An Interview with Samantha Eads, Visitor Services Manager of the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Museum of Natural History
COVID has had a momentous impact on the strategy and digital focus of all museums; large, small, independent, and institution-aligned. I sat down with the Visitor Services Manager of the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Museum of Natural History Samantha Eads — over ZOOM in our respective home offices, of course — to discuss the museum’s digital strategy over the last year.
Cameron
Can you just describe a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Samantha
Yeah, my name is Samantha Eads. I’m the Visitor Services Manager for the CU Museum of Natural History in Boulder. Under that umbrella, there are a lot of different duties. Now that we’re close to the public in person, we have pivoted to a more virtual visitor interface. And so I have taken over most of the social media for the museum at this point because of the cost.
Cameron
Before COVID, did the museum have a social media plan or was that only established after COVID?
Samantha
We did have a Facebook page and Instagram page, but they were primarily to promote events and we weren’t really posting unique content. It was more of just a promotion.
Cameron
Okay. And so now that you do have a plan, can you describe a little bit about what your strategy is for digital content?
Samantha
Yeah. We’ve got about 5 million objects and specimens in the museum, and our exhibits changed over rather frequently when we were open to the public. And so our idea was to give visitors an opportunity to explore the collection virtually. So our main focus is to promote different objects from the collection, objects and specimens, and to educate our visitors and our followers on social media.
Cameron
Do you have specific target audiences for your content, or do you have them set up into buckets such as for kids, for professionals, and so on?
Samantha
So right now our primary avenues for social media are Facebook and Instagram. We did have a Twitter a long time ago, but it’s kind of been deactivated at this point. So on Instagram, which is a highly visual platform, we try our best to put really striking visuals on Instagram and then kind of do a deep dive into individual objects and specimens. And then ion Facebook, we have a variety of well. And so our audience on Instagram is primarily adults 24 to 45. And we really try to connect with the CU community on Instagram. So there’s a variety of different Instagram pages for different institutes at CU Boulder. And so we really try to connect with other things going on campus and connect objects and specimens from the collection to things that other folks on campus might be doing or other research that might be happening.
Samantha
And then on Facebook we have a few different audiences that we go for. We definitely try to hit the family audience, so parents of young children. And then we also try to reach out to you know, adult, excuse me, adults, of course, but also folks that are retirement age and are looking for ways to continue on with lifelong learning. And so we, we tend to post about events and things that we think older folks might be interested in on Facebook. It’s definitely skewed more towards an older audience there.
Cameron
Is the museum closed for in-person visits?
Samantha
Yes, right now we are closed for in-person visits. The only thing that’s happening in the museum are we’ve converted some gallery space into classroom space so that we can hold classes for our graduate program in the museum.
Cameron
Have you noticed that any kind of content or engagement is more effective on certain platforms?
Samantha
Well for Facebook we find a lot more engagement on things where there’s a strong educational component, so we try to tap into things that are happening in the natural world: seasons changing, any celestial type events, or just general science news. And we try to tap into that and connect it to different pieces of our collection. And those pieces of content really tend to get a lot more engagement. I will also say that those like one off kind of funny humorous posts every once in a while, we’ll also get a lot of fun engagement from our visitors. And we just started using this new social media management platform called Sprout Social, and it is this great software that allows us to post to multiple platforms from one software.
Samantha
And so that tells us kind of when our target audiences are most likely to be online, it gives us an opportunity to target our posts to certain demographics and give us the right time of day and the right day of the week to post different types of content. And so like those funny posts tend to go do really well on Fridays or on the weekends when people [are] the end of the week, the educational [content is] better posted in the middle of the week. And then on Instagram we get a lot more engagement with our visitors when we post images, not just to things in our collection, but pieces of our collection. And then that same specimen in the natural world will sometimes do a what they call a carousel. So we’ll post multiple photos in one post on Instagram, and we will connect an object or a specimen from the collection with something in the natural world.
Cameron
You mentioned meme and joke posts get much better engagement on weekends? Could you give an example of some events that you covered or some piece of content that was particularly successful?
Samantha
Yeah. So last summer here in Colorado, we have these moths called Miller moths and they just kind of explode in early summer and they are everywhere all in your house, outside, they’re everywhere. And so there was this really funny meme of a Miller moth looking into a mirror and it said something like “Do I really need to go towards the light or is light within me” something silly like that? And so we kind of riffed off that and was like, who’s ready for these Miller moths to be gone. And that got a ton of engagement and it was just kind of a one-off funny thing.
Cameron
It’s pretty good. Did you cover the Lander last week, or is that more of a different department?
