Skip the Queue is for visitor attraction owners, directors and suppliers who want to improve their organisations and deliver a better experience for their guests. Each episode we speak with inspiring industry experts who share their knowledge of what really makes an attraction successful.
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Putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. CX in the real world
Saison 5 · Épisode 110
mercredi 7 août 2024 • Durée 42:29
Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.
If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.
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Stephen Priestnall founded oomph, now an accredited B Corp, in 2005, acquired Decision Juice in 2009 and is globally recognised as a specialist in CX driven transformation projects and digital innovation. He has advised at a senior level across public and private sector organisations in the UK, Americas, Asia and the Middle East and is an instigator of international research studies into behaviour change. He is a Board Trustee with Aneurin Leisure Trust, advising on CX and communications strategy and a founding Director at Wellbeing Economy Cymru, part of the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance, advocating for a new approach to economic sustainability for people and planet.
Transcription:
Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. On today's episode, I speak to Stephen Priestnall, the CEO of oomph, a CX focused agency based in the UK and UAE who help clients to understand people and design better experiences. We're going to go back to first principles and understand what customer experience is all about and understand what attractions can do better to serve the needs of their customers.
Paul Marden: Hello, Oz.
Oz Austwick: Hi, Paul. So this is the last episode of Season 5, right?
Paul Marden: Yes, that is right. Can you believe after we took the reigns from. From young Ms. Molson not too long ago, that we would actually make it to the end of the season?
Oz Austwick: Do you know, it's crazy, isn't it? I mean, five seasons of a podcast. Most podcasts don't get through to the end of one season. And I can remember listening to this podcast years ago and actually sending people links as an example of what a good podcast is. And now here we are, you and I, at the end of Season 5. It's crazy..
Paul Marden: Yay. Guardians of this little baby.
Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, no pressure. So today's quite an interesting one, right?
Paul Marden: Yeah. I've got a guest who has been a friend of mine for some time, Stephen Priestnall of Oomph agency. And we're going to talk a little bit about customer experience. So nice little chat between Stephen and I, and then you and I will come together in a little while and talk a little bit about. Let's reminisce about season five and talk a little bit about what might happen in Season 6.
Oz Austwick: Awesome. Great. I'm looking forward to it.
Paul Marden: Let's get on with it then. Welcome to podcast, Stephen.
Stephen Priestnall: Nice to be here, Paul. Thanks for inviting me.
Paul Marden: Good to have you on. Longtime listeners will know that we always start the podcast with some icebreaker questions, which hopefully not too challenging, but we get to know you a little bit better before we start talking about work. So both of my icebreakers are all about visiting attractions this time. So how organised are you in advance? If you go to an attraction, do you take a picnic with you, or are you always partaking of a cup of tea and a slice of cake in the coffee shop?
Stephen Priestnall: I think it would have to be a particularly kind of informal attraction for me to have thought about taking a picnic beforehand. So normally it's just the anticipation of going to the place, and then I'll utilise the services in the place.
Paul Marden: I love a good slice of cake in the coffee shop afterwards. Scone, cream, tea and scone that would be me.
Stephen Priestnall: No way. Maybe a bit of our breath or fruitcake. It's probably more me.
Paul Marden: Oh, lovely. I was at the Roman Baths yesterday with my little girl and we had a lovely wander around and they had a brilliant self guided tour. So if you've got a choice, do you go for a self guided tour? Do you wander around and follow your nose? Or would you rather have a guide take you around and tell you the stories?
Stephen Priestnall: I almost never have a guide to take me around. And then sometimes I even find the self guided tours a little bit invasive. If I'm in a different country where there is kind of a language barrier, a filter, then I might use it then. But you know what? I kind of like that the ability just to bump from one bit to another.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Stephen Priestnall: And experience the experience through my own kind of filter. So that's what I would normally do. I haven't been able to wander around with the headphones on, almost never with a guy.
Paul Marden: Yeah, they had a lovely one at the Roman Baths yesterday. So it had both adult interpretation and kids interpretation, and I found myself switching to the kids one so that I was experiencing what Millie was experiencing, because I was saying to her, “Oh, did they tell you what that was?” “Oh, no, that wasn't in the kids version.” So I swapped the kids one and it brought it to life. It was really. It became much more shared experience for us.
Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, well, that's like that's like the horrible history stuff. Yeah. But actually, it's brilliant. Rattles that was what they were on about in the tudor period, then. I didn't get it until now.
Paul Marden: Yeah, look, listeners, Stephen and I have known each other for quite some time. We've been working together a lot on different projects, and his agency, Oomph, does a lot of work in customer experience. And so today's episode is going to be a little bit more about a primer on what do we mean by customer experience? And really, what I'd like to get to the bottom of today is what can attractioners do better to serve the needs of their customers. Yeah. So, really, Stephen, what I want to do is pick your brains. Let's introduce this whole subject of CX and customer experience and help people to better understand a little bit about what does that mean and how can they bring that into their day to day work in running attractions and meeting customers.
