Grow

Auckland Art Gallery (AAG) brief asked for a viable design-led solution of their need for more volunteers. Having identified the need to ‘move with the times’, AAG needed to appeal to a younger and more social media savvy generation of art lovers. This extended into their volunteers, as they needed this same demographic to be involved in representing this more dynamic version of the AAG. However, AAG’s current volunteering programme lacked the appeal, both visually and motivation, to this younger demographic. The challenge was to reinvent and reinvigorate the volunteer programme to attract and recruit the youth market.

The design concept was inspired by research into how the current volunteers view the AAG: a structure that holds plenty of valuable memories in its many different phases in history, which makes them even more passionate about what they do. ‘Grow’ targets young people (18 to 25-year-olds) who are passionate, willing to learn new skills, or want to give back to the community. The design palette and imagery are targeted to this demographic. The campaign engages with the demographic in three ways: a phantom billsticker poster campaign, interactive bus shelter activations and through social media platforms

The key message in this project is to encourage young art lovers to contact AAG for recruitment opportunities. Each collateral is designed to ‘speak’ to the target demographic: posters that visually represent a journey of growth and populated with characters who represent the values of this demographic; interactive bus shelter installations that encourage users to work and communicate with each other in order to deliver a visual representation of AAG’s single-minded message; a social campaign which features encouraging testimonials from past and current volunteers; and a redesigned website that makes the recruitment process easy and more accessible.

A new volunteer management system was also designed into the project. The volunteer management system serves as a dashboard for the Volunteers Manager to allow accessing the Auckland Art Gallery’s full calendar for the year, rostering schedules and away dates, to adding and editing all the information that volunteers would need throughout their job. This approach considers the schedule of the volunteer who may have other life commitments such as study, a part-time employment, and/or family matters.