For two days every year, thousands of museum advocates flock to Washington DC to visit their state representatives in order to advocate for museums as important educational centers, job creators, economic powerhouses, and community centers. This year’s Museum Advocacy Days fell on February 22-23 and was orchestrated by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). The hashtag #MuseumAdvocacyDay was used by advocates to broadcast the work they were doing and by those who couldn’t be present in Washington DC.
Most recently, AAM (@AAMers) created a Storify of all the tweets relating to Museum Advocacy Day.
@AAMers Thank you for quoting me in your @Storify for #museumadvocacyday! https://t.co/oDeNr7hxs5 #NHsmtp #socialmedia
— Amanda Sterling (@amsterli) April 5, 2016
According to Sysomos MAP, the most retweeted tweet was a welcome to the event and a link to a page about advocating for museums.
Yesterday and today are #MuseumAdvocacyDay — click below to learn how you can speak up for museums from anywhere! https://t.co/ILlUvjT9q5
— Jewish History DC (@jhsgw) February 23, 2016
Other tweets included reasons why museums are important and thank yous to congressmen who spoke to museum advocates.
It was a pleasure to meet with Marie from @delartmuseum & Kathy from @BiggsMuseum for #MuseumAdvocacyDay! https://t.co/tpu52cF1eA
— Senator Tom Carper (@SenatorCarper) February 23, 2016
This event was exclusively based in the United States and was dominated by users in Illinois, DC, and NY.
Interestingly, the buzz around this hashtag meant that it was used by spam bots who tweeted about the weather, which explains the weather-related words in the BuzzGraph and the Word Cloud. The other words in the Word Cloud are the names of different museums that tweeted for Museum Advocacy Day.
In the BuzzGraph, AAMers is the Twitter handle for AAM, which is linked to museums and MPA stands for the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Museum Assessment Program.
Overall, Museum Advocacy Day was a success and spread the word about the amazing work done in and by museums every day. I even participated and I can’t wait to do it again next year!
I can't be in DC for #MuseumAdvocacyDay, but I'll be tweeting all day about what make museums great!
— Amanda Sterling (@amsterli) February 23, 2016