask questions to Medavi at the end of the session with a Q&A round and we do that via the chat function. If you have questions in between, you can always write them in the chat. I will collect them and hand them over to Medavi at the end. And now I'm excited to hear more about this super important topic of digital storytelling in museums. Connect and grow. Medavi, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Mira. And it is great to be here. What an honor to be your first webinar facilitator for 2024. I actually didn't think of it. So thank you so much for having me start your 2024 series of webinars. I'm also really excited to have all of you from all across Europe. I'm seeing the chat and it's filling as it fills up. And I see that everyone's joining us from Hungary, Finland, Serbia, Romania, Belgium, so many different places that I have not been to. But I hope that someday I am able to meet you in person, some of you in person as well. So as Mira already introduced me, I'm the founder of the Heritage Lab. Before that, I worked with artisans and crafts people across India and started a non-profit called Happy Hens. And I realized that both of these actually did deal with a lot of storytelling because in crafts is, you know, just the engagement with crafts and folk arts is also about understanding what stories have been important to communities and how do we, you know, communicate that to certain audience that might then become patrons for artisans and crafts people by buying their work and supporting handmade. So that was also something that I worked on. And it's actually that work that led me into museums because museums were spaces for inspiration for a lot of the artisans and crafts people I was working with. And the idea was to see and learn from the stories that their ancestors have told, have shared in different formats and forms, and see how they can work on them and, you know, deliver a more innovative experience of their stories. So that's how I started to actually work with museums in India. And the digital space is something that has been really fascinating to me because it allowed me, just as this moment right now, to network and share these with a range of people from everywhere. When I started the non-profit also, crafts were not something that were discussed online a lot and a large part of my work was to look at public engagement in the digital space with artisans and crafts people. So in a way it all really came together beautifully at the Heritage Lab. And just as I say the Heritage Lab, you might wonder why is it a lab? Because really it was an experiment and it continues to be, except that now the experiments are really targeted towards stories. How do museums sell stories? What stories are resonating with people from different communities? How can communities participate in storytelling? These are just some of the endeavors that we seek to study in a way. Each story that we publish is a study for us. We try to understand who read this, why was it important to them? So while it is great and exciting to share these stories, it's also really nice to be able to dig into the insights behind these stories which can further help institutions, cultural institutions especially, to build on their stories. So that's really what I do at the Heritage Lab. We see what formats are working, whether video is better, do memes work with a certain audience, what are the different kinds of stories that people really love and what brings people closer to museums. I myself am a fan of museums since I was little because my father forced me to go into a museum and that's how it began for me. So I'm really excited to be here and share everything that I've been learning along the way. So I'm happy to also take your questions and I will do my best to answer those. And yeah let's get started. In today's presentation we are talking about digital storytelling. And one of the interesting things that I found was every year there is a research on internet trends and internet consumption and I love looking at those. And something that's really striking to me is that people spend an average of six and a half hours online. But if one goes deeper into what this internet trend is doing, like what are people doing online really? Especially because there is another statistic which is equally fascinating that the human attention span has dropped to 8%. So it makes me wonder that if we are only paying attention, the attention span is limited to eight seconds then what is happening in those six and a half hours really? So some of the top things that are listed according to this research and I've provided a link in the presentation. This is usually done every year in October. The report is published. So this is the latest from 2023. So what people like to do is find information. That's what they use the internet for. And I find these to be the opportunities for us to tell stories when we are a cultural institution or when we are telling cultural stories to understand what is our audience really doing online. A lot of people also like to learn and look at how to videos, whether it's how to make up and how to do hairstyles, that's all good. But as long as they're looking for something to learn, that's a quality that's important to remember that that's what people are here for, how to videos. And then there is education. There are people who like to study courses. This is not in an order, but finding information and learning are some of the top goals. Education and browsing randomly are some of the least spent. I mean, people spend the least time on these two activities where they're just browsing in spare time for nothing really. A lot of the time is now taken up by streaming online shows, listening to music and so on. I didn't