Wow! This year was busy here at the Florida Museum. Yet somehow, we’re anticipating next year to be even more exciting! When school wraps up and the holiday season brings some quiet days to our office, we take the time to review lingering projects and tie up loose ends.
During the month of December, our DE team worked on 105 projects totaling over 243 hours on task-specific projects.
Some noteworthy projects we worked on this month:
Website
Our big project in December was working with the entire communications team to create and publish our Annual Report for fiscal year 22-23. This project brings together the work of our whole Museum, documenting a year in time in a beautiful encapsulation of the work of faculty and staff, students, volunteers and supporters.
While our science writers are swamped with work covering the research news of our very active scientists, the DE team here offers support to highlight some of the other fun projects and news happing around the Museum. Some highlights from December:
Changing Seas and digitizing shell collections: John Slapcinsky was enthusiastic to join the conversation with fellow malacologists on an episode of Changing Seas, produced by South Florida PBS, to talk about shells, new projects and the value of collections. Includes an appearance by long-time Museum friend Harry Lee.
Jellyfish and sea turtles with TED-Ed and Mariela Pajuelo: TED-Ed talked with Mariela Pajuelo, Assistant Scientist here at TESI, and Javier Antonio Quinones about the abundance of jellyfish, what effect it has on humans, and how leatherback sea turtles can help keep them in check.
We also manage uploading video content to our YouTube channel to support projects and departments here at the Museum, including details like responsible captioning for accessibility, copyright checking audio, and tuning titles and descriptions to take advantage of one of the top search engines on the web – YouTube! In December we helped with videos for our Head Start partnership, our Museum in the Parks support content, and a time lapse from the fishes collection and Doug’s address for the Annual Report.
Web stats for December: There were over 478,000 page views by over 222,000 users for the month!
Email campaigns
Along with our regular newsletters, we sent out a member newsletter for the Friends of Randell Research Center and we emailed the Annual Report to Museum supporters, state representatives, UF leadership, and museum staff and volunteers.
Science News, December: With about a 37% open rate, our readers were most interested in stories about two grants our Daniels Lab team earned to support pollinators, a paper on an extinct giant salamander, and several positions our Natural History Department was hiring for.
Museum Newsletter: Our main newsletter at the end of the month to get people interested in January’s happenings had a slightly higher than 40% open rate. They were most interested in the Antarctic Dinosaurs exhibit, the Daniels lab pollinator grant story, and our general calendar of events. We sent the email several days earlier than normal to accommodate planning for families with children home from school for the winter holiday.
December email stats: Over 8,100 emails opened with 796 readers clicking links to read more.
Social Media
Popular topics people wanted to share or read more about on our main social platforms included career opportunities here at the Museum, an exhibit painting showing Florida’s Eocene Epoch, and objects from our 100th anniversary online exhibit like the resplendent quetzal and a polychrome ceramic bowl.
We also wrapped up the year with a #YearInReview of our research new, bringing people back to popular stories like the gomphotheres in Montbrook, a new fish species hiding in plain view, and a look at how best to create a lasting excitement for science in kids.
Due to the holiday season, we offered a lot of messaging on social media about hours and visitation, reminding people that the Museum was a great idea for family time or for day trips, with special attention on Ingrith’s photos of the Butterfly Rainforest. We continued sharing excitement for our temporary exhibits Antarctic Dinosaurs, Black in Natural History Museums Scavenger Hunt, and Colorful Dancing Spiders. We supported our gift shop’s holiday sales, our gorgeous book All Things Beautiful, Museum memberships as gift ideas, upcoming Travel Program trips to Costa Rica and Galapagos, and the last of our 2023 Tot Trots events.
December social media stats: we deployed almost 240 posts across our social media accounts with our posts being seen almost 404,400 times.
Planning & Review
It was a busy year! We have a lot of data from many of the happenings across the Museum but here’s a bird’s-eye view of some big numbers for 2023:
Website
- 8,964,000 – Pages viewed (approximate)
- 4,037,248 – Users (approximate)
- 49 – Email campaigns sent
- 110,464 – Emails opened
- 10,332 – Emails clicked on
Social media
- 3,016 – Social posts
- 5,857,672 – Views of social posts (impressions)
- 47,233 – Link clicks on posts