Samantha
Yeah, we did not cover the Lander. There is a planetarium on campus, and so they really are the ones that put out that content. We try not to compete with other organizations on campus that are similar to ours.
Cameron
Is that like a formal coordination plan, or do you just try not to step on each other’s toes?
Samantha
Yeah. We just try not to step on each other’s toes, but if we do find something that might be you know, a crossover between something they’re doing and something we’re doing, we’ll reach out to those social media managers at those institutions and ask if we could share something or maybe tag them in a post or something like that.
Cameron
What’s the structure of your digital department? Is it just you, or do you have other people specializing in certain things?
Samantha
So we don’t really have a digital department. A few of us kind of were assigned to social media when we closed. And so a group of four of us — our graphic designer, our family and community education coordinator, and our adult and communication specialists — that all are working together to bring together the content. So the way it really works is I’m kind of de facto in charge, but we all will reach out to different members of the museum other educators, collections managers, and curators, and ask them for content and maybe some ideas about content. And then we will do most of the legwork, like getting the images deciding when the schedule, when they’re going to go, these posts are going to go out on the schedule and then if we’re writing the content, we will get the okay from the specialist in that field. So we’re doing something on entomology. We’ll make sure that the entomologists give us the correct information that we’re putting out there, which is super important to us because we are a science institution. And so getting the correct information out there is our highest priority.
Cameron
Just picking up on that. I talked to [University of Colorado Vertebrate Paleontology Collections Manager Jacob Van Veldhuizen] last semester regarding digitization and how researchers are working on that side [of digital content]. Do you guys have any input on how to get research materials to researchers who may not be able to physically access campus or specimens?
Samantha
We did one month on Facebook where we highlighted all of our digital collections. And so we did a post about each of the different sections in the museum that has digital collections that we can share with others. And so we have that linked out in the post itself, but then we just keep driving people to the website where the research and collections digitization projects can be found. And so we will periodically just go back to that same content and share it again and just say, “Hey, remember, you’ve got these great resources on campus, even though you can’t come and see us, it’s available to you digitally.” And that’s you know, something really important about access. So many museums, collections are kind of seen as behind these solid walls that you can’t break through, and go find them. So digitizing collections really increases the access for the average person to take a look at those collections. And also it helps researchers from around the world be able to access those collections without necessarily having to make the trip to the collections themselves.
Cameron
I’m looking at the site right now. I, I actually really like how the sites laid out. It’s very well-designed and easy to navigate. Do you know who the website layout?
Samantha
Yeah. So [the University of Colorado] uses a specific software. I’m not exactly sure what their technical term is, but it’s called Web Express. All of our websites are built within Web Express at the museum, specifically our graphic designer, Jenny Dylan was the one who laid everything out and set it up the way it is.
Cameron
Because I’m looking at the virtual paleo hall right now. And it’s really nice.
Samantha (12:24):
That was a really in-depth project that a couple of other folks on our on our team worked on this summer. And they really did a great job with it.
Cameron
Yeah. I really like how you have the sidebar where you can pick specific spots, a lot of museums that kind of don’t put as much effort into the navigation ability. “We’ll just have visually just plop you in the virtual room.” And just like, “Here you go,” and often have a lot of trouble navigating those. The Smithsonian also did a really good one of this where they have like a mini map of selectable little dots on the map you can see and fill in. So I really liked the that one on accessibility.
Samantha
I’m like, I’m so proud of our group because, you know, the Smithsonian has so many resources at their disposal and we have so little compared to them and to pull something like this off, I just think it’s a real testament to how well our team work together to pull this off.
Cameron
Yeah. I know you’re being modest, but this is still one of the better ones that I’ve seen. Everything is readable. Even the Smithsonian, a lot of them that the camera doesn’t actually get close enough to be able to read every plaque, the entire walls that are just, just like, okay, let me get my microscope and see if I can read these.
Samantha
Yeah. It’s also available in Spanish, which was really important to us. There is a large Hispanic population in Colorado and we reach out to that community as often as we can. There’s this really great program that was started by our family community educator called Games and it’s girls at the museum exploring science. And it brings middle school girls from Latino communities and brings them to the museum. It introduces them to female scientists across the university and kind of opens up these new doors of possibilities for future careers to them. It’s a really great program.
Cameron
Yeah. I went to paleontology conference not last year, but two years ago, and I met I met Dr Karen Chin. I don’t think I really impressed her very much because I was a little too self-deprecating, she did a talk on inferring Mesozoic environments from coprolites found in the Arctic and Antarctica. And that was really cool. Cause like I knew about like ice cores and lower-level inferences that you can make about a environment from the fossils there. But I didn’t realize that you could get such in depth climate data, like they can figure out what specific seasons and temperatures a specific poop was dropped in. And I found that that was really cool.
