Posted: 10 July 2026

One of the things I really value about working with students through Future Lab is the opportunity to see what a younger age group notices, finds interesting and takes from the information we put out.

It also means we can tap into skills that we might not necessarily have within our own team. For this micro-internship, Mark Hannay and Tejas Gadkari came from different academic disciplines, neither specialising in marketing, but both brought strong analytical skills and different ways of looking at data to the project.

In March, we welcomed Mark and Tejas for a four-day micro-internship looking at HB&P’s digital marketing. I wanted them to take a fresh look at our digital channels and help us understand what our data could tell us about how well our communications are working.

We have a good amount of information available to us through Instagram, LinkedIn, Mailchimp and Google Analytics, but, as a small team, we don’t always have the time to step back and analyse it in depth. I asked Mark and Tejas to look at what content performs well, where there might be opportunities for improvement, and what we could learn from other heritage organisations.

What they produced in just four days went considerably beyond simply reporting the numbers back to us.

They categorised our social media content and looked for patterns in reach, impressions, engagement and click-through rates. They analysed more than two years of E-Newsletter data and found that, although our mailing list has grown considerably, our average opening rate has remained remarkably consistent. They also dug into our Google Analytics data, identifying some likely AI-scraping activity that is skewing our picture of website users.

Perhaps most useful of all was the way they connected the data to the content itself. They found that our casework posts tend to perform particularly well, while Heritage Highlights featuring strong images also generate high levels of engagement. On LinkedIn, they found that posts about HB&P and our work tend to achieve good reach, while some of our more promotional content performs less strongly.
They then looked beyond HB&P, researching what other heritage organisations are doing across their digital channels. This was a particularly interesting part of the project because it allowed them to put our results into context and identify approaches that might be worth exploring.

Their research highlighted the potential of collaborative posts, sharing organisational successes and finding ways to tell interesting or quirky stories about heritage. They also suggested some practical changes, from making Future Lab more visible on our website and social media to thinking about how we use text and branding on event posts and Instagram reels.

Mark and Tejas were able to take a large amount of information, identify the patterns that mattered and turn their findings into practical recommendations, all within just four days. Their report has given us a clearer picture of our current digital performance, as well as plenty to think about as we continue to develop our communications. It is a great example of the mutual benefit of the Micro-Internship Programme: students get the opportunity to apply their skills to a real-world challenge, while HB&P gets fresh perspectives, new ideas and additional capacity to explore questions that we might not otherwise have time to investigate.