A chat with Zoe Williams, the Head of Communications and Fundraising at the Vagina Museum in London.
We discuss their successful recent crowdfunding campaign, we also explore how they've harnessed the power of digital platforms to reach a global audience, built a robust community online, and how they’ve carved out their niche in the digital sphere.
As ever this work isn't without its challenges, and Zoe doesn't shy away from discussing these. From discussing the effects of social media censorship to unearthing their content strategy for overcoming these hurdles. to dealing with trolls and more negative online engagement.
A really fascinating, frank, and funny conversation.
You can find the Vagina Museum online via their website https://www.vaginamuseum.co.uk
A chat with Zoe Williams, the Head of Communications and Fundraising at the Vagina Museum in London.
We discuss their successful recent crowdfunding campaign, we also explore how they've harnessed the power of digital platforms to reach a global audience, built a robust community online, and how they’ve carved out their niche in the digital sphere.
As ever this work isn't without its challenges, and Zoe doesn't shy away from discussing these. From discussing the effects of social media censorship to unearthing their content strategy for overcoming these hurdles. to dealing with trolls and more negative online engagement.
A really fascinating, frank, and funny conversation.
You can find the Vagina Museum online via their website https://www.vaginamuseum.co.uk
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode episode number 37, we speak to Zoe Williams. Zoe is the head of communications and fundraising at the Vagina Museum in London. The Vagina Museum recently moved into new premises and Zoe and I talk a bit about the digitally driven crowdfunding campaign that raised a huge proportion of the funds needed for the move. We also talk about owning your niche, understanding your audience and not feeding the trolls. Oh, I should also warn you that there is some very strong language in this episode. A number of sea bombs are dropped. Enjoy, Hi, Zoe. Thanks very much for joining us today.
Zoe:Thanks for having me.
Ash:So, as I do every time, I have one of these conversations before we delve into your work, specifically at the Vagina Museum and questions of digital. What is the Zoe story? How did you end up where you are?
Zoe:I started life in academia. Actually, I started doing health psychology. The academic life didn't really suit me. It's sort of very narrow, very focused and very high pressure. So I moved into another field which had absolutely no money in it, which was marketing for charities. So I started out with a democratic reform organisation and then since then, I've worked with various causes, such as anti-bullying training for children, rare genetic diseases, and in 2019 I finally ended up in my dream job, which is head of communications and fundraising at the Vagina Museum.
Ash:So for people who don't know what is the Vagina Museum.
Zoe:The Vagina Museum is the world's first bricks and mortar museum dedicated to vaginas, vulvas and the gynecological anatomy. So our physical space. We have exhibitions and events, so our last exhibition was a brief history of menstruation. Our next exhibition, which we'll be opening in autumn probably by the time that you're listening to this, it'll be open. It's going to be about endometriosis and that's going to come with an associated programme of events. We also undertake quite a lot of digital work, so we use our social media as a virtual extension of the museum. So, essentially, we don't have the physical space to say everything we need to say, tell all these stories that we'd like to tell, so we use social media as a tool for further outreach.
Ash:We also have a podcast and a virtual book club, part of a digital offer, and you've hit on exactly why I reached out to you and wanted to talk to you for the podcast, because it's been so interesting to watch how the Vagina Museum, as a relatively new organisation with a small team, has really lent into digital stuff as a way of doing more than just marketing in inverted commas. How would you describe your approach to digital? Because you are a small team, there's a limited number of hours in the day, limited resources how do you think about picking up digital tools and how you'll use them?
Zoe:I suppose our approach to social we were actually born on Twitter, as it were. In 2017, our founder and director tweeted there's been a penis museum in Iceland for 30 years. There's not a vagina museum anywhere in the world. Let's make one. And it kind of escalated from there. But while we sort of had a healthy kind of digital following, we really saw a lot of people really started leaning into it and honing it during lockdown.
Zoe:Obviously, we were closed during lockdown and it was a real shame because we'd only opened our doors to the world about four months before that.
