Beks Leary on 200 Creators - reach, resourcing, risk, and organisational buy-in

Towards the end of 2024 I had a podcast chat with Beks Leary, Senior Social Media and Content Lead at the National Gallery in London.

You can listen to our whole conversation, or if you prefer to read - I have summarised the main areas of our discussion below.

Tl;dr

• There are pronounced differences between working in smaller vs larger organisations when it comes to learning and trying things out:
  • In smaller organisations you need to be comfortable teaching yourself what you need to know, larger organisations probably have more opportunities for structured and peer learning.
  • Smaller organisations can give you more opportunities to try things out, experiment, and move quickly, larger organisations necessarily have more layers to their decision-making and are perhaps more risk-averse.
• The ways in which you (traditionally) find and tell stories in TV and the performing arts vs museums and galleries differs quite widely.
  • Digital storytelling in for theatre/TV is about selecting and framing existing narratives, not inventing them from scratch
  • Story creation is perhaps a more interpretive task in museum and gallery settings, often requiring longer timelines and more collaborative research
• The 200 Creators project was aimed at working with new voices and reaching new audiences.
  • It was successful in terms of creating new and different content, and reaching new audiences
  • It involved a huge amount of work and investment
  • Involve your legal team as early as possible and be clear with everyone about expectations and boundaries
  • Involve your senior colleagues in assessing the work and understanding the aims and realities of the project
  • There are agencies that can help you find and connect with creators

Small vs Large organisations

Beks has worked at organisations ranging in size from the Bush Theatre and the National Centre for Circus Skills through to the BBC, National Theatre, and National Gallery.

She discussed the opportunities and challenges of working at such different scales.

"It was quite a broad scope of a role. I absolutely loved it... I did all the CRM, I led all the socials, digital marketing, but I also led marketing campaigns as well.

Until I was at the Bush, I was almost entirely self-taught… no one else was a digital specialist.

At the BBC… I was suddenly learning about accounts that had millions of followers rather than thousands… you were in a team of, say, 30 social media specialists and the amount that you can learn from that is amazing.

In a bigger organisation, you’re working alongside lots of professionals who have experience in your realm.”

Beks highlighted that although working in larger organisations often comes with access to more resources and capacity, the increase in profile can also impact risk-taking and the speed at which decisions can be made.

“I think there’s pros and cons both ways… different working practices.

In smaller organisations… you can go on the fly with things… if you mess up at the BBC… that makes the news.”

Different ways of thinking about audiences and stories

We discussed the ways in which different types of organisations (a performing arts org vs a gallery vs a broadcaster) have different ways of thinking about, understanding, and prioritising audiences.

”The BBC was… absolutely obsessed with reaching younger audiences. That was all we were tasked to do - reach under 34-year-olds in the UK.

If my content did really well in Japan and the US, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, it went viral, but…you didn’t reach anyone in the UK, so it doesn’t really matter.’”

It was also interesting to hear about the different starting points for storytelling.

[at the National Theatre] “The gift is that… you’ve got a recording of a show… you’ve already got the story.

If you’re doing a trailer, you’ve got a script to work from and ideas to come from the stories that those writers have told.

Every time you’re doing a social media video… in a museum or a gallery, you are coming up with that story from scratch.

Finding those stories… talking to people around the gallery… finding amazing things from the archives… or tracking a conservation project over three years - that long-term storytelling probably exists a lot more in galleries.

The rhythms of galleries and museums are much longer-term than the rhythms of theatres.

In theatre, it was… picking the most amazing clips from a show… in galleries you might be tracking something over years.”

200 Creators Initiative at the National Gallery

One of the main reasons I wanted to talk to Beks was to hear more about the 200 Creators project.

“Its aim was to open up the social media channels of the National Gallery to voices that we might not have heard from before… but first and foremost to reach those creators’ communities.

To go out across the UK and internationally and reach into communities that may not have ever experienced or thought they might enjoy an art gallery.

We did a big celebration event to launch the content and the program… and we’ve run best practice workshops with Meta… and we’re hoping to do the same with TikTok.

“There was a lab event at the Gallery… to develop ideas, meet staff, get to know the Gallery - for some, it was their first ever time stepping into the National Gallery.”

It was good to hear that the National Gallery seemed to fully back the surprising and experimental nature of some of these creator relationships, and the content that was produced.

”I would say that 90% of the content has landed extremely well with our audiences. 100% has landed really well with the creators’ audiences.

One particular piece of content got a few negative reactions from our audience and did lose us followers… but we still back that content.

If we lose a few followers because that’s not for them, then that’s okay - that’s probably where our content direction is going.”

And there were some very clear lessons and words of advice for any other cultural organisations thinking about undertaking similar initiatives.

“It needs money and it needs resource. You need to do it in a way that you can resource as a team.

Producing 20-plus pieces of content… in a really short space of time was a huge amount of work… that’s essentially 20 creative production projects.

There’s no way we would be able to resource that again in the future.

Bring in your legal team early. We had so many meetings with legal about the contracts.

We had letters of agreement with every one of them [the creators]… we wanted to be really clear about the boundaries.”

We used an agency to source a lot of the wider network called Fetch Friends… we could not have sourced the full 200 creators by ourselves.”

And a key consideration was when Beks highlighted the importance of leadership understanding and buy-in.

“Senior buy-in is obviously so important… we had a review panel that included our Director of Public Engagement.

Having that articulated and built into the project from the start is so important so you’re not fighting battles later.”