By Janus Boye
When it comes to digital, the museum community has repeatedly delivered engaging initiatives at the very forefront of innovation.
Still, when you go explore in the big sea of arts, history and culture and plan how to communicate and deliver a new exhibition, you can easily find yourself in seemingly uncharted territory, also when it comes to the use of emerging consumer technology.
Jennifer Snyder is Chief Digital Officer at Detroit Institute of Arts and has over a decade of experience in digital leadership roles in the museum world, including at SFMOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s one of many accomplished museum visionaries that are making museums an unexpected place for early indicators of what’s next.
Jennifer is also our expert of the month.
The career path to becoming a museum change maker
Originally Jennifer dreamed of becoming a history professor and following her B.A. in History/Political Science from The University of Georgia, she earned a Masters in History at the University of Florida, which was later followed by a PhD in early American history.
After many excel spreadsheets, trips to England and countless oxford commas later, she graduated into a job market without any real prospects in ‘Early American’ history. 2009 was a rough year. Realizing that her narrow focus wouldn’t get her far, she said yes to digital. In a chance encounter, while still in graduate school, she met Jake Barton, the head of Local Projects, an exhibition and media design firm for museums and public spaces, who was presenting a multi-million dollar digital interactive for the Bob Graham Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
This encounter led to a job offer in NYC and so in 2010, she then made the decision to move to New York with two suitcases on the Amtrak to join Local Projects as Interactive Project Coordinator. This led to some intense years of learning digital in Manhattan and working on several museum websites around the country.
If you want to see digital innovation at work from this time, then one of the many projects Jennifer was involved in, is the Bob Graham Center Civil Debate Wall — recognised as a cutting-edge tool for civil debate. The interactive featured five interconnected touch-screen displays allowing students, teachers, and citizens to ‘debate civilly’ by sharing ideas and solutions to pressing political questions that face Florida and the rest of the US.
Back in 2013, Jennifer Snyder was setting up the 32” screen prototype of thinkFlorida and training local museum staff on uploading content.
Wanting to finish her PhD, Jennifer moved back to Florida In 2013 and joined the Florida Humanities Council in St. Pete, where she managed the concept, design and development of thinkflorida.org - a site intended to provide Florida teachers with the history of Florida. She also prototyped an open source application which connected small town museums across Florida. A big upside was traveling to tiny Florida towns to fix museum computers and help upload content.
Then in 2016, Chicago called.
One of many films Jennifer oversaw at the Art Institute of Chicago highlighting their digital work.
Embracing the digital experience
Joining the Art Institute of Chicago initially as Associate Director of Digital Learning and Interactives, Jennifer spent three years in one of the largest museums in the US. Home to more than 800,000 pieces of art, including some of the world's most revered masterpieces and the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art on the planet outside the Louvre, Jennifer really had the possibility to embrace the digital museum experience at scale.
Jennifer on location just outside the Ayala chapel at Quejana (Álava), near Bilbao, shooting for an interpretive film on the reinstallation of the Arms and Armor galleries in 2017.
Among her projects, she oversaw the production of an award winning family interactive app and deployment into the museum. She also produced three stop motion films, bringing the famous Thorne Miniature Rooms online and produced an award winning mobile app, which included an interactive map, a suite of audio tours, plus a ton of film shoots!
Jennifer Snyder presented JourneyMaker to one of our West Coast peer groups back in 2019. JourneyMaker is a digital tool that allows your family to create your very own tour of the Art Institute of Chicago.
JourneyMaker icons – Time Travel and Monster – allow kids to choose themed tours to explore the museum.
When she left in early 2019, she had been promoted to Director of Interactive Media and produced a suite of digital products during her tenure. She left Chicago to join SFMOMA in San Francisco, widely recognised as a leader in digital in museums.
In her three years on the West Coast as Director of Digital Experience at SFMOMA, she managed a digital team in charge of all public facing digital communication tools (email, social, website, signage, digital experiences, apps). During the pandemic she implemented technology change management unifying digital strategy across communication channels, by bringing in email and social media into her digital department.
By bringing all content channels under one umbrella, content created for education was created with a website/social media audience in mind – thus aligning SFMOMA into a digital content making machine.
In June 2022, she then moved to her current role as Chief Digital Officer at Detroit Institute of Arts, where she runs five different departments:
Marketing + Communications
IT
Digital
Video
Library/Collections
An innovator looks towards the future
Example from the SFMOMA times of content alignment across multiple channels
2022 has been quite a year and times of crisis call for fresh thinking and continued innovation. To quote Jennifer:
“The ramifications of Covid have yet to be experienced, much less understood. The museum sector is experiencing (a very long) moment of uncertainty – holding its breath, so to speak, waiting to understand the ramifications of an international pandemic. A pandemic that gave rise to a well-overdue social justice reckoning, a precipitous decline of attendance and therefore budgetary freefall, and the abrupt halt of the march towards in-gallery digital interactives.”
Interestingly, digital is one field many are struggling with. She says:
“Museums do face specific challenges, but at the heart of the issues, the challenges are similar to really any in the entertainment industry: How do we get people to buy a ticket, and how do we get them to interact with us during the time they decide to invest in the experience?”
According to Jennifer, museums need to listen and learn from successes that are happening out there and don’t reinvent the wheel. Unlike when she started her career, today there’s so much off the shelves that you can easily deploy. Still, we are far from done yet. As she said:
“There’s no real working standard or out-of-the-box tool to get individuals engaged in in-gallery experiences. You can customize popular tools like Drupal and WordPress, but still there’s extensive development work required each and every time”
Jennifer doing some impromptu whiteboarding at a peer group meeting in San Francisco in 2019
Another big challenge facing museums and other leaders alike is staffing and recruitment. Museums are not known to pay top salaries, and as Jennifer said, museums are competing for talent after the 2020 industry-wide layoffs/staff exodus. While museums are a unique place to work, to many talented people working on digital, it’s the same job, whether in a bank or in a museum.
So what does the future hold? Jennifer has more questions than answers:
“Philosophically – What is the future of the museum sector? In 2020, Lonnie Bunch, now the Director of the Smithsonian, gave an address to museums in which he encouraged museums to start being community-based. His talk has been rolling around in my mind ever since. I would love to see this directive pushed further. What if art museums in particular specifically supported local artists, instead of becoming tombs to artwork. And I mean the boring stuff, what if we provided healthcare, housing, salaries, access to digital tools, etc. to local artists and bolstered communities through this avenue? Museums have a lot to grapple with in 2023 and I wonder if this is the year for bold change?”
Learn more about Jennifer Snyder
You can naturally connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn.