Engage Visitors at Heritage Sites
This is the second article in our series that shares tips on how you can keep visitors to your heritage sites engaged and entertained.
Part Two
Heritage sites are important for many reason, they have a cultural, historic and scientific impact on the world we live in. It’s vital we keep these sites running so we can continue to learn and grow from them.
However, these sites can only succeed if people (1) visit them and (2) engage with the stories or themes while there. The best way to do this is to create a site people want to visit by offering an interesting and engaging experience. But how do you do this? We’ve covered some ideas in the Part 1 of this series, so now it’s time for Part 2!
1. Keep it Fresh
Keeping things fresh for visitors is a sure-fire way to ensure repeat visits. This is something larger locations like the National Archives do really well, always creating new exhibitions and sharing intriguing parts of history such as in the Treason or Beyond the Roar exhibitions we were lucky enough to work on with them.
Now, not all places have the funding of the National Archives but there’s still things you can do to keep things fresh for visitors. For example, using hardware that can be quickly and easily updated with new content such as our plug and play video products is a good first step. If you’re lucky to have a lot of multi-media archives to share you can use touchscreens and software (such as our Lightbox 3 package) to put together ever changing interactives, focusing on different themes throughout the year.
2. Incorporate Social Media
Social media calls to action can be a great way to spread the word about your site as well as give visitors something fun to do when they’re with you. Who doesn’t love a photo opportunity these days? To achieve this you can take advantage of an already popular photo spot by adding some form of request for visitors to take a picture and use a specific hashtag. Or you can create a completely new one.
We’ve used this technique in a few places, such as the travelling exhibition Rock Around The Hills where visitors were given a stage backdrop and items to dress up with, or in the Llandeilo Heritage Centre where a genuine judges chair from the site was made available for visitors to sit in with mock court room backdrop and suggested hashtag.
3. Interact with Visitors
As this series is all about the visitors, it’s only fitting that we make them the main focus for this next tip. Interaction with your audience, whether it’s online or in person, can make a world of difference to boosting your presence.
This tip is two-fold, creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere in your space will attract repeat visits, while also ensure that visitors share their good experiences online. Through things like Google Reviews you can reach out to visitors and use their feedback to help you improve on your services.
4. Surprise!
Subverting a visitors expectations can be a really good way to take visitors by surprise and create a notable experience. This can be done in many ways, one of the simplest for example would be using a PIR activated speaker to trigger audio content when a visitor is detected. This is something we’ve done in various places using the Message in a Speaker, from triggering crowds clapping the NHS during Covid, to toilets flushing when visitors walk past a historical loo!
This concept was used to great effect in Dan Yr Ogof where we developed some bespoke software that re-created an ‘Underwater Viewing Point’. Here a visitors flick through mock underwater CCTV cameras to view prehistoric creatures… however if you tap on the screen too many times a giant Mosasaur will attack the glass which has made many a visitor jump!
5. Offer Incentives
Inspiring people to keep coming back is key to a successful heritage site, it boosts revenue and allows you to invest this back into the visitor experience. One way to do this is by offering incentives, for example, you could run competitions or have guest speakers appear to give talks about your site. Offering free returns within a month for each ticket sale or annual memberships is also a good strategy.
You can have half price days during the week or organise special events such as movie screenings or local lunch meetings. There are endless possibilities to choose from when thinking of incentives, you just need to find something that suits your message and audience.
Thank you for reading!
That’s all for today’s article, we hope you’ve found these tips helpful and keep an eye out for the next in the series. If you’d like to discuss anything mentioned above or have a project coming up you’d like us to be a part of please head on over to our Contact page.
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