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 …
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 …
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 …
Read more “Understanding Audiences: The Downside of “Falk Types””
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 …
What happens when you have more ideas than you can handle? I just completed a really productive ideation (brainstorming) session with a client. It’s for a new major exhibit we’re planning. It was a ton of fun—we opened the workshop with a presentation of all the different kinds of interpretive media that could possibly go …
Virtually all arguments against repatriating Indigenous objects are rooted in white supremacy. Hey reader, did you ever have your bike stolen? I have more than once, and while I have never been successful in getting my bike back (thousands of them are stolen weekly in most cities, apparently), I’d like to take you through a …
Those of you who have followed my writing for a while know that as an interpretive planner, I’m a strong believer in evidence-based decision making. One of my challenges has always been in trying to communicate the importance of data—visitation patterns, visitor demographic information, analyses of program evaluations, and the like—in such a way that …
(Editor’s note, April 2023. Since I wrote this article last year, the topic has heated up a bit. Please read through the comments as well as the article to get a better sense of my point of view on the subject. Thanks.) (TL:DR: we are now using “titleholders and stakeholders”. Boom.) As an interpretive planner, …
Nonprofit memberships aren’t what they used to be. Is your organization struggling with its nonprofit membership program? Are you having a tough time keeping your membership numbers up? You’re not alone. Membership has always been a cornerstone of the nonprofit model: any society or association is by definition a group of like-minded people—members, official or …
As an interpretive planner and visitor experience advisor, I’m a big believer in evidence-based decision making. When I start a new project, the first thing I ask for is data: visitor surveys, gate revenue statistics, comment cards… anything I can get my hands on. Recently I started an exhibit planning project where my client knows …