Museum marketing and communications teams face a familiar challenge in a cultural landscape characterized by uncertainty. How do we continue to engage audiences and prove our institutions are dynamic, accessible spaces in touch with the world today?

One answer might already be sitting on your website: your museum’s blog or long-form editorial platform.

Treated as more than notice boards for ad hoc institutional updates, these platforms can do some incredible heavy lifting to reflect your institution’s value, commitments to community, and continued relevance. At the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), we launched The Hub with that idea in mind, investing in and developing a steady cadence of original, accessible, and thoughtful narrative content. With 60-plus pieces published in the last fiscal year, The Hub has hit 104,329 page views since Mia launched it in January 2025. Generative search engines are also increasingly picking up these stories, bringing new audiences right to our digital doorstep.

Here are three ways to unlock the full potential of an editorial platform:

1. Uplift Staff (and Pull Back the Curtain)

Visitors see incredible displays of museum collections. What they rarely see is the work that goes into planning, creating, and caring for them, though the numbers tell us they’re interested.

Dedicating editorial space to staff profiles that span a wide range of roles—at an art museum like Mia, those roles are held by conservators, curators, security personnel, and facilities teams, among others—celebrates the often-invisible labor that keeps institutions running. Staff profiles have proved immensely popular internally at Mia, as staff are encouraged to nominate their coworkers and share stories about them, fortifying an already strong workplace culture. Externally, these stories offer the public insights into the varied, often unconventional career paths and fields of study that lead to museum work. This illuminating content builds trust, humanizes your brand, and proves that museums are powered by the people who work in them.

This profile of Mia’s event media technician offers an example, highlighting the tech-related work that happens before an event—largely out of sight but crucial for providing visitors, speakers, and performers with a smooth experience. It was the top-performing story the month it was published.

2. Share the Stage with Creators and Experts

Museums hold significant institutional legitimacy and credibility. One of the most meaningful things we can do with that cultural capital is share it.

At Mia, we know that artists are endlessly fascinating. Through interviews and close examinations of their work, we use our platform to connect emerging and mid-career artists directly with Mia’s audience, increasing their reach and exposure and archiving their work at the museum after their exhibitions come down.

It’s a win-win for the artists and Mia’s marketing team. Featuring artists in high-quality, thoughtful editorial pieces has encouraged them to share those stories on their own websites, newsletters, and social media platforms, expanding the museum’s digital footprint.

This Q&A with artist Hend Al-Mansour shone a spotlight on the artist’s’ story while bringing nuance to various aspects of her exhibition.

3. Illustrate Your Values in Action

While strategic plans and annual reports lay out an institution’s values, storytelling is where museums can capture how and where they are enacted more granularly. This could be a story about a community partnership from the perspective of the participants that highlights a commitment to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Or it could be a piece that documents sustainability initiatives through the lens of exhibition design.

Storytelling offers a chance to demonstrate follow-through on stated commitments to an audience that may not be familiar with the lexicon of strategic plans, and to do so in depth. Stories also offer a casual, approachable medium to show how your institution is integrating its values into everything it does, with room to include a variety of voices.

This story about Mia’s partnership with the Tibetan American Foundation (TAFM) of Minnesota exemplifies the approach. For more than a year, Mia staff met with a cohort of TAFM members to build a partnership and understand what the community wants to see in terms of programming and events. The story captured the invaluable learning and insights gleaned in the process.

Meeting the Moment

As the volume of content on the internet grows exponentially, museum writing will need to be engaging, credible, and authentic to capture audiences and be picked up by generative search engines. Thoughtful storytelling requires a significant investment of time and resources, so it helps to be efficient with your content. Create core material that can be strategically repurposed and reused for different audiences, excerpted for social platforms, and refreshed periodically with new insights.

Done right, this kind of work can meet dual aims: unearthing the wellspring of stories within your museum and enticing audiences to walk in the door.