The project team from the MFA visited Saint-Petersburg

Submitted by KA9021 on
MFA in SPb

The Museum of Fine Arts of Karelia continues to realise the KA9021 project "Museums in Focus: Development of Cultural Services for Chinese Tourists". After the creation of a new section of the permanent exhibition "Kalevala Universe", it is required to promote actively the exhibition and communicate with the target audience.

The pandemic influenced marketing and communication palns. At this stage the borders are closed, Chinese tourists cannot visit Russia, and it is rather difficult to evaluate whether the communication channels were chosen correctly, an advertising campaign was carried out effectively, in general, the promotion of a new tourist product was organised in a right way.

In this situation, it was decided to contact colleagues from leading Russian museums, who, prior to the situation with COVID-19, actively worked with Chinese tourists. Last week, the project team - Irina Latkina, PR-manager of the project, and Vitaly Tamm, project specialist in digital technologies - visited St. Petersburg and talked with colleagues from the Museum of Peterhof, Tsarskoye Selo and Faberge Museum. When discussing the situation, it was suggested that there would not be a mass foreign tourism for a long time, so the focus should be shifted to individual tourists. Various options for reaching the Chinese audience were also discussed. Representatives of the press service of Peterhof spoke about the peculiarities of communication with the Chinese audience, about the work carried out by the museum in social media WeChat and Weibo - the most popular social networks among Chinese people, and about the content that Russian museums could prepare for potential Chinese subscribers. The colleagues from Tsarskoye Selo discussed the problems of serving groups of Chinese tourists and the possibilities of museums to receive them: from the availability of a tourist product to the size of exhibition halls and other nuances. The project team also managed to talk about the situation on the domestic tourism market and get acquainted with the work of the gift shop. The colleagues from the Faberge Museum shared their experience and advised communication channels that may be relevant in this situation, and talked about the difficulties of working with groups of Chinese tourists in small exhibition areas.

We thank our colleagues for the warm welcome, cooperation, willingness to share their experience and the opportunity to get to know better the work of famous museums!

More photos in the project album https://vk.com/album-4852062_270866073