put that here, but I felt that these are great opportunities for us to look at how we can plug in our stories. A lot of my friends are very, very fond of those hairstyle videos and yoga videos, both that I I mean, I love the yoga videos for a simple reason that I can't follow yoga really well. But a study of these videos told me that there was something really similar about them. And what was similar was that as someone consuming these videos, I feel even if I don't know how to you know, make a yoga pose, I feel like, oh, I have exercised, you know, just looking at someone do it. And if I don't know how to draw really well, it gives me immense satisfaction to see that someone painted something in a really quick video. So the essence that I understand is that it's the digital way of sharing something gives audiences an aspiration that, hey, I could do this. Now that I know this, or you know, when you're seeing like a cooking video, you don't always cook that, but you love seeing what recipes went in and feel, oh, this could be simple. So what the Heritage Lab actually does is see where we can draw these kind of notes and comparisons and then share them with museums as insights to just see how their stories can also start to touch a chord with their own audience that they hope to speak with. So in today's presentation, really, we are going to talk about how we are going to create a digital storytelling strategy and how we can frame these stories for a certain community. What we actually do is that we delve into how digital, what the power of digital storytelling can be and how it can be used to, you know, captivate our audience and connect them with the institution's ethos, with the institution's mission, how we can really convert them from being an audience to being a community, really. And if you see this image here, there's a bunch of children looking into a bioscope which have these little movies still playing. And here we also see a storyteller using a scroll to share a story. So in a sense, I guess stories have existed for a really long time and it's just the medium and the format that keeps changing. As the audience changes and as their preferences change. So if I have to say it in one word, it's really an experiment of understanding who our target audience is when it comes to digital. So before we begin and before we begin to talk about how we use stories to build a community, I want to ask you to take a moment and just share it in chat. How important is community building to you at this point, whether you're doing it professionally or personally? How important is community building for you at this stage? And maybe even a little line on why is it important to you? So if you're starting a newsletter, for example, go ahead, just tell me that, you know, you're starting a newsletter and that's why community building is important to you. So I'm going to wait to hear from you. And well, I can see the numbers coming in and I do hope that the sound issues have cleared up for those who could not hear. I really like this response that it's part of a community and it's important for us to build a healthy democratic and critical society, critical society. We exist for the community, connecting people who are back home and people who have moved abroad. I really like these responses because some of them are so nice and specific. It's really great to know that you're already so specific about who your audience is and who your community is. Because sometimes for museums it can be a very difficult way to point out who that exact community is because there are several communities that museums can have, should have even, and there are different target audiences, like there is the educator community, there's general civil society in the public, there are young people, artists, just so many different kinds of audiences. Okay, great. So what we do is, as your responses also come in, we look at four different stories all in video format. Because I chose Instagram Reels right now, even though, you know, storytelling is an ancient form and we know that it's just the latest form here, Reels and short videos. The principles of storytelling remain the same, but this is just a different format. So I would like to share these four stories with you and then ask you to point out what you found to be similar between all of them. I'd also share that these are some of the most successful stories in a way. So for instance, the third story that you see here, that you will see would, you know, have around 328,000 viewers. Just what do you think made it successful? Just take a look at the videos, they're really short and they don't have a lot of text or anything. Okay, so I'm just going to recap a little. In the first video, you saw like, there were these really different, you know, scenes from, these are all India based in a way. So they shared different scenes from different cities, popular locations even the second one is about you're looking at the first colored photograph and a little zoom in about that. And the third one is about one of India's most popular artists. So his, his home. So that's going to be converted into a museum. So a look at his home in a very nobody has ever discovered his home really, or seen it from the inside. And the fourth one is about the second largest painting in the world that is exhibited at one of the museums in India. So I'm hearing some of the things. So using social media language as POV, yes, you make the information really fast and captions are direct. Okay. Anything else? What is common with the stories in a narrative structure? Maybe any guesses there? Making a connection to reality? Okay. An invitation to discover more and structure information. Okay, great. So this can help me move ahead