Projects

UPDATE: I am no longer working for the National Heritage Board (but I remain a card-carrying museum junkie). I am now working for a government office which promotes cultural philanthropy and art volunteerism. Nevertheless I’m keeping this page around to bookmark the interesting and fun bits I had in marketing museums.

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My department at the National Heritage Board focuses on promoting a museum-going culture in Singapore. We have been lucky in that our bosses and our bosses’ bosses are supportive of our marketing and outreach through social media – something that just a few years back was largely considered a non-convention by traditional marketing standards.

In March 2006, we launched Yesterday.sg, an aggregator blog about Singapore’s heritage and museums and there are now over 2,000 registered members (anyone can register for free and submit blog posts). In February 2009, we gave Yesterday.sg a makeover and dressed it up with discussion platforms, photo galleries, and best of all – HeritageTV, an internet-based video series hosted by our colleague, the artistic Kimberly.

I focus on the youth market for community development, working with partners and spotting people who can help me spread the word about museums. We are recruiting youths with a passion in the arts, culture and museums to generate interest among their friends. It’ll be great too if you’re also into different forms of social media such as blogging and facebook-ing. Interested? Email me at rileykim[A/T]gmail[D/O/T]com.

Some of my projects are more substantial while on other occasions they can be small organized visits to exhibitions and activities. Everyone in the department gets together for our annual national campaigns – International Museum Day and Explore Singapore!.

I get it that listing past and present projects on my own blog is about as modest as advertising the company’s annual report. But we really have fun working with cool people at cool museums so it’ll be nice to plug a little here. Plus if I reach someone who has an idea to do more cool things for museums then it’ll be even more worth spilling cyber ink for:

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• I Love Museums
Our Facebook Page dedicated to only the coolest stuff about loving museums and culture

• Halloween’s Party 2009
A great excuse to par-tay, we held a Halloween’s party at the MINT Museum of Toys. We invited guests from different communities, including readers of the very fashionable Fashion Nation blog

• omy.sg – The Next Big Blog Gathering
We organized a special guided tour with popular bilingual social media site omy.sg to the exhibition “A Story of the Image” at the National Museum of Singapore

• Night Festival 2009
Pairing together indie bands with cultural musicians for a youth music segment at the late night street festival (event link on facebook, video clips on youtube)

• International Museum Day 2009
Sanctioned by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), International Museum Day is when we focus our outreach activities on families and children to foster museum-going culture from young

• Youth Museum Envoy video
48-hour-deadline zero-funding work schedule-disrupting in-house production of a promotional video for our Youth Envoy programme