It’s always lovely to change over to a new year. The DE team started with some mini sessions of department time to reflect on what we worked on in 2023, breaking down our wins and challenges. We then looked ahead at the upcoming year, identifying our internal goals, scheduling anticipated Museum projects, and discussing industry-wide changes on the horizon. This helped us jump into the new year with enthusiasm!
During the month of January, our DE team worked on 115 projects, logging a total of 312 task-specific hours.
Some noteworthy projects completed during the month:
Website
The DE team works alongside our scientists and science writers to create content that supports the research and collections news. We focus on telling stories that are approachable and easy to share, and that offer a stepping stone to our more complex research work. Outside of the heavy lifting our science news desk did this month, some notable DE projects:
We created an air potato video short to accompany our popular intro feature Five Facts: Air potatoes in Florida. The video was posted on several social platforms as well as on our YouTube channel and embedded in the article page. Fun additional fact: Our popular feature post about this invasive plant was viewed over 19,000 times on our website in 2023 alone!
We also created blog posts to spotlight other research, students, and notable happenings here at the museum:
Protecting rare butterflies of Florida’s pine flats and prairies: Rachel Walsh, a Ph.D. student with our McGuire Center, trekked out into the wet prairies of the Apalachicola National Forest in search of the Loammi skipper, and was joined in the field by Dani Davis and Lilly Anderson-Messec so Lilly could create a video for the Florida Native Plant Society about this tiny butterfly.
Cattle DNA: Nicolas and the NSF podcast: In the wake of the wildly popular story about Nicolas Delsol’s research on ancient cattle DNA, he was invited to be a guest on NSF’s podcast, The Discovery Files.
Winter 2023 in the Butterfly Rainforest: As part of our ongoing efforts to preserve the ever-changing beauty of the Butterfly Rainforest exhibit, we’ve gathered the winter season’s photos from our keeper, Ingrith Martinez.
Back in Time: Museum photographer recognized for fieldwork shot: It’s easy to get caught up by the next cool thing happening around here, but we like to document the awards and acknowledgements of other science communicators—our photographers! In 2022, Kristen was recognized for her shot of Coleman Sheehy and a terrapin turtle. While cleaning up our projects for last year, we realized we hadn’t hit the publish button in this blog post but our social posts about it were very popular!
Web stats for January: Nearly 571,000 page views by over 267,000 users for the month!
Email campaigns
Along with sending email campaigns out this month, we managed a significant technical upgrade that affected all mass email senders globally and involved coordination with UF IT and our email marketing service. We also worked with other Museum groups who mass email like TESI and vertebrate paleontology to bring their service up to this new requirement.
Science News, January: With a 41% open rate, our readers clicked the most to our stories about nine new snail species and our holiday-themed frankincense and myrrh fossil discovery.
Museum Newsletter: Our main newsletter went out at the end of the month to get people excited about museum happenings in February with over 42% open rate. Our readers enjoyed the natural history Valentine’s Day ecards the most, as well as the blog post about Rachel Walsh’s skipper trek and our current special exhibit Antarctic Dinosaurs.
January email stats: Nearly 7,000 emails opened with 746 readers clicking links to read more.
Social Media
Popular content people wanted to share or find out more about included air potatoes, Herty pots, freshwater fishes of Florida, the fossil shark jaw and paintings in our Florida Fossils exhibit. And as always, our research news stories.
We continued exhibit hype for Antarctic Dinosaurs, Black in Natural History Museums Scavenger Hunt, and Colorful Dancing Spiders exhibits.
We also promoted events on our calendar such as Ask a Scientist: Soltis Lab, the TreeTender 2 Premier, weekly Tot Trots, and the Butterfly Rainforest closing early on Jan 19 and all day Saturday the 20th due to low temperatures.
The ongoing campaign to elevate our collections and resources continued, with popular features this month on a digitized suckerfish specimen, the Bullen Point Type Gallery, some cool mollusk fossils, our online frog calls page, and herbarium specimens of pollinator-friendly Florida plants. Many gorgeous specimens can be seen in our Rare, Beautiful & Fascinating online exhibit.
January social stats: we deployed about 240 posts across our social media accounts with our posts being seen over 316,000 times.
Planning & Review
As always, the DE team loves to look at data to review our efforts and strategies upcoming projects. We share specific reports with stakeholders across the Museum as requested, like when we coordinated delivering the 2022-23 Annual Report digitally. For 2024, we are planning to proactively deliver more reports, more frequently. All the data!
With all this data, we are better able to prepare for campaigns like Gator Giving Day in February of 2024. To support awareness of our community partnerships, we helped rework a video about Tina Choe’s Head Start partnership to submitted to the Giving Day 24-Hour Streaming TV team. Looking ahead, we’re also laying the groundwork for the new Water Shapes Florida awareness campaign, and the next home-grown special exhibit, Science Up Close: Invisible Insects.
There’s a lot happening this year. Let us know what you’re doing so we can help let the world know about it!