perhaps. And this is excellent. People being able to relate to the story. For example, the house, thank you for that. That's really interesting because that's the crux of it. How do we make this relatable and accessible? So one of the things about any amazing story that you might remember from your childhood also, just think about it. If you did, you realize that a story can engage our emotions. And that's, that's what we strive to do. So in today's presentation, that's also what we're looking at that how do these stories engage our emotions? The second layer of the question is that what kind of information are we wanting should remain memorable for the audience? That's something that will depend on relatability. So for instance, somebody finds that house, it's a thing about nostalgia in a way. You're seeing an old house, that kind of architecture doesn't really exist. But at some point, all grandparents's homes, etc, looked that kind of that way. And a lot of the comments on that video actually attested to that saying that, hey, this used to this, this, my uncle used to have a home like this, or my aunt used to have a home like this. So there's that relatability. There's a specific demographic that this is people from a particular city in India who relate to that house and it's rich cultural heritage that oh my God, this artist in his home is in our city, great. And the other part is that's like establishing that connection, not with just the video or the story, but a series of stories that help people establish a connection with your museum. Because everything that you tell them in some way remains in their memory. It has a recall value. That's what we try to do when we tell a story at the Heritage Lab. So we look at a story, we look at a museum object and we see, okay, what can be something? What is that one piece of information that someone ought to remember about this painting? They may not remember that it was a Russian artist who made this painting or that this was about a particular historic moment. But they might remember that this is the second largest oil painting in the world. It's easy to remember. It doesn't take a lot for the person who's consuming the story to remember and that's their entry into your world. So it's easy for them to enter, but as they are given similar stories and as they experience more of these, they start to develop a love for the kind of stories you tell, which brings me to another aspect of our consistency, which I will tackle a little later. That's the thing that when you're telling the story, you know that, oh, is my audience a beginner? Do they really need basic information first that they need to remember so they can establish a connection with our museum or are they people who are used to coming to the museum a lot? And we want them to establish a connection with us in a different way. So it is really the understanding the audience that will help craft that narrative. That said, it is not important that if you don't have an understanding or research of your audience, you shouldn't start to tell a story. What is clear is that the story is meant for a certain audience and not just everybody. When you're starting to tell a story, it's very clear that, okay, this is meant for people of the city of Calcutta so that they can appreciate the house when it is turned into a museum. So it's very clear and very direct that that's what we are looking at. That's the demographic of the audience that we are looking at. There are also sometimes, like for the Heritage Lab, social media channels have been an excellent way to experiment and know our audience. I know that there have been several workshops about social media, a lot of conversation about it as to how to talk on social media and what to post on social media. But the Heritage Lab transitioned from sharing stories on the Heritage Lab's Instagram channel to using these as research material. So we see, how did people react? How did a certain kind of set of people, set of audiences, how would they react to the story? Did it reach teachers as we were intending it to or did it reach a completely different audience that we had thought to? So one of the things, one of the foundations of the digital story is that it resonates with people. So who does the content or the story resonate with? In this case, we put out a Mother's Day post. Now, this was supposed to be a really general generic post that popular story about one of the deities and how his mother is fooling him into believing that, hey, look, I got you the moon. It's right there because he wants the moon and he can't have the moon, but his mother is smarter. So this was like a Mother's Day post to say, all our mothers fooled us at some point trying to make us believe it's something that we didn't know at that time that it wasn't true. Now that's relatable. This has happened with almost every child as they've grown up. So that worked, but we also discovered that our posts were a source of inspiration for artists. And so this is an 18th, 19th century painting, miniature style that an embroidery artist feels that he can actually use as a textile piece. It's his inspiration for a textile piece. So it really became clear to us at that point that a lot of our followers were creators and artists themselves. And so the next set of our storytelling experiment sought to tell stories about women artists. And the Heritage Lab does a lot of Wikipedia editathons. That's like a next level of community because all of the storytelling has led to a point where people want to participate in our storytelling endeavors or our research endeavors. And one way to have them participate and create impact, because everybody who wants to participate wants to see the value of their participation. How have they