Zoe:So we were kind of looking for ways to reach people and looking for ways to share our collection with the world and to do it in a way which, for a small organisation, was most affordable for us. So we couldn't afford anything such as video production or so forth. We really only had like one account on InDesign and so forth that only one of us could use at the time, so sort of realised that Twitter essentially lends itself very well to just typing in some text and being able to tell the story that way. So we sort of, as a cost effective way of reaching more people, telling more stories, we started using Twitter and we sort of saw the numbers go up and, up and, up and up and we realised this is a fantastic way of reaching people. It's a fantastic way of engaging people around the globe with our exhibition content and the sort of expanded content that we can't physically display, and you talked about that international audience, that social media digital allows you to engage within a meaningful way Based on your insights that you have.
Ash:does that audience mirror the people that were coming into the bricks and mortar building or is it a very different demographic?
Zoe:So our first premises was in Camden Market. So actually that was a varying international kind of tourist demographic anyway, and after that we moved to Bethnal Green. Many more of our visitors were domestic, but we still have a lot of people who come in. They're on holiday in London and on their agenda among the things they want to visit they want to go take their picture outside Buckingham Palace and do whatever else tourists do. They also decide to come along to a tiny little museum in London which we're really excited by because it's something which shows that, despite being such a small organisation, we're actually incredibly well known outside of London and outside of the UK.
Ash:And I think it's really interesting that the words you've used to describe your digital activity. You use your words like storytelling and an extension of the physical space and engagement. It's not been about Selling, all really about sort of commercial promotional activities. It seems like you're using it for community building. Would that be fair?
Zoe:Yes, yeah, it's absolutely a community building exercise. I'm aware like we don't actually use it like a marketing channel, except occasionally when we do, but the fact that most of what we're doing, as with the museum itself, is giving people something and letting them, you know, engage with and learn it sort of encourages people to follow us and it means that when we do ask them for something so when we launch a new exhibition people are much more engaged with that. When we need to ask for money, which we did recently they're much more willing to give it to us and you mentioned.
Ash:The next thing I want to talk about. This is something we spoke about last week, but the fundraising campaign that you ran recently. Tell us about that. How did that go? What was the role of digital in sort of executing that campaign?
Zoe:Essentially, we needed to raise eighty five thousand pounds to move into a new home and we decided to crowdfund this. And so, behind the scenes, we were doing what fundraising managers always do, so hitting up every contact, asking little black book to pledge and donate, and out of that we raised ten thousand pounds or so and at this point I was nervous loading my cv to every website, cuz it was quite a critical situation and you know, seventy five grand to go on this fundraising and I'm looking at redundancy next month if we don't manage to do this. So the private fundraising actually didn't go very well, but we always plan to go public with press and social media about two weeks after we tried the private phase, within a day of going live on social media With the messaging being we need this and will wind down. We won't even be posting online anymore because we want exist anymore.
Zoe:Within the first day of going public, I think we raised about Sixteen or seventeen thousand pounds and the momentum was completely unstoppable. So it's set a deadline for June, the second we've gone public on may the seventeen and we met our target week early and it was just beautiful, refreshing twitter and seeing loads of people just sort of watching it with us and go. It's gone up by another thousand pounds the night that we actually hit the target, just watching absolutely everybody like they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it, and the joy that happened after that was absolutely spectacular. And we couldn't have done that without having built that community yes, I was gonna be.
Ash:my next question is all of the donors that contributed to that fundraising campaign online. Do you have any insights on how many of them were sort of part of that existing community and how many of them were Newcomers to the museum?
Zoe:I believe actually most of them was sort of familiar with us. It's very hard to tell for certain given the data that we've got, but what I can say is the average donation amount to that campaign was about twenty pounds. It was very low amount and that sort of tracks a lot with our audience. So sort of Ski towards female skewed, towards young skewed, towards disables and therefore demographics, that kind of broke really but it you know that it sounds like that was the payoff of years of community building.
