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 …
In the last two years, virtually all of my projects have taken on a consultation component. At some point in an interpretive plan, an exhibit project, or a visitor experience strategy, the client needs to involve the community. These include Indigenous groups, naturalist organizations, historical societies, neighbourhood associations, and the like. Not all of these …
If you’re going to dive into TikTok, you might as well try to do some good in the world. Addressing the settler-colonist that lives inside us can be difficult, emotional work. And the more I dive into the steep learning curves of decolonization, the more I realize that it is unfair to expect affected communities—Black, …
What is the way to your visitors’ hearts? Understanding their problem spaces—and imaging solutions—is a first step.
Once upon a time… …if you wanted to learn about a historic site or park—or the contents of a museum or aquarium—you had two choices. You needed to visit it, or you had to go to a library and get a book about it. If you were lucky, and if the site were famous enough, …
Read more “Interpretation, Good Writing, and Sensory Experience”
Those who fail to learn from the 1970s are doomed to repeat them… …and I’m old enough to tell you it won’t be as much fun as pop culture would have you believe, ABBA soundtracks notwithstanding. I was recently transported back to that era against my will, in the form of an interpretive walk. It …
Every great travel experience has three parts: the anticipation, the realization, and the recollection. Those of us who deliver interpretive programs—guided walks, talks, workshops, dialogues, and the like—have long placed ourselves squarely in the second of those three phases: the delivery/realization of the visit. With the shift in recent years to new communications tools, it’s …