M+H Awards Hall of Fame: ‘The biggest museum YouTube channel in the world’

The Tank Museum’s online efforts on YouTube was among the winners at the Museums + Heritage Awards 2024 earlier this year.

Nik Wyness, Head of Marketing & Engagement at The Tank Museum, spoke to Advisor six months on from winning, with updates on its efforts, plans for the future, and a look back at the win.

The Tank Museum in Dorset claims to boast the biggest museum YouTube channel in the world, with just shy of 800k subscribers during its win, which has grown to over a million since.

The Tank Museum won the ‘Marketing + Communications Campaign of the Year’ award at the Museums + Heritage Awards.

The panel of Museums + Heritage Awards judges said of the museum’s marketing and campaign efforts: “This winning campaign has achieved the impossible in an increasingly uncertain world – it is a major step forward in community building with extraordinary reach and exceptional results.”

How has your work evolved since receiving the Museums + Heritage Award?

We’re constantly examining the way in which we do things so we can become more efficient and more effective. We’ve spent a few weeks reviewing what “good” YouTube videos need to be in 2025 – and adapting our processes and approaches accordingly. We’re also looking to grow the team to support our membership recruitment – as I feel there is a great deal of potential here for us. We recently hit the 1 million YouTube subscriber milestone which, whilst being a vanity metric, felt like it was worth celebrating!

What did winning mean to you and your team?

Of all the awards we’ve won, this meant the most – but at the time we were genuinely very surprised to win it. To be recognised in this way with such a high-profile award was a massive boost for all of us. Being a rural regimental museum, it feels like its harder to make our work stand out and get the attention that is often directed toward the bigger, metropolitan or national museums. This showed that what we do matters – and hopefully signalled (to what often feels like a pretty metropolitan-centric industry) that there is plenty of great work going on in the provinces!

What would you say to others considering entering the Museums + Heritage Awards?

It’s a great opportunity to put your organisation on the map, measure yourselves against the best in the business – and whether you win or not, to celebrate the work and achievements of your team. I’m sure for most of us, the biggest challenge is to set aside the time to complete the application… you just have to remember that it is time well spent.

Of all the awards we’ve won, this meant the most"

Where do you display your Museums + Heritage Award?

It has pride of place on a cabinet that sits behind me in the office. When I’m on a Teams call it can be seen just over my right shoulder, next to our gold 1m Subscribers milestone plaque from YouTube and our 100,000 Orders trophy from Shopify. I mean… it would seem churlish not to show it off and talk about it at length when anyone asks what it is, right?

Tell us about your next ambitious project or plans for pushing boundaries further

There is still so much more we can achieve in the pursuit of this strategy. In many ways, we’re just scratching the surface of what is possible from both an audience development and revenue generation perspective. We’ll keep hacking away and see where it takes us. But we can’t just keep doing it the same old way and hope to get the same results – We have to stay on top of how the platforms work and what the audiences want from us. Like all museums, we will do what we can to push the boundaries as we fight to stay relevant to audiences in a rapidly changing world.