created impact? So we often hold these Wikipedia editathons on different themes. And for Women's History Month, we decided to focus on women artists who were really less known, not known, not enough information about them. So we collaborated with the museum who provided all the information. But the museum was very hesitant to release artworks about these women or by these women into public domain because of licensing doubts. And they just were not sure how to pursue that. We saw this as an excellent opportunity to bring creators from our community into looking at how they can support this endeavor. So what we have are three things here. There is, you know, Hashi Rashi Devi was an artist. Her artworks are also hardly visible. So there is an artist who created a graphic novel about Hashi Rashi. The second one on the right, extreme right is the group, which is a women's collective in the late 19th, early 20th century. And I think I'm not so sure about the period right now, but there exists no photograph of them together or their work. So there's another artist who actually used one, the single newspaper article about them to craft their image and start to tell their story in a graphic way. And there's another one on the left also about a woman who used embroidery to train a lot of women post-partition who were the partition of India who were emerging from a refugee crisis from poverty. So she used embroidery to help them build their lives. So these are just examples of three stories, but it's the creators that actually came up with these illustrations based on the Wikipedia articles we were writing or the research we were doing, which became crucial for, you know, having that kind of a visual language there. And like I was saying, sometimes you really don't know the audience. So for instance, you will see here, Mr. William DiRumpel is a really well respected historian. And he decided to share this at a time when the pandemic was upon us and there were a lot of debates about vaccination. This story was written way before that. So one doesn't know at the time that the story was written, you know, and shared that, hey, this is a portrait of three princesses who were trying to be brand ambassadors for the government at that time, like for the kingdom at that time, and you know, they were promoting smallpox vaccination. So that story was taken in context much later, almost a year and a half later after it was first written. So there are some times that you write a story, and it doesn't reach the intended audience at first, but it reaches a whole range of other advocates, people who might use that as research later, which is the second example. Mr. Prashant Pushan is a well known lawyer and advocate in India. And when there's a discussion on environment and banning firecrackers just before a huge festival, the history of firecrackers and that kind of information becomes important for his debate. So we don't know who is using these stories, which is why it is absolutely crucial to ensure that there are facts and figures in the story is substantiated well enough. And it's a compelling narrative also for different kinds of audiences. If you see all stories mostly have a main character, have like some conflict happening and then a resolution. But if you're talking about an object, that may not be true. It can just be, it can start from an emotion, it can start from the discovery of something, it can be completely different, which is why I want to show you this example from the Stadel Museum. This has been one of my absolute favorite examples to use when it comes to promoting an exhibition. Like we say, like how do we start to captivate the audience and engage them in that first instance when the attention span is eight seconds, right? So if you see here, the first slide of their story is Vincent, is that you? And there is there's a copy of a self-portrait by a contemporary artist. And now this is the thing that someone who is not into art maybe, or is a lot into art feels that, yeah, okay, I have seen Vango exhibitions. Okay, I will visit if I if I can, you know, that kind of a thing. But here suddenly it's appealing to a creator. It's also appealing to someone who's like, hey, it's works of other people who have created Vango versions on their own. And it might be interesting to see because this is something you haven't seen before as to what is the extent of creativity that people can have with existing art. So that's something new to discover. In another slide, they said can't have must have so they're promoting their merchandise. Yes, great. But it's not in a very promotional way that hey, you will find Vango merchandise at the exhibition and after the exhibition, a special merchandise. Instead, it tells you that hey, you can't have the painting, but you can have this jacket, which would be great if it's because it's Instagrammable. They're using a certain kind of tone with the audience. And that's a tone that they have used to create excitement that, okay, I can go for this. It could also well have been part of a contest that you know, you might win this if you come or there's a lucky draw for the exhibition visitors who knows there are different things that different museums have done over time. But this tells me that even though I can't buy that jacket, I must want I must go and see it at least in person. How does it really look? It gets me excited. The third one is an action point. It's telling the audience what to do. They're not passive consumers. They are being told that you can visit but you can also share your, you can geotag your location, you can put a hashtag. This is what you do to get featured on our Instagram channel, for instance. And then there is the simple, sweet message, very direct call to action