Fundraising campaign for The Ashmolean

Britain’s first public museum, the Ashmolean, welcomes around a million visitors a year. Although impressive, that’s a fraction of its potential, especially given how much of its collection remains in storage, unseen and inaccessible.

Working with the Ashmolean’s development team, our role was to help raise funds to digitise the collection, opening it up to researchers, academics and the public worldwide.

We built the campaign around the headline ‘Welcoming the World’ — a nod to the museum’s founding purpose as a place of open public access, and a promise of what digitisation makes possible: bringing the collection to a global audience. Striking, intriguing objects from the collection were placed front and centre throughout, drawing people in and hinting at the richness still waiting to be discovered. The campaign centred on a direct mail pack, supported by digital and social activity.