Samantha
Yeah. I have a degree in anthropology and one of my “aha” moments and anthropology was in an archeology class and they were like, we always look for trash heaps because you can learn the most about people [from] the waste that people produce, because it really gives you a sense of the area and what they were using and what something they could just throw away that was common in the area. So just like with human waste, you can learn a lot from that.
Cameron
This might be a little too little too far out or might be a little too trade secret, I guess. But do you have any plans for digital content or strategy once COVID is over?
Samantha
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been we’ve been really successful delivering digital programs, such as researcher lectures panel discussions with experts in multiple different fields. And at the museum, we can only host about a hundred people in our biggest gallery for talks like this in person. Digitally though, we’ve reached over 500 people for just one talk, and we consistently get well over a hundred people that tune into these digital programs that we do. We’ve had people from Poland come in, to join some of our programs [such as when] we did this program with Dr. Jaelyn Eberle, who is also a paleontologist that studies mammals in the Arctic. And she did a program the Ice Centre in Beringia in Alaska and the Yukon, and we had people from all over the world that were involved in that. So we are definitely going to continue doing digital programs as a way to reach a wider audience.
Cameron
Speaking of international audiences and the museum, you have the translation in Spanish. Are there any plans for expanding into additional languages?
Samantha
We’ve run into a little bit of speed bump there because we really do want to expand our language accessibility, but the website that I was talking about, Web Express, how we create our websites on through CU doesn’t really lend itself very well to translation. And so not just our Institute, but institutes across the university are running into this problem where they want to provide translation tools in multiple languages, because we do have a very broad community from students and researchers that come from all over the world to study and work at CU. And so being able to provide translation services for not only the museum but other institutes on campus is definitely a push from all of us, but the university has just not quite figured out how to either change the web format that we use to allow for better translation or to upgrade that. So we’re kind of in a holding pattern right now, waiting to see if we can expand that.
Cameron
There’s no way to make alternate pages, and you’d basically have to make the whole page from scratch to add translations. Yeah. I can see that’d be why that’d be a problem.
Samantha
Yeah. We’ve also been really focused on digital exhibits online exhibits. So the Colorado snakes exhibit for example, was one of the first ones we put online. And that was an exhibit that I developed in person that we had on display for a few, for about six months. And then once we went digital, we thought, well, why not? We’ve got all the content, why not just put it online? So that was sort of the impetus to put more and more exhibits online. And we want to be able to present those exhibits in as many languages as possible. But again to do the Spanish language snakes exhibit, we had to rebuild the whole thing in Spanish. It wasn’t just a translation, and there’s also an issue for when you’re using technical and scientific terms, it’s sometimes hard to, for a run of the mill translator to know what those terms would be in a different language. So there’s also that speed bump to get over.
Cameron
When I worked at [EBSCO Information Services] both in abstracting and in the taxonomy departments, that was always a huge issue whenever we had people who could translate, but they didn’t necessarily always have the expertise in that field. So we basically have to have multiple meetings of the translator being like, “Okay, I can translate this, but I can’t translate this. I need some help with that.”
One thing that I like about digital exhibits is being able to preserve temporary exhibits. It happens a lot where I wanted to go see such and such, but they closed it they closed last year. Being able to keep [exhibits] up in one form or another permanently, was that a consideration, such as with the snakes exhibit?
Samantha
It was also an in-person and it was great. We had you know one of each snake specimen in a classic preservation jar on display, so people could see it from all the way around. And so we don’t really have that same quality of being able to manipulate the snake in 3D on the online exhibit, but you do get to see up close images of the snakes, which is great, I took most of those pictures! Oh, that’s another thing, the Wonder of the Week was another project that started because of our push to digital programming and being closed to in-person visits. A lot of museums have an object of the month or something that they do to highlight different specimens.
Samantha
And we thought, well, let’s try to do a weekly thing, a deep dive into a specific object or specimen. And so at the beginning of COVID, we reached out to all of our collections managers and asked them to give us the top 10 coolest objects or specimens in their collection. And then we gave them about two months lead time so that they could write the content and that we could work with them to kind of translate that into a more something that would be more digestible by the general public. And then so we just got this big list of wonders of the week that we can just pull from each week. And so that’s been a really fun project to work on as well.
Cameron
Assuming that money was no object. What would your dream project be for the museum’s digital offerings?
Samantha
That’s a really great question. Well, we have this unbelievable Southwestern textile collection that was amassed during the time of one of our former curators in anthropology, and these textiles are one of a kind, they’re just amazing. And if we could put all of those online for people to see in full detail, like we have a silk woven textile from the Navajo nation, and it’s just unbelievable. And so if we could get those textiles online so that people can see them in all their beauty, I think that would be amazing.
Cameron
I don’t know if you have this off the top of your head, but do you know what the ratio is to what you have available to view digitally versus your total collections?
Samantha
I don’t know for sure. But we have about 5 million objects and specimens and I would say only a handful of those collections are digitized at this point. And our botany collection has really made leaps and bounds getting that collection digitized. The anthropology collection is a little bit harder. They’re working on that too. And our invertebrate zoology collection just got a grant to digitize their collections. So that’ll be another a hundred thousand or more specimens that will be digitized.
Cameron
How do you prioritize what gets digitized first?
Samantha
It’s really a matter of the curators and collections managers reaching out to others in their field and applying for grants to get those objects digitized.
Cameron
Okay. what do you think the main challenges the museum is currently facing? COVID obviously, but besides COVID, what would you say?
Samantha
Well, we’re planning to reopen in August when the fall semester begins, and we don’t want to open with just what was there before we closed. We really want to put out new exhibits so that we can get people to have a reason for them to come in. We have this amazing Triceratops skull thats a, that used to be a holotype specimen. It turns out that it’s actually a member of another species that already had a holotype. It was on permanent loan to us from the Smithsonian and in the 1980s a graduate student put it together in our gallery. And so, because of how big the frill is, it actually can’t be removed from the gallery without being broken down, but the Smithsonian wants it back. So at some point in the next year, they’re going to take that specimen. And so this really gives us an opportunity to put something new from our collection on display that will bring people in so that we’re definitely giving the paleontology hall a big upgrade, but getting all of that done while we’re all still working from home is a real big challenge.
Cameron
Yeah. It’s hard to work with a two-ton skull remotely. Work on your telekinesis.
Samantha
[laughter] Yeah. I mean, it’s just we have to coordinate when people can be in the building and because of the capacity issues, only one or two people can be in a gallery at a time. And so just coordinating all of that is a big challenge.
Cameron
So what’s your main interest? In terms of an area of focus I mean.
I’m definitely a snake person. I love snakes. I go look for them all the time, and my husband and I go all over the country to go find new species we’ve never found before. And so I definitely get pigeonholed into that. You know, I’m like my whole family and friends, snake person, like if they find a snake and they don’t know how to identify it, they contact me.
Cameron
Yeah, when I was a kid, I grew up on what used to be an old farm house. It’s not a working farm anymore, so now it’s basically just where my parents live. There was a little rock wall that was only about like four or five feet long, but it was it was a big garter snake hibernation spot. And I harassed those poor animals so much just picking them up and collecting them that they actually abandoned that rock wall. And to this day, there’s still very rarely a garter snake in that wall.
Samantha
When my husband and I moved to our new house we were downstairs looking at something in the basement and just my husband happened to look over in the window. Well, there was a garter snake in the window. Well, it turns out we’ve got a hibernacula in our backyard and there are garter snakes everywhere. So I’m going to heaven. I’m just like so happy to be here.
Cameron
Is there anything else that you would like to just plug about your program or what the museum is doing that you don’t think we’ve covered?
Samantha
Well, just some administrative things that are really important for social media. It’s super important to have your social media policy posted on your website so that if you do get negative comments or if you do get someone who is kind of trolling, you can point to that policy and say, yeah, we’re going to mute you, or we’re going to block you because we don’t tolerate this kind of language. And so having that policy posted is just an easy way to point to something when someone’s being inappropriate and say, this goes against our policy. So we have that posted on both our Facebook and Instagram in our link bio. And another thing is it’s really important not to overpost. And so we post three times a week on Facebook and twice a week on Instagram. if there’s a breaking news story, that’s really in our wheel house, then we will post an extra post on that week, but we really try not to over inundate people with any ads or spam posts. So we really try to target them to things that are very specific to the museum quality over quantity.
Cameron
It’s really easy to kind of tune stuff out if there’s an overwhelming flood of it.
Samantha
Yeah. I mean, there’s some institutions that are large enough that they post once a day. We just feel like we’re kind of in we’re sort of in this nice little pocket of not too big, not too small. And we want people to be excited to see our content. We don’t want them to just scroll past it because they see it so often.
Cameron
Yeah. It makes it feel more like a treat and not like it’s just something that you can take for granted.
