Sanger 200 – The National Fairground and Circus Archive’s first online exhibition

Joseph Cutts writes about the challenges of digital displays as The National Fairground and Circus Archive mounts its first online exhibition, Sanger 200.

2025 marks 200 years since the birth of ‘Lord’ George Sanger, one of the most significant circus proprietors of all time. From early beginnings growing up on the fairground to the formation of the Sanger’s Allied Circus, through to his family life, significant legacy and impact, Sanger 200 recounts a decorated life through the archive.

When creating an online exhibition, it is not just a question of attracting visitors, it is keeping them engaged, hopefully with intrigue, parting with time.

You simply cannot copy and paste a physical exhibition design to become a digital one either, you need to reset your curatorial focus and narrative aims and better understand your audience and the levels of interactivity. Many of the principles are the same, but the rules of engagement are different. Set design (or display), timing and a strong narrative is needed in both the physical and online when building a satisfying user journey, but while the online can provide immediate access in little time, it has the ability to lose its audience quickly also.

During Covid-19, the online world became saturated with many programmes initially intended for physical spaces, with the immediate closure of organisations and physical exhibitions cancelled, streaming platforms had an increase in viewers and worldwide connectivity became a norm through increased video calling and online talks and seminars – but how is the impact of audience engagement measured?

As viewers to online content, we are now exposed to screen fatigue more than ever, with one of the big lessons for content providers being – how long is the perfect amount of time for audiences to engage with content? The answer to keeping an audience engaged will be dependent on how gripping your narrative could be and whether it urges them to want to continue exploring, no different to flicking through television channels. If an online exhibition is not created solely for one specific audience then it should endeavour to help a multitude of audiences overcome the barriers to engagement, and that could be through a combination of text, alternative text formats, large scale imagery, video, guiding audio overlays and participatory elements (where possible). Finding the balance between these features is key and both in house and external user testing is necessary before launching. The solution to a strong online exhibition is not to have the most expensive website or the most content either, but to have a user friendly platform that is both simple and clear in its direction and functions and contains moments of investigation from the user.

Similar to retaining an audience’s attention, reaching audiences is not easy either, also due to the heavy saturation of online marketing and the competition for space. Social media becomes a valuable tool for reaching audiences worldwide, with Instagram stories strategically only allowing for the showing of bitesize content, it means we can frequently use key excerpts and create trailers to promote the exhibition and build momentum. Sourcing multiple platforms online to host an exhibition on becomes a challenge also, but by aiming to understand who our audience is helps to identify where to host.

In the case of our recently launched online exhibition Sanger 200, the circus, fairground and arts industries remain constant, but directly targeting community groups, schools and alternative educational institutes both locally to overseas ensures we can continue to develop our audiences and hopefully gain valuable feedback into their areas of interest and overall experience, which in turn we hope would provide a pathway into learning further about our organisation and year-round projects and aims.

An important way we understand our audiences and develop our future projects is by analysing both the qualitative and quantitative data and feedback. This may be a combination of reviewing the levels of interaction across our user journey, the estimated time of engagement and how many visits there have been. Beyond that, we have opted to include a specific narrative based feedback form that involves questions relating to an audience’s thoughts on the exhibition and what drove them to it.

All of the above ethics and approaches towards building an online exhibition, where to promote it and identifying its audience have reinforced the making of Sanger 200, the National Fairground and Circus Archive’s first online exhibition, a pivotal moment in our year-round strategy for building innovative ways of communicating our archive to new and existing audiences.

Written by Joseph Cutts, Digital Engagement Officer of the National Fairground and Circus Archive.

Sanger 200: An Online Exhibition can be accessed here.

Photographs are from the National Fairground and Circus Archive at the Western Bank Library of the University of Sheffield.