Ash:Actually, in another podcast conversation I had, someone was saying that to often you see cultural organizations, you know, asking someone to marry them on the first date. You know they only get in touch when they want something of their audience and actually the approach that you've described is the complete opposite to that and the dividend that pays when you are in a moment of need and you can make a really clear ask of that community. It sounds like that is actually, over the long term, a much more commercially effective approach.
Zoe:Yeah, absolutely, and yeah, it's been very conscious choice to make our kind of front facing communications Will never sort of ask for anything without having given you much more, and it's built up a lot of love. It's built up A huge community. You know, we've got a lot of people who are invested in the vagina museum and want to help how they can, and In our hour of need we supplied them with a reason to help us and this is, you know, after years of threads explaining you know, here's why your knickers have weird stains in them. Here's a funny story about a night you can make. Can't speak is an analysis of how in Star Trek, did Janeway and Tom Paris fuck when they were salamanders? One of my personal favourites, the actor who played Tom Paris, retweeted it and tag Kate Mulgrew in it.
Ash:My next question was going to be about that idea of value exchange. You know, because, as you said, when you're asking your community for money, you're doing that sort of safe in the knowledge that you have delivered value to that community and it's a sort of it feels equitable that relationship and it's not an exploitative relationship. And, given the focus of the museum, how do you go about that question of working out what is valuable to your audience, understanding what your audience wants from you?
Zoe:The absolutely fantastic thing about social media is you can follow in real time whether your message is hitting or whether it is. So you post something and it kind of flops. It's like, okay, they're not so interested in that. You post something and it takes off and you can really offer them more of the same. So you know, turns out our audience absolutely love weird medieval stories and that's great, because there's absolutely tons of medieval stories about vaginas that talk and vaginas that terrify the devil and so forth, and the mob wants it. The mob gets it.
Ash:And so it sounds like you're quite responsive and you're really looking to specifically measure what lands and then to capitalize on the stuff that works and to kill the stuff that doesn't. And I assume, being a relatively small team, you have to be ruthless in that way.
Zoe:Yes, yes, we do. You know, obviously we are a very, very small team indeed. So I kind of cap the amount of time we're spending on this at about kind of eight hours a week or so. So that sort of time is spent sort of researching, creating content and so forth, and that does mean that, you know, yes, there's a lot that ends up on the cutting room floor, but, to be honest, a big part of it as well is OK.
Zoe:This is quite a tedious kind of thing to look at. How can we make this interesting? So, for example, international Men's Day. For the first few years it was like how can we possibly make this relevant? Couldn't really come up with a great way of doing it until this year where we decided our audience is skewed very much towards feminist, so a lot of it they don't necessarily want to hear. So this year we did a sort of tongue in cheek kind of list of every part of the gynecological anatomy which is named after a man and the man who named it. So there's quite a lot of them like really weirdly specific parts that are named after men, like the line on the vulva where it goes between being sort of skin textured and very sort of flat named after a man, william Berry Hart it turns out Scottish guy, and that resonated really well. That landed incredibly well.
Ash:It take quite a bit of time just sort of working through the sheer quantity of parts which are and finding out information about each of these men, but definitely landed in the end and have you found that, over you know, recent years, as you've lent more into doing more with digital, that those sorts of workflows have become more efficient, that you have a shared sort of feeling for the things that are probably going to land and you're able to move more quickly to shaping what that will actually look like when you put it out to your audience?
Zoe:Yes, absolutely. So you know, after spending about three years kind of essentially down in the trenches with this audience, got quite a good handle on what's going to fly, what isn't going to fly. And of course our audiences often do volunteer questions and when they do like we never respond to individuals individually. If it's a good question, we can use that as a jumping off point to explore further. And recently we actually started using Mastered On because we noticed a lot of our audience on Twitter were starting to leave and we could see where, exactly where they were going, which was Mastered On. And because we'd sort of understand this audience and we've sort of cultivated, nurtured and been on a journey with them, we decided to make the jump to going on that journey with them on to Mastered On.
