GLAMi nomination: The Farquhar Collection campaign

The National Museum of Singapore has a rich 130 year old history dating back to when the museum opened its doors as the Raffles Museum and Library in 1887. The museum started off with a largely ethnographic and natural history collection, but along the years has been built upon and is now known as the National Museum of Singapore, with a predominantly social history collection.

Following the revamp of its permanent galleries in 2015, the museum wanted to create an awareness of our prized collection, the William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings. A campaign was launched to coincide with the reopening of the Glass Rotunda where the collection is brought to ‘life’ as an immersive digital art installation. The campaign seeks to raise awareness of the collection as a whole, and  resulted in a 20% increase in visitorship to the museum in just 2 months! The multi-layered campaign comprises of various components:

• Story of the Forest exhibition (new permanent digital exhibition)
• Desire and Danger exhibition at the Goh Seng Choo gallery, which is a permanent gallery dedicated to displaying the actual drawings of the collection on a rotational basis)
• Second Nature interactive exhibit (interactive corner which allows for visitors to interact with the analog display inspired by the collection, and also donate to the museum)
• Marketing ‘hero’ visual stretching across all collaterals and onsite as well as out-of-home marketing developed as part of the 3 month long campaign
• Sustained social media campaign to increase awareness of individual drawings in the collection
• Media engagement and Public Relations campaign resulting in more than 100 stories in the launch weekend alone, from both local and international media (ROI of over 900 times)
• MATW submission proposal