Visitor Experience has been a long-neglected aspect of museum practice. It receives less academic attention than areas such as exhibition design or collections care. Despite this, the quality of the visitor experience is the single biggest factor which will influence visitors returning to your museum, or recommending a visit to friends or family.
It is also the area of museum practice that has undergone the biggest change in the last twenty years. The image of the aged security warder shouting at children to not touch the exhibits has long gone. Now, museum visitors expect teams of friendly, knowledgeable and passionate people ready to engage them with the museum in an interactive and enthusiastic way. Expectations have never been higher. And, as they grow, museums must develop the visitor experiences they deliver in order to meet them.
A new book from Rachel Mackay entitled Delivering the Visitor Experience discusses the process of delivering a visitor experience from beginning to end. It covers everything from opening a new visitor offer and building a team to future planning and strategies for development. It draws from theories from practitioners and academics, arguing that by examining issues such as motivation and relevance, museum operators can start to truly put themselves in their visitors’ shoes. By doing so, they can build experiences that are impactful and unforgettable.
Blooloop has been given three exclusive extracts of the book prior to its publication. In this first part, Mackay delves into the topic of Creating the Visitor Experience
Creating the Visitor Experience
Many of us work at museums and heritage sites that have been around a lot longer than we have. However, sometimes we will come across the opportunity to create a visitor experience from scratch. This might be in the form of a new exhibition or offer within an existing site. Or, it could be when opening a brand-new attraction for the first time.
Creating a visitor experience from the beginning is an amazing opportunity. It allows you to set the tone of your offer and the culture of your workforce. It allows you to get all the processes and procedures in place exactly as you like them, without having to battle with pre-existing ways of doing things.
But this isn’t just for those starting from scratch. Going back to basics is a great way to audit a visitor experience you are already managing. So, whether you are an experienced visitor experience manager or brand-new to the sector, hopefully, there will be something for everyone in this book.
Volunteering and the visitor experience
The visitor experience is all about people. The first section of this book, therefore, focuses on people: recruitment, induction and training. We’ll discuss paid front-of-house staff in detail, but in this extract, we’ll introduce the critical topic of volunteering strategies. We’ll also use a case study from Verdant Works: Scotland’s Jute Museum. This shows just how much volunteers can bring to the visitor experience.
Many museums across the world would not be able to offer the experience they do if it wasn’t for the support of their volunteers. This support can range from a volunteer offer that adds value to the operation of a full-staff team, to an entirely volunteer-run and -managed organisation. Wherever your museum sits on that spectrum, there’s no doubt that volunteering is a huge part of any museum visitor experience.
A volunteer strategy
If you make the decision to take on and manage volunteers, it’s important to take some time to think about your approach to volunteering as an organisation. Doing this will ensure that you are keeping your organisational goals in mind as you embark on your volunteering programme. For example, is one of your organisational goals to target a younger audience? How can your volunteering programme support this goal?
Taking the time to think your approach through will also mean that you can problem-solve before problems occur, ensure that you have considered what the volunteer journey is going to look like for your organisation and, importantly, have the resource to support this.
As the Heritage Volunteering Group (HVG) have said, ‘[Volunteers’] ingenuity and support will be central to creating new and innovative solutions that not only allow our sector to survive but to thrive. To do this, though, heritage organisations must possess the skills and culture that allow us to fully leverage volunteer talent’. i
Despite this critical need, a study carried out in 2021 by HVG and Historic England found that senior roles that look after volunteering as a specialism are rare in the sector. 40% of UK museum and heritage organisations have no volunteering strategy. ii
Questions to consider
If your organisation is one of that 40%, consider that developing a strategy is a great way of thinking through the resources and processes you’ll need to support a volunteering programme.
You can find online resources to help you create one on the Association of Independent Museums (AIM) website or the Group for Education in Museums (GEM) website. However, it doesn’t need to be as formal as creating a written strategy. The important thing is that you take the time to think through your approach before recruiting volunteers. Ask yourself certain questions, such as:
- How will volunteering support the goals of the organisation?