Zoe:And I was quite nervous with the first posts there. It was like I hope this is a similar crowd. So we did a thread about Mastered On vaginas which you know, beyond the boring answer of we've never seen a soft tissue sample. We could sort of talk comparatively about elephant vaginas, which are very fascinating. Elephant vagina begins about a metre inside the elephant.
Ash:And with the state of social media At the moment. In the word state can be interpreted many different ways, but you know Twitter or X is not the place it once was and You've just said there that you are finding that some of your audience are going elsewhere. Is that a worry, a concern, a threat to the way that you have been using Twitter in the past? If that's sort of Reducing in efficacy and the same people aren't there and they're more fragmented across a number of different platforms, how are you sort of dealing with that challenge?
Zoe:So, yeah, a present with sort of our Twitter audience. We're losing a little bit week on week but we're still sort of it's still holding. But you know, I'm aware, to be honest, by the time this podcast goes out, it could be a banking app With a micro blogging functionality which no one uses by this point. So as soon as Elon Musk built Twitter, we did start doing a research into alternatives. So, as well as master don, at that point we joined tumblr as well, which tumblr is an Unusual place, and we've been cross posting the same content across it with tumblr. It's been adapted ever so slightly to be a bit more paragraph based, but tumblr turns out we went viral on there with Very old thread we published on Twitter of Benjamin Franklin essay about why you should have sex with milfs, and tumblr absolutely loved that.
Zoe:So, getting to know our tumblr audience, blue sky we've given it a go and haven't had much joy with it. A big problem with blue sky is is its moderation. Tools are Nominally non-existent but in fact they're very highly automated. So completely arbitrarily, it will Stick a content blur over things and stick a reason that is, put this content blur on it which they're very kind of morally judged, whereas all of the other platforms we use, even Instagram, where we do have to be very careful about what we post. Even Instagram lets you blur your own images. Well, blue sky will only let you do it if you label it as porn.
Ash:Wow and I think that does move us on to one of the challenges that I imagine you experience on a Daily or hourly basis, and that's the fact that all of the most popular social media platforms are, to a greater or lesser extent, fairly puritanical when it comes to their approach to censorship around content, and you know Instagram has been scared of nipples for years, so God knows how it deals with vaginas. What is the experience like for you as a vagina museum on a day-to-day basis? Is it a real challenge?
Zoe:I'm badgering our director to have a small display of printed out Instagram notices, for this post has been flagged as inappropriate Because there's been a lot of them and they're quite arbitrary and quite ridiculous. Sometimes Facebook is worse, if anything. So Facebook this is my personal favorite ever, because we have the word vagina in our name. When we attempted to have our shop on Facebook and well actually, therefore Instagram it flagged literally everything in our online shop as soliciting adult sexual services, and so I have a lovely screenshot of Emilyne Pankhurst's memoirs flagged as soliciting sexual services, and Instagram is much the same. Instagram, obviously, as you mentioned, really doesn't like nipples, so we very much kind of always use art which has been painted or sculpted, and even then Instagram will sometimes flag it, such as Jamie McCartney's Great Wall of Regina sculpture was flagged as as adult content.
Zoe:This is, you know, sculptures all very in white and tasteful. They're casts of real people's volvers, and that was flagged Recently with their shadow banning things. So they now show you which posts have made you shadow ban. One of them was a sculpture on the side of a, an 11th century Church in France, I think it was. They didn't like that one, so Instagram I've sort of got to grips by this point on what they'll actually force you to ban, and they're reasonably liberal if it's not a photograph, and it's made very clear that you know this is an illustration of a scene from Greek mythology or an illustration of a story, and they don't mind if you do that, but they will shadow ban you for that.
Zoe:And so, basically, given that they're gonna shadow ban us for literally anything we post anyway, just sort of decided to give up on not being shadow banned, and we have about 20,000 followers on Instagram who have found us organically, for the most part because they've had to, and it's sort of it's worked out Absolutely fine from our end. They will still. They haven't figured out a way of stopping. You know people who actually follow us in our posts or our stories, so we're rubbing along with it, even though kind of giving up the ghost on never being shadow banned, and Given the sort of dumpster fire that you've just described there of fragmentation and censorship.
