Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg Connects App

Project Background

Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, launched the Bloomberg Connects mobile app in November 2019 to provide visitors to museums, galleries, gardens, and more with a free digital guide. With over 500 guides currently on the platform, the app offers dynamic content to engage and inform visitors, including commentary on current exhibitions, video highlights, and way-finding maps. Each institution—called a cultural partner (CP)—generates their own text and uploads it onto Bloomberg’s bespoke content management system (CMS).

In early 2022, the Bloomberg Connects team connected with Flatpage to provide ongoing editorial support for their CPs, including copyediting, proofreading, and project-management assistance. With such a large number of incoming guides, they needed a team that could provide high-quality editing and a fast turnaround, with only a few days for each pass. Additionally, they were attracted to the subject-area knowledge of Flatpage’s editors in fields relevant to their cultural partners: art, history, popular culture, music, performing arts, and more.

Flatpage’s expertise in art and culture made it a perfect fit for the Bloomberg Connects team. We needed editors who not only could help us with grammar and punctuation, but also understood the quirks and nuances of working with museums and cultural institutions.

Kate Spellman, Project Director, Bloomberg Connects

The Collaboration

Flatpage’s collaboration with Bloomberg Connects is complex yet highly rewarding for all involved. It requires the collaboration of multiple stakeholders, including the Connects team, their cultural partners, and the editors at Flatpage. A large team of editors, managed by our chief editor, Cara Jordan, are assigned to this project. These content experts, many of whom have visited and are familiar with the institutions, are well positioned to provide the highest quality edits.

We’ve been extremely happy with the team at Flatpage! We’ve been lucky to work with expert editors with the knowledge and experience we needed, and we’ve been impressed by the congeniality, patience, professionalism, and good humor of the team. Dare we say that Flatpage makes editing fun?

Each guide, which ranges approx. 40–300 pages (10,000–100,000 words) in length, needs to be edited to ensure that it is error-free and meets Bloomberg Connects’s content and user experience standards. To address this need, Flatpage supplies the Connects team with two stages of edits: one for copyediting and a second for proofreading. During the copyediting stage, the editors address grammar, punctuation, and consistency issues; proofreading is used to ensure that the CPs have correctly entered the revisions into the CMS and that the guide is ready to be published on the app.

While most of the guides have been in US or UK English, in spring 2024 Flatpage began to assist in editing guides created in other languages, including Spanish and French.

The Outcome

As of April 2024, Flatpage has completed edits on approximately 300 guides, with many more anticipated in the coming months. Flatpage’s editors have worked on guides for local history museums, sculpture gardens, performance festivals, art biennials, modern and contemporary art museums, and historic sites.

I would enthusiastically recommend Flatpage to any of my colleagues in the arts and culture world. Cara and her team have identified and filled a niche need that eliminates the challenges of juggling schedules and skills of individual freelance editors, while delivering consistently high-quality work at a fair price.