- What are the long-term aims of our volunteering programme?
- What barriers are in place that might prevent us from accomplishing this?
- How will we know when this has been accomplished?
- What are the tasks and roles that we want volunteers to take on?
- How will we recruit volunteers?
- What skills do we need from volunteers?
- What training will we give volunteers?
- Are we welcoming and inclusive to volunteers with diverse needs and experiences?
- Does our safeguarding policy cover young people and vulnerable adults when they are volunteering with us?
- Who will look after the volunteers and is any additional training needed to support this?
- How will we coordinate the volunteer admin, such as rotas and expenses? Do we need software?
- How will we recognise and reward volunteers?
- How will we measure volunteer performance?
- How will we resolve any performance issues?
- How will we gather feedback and suggestions from our volunteers?
Whether your strategy is formal or informal, the National Council for Volunteering Organisations (NCVO) advises that it is reviewed at least every year to ensure that your volunteer programme is still going in the direction you want it to. ‘Reviewing your strategy will help you respond to trends and changes in volunteering. It’ll help you overcome challenges and develop volunteering further in your organisation’. iii
Lived experience at Verdant Works: Scotland’s Jute Museum
This case study demonstrates how taking time to think through an approach to volunteering can help in creating a unique visitor experience, and how strategies might have to adapt and evolve in the future.
Volunteers are used in a number of roles at Dundee Heritage Trust (DHT). This is the conservation charity that looks after the RSS Discovery and Verdant Works: Scotland’s Jute Museum. Some of them take on archive and conservation tasks. Meanwhile, others directly contribute to the visitor experience by acting as guides or costumed hosts.
What exactly they talk about depends on the needs of the visitor, as curator Mel Oakley explains:
‘They make sure people don’t miss things, and maybe give them a bit more background information and explain it in a way that works for them. It means that they can give a really tailored experience to the visitor’. iv
However, at Verdant Works, the specifics of Dundee’s heritage can be demonstrated and explained in an extra-special way.
At the height of the 19th century, Dundee was home to over 150 jute companies. Mills like Verdant Works employed approximately 500 people. Many of the employees were women, leading to Dundee being dubbed ‘she-town’, where women went out to earn a living whilst the men (or ‘kettle-bilers’) stayed at home and raised the children.
The jute industry dominated Dundee until the mid-20th century when India became the primary manufacturing centre. However, despite its later decline, jute has shaped the urban landscape of Dundee. It remains an important defining characteristic of the city today. v
The last working weaver
Verdant Works opened as a museum to the public in 1996. Since then, it has been engaging visitors with life and conditions in the jute mills. Examples of mill machinery are still on display and are often brought to life by volunteer machine demonstrators. One of those demonstrators is Lily, now in her 80s, who is the last remaining volunteer to have worked in the Dundee mills when they were operational.
‘Lily’s the last working weaver,’ Oakley explains. ‘[She] can tell [visitors] that the mills were dirty places to be; that it was hard work; that they were poor, but there was a sense of community . . . It’s not just a piece of paper telling them that; it’s somebody who lived and breathed it.’
Oakley says that this difference is even more acute when it comes to working the machines. ‘The dynamic between Lily and the other machine operators is quite interesting, because the machine operators give a demonstration of how the machines work, Lily works the machine. It’s very subtle, but there is that difference. It’s not a demonstration. She just shows them what she would have done when she was working in the mills.’
Lily’s professionalism and workmanship are such that Oakley can tell the difference between cloth produced by Lily and the other machine demonstrators just by looking.
People like Lily are all the more valuable because the experience they are giving visitors is, sadly, a finite one. The knowledge and understanding of the industrial revolution as lived experience is on the decline.