Ash:You mentioned earlier that you have a podcast. Is there a? Would you foresee more of a shift towards a Focus on your sort of owned channel you know, newsletters, your website, things like podcasts where you Hopefully I'm having to grapple with fewer barriers to reaching your audience?
Zoe:to an extent. It would be absolutely lovely to be able to do that. So we do have Content from a physical exhibitions on a website and which is kind of important to us, really retaining the intellectual property on that specific stuff. As for self publishing in general, ultimately what we're really trying to do here is meet people where they are, because people might be embarrassed to kind of seek out and find content from the vagina museum, but if it's, you know, shared with them by a friend and their feed, then it's sort of safer in a way. It's not something that they've searched out for themselves which might feel a bit weird typing that into google but instead something that they've Kind of found peer to peer, where they are and where they're getting their stories from, and related to that.
Ash:I suspect there's a question of sort of tone of voice, because the different types of content that you've described range from Obviously humorous all the way through to your medical and in focus, and that is a wide range to keep within the same sort of institutional tone of voice I'm interested in how do you, how do you manage that? Is it kept consistent, because everything is you are ultimately authoring it, or is there more of a sort of framework and process around that?
Zoe:So general underlying framework is conversational. So I like to sort of maintain a conversational tone like you talk to a friend, and from that it means you know if you're talking about the medical. It's a serious topic, but it's also something that doesn't necessarily need to be formatted and presented like a scientific paper. It can be a simple as have you ever wondered you know why your teeth hurt during your period? And here's why. Here's a few things you can do about that.
Zoe:Incidentally, anybody who has periods listening to this, but your dentist appointments as far away from your period as you can, because the hormones affect your guns, which is why you get sore teeth sometimes. And you know that's obviously a gulf of difference to when you're telling a funny story to a friend, when you're adapting, I suppose, a medieval french story about a night yes, wishes granted by a fairy and he ends up with the power to make can't speak, and you know that, being a weird story, you can kind of go with silly and weird with it as you want. So essentially, if the underlying time that we go for is keep it conversational, tell the story like you be telling it to a friend, and indeed a lot of the time when I'm a bit stuck on how to author something. I will have a chat, either with my partner or in the work group chat, and just Try and explain the thing to them and see what it is that they find fun and then lean into that.
Ash:Another challenge that comes with social media is abuse and sort of trolls and negative engagement, and I know that the vagina museum has been on the receiving end of that. Could you talk a bit about how you deal with that, because it does seem to be a regular occurrence with the way that people are looking to engage with you?
Zoe:Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, what we're dealing with is taboo topics and some of our topics are Quite hot but an issue. So we're explicitly trans, inclusive and we're also explicitly feminist. So this does mean that we sort of end up on the receiving end of pylons. So when we're dealing with that sort of home to the approach again.
Zoe:So the two sites where it's most likely to happen a twitter or instagram tumblr doesn't seem to have Anyone taking anything seriously on it, which is fun for us and master on explicitly bands a lot of people quite liberal. Those ones are easier. But the first thing I will do is twitter and instagram both have a great feature where you can just switch replies off of your post and that immediately nips a lot of it in the bar because all they want to do is have a torrent of replies that they know someone's gonna have to read and it's bullying behavior essentially, and I suppose actually working in an anti bullying charity kind of helped with this, help give me the confidence to understand that this isn't actually right full criticism. It's a bullying and inorganic. So I immediately switching off replies.
Zoe:That actually causes quite a big loss of interest because now they can't do Quite so much, and I might go for it on the quote, but it helps it peter out quite a lot by giving them nothing and we sort of continue to give them nothing unless there's a point that really needs clarifying. So an example of that is last year is endometriosis awareness month and we tweeted that two hundred million people in the world have endometriosis A pile on in seared. Because we use the word people despite the fact women are people, that got some backs up, and so, after switching off the replies, we made a clarifying post explaining that actually this is the precise language, because not only to transgender men and non binary people sometimes get endometriosis. Also, there are at least fifteen medical case studies of cisgender men who have been diagnosed with endometriosis and obviously it's really important to acknowledge this. So, as well as the fact that women are people, it's not any women that get endometriosis, and that needed clarifying.
