Personalization in One Visit or Less

    Let's take the example of the non-member, the person who visits once, has a great (hopefully personalized) experience, and leaves. What can the museum do to support a connection that builds on that first visit? Most museums treat one-time visitors like one-night stands; they don't call, they don't write, and they certainly don't pine. If visitors sign up for mailing lists or e-newsletters, they will receive cheerful announcements of upcoming events in the mail, but they won't be connected to humans, staff or otherwise. And while it is unrealistic for staff to introduce themselves personally to each visitor who visits once, there are opportunities for personalized connections that can follow visitors beyond the exit doors.

    Many museums are experimenting with exhibits that allow visitors to send home an ecard or email with bookmarks to content that visitors found compelling or made themselves. Several art, science, and history museums have offered systems since the mid-1990s for visitors to save experiences at the museum for later perusal on the Web. These "do it now, see it on the web later" activities tend to have a low follow-through rate, where fewer than 10% of visitors actually check out their web content after their visit (Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience). This number increases depending on how personal the content is; in general, activities where visitors take a photo of themselves or create digital artifacts generate more online visits than those where visitors simply bookmark an object or piece of media. It's not surprising that so few visitors choose to follow up; these visitors are a subset of the niche who choose to create media or bookmark content in the museum in the first place. In most museums offering this kind of personalized experience, the opportunity to personalize is provided to each visitor via her ticket, and anywhere between 6% and 40% of visitors choose to actually perform the personalization or bookmarking activity while onsite (same source as above). This is reasonable when you consider the Forrester profiles on the percentage of people who like to create (20%) and collect (18%) content, the two activities available in most of these personalized museum systems. So there is a subset of the institutional audience that wants to do the activities onsite, a subset of those who want to follow-up later online, and then large numbers of people who are unaware of or uninterested in these activities. There are also visitors who lose the ticket between the museum and the home computer, forget or do not realize that they can find the content later online, etc.

    Follow-through rates on visitors opening emails generated by specific exhibits--such as the Tropenmuseum's "send home a photo of yourself with an African hairstyle"--are much higher. That content is explicitly requested via interaction with the exhibit that generated it, and it travels directly to your email rather than forcing you to type in a string of numbers and visit a website. Some of these “send it home” activities are trivial--take a photo, complete a game--and others are more involved, inviting you to collect content throughout your exhibit experience or via a multi-step process.

    Consider the involved process in the Skyline exhibition at the Chicago Children’s Museum. In a photo-narrative component of the exhibition, visitors worked in groups to construct a mini-skyscraper over several minutes. As the team worked, a kiosk snapped timed photographs of them. After the skyscraper was built, the family or group sat down to make a digital "book" of their experiences. The kiosk prompted them to select pictures from the bank of photos taken that represented "a time when we worked well together," or "a time when we solved a tough problem." This clever setup allowed the personalization (the photo-taking) to be automated, and then required visitors to layer on meaning by reflecting on what they were doing and feeling at the different moments caught on camera. This highly personalized photo narrative took a long time to create (median group time on task is 15 minutes) and about 85% of visitors opted to take their "building permit" with them, the ticket to retrieving the digital story at home. 31% elected to revisit digital stories from home—a higher number than is typical, especially considering the very young age of these visitors. 

    In another much lower-tech activity at the Chicago Children's Museum, rather than sending home an email, visitors hand-wrote postcards to themselves about their museum visit. This activity was introduced to encourage visitors to reflect on their experience at the museum and memorialize their learning for later review at home. Plus, the treat of receiving a postcard in the mail is a special delight, especially for young visitors. A physical, personal, time-delayed artifact like a postcard has much higher potential impact on visitors’ relationships with institutions than an automated email, waiting in the inbox when visitors return home from an outing. As Tsivia Cohen, Associate Vice President of Family Learning Initiatives, put it: “One reason we like to mail the documentation--rather than just handing it to visitors to take home--is to create a delay.  We're assuming it will arrive at their house in a few days (let's hope).  Families can also choose to mail the record of their visit to a relative who's not with them, which we hope will result in additional correspondence or a thank you phone call--one more opportunity for conversation.”

