Henry Moore Foundation
Communicating a complex museum and gallery offering to online users
Our friends at Henry Moore Foundation (HMF) tasked us with creating a new website that better reflected both their complex offering and their identity as an organisation. HMF consists of two physical sites – a contemporary gallery at the Institute in Leeds (which is also a Centre for sculptural study) and the Studios and Gardens in Hertfordshire which houses the Henry Moore collection – in addition to hosting online events and an international programme of touring exhibitions.
The challenge
- To make this hybrid offer easy to understand by giving more clarity over what visitors could expect from both physical sites, along with dedicated places for users to explore their online and international programmes.
- Drive deeper audience engagement with HMF’s extensive collection, library catalogue and archives to support their audience development plans, encouraging people to visit and explore.
- Style HMF’s new Shopify platform to align with their brand and ensure a cohesive feel between the main site and Shopify, that would increase online retail and funding opportunities.
“We faced a lot of challenges – we’re a complex, multi-venue organisation, with additional focuses on sculpture research, engagement and grant-giving. The requirements set out at the start of the project were (and are) extensive – it was clear that the new site would have a lot of work to do to communicate our varied messages effectively.”
– Emily Dodgson, Head of Marketing and Communications at HMF.
The solution
User focused information architecture
Content on the legacy site was organised from an internal departmental perspective, for example, Archives, Grants and Collections. From a user-centred perspective, we distilled HMF’s vast offering into three core headings: See & Do, Discover & Research and What We Do. This new structure focuses on the types of activities users were coming to the site to do – placing user needs at the heart of the new sitemap.
Improved access to the collection
We have created multiple touchpoints across the new site that introduce the vast and free-to-access collection to users, including a search tool that can be added to any page. You can see this in action on the Cataloguing Henry Moore’s work page. This new feature exposes users to the collection online, encouraging more traffic to the collection site to folks who may otherwise not have known it was there.
Visual identity
We needed to make better use of their pre-existing visual identity to make it more engaging for online users. HMF weren’t rebranding but they wanted the new site to have a more contemporary look and feel, while retaining key design devices from their existing brand.
Streamlined integrations
HMF use a few systems, such as GoodCRM to process donations and memberships, ArtTickets and Eventbrite for ticketed events, and a third party site called eMuseum for their collection. Alongside this, HMF needed a new digital system to manage the applications, assessment, and administration of their grants programme. They were previously on a custom system that was built into their legacy site. For the new site, we identified and assessed the requirements for HMF’s grant programme and designed a brief to procure a new system to support this work.
“The result is a new website that positions us as relevant, interesting, open, demonstrates our expertise and provides a sense of narrative. We also think it is exceptionally fine and good looking! We are excited about where we can go from here; we’re already talking to Substrakt about next steps and the new features to explore”.
– Emily Dodgson, Head of Marketing and Communications at HMF.
What’s made this project so great is seeing the combined impact of all the changes we’ve made. There’s not been one specific thing that characterises the work, or a major development solution that we’re shouting about. It’s been about working collaboratively with the HMF team to make seemingly smaller improvements across different areas, creating a new website that does HMF”s offering justice while providing an easy and enjoyable user experience.
Find out more
If you’d like to hear more about anything we’ve talked about here just get in touch, we’re always happy to have a chat.
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