Ash:Yeah, I think your patience is admirable and your approach is effective because, as you said, around these moments of difficulty, you have a huge amount of positive interaction and digital is working really well for you hasn't forced you to retreat off these platforms entirely.
Zoe:Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's always important to be aware that the digital world, especially social media platforms, aren't reflective of real life. And so I can have a nasty day where I'm where I'm just seeing another pile on and seeing hundreds of abusive replies, and when you see all of that in front of you, it can sometimes feel like, wow, the world hates us. Over the years it's not resulted in any reputation damage whatsoever. There's been one or two Got a press hit pieces from newspapers which I shan't name, imagine some of you might be able to guess. But all of those publications, you know we might get a hit piece, but then a completely different desk. Even they won't be aware that this has happened and will come to us with an honest question about, you know, funding for the art.
Zoe:So When's your next exhibition? And so, yeah, we get them coming to our exhibitions. So it really these pilots on in any way reflective of real life? It's, you know, if you very, very noisy bullies who frankly need to get a life, while everyone else the world just sort of goes on and get the message.
Ash:And, on a positive note, you know the Chinese museum is moving into new premises. Successful fundraising campaign. When you're planning and I know you're hugely busy at the moment Putting together the program for when the building does open what role is digital playing in in that?
Zoe:in your thinking, so obviously, digital will be used to promote wheels, so Do you have kind of digital content within the exhibition and the exhibition being accessible online. So one of our permanent exhibition items is actually a tick tock, because this was actually one of the best ways we found this message communicated to tick tock video from a doctor who's explaining how to explain to doctors your gynecological symptoms, and so that piece of content is on display in the Chinese museum because you know, we go back and forth between digital world.
Zoe:You know the digital world is doing great stuff as well, so we like to include that within our exhibition. We also, because of our high international audience, we do make sure that our exhibitions are accessible online and we're also doing podcast. Tie in series is with each exhibition. So our periods of brief history exhibition had three podcast episodes associated with it, which again provided expanded content. My personal favorite was about periods in space. Some wonderful content in that and of course with the funding of this exhibition it's actually also budgeted for some space for more For the time that I take in the social media outreach. So again we can really dig down into topics which we don't have a physical space to display.
Ash:You know the picture that you've painted, that what we've been talking about today for someone like me, sort of An advocate for digital, is so encouraging because it's clearly such a central part of your work and the museum's work. For people who might be listening, who are working in institutions that are more than a decade old, that weren't founded on Twitter, and perhaps grappling with structures and culture and leadership For whom digital is you know, it's for marketing or it's for sales. Do you have any words of encouragement, practical approaches that they might be able to take from your work at the vagina museum and apply in more traditional institutions?
Zoe:So what I would say is it's actually a model which work very well for any museum, because you've always got so many stories which are left only for tools or Podcasts or so forth, and it's actually very easy and Wonderfully cheap use of resources to use social media in the way that we do.
Zoe:I don't have return on investment statistics necessarily, because Our entire expenditure on social media is my staff time, but like when you're using your social media not as a marketing channel but as a virtual extension of the museum, just like when people come to visit the museum and they spend money while they're there, they will spend money while they're there. When you ask for it, when you post about what you've got in your gift shop and so forth, they will come. So it's something to push for and it's something which you sort of ask your curatorial team to do it during their free time. Ask your volunteers who lead tours to tell a story in their free time and then just watch the good will and the organic reach start rolling in amazing, so thank you so much thank you.
Zoe:Thank you for having me.
Ash:And that is everything for today. Thanks for listening. You can find all episodes of the podcast, sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, the digital dot works. You can also find us on LinkedIn. Now that Twitter is a total garbage fire, our theme tune is Vienna, beat by blue dot sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark cotton pays, editing support on this episode. See you again soon.