Short month with an extra day! We helped with several high-profile projects both in communications and technical assistance. From shark reports to Valentine’s Day to the ever-changing social media landscape, this month brought us a lot of interesting projects.

We celebrated Gator Giving Day, an annual awareness and support campaign that the University of Florida coordinates to elevate all of the colleges, units and programs across campus in one big online party. We worked with our development team and others here at the Museum as well as with campus partners to highlight our 2024 featured funds and the work that results from generous gifts to each.

Our usual weekly workflow involves a myriad of requests from and support for many people, from internal Museum colleagues to the general public. We handle direct messaging to our social media accounts, emails to our webmaster when people don’t know who to ask, technical and communications queries from Museum staff, technical reports on digital assets from outside sources, collaboration messages from university and museum affiliates, and so much more. Sometimes it’s nice to work on one big project instead of dozens of small ones!

During the month of February, our DE team worked on 119 projects, logging a total of almost 297 task-specific hours.

Some noteworthy projects completed during the month:

Website

We often handle a large number of small web projects in our daily workflow but this month we were able to assist with some pretty big ones. Our shark researchers released their annual shark encounters report in early February which traditionally earns broad media coverage. We help the team publish their new data to their website so people can look at maps and charts to better understand the human-shark relationship. This involves some technical support that needs to be tightly coordinated with our science writers and researchers to update the website with respect to news embargoes.

Our whole communications team has been preparing for the opening of our new permanent exhibit, Water Shapes Florida. But in February we really turned the volume up and the rubber hit the road to promote the March 23 exhibit opening. This meant coordinating with our marketing team and the events and exhibits team to coordinate webpages for the exhibit and the many events surrounding the opening. We tested a website tool that would allow us to power a photo challenge voting system on our own website instead of relying on Facebook in order to tally votes for our March Water Shapes Florida Photo Challenge.

We also helped publish other events to our web calendar for the spring season, including Tot Trots, Museum for Me, and the big spring plant sale. Even our signature and reoccurring events mean review and updates, image refreshes, and translating these events to Facebook events.

Web stats for February: Nearly 676,000 page views by about 311,800 users for the month!

Email campaigns

During February, we sent more email campaigns than usual as well as continued to support other departments and teams across the Museum that use mass email services with the technical upgrade that went into effect this month.

We sent seven email campaigns in February, many to targeted lists for people who signed up for specific news like our sensory-friendly Museum for Me events and a call for contributions to our photo challenge. We were also able to invite our Museum community to take our annual AAM museum visitor survey.

Science News, February: With a 43% open rate, our readers clicked the most to our stories about our researchers using technology to better understand why insects react the way they do to artificial light at night, the newest ISAF shark encounter report, and our fun and creative look at some quirky relationships in nature through the lens of a natural history museum for Valentine’s Day.

Museum Newsletter: Our main newsletter went out at the end of the month to get people excited about museum happenings in March with about a 41% open rate. Our readers enjoyed the announcement about our new permanent exhibit, Water Shapes Florida, and the related events surrounding it, as well as the ‘save the date’ announcement for our vary popular spring plant sale. Other than that, readers clicked through for news about bat fossils from Panama, our fishes in the freshwater of Florida resource, and our callback to when we closed the Northwest Florida exhibit to prepare for reimagining that space for the new exhibit.

February email stats: Nearly 13,300 emails opened and over 1,300 emails clicked for more info!

Social Media

Popular content people wanted to share or find out more about included our Valentine’s Day natural history ecards, the Water Shapes Florida Photo Challenge call for submissions, and exhibit content like the online Fort Mose exhibit and blog posts about the art in our Florida Fossils exhibit.

We continued talking about our Antarctic Dinosaurs, Black in Natural History Museums Scavenger Hunt, and Colorful Dancing Spiders exhibits. A few posts about objects in our Rare, Beautiful & Fascinating online exhibit resonated with fans this month as well, like the bone figa and the wood box lid.

As usual, we promoted events on our calendar such as regular Tuesday Tot Trots, Girls Do Science and the #BiNHMs exhibit celebration, as well as the off-site event at a local brewery in partnership with TESI hearing about research in the Arctic.

Looking over our collections and research news topics, our fans and followers responded to the stories about bat fossils in Panama, the insects responding to artificial light study and our natural history Valentine’s e cards. We also saw a lovely response to the announcement about the loss of long-time Museum supporter and volunteer Harry Lee and his famous shell collection that he gifted to our Museum. Lastly, we could tell it was getting warmer in Florida because of the uptick in interest in our Florida Snake ID Guide posts.

February social stats: We deployed over 230 posts across our social media accounts with our posts being seen over 220,000 times.

Planning & Review

Here in the DE office, we strongly believe in making decisions with the support of data to inform us how best to use limited resources to most effectively reach clear goals. We collect, interpret, archive, and disburse data as targeted reports constantly.

For example, we used four years worth of Gator Giving Day reports to layer over our understanding of current social media platforms and audience behavior to strategize a simple campaign for our 2024 messaging. We even know what types of imagery our fans and supporters most want to see this year.

Using data to evaluate every project we are delivered helps us manage our own resources, allowing us to support the many teams and departments across the Museum who rely on using digital channels to connect their work with their audiences.

Our projects are tracked on a unified platform all of our DE team uses to communicate progress, workload, workflow and even time spent. This allows us to be nimble, accountable and organized in a digital environment that is high volume and fast changing.