Museum Love Stories: Increasing Brand Awareness For Fleet Air Arm Museum

Visitors of the museum often owe their positive experiences to the team of volunteers, praising insightful and heartwarming interactions. However, without visiting the museum, the volunteers were unknown to the public. We knew that to drive visitors to the museum and promote the team of volunteers, it would be key to start with the volunteer’s own stories first.

Upon visiting the museum and meeting the volunteers in person, it stood out to us how they all shared a common love for the museum. This undeniable love sparked our creativity and cemented our idea to explore their individual love stories. Inspired by the Meet Cutes NYC Instagram account, the YS team proposed a series of short videos interviewing the volunteers, encouraging them to share their own stories and love for the museum. Much like the Instagram account, we wanted to capture the essence of everyday people and how they hold their own understated love stories; These stories would allow the public to connect and relate with the team, providing an emotional hook to attract visitors and inspire others to volunteer.

We began with drafting a list of interview questions and filming directions to shoot the interviews on site at the museum, encouraging the volunteers to open up as to why they loved volunteering so much. Whilst we were at the museum filming, we ensured the volunteers being interviewed were as comfortable as possible, so we could capture a natural and authentic moment. To go alongside the footage, we also created a visual identity for the series to be used when launching the campaign and sharing the content across social media. The designs followed the brief of being fun and engaging, whilst serving the fundamental purpose of tying each video together as an entire series.

Throughout the videos, we heard from several team members, who shared their connections to the museum and how that led them to volunteer. One of the most memorable stories was that of husband and wife, Gary and Jill Umpleby. Their relationship tied in perfectly with the love theme of the series, which is why we strategically decided to kick off the campaign by sharing their video interview with key media contacts during the school half-term, on Valentine’s Day.