‘I think all industrial museums are having this experience now, where we’re losing this understanding’ says Oakley. At Verdant Works, this means a future where ‘the visitor experience is going to be demonstrations as opposed to [someone] working the machine as they would have worked it in their working life . . . In the next 10–15 years we are going to see that shift, not just for Verdant Works but for mining museums and for any type of industrial museum. We’re all experiencing that exact same issue at the moment.’
Creating the visitor experience: keeping the conversation alive
The visitor experiences that people like Lily can provide is so valuable that conversations around how this can be replicated in the future are ongoing:
‘We’re looking at a range of things such as trying to pass on knowledge – it would be wonderful to have someone who could come in and learn from Lily, be Lily’s apprentice and then that knowledge would be passed on. And the other options are looking at digital. Can we use some of the fantastic technologies that are coming out now?’
One option is targeting new volunteers who have a family connection to the mills. ‘We have an oral history project coming up and hopefully, we’ll recruit people with family connections via the oral history project’ explains Oakley. However, thought needs to be given to the different visitor experience that will provide.
‘It’s a slightly different thing from what we’re doing at the moment’ she says. ‘We’d need to be clear that this was second-hand opinion, as opposed to first-hand. You want to make sure the visitor really understands that that’s a subtly different story…But I think when it comes time to recruit, those might be one of the target demographics that we need to recruit for.’
What do the volunteers get out of it?
With such an obvious benefit to the visitor experience from using volunteers with lived experience, how does the Verdant Works team consider what the volunteers themselves get out of their experience?
For Oakley, motivations can be different, but in dealing with an older demographic, interaction and socialisation are recurring priorities. Volunteers might jokingly refer to being glad to ‘get away’ from their spouse, but the truth is more complex than that. ‘Not get away from your spouse, but have something to take back to your spouse, so you have something new to talk about’ explains Oakley. ‘I think that’s a really crucial thing. I think a lot of our volunteers get that out of it.’
There are also very altruistic motives at play. ‘There’s a lot of people who want to give back to society . . . they really want to give back and share’ Oakley says. ‘We do have people who have a connection to the industry, they worked in the polypropylene industry, or they were an engineer for a short time, those sorts of things . . . and they want to continue to use their skills past retirement.’
As for Lily, volunteering allows her to keep alive the skills and knowledge she has devoted her career to. ‘Weaving and working in the industry has been a really big part of her life; it’s in her bones, it’s what she does. It’s really just right through her. So, it allows her to make sure that it doesn’t die; it gets kept alive. She’s the person who trains the other machine operators; she’s trying to pass on her skills and her knowledge.’
To preorder Delivering the Visitor Experience: How to Create, Manage and Develop an Unforgettable Visitor Experience at Your Museum by Rachel Mackay, please click here. Customers in the US or Canada can pre-order from the ALA here and customers in New Zealand or Australia can pre-order from Routledge here. Blooloop readers can save 25% on the paperback edition by entering the code VISITOR25.
For part two of this series, on Managing the Visitor Experience, please click here.
Sources used in Delivering the Visitor Experience excerpt part one: Creating the Visitor Experience
i HVG (Heritage Volunteering Group) (2021) Creating Capacity 2021: Rebuilding Volunteering in the Heritage Sector Post Covid, http://heritagevolunteeringgroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Creating-Capacity-Final-2021.pdf. Accessed 6 December 2021.
ii HVG (Heritage Volunteering Group) (2021) Creating Capacity 2021: Rebuilding Volunteering in the Heritage Sector Post Covid, http://heritagevolunteeringgroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Creating-Capacity-Final-2021.pdf. Accessed 6 December 2021.
iii NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations) (2021) Writing a Volunteer Strategy, https://beta.ncvo.org.uk/help-and-guidance/involving-volunteers/understanding-volunteering/why-involve-volunteers. Accessed 6 December 2021.
iv Oakley, M. (2021) Interview conducted by the author, 6 December 2021.
v DHT (Dundee Heritage Trust) (2022) Verdant Works Story, www.verdantworks.co.uk/verdant-works-story. Accessed 4 January 2022.