that says swipe up. I mean, that's the call to action. You're giving them something to do. You're simply saying, come and see the master with a really tiny part of, I mean, it's the painting that it's at a distance. You can't really zoom in and see. So in a way, it's like a short glimpse, but you can't see the detail. You can't see everything. Because if I saw everything, then how would I feel motivated to go? So when you see all of these stories, you understand that the audience for this particular story is a local audience that might want to be visiting. That's what they're doing. Their mission here is to make the digital visitor visit the exhibition. So it could be the local visitor. But the idea is that that's the story, that the premise that the story is built on visiting, like driving the visiting part of it. So that is a certain kind of a mission to crafting that compelling narrative. I'm also happy to share another example that keeps becoming a trend in India every few days. And this is interesting for us, because again, this was a simple story. It was meant to just clarify what this culture is about, because nobody really knows the story behind it. The label just says, Mephistopheles, Margareta, Sackamore Wood. That's it. It doesn't say anything else. But we start with stating the obvious. That's another technique in storytelling that states the obvious and say, this is perhaps the most photographed object at the Salarja Museum. And then that line is enough to drive up the curiosity of the reader that, okay, this is the most photographed object. What is it about? And then you tell them that, okay, this has a, you know, it's based on the goethes Faust. It's a popular story. And it's a popular drama. And how the artist has really interpreted it becomes the rest of the story. But it's clear in bold letters as to this is based on goethes Faust on the concept of good and evil. So if someone is looking for those key words, they immediately want to listen to the rest of the story. And this has become interesting because till that point in time, this narrative had not been shared online at all. There was no information online. So some of the things that we remember while creating a story is that does this narrative, is this accessible narrative? Do people already know about it? Am I sharing a story that people know? If yes, like, for instance, people already know the story of the hare and the tortoise. So if there is a graphic and it says the story of the hare and the tortoise, people already know the story. So how do you make it interesting to them? Do you make it animated? Then it can rely, then one might have to think of different strategies of format of, you know, how do we tell the story that is already popular? Another question is if it's not popular, do people have any interest in it? So one of the things that we do is we check on Google Trends and that's a useful tool. It helps to see are people searching for these keywords? Are they searching for this? Now Google doesn't always give the right results when it comes to art, but we have used it in the past to see if there is enough interest. When it comes to museums and cultural storytelling, this is not the most reliable tool because if people don't have interest, it does not mean you will not tell the story. You will still tell the story to generate interest in that. So that's also sometimes an editorial call to take that yes, we want to generate interest in the story. People are not searching for it. People don't know about it. So how do we drive this? That's when we use a, you know, really shocking statement or something that is absolutely intriguing to people that this is the world's second largest painting or, you know, then people are like, hey, I don't know about this and I want to know about this. So they would listen. So that's when these kind of strategies come into play. Similarly, another strategy is to look at the timeliness. How important is it to react to situations with a story in your museum? We've done this in the past a lot. For instance, you know, maybe a huge celebrity wedding is making the rounds and it's become really popular and that people are consistently discussing it on every social media channel that, hey, this wedding is happening and so much money is being spent. That's when one can go back to say a painting in the Mughal period which says this was the most expensive wedding back in the 18th century or the 17th century. This much was spent in that time and this is how it happened. There's a similar story we once told when there was a political campaign and a lot of conversation about how the media crafts an image and there's a lot of visual propaganda happening and so we used that as an absolutely wonderful opportunity to talk about this incident when the British had just, you know, established their rule in India and they held a really spectacular event and so we delved deep into that event to show how this was more of a visual propaganda that the media was covering through books, through illustrations, through prints, through newspapers who came to cover this event and what was the narrative that was being crafted. In a way what it does to the audience is share that this has happened in the past, there is a pattern to it and it's happening right now as well. So it's for the audience to understand it's not something you explicitly say out loud. So that's how storytelling would serve different purposes. In this case we looked at the timeliness of, I mean this was way back during the US elections I think when Bernie Sanders became sitting in his mittens became a phenomena on the internet and so we used that opportunity to position him in a crowd of, you know, sitting exactly with, in an Indian painting which would appeal