Digital Change: seizing the opportunity online

'Digital Change: seizing the opportunity online' is part of a series of events aimed at supporting the arts and culture sector to explore and respond to opportunities offered by digital technology. It focuses on how to reach and engage audiences via technology, and provides a platform to explore the issues and challenges inherent in this work.

Doing digital well is difficult. It takes skills that cultural organisations often don’t have in-house, it costs money we don’t have and it’s hard to measure if anything is really having an impact. It also flourishes in quick, agile environments where things can change easily, not usually what we find inside our theatres, museums, galleries and arts organisations.

Key topics covered during the day will be:

- Understanding YouTube through one of its superstars, Charlieissocoollike, and his teenage audience
- A practical session with the Google Search Quality team
- Using data analytics to build audiences online
- Feeding cultural content to other online channels

This is an Arts Council event, supported by Google and curated and delivered by Culture24 and is free to attend. It's open to invited guests only with a limit of 2 people from any organisation attending. It has been curated to help you build your digital skills, promote a deeper understanding of a wide range of google tools and nurture a more strategic approach to the use of digital tactics.

Speakers confirmed already include:

Charlie McDonnell (charlieissocoollike)

Charlie McDonnell is a film-maker, vlogger, and human being who has the ability to create words from his mouth. He uses this skill to participate in events such as this one.

Eddie Berg

Eddie is an independent consultant specialising in film and digital arts. From 2005 -2014 he worked at the BFI, firstly as Director of BFI Southbank (leading the transformation of the venue) and then as Director of Partnerships where he was responsible for leading the BFI’s lottery investment in film exhibition, education and skills across the UK. Eddie is also the Founder and former Director of the £11m FACT Centre in Liverpool which opened to popular and critical acclaim in 2003.

Kelly Greaves

Kelly worked as a video editor and producer in the traditional media space until switching over to online content five years ago. Her role at YouTube has been to discover new talent and exciting formats to develop on the platform. She opened the YouTube Space London and developed a YouTube partner curriculum for workshops aimed at building high quality content.

Joanna Jones

Joanna manages the small and agile team of content editors within the Digital Media team at the V&A. She has worked at the V&A in a variety of digital roles for almost 10 years – always on the content side. During that time she has seen at least two website redesigns, the birth of Twitter and the upsurge of social spaces.

John Benfield

John is the User Experience Manager at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he maintains the theatre’s website in terms of how its audiences engage with an increasingly extensive digital offer. He joined the RSC six years ago having worked at The Natural History Museum for many years, ultimately as the Creative Head of Interactive Media. Since joining the RSC the number of staff creating content directly for the website has gone from one to over thirty, with content in support of theatrical productions increasing dramatically as a result. In the last 12 months the RSC’s webpages have been viewed over 18 million times by over 2.2 million ‘users’.

Matt Locke

Matt is the founder of Storythings, a company established to experiment with new ways of telling stories. Prior to this he was Head of Multiplatform Commissioning at Channel 4 where he was responsible for running the Multiplatform Commissioning team with a £7m budget for multi-platform projects around some of Channel 4′s biggest brands, including Million Pound Drop, Skins, Misfits, Embarrassing Bodies and Big Brother

For more information about the speakers and the event please visit here.

Supporting host partners: