1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum on Museum 2.0
Museum 2.0 interviews Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans managers Will Cary, Shelley Bernstein and An Xiao. 1stfans is a new membership initiative, launched only last month, which utilizes social media platforms to build and target specific museum audiences. They plan to incorporate a number of different groups in the future, but in its current iteration, they gear the program toward web-savvy museum-goers who frequent their free events, but don't opt to purchase high level memberships. (1stfans is only $20 a year.) It's an interesting venture, and they've gone far and beyond simply managing a Facebook profile for the museum. In an effort to build a more dynamic and two-way relationship between the museum and the community, 1stfans offers creative perks such as a private Twitter Art Feed maintained by a revolving group of artists and invitations to offbeat 1stfans events, like a talk by conservator Lisa Bruno on animal mummies.