to people and it became again really popular. So that's the kind of thing that people would like to share. In the next subsequent tweet of course there was the information about the painting and link to the article story so that was different. So the thing about storytelling is that whether it's timely, whether it serves a certain purpose and what format can we adapt it to. So like we were talking about the hair and the tortoise example, it might be really nice to see a flip book about it, it may be nice to see an animated story about it and it might be entirely new to hear an audio drama around it. It's the format that keeps the audience engaged. So on the right side you see that this is an example from the DAG Museum in India which I really admire. Not only did they look at a new format but they looked at the format being a way to build their community. They were very new to the social media platform at the time when they started with this and one of the things that they did is invite popular cultural practitioners. So whether it's an author or whether it's someone who runs a website or something to just come and look at a story that they have developed, read it out with expression and that's the story. So in the video actually shows the artwork in great detail but then there is audio and people who are new to DAG being on Instagram are like okay I follow this author and the author is talking about a painting and it's different because they don't expect this so it's new the format itself and it also brings someone you admire into a different light because if I'm fond of an author and they're doing an audio you know explanation I would like to hear it for them if not just the art. So sometimes you bring in people to share your story who also might have a certain kind of audience a certain kind of following that exists. So that's how they did it and if you notice all their videos have the same logo the same font which is what was the consistency point that I was talking about earlier on in this presentation that one of the things that is absolutely crucial in what we have found is the consistency of our tone. I mean the heritage lab has been known now to make it simple and easy so we are not known for a really academic language of art or anything like that but it's people already know it's playful it's easy to understand but that's something that we have not said ever we've never said things like oh follow us for easy art information or jargonless information stories we've not said that it's it's in the tone that you establish it and let it grow on people there are times when I've heard from people what they think and I'm like oh I wasn't intending that but it's great to know that that's the impression that they have of the heritage lab. So in this you see that there's a graphic consistency so we have like videos that we've done with a certain art gallery to bring their collections into spotlight but it's really about the person in the portrait and their life story but it's told in a certain format and a certain tone consistently. So if it's like you know your Instagram tone is very different from your website tone and it's very different from your actual space then there is a discord and the audience doesn't feel as welcomed or you know they're suddenly not as comfortable with the switch so that's something that we discovered as well as we went along. This brings in one of the aspects about the community that you know just as DAG did this invited people to start telling their stories to start telling DAG's stories but you know using their own expressions. There's also a thing about how do you use social media to let others talk and let others help you with that social aspect. Some of the museums that we've worked with started with sharing their own collection stories etc but then how is that different from the website or an editorial or a newsletter. Social media storytelling gives this absolute wonderful opportunity to really let others share and talk and connect with them. Like I said at the beginning it's a way for us to experiment and see what do people say about these stories. What role does you know different kind of media formats or multimedia audio video what role does this play. So if you're doing a campaign for example this is we give a prompt to the audience to say hey this is the hashtag campaign that we are doing and we want to hear from you. So they share their favorite paintings architecture anything they know it gives us an insight into what people already know and what might be the gap that is yet to be filled. So when we actually do an editorial series on Sufis so this particular campaign that you see on screen is about Sufi Thursdays because in India Sufism is it's it's Thursdays are like a day you know it's it's an auspicious day for the Sufi people also and it's so we called it Sufi Thursdays and it's also you know good for people to remember because it's Thursdays and you have a word that clicks like Sufi Thursdays. So people started to share this and this went on for a while. By the end of it we know exactly what kind of Sufi stories are already popular which ones are you know yet to be told so that's when the editorial team plans or calendar is planned accordingly. So that's how we actually use social media to experiment and hear and listen to the audience but this is also to say that how do we make it simple for the audience to participate in these kind of campaigns. We realized that there could be a good way could be to have people tell stories on social media that we could then take to the website instead of asking them to come to the website click somewhere fill a form write their story and figure out the you know layout and the user interface. It was easy for us to use an interface