Our ex-Development Manager (now Music and Events Manager) Aoife Flynn was invited to present a case study at the recent National Gallery of Ireland Symposium on Audience Development. The case study was around the Model Blog, how we came to set it up, whether it’s been a success and some tips for others thinking about setting up an arts blog.

The motivation for this blog was to create a virtual front desk for The Model during our temporary closure; somewhere online where people could drop by and pick up information beyond that contained in the programme of events. We wanted it to be relatively informal, conversational and informative, much like how we want our Front Desk in the physical building to function. We’ve been running the blog for over 18months now and have reached a monthly readership of 2,400+ , which has increased traffic to our main website by 33% over the same period.

For us it’s been a great success, we feel we have a platform to add extra information to enhance the exhibition experience- as with the case of Barbad Golshiri‘s mails sent from Tehran during the recent political unrest while Medium Religion was ongoing – and somewhere to fill you in on works in progress like the redevelopment, The Interview project, The Niland Collection, The Trades Club and more. It’s also a place where people can post replies and give us your reactions to articles or updates, and we’d love to hear more of that.

It’s also been a great way for us to test other social platforms like flickr, facebook, twitter and youtube and we look forward to integrating all of these elements into our new web platform which we’ll launch along with the new building in spring next year

For anyone at the symposium that wants the notes from the case study, which include some further reading around current theories on the use of web 2.0 for the museum/gallery you can download them below, and you can view the slide show here

Click to Download: Case Study on The Model Blog for NGI Symposium