The Myth of Two-way Interpretation
It’s only two-way if you’re actually listening to what they tell you.
When to do Consultation in Heritage Tourism
When in doubt, consult. Trust me on this one.
The Fine Art of Firing Volunteers
Yes, firing volunteers is a thing. No, you shouldn’t do it lightly. I have had the pleasure of working with volunteers in a few different capacities. I have managed volunteers in the public sector and in the nonprofit sector. I have worked in places where volunteers were treated like high-maintenance guests, and I have worked …
Diversification is hard. Here’s how to strategize.
As a visitor experience planner, market analysis is part of what I do. That is to say, I help parks, museums, aquariums, zoos, and historic sites to identify who their visitors are, and who their visitors might be in the future. And I help them figure out how to reach out to them and how …
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Social Media: A Method to the Madness
If you are a manager in the cultural or natural history sector, you’ve probably got staff madly working on social media. Maybe you’re a social media person yourself. And if you are, you know it’s busy and challenging work. As a visitor experience advisor, I’m often asked to help put social media in the greater …
We don’t need to endorse in order to interpret.
Over the course of my forty-year career (yikes!) I have made a long shift from natural history to cultural history interpretation. The transition has been… interesting. See, when you interpret birds or rocks or stars, you generally don’t argue for those things’ moral goodness or purity. Yes, you might defend their place within their ecosystem …
Screw Latin Names.
Latin names have no place in popular writing and programming. Once upon a time I was a bit of a tedious pedant. Hard to believe, I know, but I have vivid memories of tossing around Latin names to impress my audiences. I was young and insecure, trying to do my best with a serious case …
Marketing: An Interpretive Approach
As a visitor experience advisor, I find that a lot of my work revolves around helping parks, historic sites, and museums do a better job of communicating who they are in an inspiring way. Naturally, as a life-long interpreter, I am a huge believer in the content-based approach. I’m not alone in this; content marketing …
Understanding Audiences: The Downside of “Falk Types”
About twenty years ago, Dr. John Falk and Dr. Lynn Dierking did a body of research on why people visit museums and other informal learning institutions. It’s fascinating and valuable stuff, and if you get a chance to read their work, you really should. They discovered that, broadly speaking, people have a handful of different …
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Why is your e-newsletter so boring?
As a visitor experience advisor, I’m a fairly big fan of using email to build relationships with your members and prospective visitors. And I’m not alone; generally, direct email is known to bring a higher return on investment than social media, and we manage to spend hours and hours every week trying to come up …