    All of these activities send home memorials of fun and educational visits for further reflection, but few explicitly motivate another visit or continued interaction with the museum beyond a few clicks of the mouse. In cases where visitors save content onsite for at-home use, the post-visit experience is usually intended to be entirely digital. For example, the US Holocaust Museum's "From Memory to Action" exhibition about worldwide genocide allows onsite visitors to swipe a card across a table to store videos and multimedia stories for exploration at home via the Take Action website. The goal is for visitors to continue their experience exploring the exhibit's content when at home, where their attention may be more focused on a difficult and highly emotional topic. But the planned experience is still pretty simplistic: see the exhibit, save the things you like, check them out at home.  The end.

    The take-home and "post-visit" experiences are treated as an epilogue rather than the hook for a sequel. One of the interesting things about libraries is that you have to visit the place where you checked out content to return it. And while a great number of patrons use drop slots external to the book-browsing section of the library, there's always that potential, that sense that "here I am at the library again, continuing the cycle of returning old books and checking out new ones." There is no such sense with the museum. The experience is contained in the box of the visit which can only trickle so far beyond the parking lot.

    The web is an obvious place for museums to continue building a relationship that might motivate subsequent visits, but so is the rest of the visitor's world. One of the nicest things about the Chicago Children's Museum's postcard activity is the time delay inherent in the postal service. You don't come home from the museum to a postcard waiting for you at your door. Instead, it surprises you a few days or weeks later--your own handwriting, a card you may have forgotten that you wrote, the gift of a memory of a pleasurable experience. From the museum's perspective, the postcard activity promotes the recall of museum experiences, which contributes to cementing the learning that started onsite. But it also injects the museum into real life and reminds you, via the most personal voice possible, that you liked being there and might like to visit again.

    There are more extensive ways to create cross-platform relationships between the museum and individual through narrative, by treating museum visits as "pearls on a string" that punctuate a more pervasive narrative experience. In 2008, Scholastic Books released a new series, The 39 Clues, which ties together a ten-book mystery with an online gaming environment. Here's the problem that Scholastic addressed with The 39 Clues: the company paid for ten books written by ten different authors, and the books would be released every few months over two years. How could Scholastic keep readers interested enough between releases to bring them back for each subsequent episode?

    Scholastic realized that their books can't do everything. Reading a book can be an intense and powerful experience, but it is a punctuated moment in time. Few people obsessively reread the same book over and over, especially if its sequel will arrive in only four months. Is the intense experience of reading one book enough to hook people to that author or series? And if the author is changing each time, how do you build allegiance to the content rather than the writer?

    This problem is analagous to the repeat visit problem for museums. Museum visits, like book reading, can be an intense and wonderful experience. But is one museum visit enough to compel a second visit? If exhibits are organized by different staff members on different topics at different times, how do you build allegiance to the museum rather than a specific exhibit? How do you encourage visitors to have a sense of pervasive experience with the museum? Most museums try to solve this by convincing visitors that there is more to do at the museum--that the deeper, layered experience can happen within the galleries. But that strategy requires audiences to deepen their engagement with the museum by visiting, which is necessarily a time-limited, location-specific experience. Time-limited, location-specific experiences don't lend themselves easily to pervasive relationships.

    The staff at Scholastic realized that. They knew some readers wanted to engage more deeply and continuously with characters and stories and that there was an opportunity to draw some lukewarm readers into fandom via overlapping secondary experiences. Rather than trying to solve this problem by releasing longer books (for the obsessed) or more books (for the skeptical), Scholastic went to another medium: online gaming. The company was already good at achieving a primary goal: publishing great books for readers. To achieve new relationship goals--deepening the experience for obsessives and bringing new readers into their empire--Scholastic turned to other media (games and online environments) that are better at achieving those desired user effects.

