Background
In 2025, the National Science and Media Museum will reopen with its new multi-million-pound Sound and Vision galleries – two shiny new galleries to replace ones that have been there for as long as I can remember.
When they open, these galleries will bring us lots of new and exciting opportunities to connect and interact with our local communities and visitors. Whilst we get everything ready for that, the museum has had to temporarily close it’s doors to visitors. But we haven’t gone away, and as a museum, we are still very much here for our audiences – so we have had to think about what else we could do to connect with them.
The answer was fairly simple, if people can’t come to us – then we would go out to them…and from there ‘Visiting You’ was launched!
Testing
To get us started, we created a brand new show that we could take into schools which, without giving away too many spoilers, includes fire and getting teachers wet!
The show was tested over the summer of 2023 at BD3 and BD5 postcode primary schools who we have close relationships with thanks to our Learning Community Partnerships team (in Braford the area postcodes get higher the further away from the city centre you travel).
Our purpose built show space in the museum usually holds around 100 people, but going out to schools, we were suddenly delivering shows to much bigger audiences of children in their huge assembly and sports halls.
This testing phase helped us to realise that what engaged audiences in the museum didn’t necessarily engage them in their school setting, so we had some experimenting and finessing of activities and practicalities to do before we launched our programme wider. This is something that we’ve taken into consideration in other aspects of our programming during this temporary closure period – what works in their space?
The Launch
Autumn 2023 saw us head out on the road for our first official bookings.
To transport all our equipment (and all of us) to and from venues, we contracted a company with a van which was an absolute lifesaver. This enabled us to take lots of activities and demonstrations with us and make our shows as exciting and interactive as we possibly could!
Expanding THE OFFER
We really loved being out and about and as we reached the end of 2023 we’d been to most of the schools in our local area and they’d seen all content that we had to offer. So, we decided that we would be even more ambitious and widen our reach further.
This has been hugely popular, both externally and internally. We have had bookings as far as Bingley and Baildon (5 miles away from the museum) and even more brand-new schools are welcoming us into their sports halls and classrooms four days a week.
We are also getting repeat bookings from schools before they’ve even had their first visit – so word of our offer is spreading and there is trust that we will deliver spectacular educational experiences.
An amazing outcome of the new ‘Visiting You’ offer has been that we have been getting bookings from schools that we didn’t recognise – either they’d never been to the museum or at least didn’t visit us regularly.
This has opened up the question around what can we do to keep reaching these schools once the museum reopens and we start delivering our shows back in the museum? We are building up our reputation for engaging, exciting content delivered by a team of expert facilitators, and we want, and need to keep hold of that.
THE Future?
The reason for NSMM creating ‘Visiting You’ was because our museum hasn’t been open to schools and other visitors – so what will happen with this programme once the museum reopens?
Honestly, we don’t know yet, but we’ve really enjoyed this pivot towards outreach programming as it has offered unique opportunities for schools to engage with our content who might normally struggle to reach our building.
But, I hope that it has helped to expose the wonderful experiences and opportunities that the National Science and Media museum has to offer – and I can’t wait to welcome those school groups back into the museum see and experience all our amazing objects and hear all about their unique stories.
Thanks go to all our staff and partners who have contributed to making Visiting You a resounding success for the visibility of the museum
