Newsletters During Lockdown
Museos de Málaga 2020
Weekly newsletters sent during the first weeks of lockdown at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Role: Content Designer and Copywriter.
Starting point
The Agencia Pública para la gestión de la Casa Natal de Pablo Ruiz Picasso y otros equipamientos museísticos y culturales is a public body responsible for managing three of Málaga’s leading museums: the Centre Pompidou Málaga, the Colección del Museo Ruso / San Petersburgo, and Casa Natal de Picasso.
Each venue sends a monthly newsletter keeping subscribers informed about upcoming exhibitions and events. On 14 March 2020, however, this came to an abrupt halt when a state of emergency was declared in response to the spread of COVID-19.
Overnight, all three museums were forced to close their doors, and every planned exhibition and activity was suspended indefinitely.
The Casa Natal de Picasso had a brand-new exhibition that had only just opened in February, while the Centre Pompidou and the Museo Ruso both had major collection launches scheduled for late March.
The challenge
Following the COVID-19 closure, all three museums needed to stay connected with their audiences and keep their exhibitions alive in the public imagination, despite being closed to visitors.
The lockdown brought a radical shift in the way people consumed culture, and it was essential to adapt to users’ new needs.
Working approach
To avoid losing touch with their newsletter subscribers, the museums needed to keep sending them content, even with no upcoming events and no possibility of visiting.
At the same time, the communications team noticed that the first online engagement initiatives being rolled out through the museums’ official social media channels were being well received by followers.
We decided to turn the newsletters into an extension of the social media presence, a kind of cultural magazine for the lockdown period.
To boost response rates, and as a one-off measure, we chose to present a united front during the pandemic by combining communications from all three venues into a single bulletin. We also increased the frequency from monthly to weekly, allowing us to respond more nimbly to the constantly shifting situation.
The hypothesis was that, for as long as lockdown lasted, this approach would produce higher engagement metrics (open rates and CTR) and strengthen the social media profiles of all three museums.
During lockdown, we transformed the newsletters into cultural magazines and increased their frequency.
The design
For the design, I took the three monthly newsletters as my starting point. All three are based on a shared template — reflecting their common identity under the same parent agency — with individual variations in brand colours and typography.
I designed a shared header and chose a distinct typeface and colour palette, so that the new newsletter would follow the established visual language while still feeling different from the regular monthly bulletins.
Each museum applies its own brand identity to the colours and typographic styles of its newsletters.
For the lockdown newsletters, I defined a complementary colour palette that worked alongside the three museums’ existing brand colours. The goal was to maintain visual coherence while differentiating them from the regular bulletins, so we kept the individual brand colours for each museum’s content, and used the new palette for content relating to shared activities, such as the celebration of International Dance Day, which took place across all three venues.
The content
To decide what content to include in the new newsletter, I worked closely with the social media team to establish an information hierarchy and a publication schedule across the weeks, in other words, how and when to communicate each story to subscribers.
We also coordinated with the education and outreach departments at all three venues to ensure the content stayed relevant to the evolving lockdown situation: the types of activities on offer, how they fitted into the wider calendar of cultural events, and so on.
A total of 10 weekly bulletins were designed, written, and sent from 20 March to 22 May. We launched when the state of emergency was declared, and signed off by letting our subscribers know that the museums would be reopening on 26 May 2020.
A selection of content designed for these newsletters:
Results
The response from the subscriber communities across all three venues was positive. The weekly bulletins achieved an average open rate of 32% and an average CTR of 5.1% — an improvement of several percentage points on both metrics compared to the usual averages for the three monthly newsletters.
Subscriber numbers also grew by an average of 4.5% across all three venues.
Through content developed specifically for lockdown consumption, the three museums kept their subscriber base engaged and managed to strengthen their connection with their online community.
Tools
- Mailchimp
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Slack
- Trello
- Google Spreadsheets
Lessons learnt
On this project I learnt that people do read. They just want something worth reading.
I also learnt that the best way to send a newsletter on time is to pretend you don’t care about last-minute activity announcements, while whistling and looking the other way.