that they are already used to and say hey why don't you put in your story here and when you write the heritage lab publish it gets submitted to us as a draft to review. So once it's reviewed then it's published and then we can also tell the person that it has been published here. This pretty much works in the same way as a thread role app could work unroll app could work. So people are already familiar with how this works they don't need more instruction it's almost natural to them. And so we started doing a lot of these activities where people can be involved to tell a story. The Bernie Sanders example told us about how people loved memes and how humor had potential. So we created a meme maker and the thing about the meme maker is that people can use open access artwork to make their meme but when we shared it we shared it with their name and so on Instagram kind of a platform people with a similar interest start to follow each other also because when we say hey this meme was created by XYZ other people who love that kind of humor can follow XYZ start to chat and they there's a sense of recollection every time you hear XYZ's name on our Instagram for example. So the meme maker for us became a way to you know just build a community and have them all share these things. So that's what we do even on Twitter and on you know we already know that after this Sufi Thursday's campaign who are the people who really like to share these kind of things. So we create a separate list keep tagging each other even though we've never met in person it's become like a little community of people we know will support the art kind of an art and cultural kind of storytelling. This is the part that is really very important because we have to know no strategy for storytelling can be complete without knowing whether we're going in the right direction and that's what feedback is for. Get feedback you work rework iterate see that okay this has clearly not worked to improve right. But this is a really difficult point because different institutions have different needs and the storytelling strategy can be part of different kinds of motivations. So for instance are you telling stories to you know make people come to the institution are you telling stories because you want to build more participation. Are you telling stories because I mean by participation I meant in your existing programs or workshops or are you trying to you know cater to a big mission that says we are here to provide knowledge and share knowledge with everybody. So it really depends on what the main mission for the storytelling is. For us we've experimented with different metrics whereas for it is important to understand okay that this story had these many likes and these many saves. We look at the number of people who saved that particular post. When we know that there's this post had a high number of people saving it we know that this has potential to become a resource this has to become a learning resource because people are saving this they need to refer to this again this definitely needs to be complemented by a website story so that it's always there Instagram you lose things. So it always has to be there. But if there are more things where you had more comments and then you would see what kind of questions people have in the comments or what are they saying in the comments. So you know that if you were to do a story on it what kind of an angle it should take what is the interest in this kind of a story. Does it have I mean if it has a propensity to cause a lot of friction and bad comments then maybe it's best to stay away from that angle. It's the kind of insights that you get from the insights that are already there on social media. So it's not for museums that I have often consulted with. I don't suggest usually that they look at metrics as just pure numbers and full stop. The metrics and the numbers have to inform the editorial strategy or the storytelling strategy further. And similarly the other two which are more emotion based. I think one was for our gift making program that we did where we had DAG museums again open up 13 of their artworks for public use and remixing as gifts. And that was during the pandemic. It was also at a time when we thought that people are only online. So we released that and we measured that through Talk Walker which is a popular measurement tool. And we saw that the emotions that it generated were that of joy and surprise. And that was great because this is during a pandemic. And if people are feeling joyous and surprised because of your efforts then the gift making serves a certain purpose and gifts are for joy. And so it meets the purpose then of actually doing that activity. And similarly on the right you see a pie chart which is based on these little emojis that we have at the end of our all our articles. Now it's a very recent feature. So every time someone reads they also share that OK this is useful. This was something that they have more questions about. So it gives us a certain kind of insight there. So yeah I mean I think what is something that is important to remember is that digital storytelling because of the nature of digital is always changing. It is it is dynamic. So it's important to keep changing the digital storytelling strategy as new platforms emerge as new tools emerge and stay curious and keep refining and working on these these skills. So it's what really helps us build our relationship with people who are listening. So yeah that's that's exactly what our experience has been at the Heritage Lab. And just the last thing I want to end this presentation with is that no matter what tools and what digital insight tools that we are using one has to remember that the other end of the screen is a human person. So