Learning from applications

Overview

In December 2020, the Museums Association, UKRI and AHRC issued a funding call for Digital Innovation and Engagement. We offered grants between £25,000 and £50,000 for one-year projects that support museums to explore digital innovation and to evaluate, refine and build on their recent digital engagement.

The funding call was designed to enable museums and galleries to kick-start, scale up and evaluate the innovations they had designed to connect collections to audiences through the Covid-19 pandemic.

We were looking for projects that used digital innovation to either engage new audiences or to embed their digital practice to connect their audiences to collections. We expected to see applications from museums who had had to adapt their audience engagement during lockdown, could see the benefits of this work and therefore wanted to build upon it.

Through these projects we hoped to see how innovations to facilitate digital engagement could effect longer-term change in the sector and asked for applicants to detail their approach to research and evaluation; sharing learning through partnerships; and other forms of dissemination.

The Digital Innovation and Engagement funding call was a short-term response to need in the museum sector during the Covid-19 pandemic, that nevertheless embeds the social and community values of Museums Change Lives and the Mindsets for the Museums of the Future.

UKRI

AHRC