Case study: Engage donors with the Peabody Essex Museum’s history and collections
Team:
Museum leaders, curators, designers, contributing writers, editors, development officers, registration, and photographers
Situation:
The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) needed a tangible tool to fundraise and build awareness around PEM’s origin story while looking forward toward the museum’s future.
Opportunity:
Engage core museum team in conversations about what makes PEM unique and what objects are iconic. Build cohesion between departments. Create a brief that highlights the human story behind the museum. Extend PEM’s brand in a fresh way.
Strategy:
Create dynamic, flexible content that can be deployed on multiple platforms, including a printed handbook, the museum’s website, and social media channels. Increase access to PEM’s remarkable collections and history. Make emotional connection with donors.
Work included: Research into the museum’s collections and early library manuscripts to identify visual tools and core messages.
In-depth interviews with museum staff to identify key events and stories and develop content style. Guidelines that enable multiple authors to deliver cohesive content in record time.
Information graphics that highlight PEM’s early acquisitions and extensive campus of historic buildings in Salem, creating simple visual connections that cut across time and place, the past and present, the local and global.
Impacts:
Created—in six months, during a pandemic—a stewardship piece that PEM’s development team can share with members, trustees, and advisers. Per PEM’s Chief Philanthropy Officer, “People love receiving the guide. It’s a perfect format to mail. It serves as a conjurer of memories and a way to showcase recently acquisitions. During the pandemic, it was great to be able to send out because people could not visit the museum. We are using it as an engagement tool to cultivate potential prospects, and we have received incredible feedback—including from a highly placed government official in DC who grew up in Salem and, based on receiving the guide, is now planning a visit to PEM.”