13 - Creating a Visitor Experience Strategy

Summary

Make your plan like bamboo… flexible to bend but not break in the wind.

(Brilliant Idea Studio)

This section of the book is all about setting the vision and taking responsibility for developing the visitor experience at your organisation. However, this doesn't mean it's something you can do alone. Museums are always a collaboration. Different parties hold a stake in that vision, including staff, volunteers, trustees, audiences who visit all the time and audiences who haven't yet set foot in your museum. So, when it comes to developing the visitor experience, it's important to bring in different voices all the way through.

A really useful way of doing this is to develop and deliver a plan that sets out the organisational approach to Visitor Experience, brings in feedback and other views to articulate the current reality and sets the future direction.

Developing a plan like this helps you:

• • bring in different voices and opinions

• • develop a clear picture of where you are and where you want to go

• • agree on what success looks like and how you will measure it

• • plan and commit the resources you need to get there

• • get buy-in from different stakeholders within the museum

• • demonstrate the value of the visitor experience to the organisation and other stakeholders

• • demonstrate how delivering on your visitor experience objectives can help realise the wider organisational vision.

Some museums will call this plan a ‘Visitor Experience Strategy’. It might be a lengthy stand-alone document, or for others it may be a smaller part of an overall business plan. Some museums have a whole suite of ‘strategy’ documents, some won't have any. It really doesn't matter what format your Visitor Experience Strategy takes. Although in this chapter we’ll look at some examples of how different museums and heritage organisations have articulated their strategies, what I’m really hoping to do is inspire you to have a deep think about where your visitor experience is going, and give you some tools to bring others along on the journey.

What is a Visitor Experience Strategy?

A good definition of a Visitor Experience Strategy comes from the introduction of the National Museum of Wales's own Strategy:

This document outlines our ambitions for Visitor Experience between 2018 and 2021. It defines our responsibilities to our visitors, through a Customer Service Charter.