Six ways to create shared experiences.

School holidays, like half-term, are a prime time for families to visit museums and cultural heritage sites. These venues offer engaging learning opportunities for all ages, fostering deeper relationships and shared experiences among visitors. While children benefit from informal learning, they also crave time away from formal studies, making attractions an ideal setting to absorb knowledge and create lasting memories with loved ones.

With most younger generations being digital natives, technology is an intrinsic part of their lives. Therefore, the most impactful shared experiences often blend digital elements with physical and tangible interactions. This dual approach is essential for visitor attractions to resonate with modern audiences and encourage participation.

Embracing digital transformation is critical for the visitor attraction sector. It helps promote understanding of human history, our place in the world, and the future responsibilities of the next generation. While larger attractions often lead in digital engagement, many in the sector lag due to concerns over cost, expertise, and resources. However, new technology offerings, such as tailored audience engagement platforms, are helping to close this gap between visitor expectations and current reality.

Six Ways Technology Shapes Shared Experiences

1. Go Interactive

Audience engagement platforms enable attractions to create customisable, engaging, and educational content that reaches visitors instantly via an accompanying app. Attractions can make entire collections, exhibits, and monuments digitally interactive using beacon or object recognition functionality, without requiring technical skills. These platforms facilitate the creation of quizzes, tours, and trails to drive engagement while providing valuable insights into both on-site and off-site visitor behaviour, aiding future planning and curation.

2. Stimulate Action

Platforms can be used to stimulate action, from learning and education to promoting preservation and conservation messages. Configurable prompts, notifications, and facts highlight key messages, encouraging visitor responses or participation in projects. A cloud-based, mobile-optimised platform ensures continuous connection and engagement with visitors, making shared experiences a natural occurrence.

3. Enrich the Journey of Discovery

Digital tools allow for the digitisation of collections or the innovative introduction of new exhibitions, enriching content beyond what can be displayed on physical signboards. Visitors can unearth new facts, locate specific exhibits, and learn more through layered multimedia content, much like an archaeological dig where discovery unfolds step by step. This shifts consumption from static, exhibit-based information to dynamic content accessible both on and off-site.

4. Increase Accessibility

Adopting an audience engagement platform inherently improves accessibility to both venues and their content. An app, downloadable onto any smartphone, allows visitors to access more content. The platform tracks engagement before, during, and after a visit through the device's unique ID, delivering powerful insights to operators while simultaneously promoting the core mission of the establishment.

5. Personalise and Communicate

Audience engagement platforms collect and analyse real-time data, enabling highly customisable experiences delivered via an app. These apps facilitate multi-language communication and tailor information or offers based on visitor profiles, such as dwell time at specific exhibits. This personalisation fosters better response and engagement, transforming visitors into loyal fans. Operators can also maintain contact with visitors, deepening relationships by notifying them of pertinent upcoming exhibits, events, special offers, or private viewings.

6. Reward and Delight

In today's fast-paced world, providing visitors with smart wayfinding and mapping tools for pre-planning and quick navigation enhances their experience from the outset. Further delight can be added with branded digital photo frames, easily shareable to social media, turning the experience into a shared memory and expanding the attraction's audience.

Technology also enables rewards. Visitors can participate in quizzes or treasure hunts, and upon successful completion, redeem benefits such as prizes, discounts, or even digital recognition. This maximises visitor satisfaction and experience.