What did the project involve?
What were our aims and motivations?
Planning process
Achievements and benefits
Data from the project
Things to consider next time
First steps to running a similar project
Key contact
What did the project involve?
- Creating a museum podcast – the creation of five episodes about Wiltshire’s history aimed at teenagers.
- Developing the skills of the museum’s youth panel in researching, scriptwriting, hosting and editing podcast episodes.
- Discussing what aspects the youth panel wanted to research and base their episodes on.
What were our aims and motivations?
- Expanding the museum’s digital presence.
- Making the youth panel feel engaged with the rest of the museum.
- Wanting to engage more young people within the museum.
Planning process
- Discussing and sharing ideas for potential topics to base a podcast on, alongside demographic focus and podcast lengths,
tone etc. - Once a general topic had been found, researching ideas for smaller ‘sub-topics’ to focus episodes on.
- Researching stories within those ‘sub-topics’ and scriptwriting episodes based on this research.
- Assigning hosts to episodes.
- Familiarising the youth panel with recording equipment (microphone) and showing them how to record.
- Teaching the youth panel how to edit audio using the free platform, Audacity.
Achievements and benefits
- Confidence gained by youth panel members.
- Podcast was up on major streaming sites.
- Youth panel feels like they’ve contributed to the museum.
- Improved the well-being of youth panel members, with them making friendships and connections with other people their age.
Data from the project
- Five podcast episodes
- One hundred sixty nine downloads
- Most popular episode is Folklore of Wiltshire (46 downloads), followed by Murder Cases of Wiltshire (41 downloads)
Things to consider next time
- Timings – Most of the research was completed during the summer holidays, but meetings became infrequent due to COVID.
- Restrictions, a busy exhibition period (Ravilious) and school commitments. Most of our youth panel are in school, so we had
- To work around their exams.
- Location – Wiltshire Museum is located on a main road, so traffic can be easily heard throughout the building. Recording needed a space where no traffic or background noise can be picked up on a microphone!
- In-person recording made it difficult to edit out coughs and stumbles – especially when other people were talking.
- Some of our youth panel members are softly spoken, so amplifying their voices while editing could be difficult.
First steps to running a similar project
- Try to figure out when people are available – making a podcast is a long project, so you need to know people’s commitments.
- Ensure you have a quiet space where you can record (very little to no background noise).
- Know your demographics! Who are you aiming the podcast to reach, and how are you going to appeal to them?
- Podcasts don’t need to cost a lot of money; we kept ours at a low cost – only using equipment that we already owned and using free software.
Key contact
Amy Hammett
Community Curator, Wiltshire Museum
amy.hammett@wiltshiremuseum.org.uk
