Students required: 4 groups of 5 students

George Brown College is partnering with Ontario Museum Association to assist museums in Ontario on their digital transformation journey. There are 700 museums in Ontario, small and large and a variety of different focuses. Some museums have never done virtual events before, others have experimented with the use of virtual events, particularly during COVID19 restrictions. They are using virtual events for online lectures, webinars or fundraising events. It is likely that the use of virtual events will continue in a post-COVID19 environment. Online events are important to museum digitalization strategy to improve museums brand presence and drive visitors both online and offline.

We are seeking virtual event managers do an environment scan on the use of virtual events by museums in Ontario and create a best practices How To Manual for Virtual Event management for museums in Ontario. Students will also recommend, plan, organize, implement and evaluate virtual events for selected museums in Ontario. Our objective is to achieve inclusion and help museums across Ontario build awareness of the stories of Canada's heritage and use online channels to promote an integrated visitor experience for museums in Ontario - both online and offline.

The project will include the following:

• Conduct and evaluation of the use of virtual events by museums in Ontario and identify best practices for virtual events.
• Developing a high-level calendar of events, reflecting the museums vision/mission, including theme and graphic design.
• Assist in outreach and content creation for the promotion of the events including preparing written copy for event promotion (e.g. speaker bios, brief descriptions of event, etc.)
• Promote the event through email blasts, social media and event listing websites as tools to increase attendance/ticket sales and use photos/videos from the online event to create digital content for website and social media platforms after the event.
• Event Implementation will include outline the event and content creation, developing brief outlines of individual events, secure guest speakers/talent for the events
• Design post-event conversion of participants to onsite museum visitors.
• Identify and Develop sponsorship/partnership opportunities based on their contacts
• Conduct post-event evaluation and tabulating results including effectiveness of outreach. Consolidate lessons learned into a Handbook for Implementing Virtual Events for Museums in Ontario.

Assignments will be structured into 80 hour gigs based on the expertise of the students and the phase that the project is in when the student comes on board. This is a great project for students to prove their event management and digital marketing expertise to future employers, as the impact of their work on this project can be easily measured and communicated.

Students will work independently and will meet with faculty, online event management and heritage professionals on a weekly basis for knowledge sharing and project status updates.