it has to resonate more. It has to be more authentic and it has to be a resonant experience for them. So that's that's what my presentation was here. I hope that this experience helps some of you. I'm also here for questions sometime and if we can't take all questions then my email address is right here. I know I've already heard from some of you who are going to participate today and it'll be really nice to hear from you and if the Heritage Lab or I can contribute to your storytelling endeavors that would also be great. So yeah with that I would like to thank Mimo, Mira, Rebecca and the whole team for making this such a smooth experience. Thank you. Yeah thank you Midavi. Thank you so much for this input and for taking us to India and the Indian Museum world for this past hour. I see some questions are popping up. We have a few more minutes but also for everyone else we can share the presentation and for everyone who there was one Ellie from Scotland. This video will be online in the next one or two weeks so you can review that and of course get in touch with Midavi directly to share experience or ask more questions. Yeah Midavi you mentioned one inside tool that was a bit maybe you can just say that again or type that in the chat. I also didn't really hear that. Did I mention Talkwalker? It's a tool I used to also be on the team for Museum Week when it was really new and it was a hashtag campaign that brought people museums together so we used Talkwalker at that time to understand insights from all over the world. So I can definitely recommend that Talkwalker has some really great it's a good tool. It's a great tool. Yeah and then we have more specific questions and I don't know if that if you have the time to even answer that someone is asking about how do you work with children or young people and if playing something is something important on this regard and someone else asks how do you work with seniors or retired communities who are not so used with the digital world. So maybe yeah you have an answer for that. Yeah that's fascinating both sides. I can start with the senior citizens question first perhaps. I think for our experience where our experience has been largely with the South Asian Indian community a lot of people love to use WhatsApp especially like you know demographically I could say over the age of 55 onwards WhatsApp is something that's really easy for everybody to engage with and share and comment. So we do have communities like these using different groups earlier we had a WhatsApp group now we can convert it into a community that's great because WhatsApp has this tool so people can respond and engage. We also have at the Heritage Lab have a telegram community which was not very successful because telegram as a tool was not so popular in India at that point in time when we started it but these kind of apps make it more easy for people to engage in quizzes and polls in sending something they have written or even their own photographs if they want to do that and the articles are also simultaneously broadcasted whenever we come up with an article or a series or even our newsletters are shared in this manner with everybody. So there is a certain kind of we found that there is one tool that helps so we've stuck to that so that's that's perhaps my question for the first part. With children again we face a problem because in schools where we work devices are not allowed students are not allowed to use these but we did find a way around it because digital humanities itself is an up and coming field in education in India as well as in other countries and what we try to do is focus on creative things like digital zine making or comic making you know building digital skills also so for instance when we were making the gift campaign we did encourage students to attend workshops and how to make gifts and when we did take a feedback in the end of the campaign publicly from Instagram and different channels we put up our feedback forms it emerged to us that 64 percent people felt this was an opportunity to learn a new digital skill this was not part of our plan we had not intended to share a new digital skill but it was one of the unintended outcomes of the program so what our research has shown is that young students especially I also have done museum education consulting with different schools in India where we take museum objects to the classroom not literally but as a way to teach them about curriculum topics that exist and students are meant to innovate on that and respond to it and create something based on it what we have found is that not only does this build excitement and students to actually go to the museum and see it but also be inspired and then create something of their own whether it is using a digital tool or not is really on mostly the resource it's a resource-based question that students really enjoy these and apart from that we've had different quizzes different kinds of short you know comic based things that students are used to and during these endeavors we have seen that students are most happy when they get to share a story and it gets you know it gets featured by the museum it once led us to having the museum do a children's take over in the sense that the children would curate and lead people through a walk in the museum so how do you see this museum through the children's eyes so it really had capacity we saw to engage students also I hope that answered the question but thank you for the answer is the answer yeah perfect thank you there are a lot of thank yous in the chat Medavi really it was a great pleasure to have you here and yeah please all connect exchange and yeah we are looking forward for the next time and wishing a good day to everyone thank you Medavi thank you all