Business Plan 2017: Spreading the Word

Last week, we announced our Recalibrated 2020 Strategy, revising our focus for the next four years to maximise our impact towards 2020. The first expression of this strategic update, our business plan 2017 aims to implement these new ambitions. We have therefore aligned what we do with our new priorities – making it easy and rewarding, scaling with partners, engaging with people – and organised our plan around the operational shifts that will be executed throughout the year to fulfil our strategic plan, and make us more impactful as Europe’s platform for cultural heritage.

Towards a market oriented approach

A central component in our approach is a market focus. We believe that if we want to be more effective, we need to become more focused on delivering value for specific audiences. For that reason, we decided to organise our work around 5 key ‘markets’ that are connected through our platform: Cultural Heritage Institutions who have data to share with us, and the audiences that want to use this content for work, learning or just for fun (General Public, Research, Education and Creative Industries). We want to get as close as possible to these audiences to gain deeper understanding of their specific needs, so that we can adapt faster and develop more targeted products and services. To understand how we are making progress against our goals we have expressed the change we aim to achieve in each market and developed performance indicators to match.

What can you expect?

But all this is just theory of course. To give an idea of what we hope to concretely deliver, this document provides a taster. It includes the launch of new collections on the themes of fashion, photography and newspapers and the revamp of our professional websites Labs, Research and Pro using one back-end system to allow more seamless user journeys into our content. Highlighting the variety of content in Europeana in all forms and languages, the #AllezLiterature campaign already started to celebrate European textual treasures on social media. Building up to 2018 with the European Year of Cultural Heritage and centenary of WW1, we will plan two more major campaigns dedicated to Migration and Culture and the centenary of the end of the First World War. 2017 promises to be an exciting year for copyright reform and we will flesh out a strategy to revitalise the way we aggregate. But there is much more. The full story and what is happening under the hood can be read here.

Joining forces

All this cannot be done alone. Europeana has always been a collaborative endeavour so we are proud to work again with so many great partners in the projects, the Member States Expert Group and of course in particular with the members of the Europeana Network Association. With 6 Tasks Forces running, we expect great things from our continued collaboration in our ambition to make significant changes in the way cultural heritage is delivered and used. We are looking forward to fruitful year full of inspiring online and offline experiences.

#AllezCulture!