    Here's how The 39 Clues cross-platform experience worked. There were 39 clues to find. Each book unlocked a clue. Each book also came with 6 game cards that help readers find other clues. These two elements guaranteed that people would not only read but purchase books (to get the cards). While the books followed a team of orphaned siblings who hunt for clues, the online game revealed that you the player are also related to them (surprise!) and could hunt alongside them. Online, there were puzzles to solve and exclusive book-related content to absorb. Readers consume the fictitious experiences of others. As game players, readers can ascend to center stage. When combined, both types of experiences enhance each other.

    There were also some creepy advertising components of The 39 Clues which make their path not entirely appealing from an educational or public perspective. Scholastic offered cash prizes for participation, which seems both inappropriate and non-conducive to the creation of real online community. And the whole approach--manufacturing a series featuring a range of authors--is not exactly an entrance to literary heights. But the approach is valuable. It takes humility to acknowledge that museum visits can't--in most cases--accommodate every kind of relationship museums would like to have with visitors. There are content-related experiences and preferences that would be better served in alternate environments. Art museums have always created catalogues to accompany exhibitions, which are one cross-platform way for obsessives to deepen their relationships with content. But what about the grazers, the visitors who come once but never make it back to that time- and location-specific experience of visitation? What other engagement platforms could connect those individual museum experiences into a more continuous, growing relationship?

    The Web is certainly one of these platforms. Too many museums have an overly structured concept of the online pre- and post-visit experience that limit the opportunities for pervasive engagement. Rather than thinking of extending one museum visit with a pre- and post-visit, we should be thinking about linking many museum visits with online experiences. Scholastic took the audacious position that people will want to read all ten books, and The 39 Clues online experience was unapologetically geared toward that long-term investment. Imagine a museum game that required visitors to visit six times in a year to connect with six different exhibits that punctuate a more open-ended online narrative. Forget "build the exhibit and they will come". This is "build the narrative and they will return".

    These narratives need not be crass advertising grabs; they can become opportunities for visitors to educate themselves in a range of ways about museum-related content. In other cases, such as the personalized membership experiences at churches and social groups, pervasive narrative is not produced by the institution; it is driven by the ongoing stories of the lives of the members.

    But let's get back to the first-time visitor and the potential to make a connection that will lead to further engagement. In the same way that the beginning of this chapter discussed visitors creating profiles on their way into museums, it's worth thinking about asking visitors to create simple profiles on their way out. You could imagine a e-newsletter sign-up kiosk at which visitors are queried to pick one word that best describes their visit experience ("inspiring," "boring," "fun," "educational," etc.) and another word to describe a new interest motivated by the visit. Then, when the visitor goes home, he receives an email from the museum--not a completely impersonal one announcing the next exhibit, but one that says, "George, we're so glad you were inspired by the museum. Here are a few of the objects/exhibits that other visitors (or staff) have described as inspiring that you might want to check out on your next visit. And since you're interested in learning more about the behind-the-scenes of the museum, here's a blog that some of our conservation staff run, and a couple of dates of upcoming behind-the-scenes tours."

    Yes, this is marketing. It's not exactly participatory, but it is personal--and that's the first step towards a more multi-directional relationship. On the institutional side, the museum is expressing an explicit, personal desire for the visitor to return--asking him for a second date. There's a restaurant in Santa Cruz with an eccentric owner who says to every exiting patron, "See you tomorrow!" He knows you aren't actually likely to come back the following day, but he has set an expectation (and expressed a personal desire) that you might in the near future.  This is much more compelling than the generic "Thank you for visiting Maryland.  Come Back Soon!" highway sign that you drive by at 80 miles per hour.

    And on the visitor side, there are folks who want that second date. These are people who willingly give museums their email addresses. They WANT to receive content, and despite all their other e-newsletter experiences to date, they are secretly hoping that this institution can finally provide something compelling.  You are more likely to satisfy visitors' desires and motivate repeat visits or membership purchases if you can be responsive, even in small ways, to their personal needs and interests.

Continue to the next section, or return to the outline.