Paul Marden: So, before we start that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about you and a little bit more about Oomph. So that listeners can better understand the context.
Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, thanks, Paul. We've positioned ourselves around the concept of customer experience for about ten years now, and customer experience ten years ago was a bit of an oddball place to be. It kind of grew out of the user experience, the UX world, with a little bit of event management thrown into it and a little bit of actually, you need to think about people in the middle of all of this. And we come from a background of combining digital and data quite successfully to kind of help devise communications campaigns, kind of brand engagements, that kind of thing. And what we could see was if you brought all these things together as data was getting more sophisticated, with digital interactions on the rise, that you could get yourself much more informed about the way in which people's customers were actually behaving.
Stephen Priestnall: And not so much what they were actually how they were behaving, but also what their needs were that drove the behaviours. And so we have, we've grounded our work and customer experience around a very clear desire to understand the needs of our clients’ customers, and then to hold that mirror up for our clients and say, “Look, I know you have these products and services to sell and to engage with, but what we're going to do is a job of letting you know at the point of engagement they're hitting your customers needs in this way. And if you then flip the lens around from the customer need first rather than the product or service first, you might determine a different way of building that service or designing that interaction, or maybe even changing the way in which you invite customers into a journey with you.”
Stephen Priestnall: So a lot of data and digital inside are our space port that inform CX. And then in the last couple of years, AI has been another transformative technology that we've started to utilise. And we know we treat it as good AI. We know there's bad AI out there, but the good AI is really helpful.
Paul Marden: That's really interesting. We know from the Rubber Cheese Survey this year that most attractions have dabbled. They've played with ChatGPT, or something like that. But there's still a large portion of attractions that have done nothing with AI. And then there's a couple that I would consider at the leading edge. So they're doing things beyond GPT. They're looking at AI enabled CRM or AI enabled workforce management solutions.
Paul Marden: So there's some interest in here, but it's definitely, there's a conversation that we've had on the podcast just recently with Oz and I talking about the idea that we can't quite figure out if we're in a bubble because a lot of people that we talk to talk a lot of good game about AI, but when we're talking to the businesses, the clients, they're only just getting into this in the most shallow way. Agencies like yours and ours are kind of. We're leading the conversation on this, I think.
Stephen Priestnall: Well, I think it's really interesting you frame it like that, because one of the things that has informed our approach to CX is the idea of understanding behaviour change, which is a science in itself. So if any listeners are familiar with behaviour change, you'll know how long the tail of kind of investigation evaluation that is. We launched a study in 2020 which ended up over three years and three waves, 10,000 respondents looking at the impact of Covid-19 on people's behaviour and their interaction with organisations. That is part of our research centre which we call tide of events, which is now about to launch another study which is going to be looking at the impact of AI.
Paul Marden: Oh really?
Stephen Priestnall: As employees, as citizens, as customers, as service users, as members, as supporters. I'm expecting some very interesting things to come out of that study as well.
Paul Marden: Yeah, very interesting. So there's this idea of kind of CX thinking and embedding that, embedding it the heart of your agency, but you then helping your clients to embed it into the business. So how can CX thinking help an attraction to improve its offering? And I think if we can look at that in two directions, because obviously most visitor attractions are an in person experience, there's lots of thinking around their interaction and the experience that they feel when they're in the attraction itself. But there's a lot of us looking at either side of that interaction. How do we use marketing to get more people to want to do stuff? And then how do we make sure that they got the best experience after they did and reengage with us. How can CX thinking offline and online help an attraction?
Stephen Priestnall: The principles of customer experience thinking, certainly from our perspective, is to deal with the reality of that there are people involved. And I think you and I both know, Paul, in the digital world it's kind of quite easy to forget as a person we spend a lot of time in front of technology, trying to get technology to do stuff that we think is helpful. And then it's easy to lose sight of the goal, which is to help a person achieve a task or do something which they have, they enjoy doing. I think in the world of attractions, destinations, then when you're in a kind of physical world, that you're sat in that environment designing something, and you're a physical person yourself.
Stephen Priestnall: And as a designer, looking in that environment, feeling that, okay, well, if I walk from here to here, it's going to feel like that. If I put this in the wrong place, if my member of staff is trained in the wrong way and uses the wrong language, that's going to have a direct impact. So you kind of get brought back to the people side of it quite a lot when you're in it in person. So I would say that the world of CX thinking is about bringing the importance of the human into the overall experience. So you don't treat the digital experience with kind of it in a different frame set than you treat the in real life, in person experience.
Stephen Priestnall: And that's quite hard to do, because sometimes you're trying to drive the digital experiences as a kind of conversion funnel to get people to do something and buy something or consume some content. And you can kind of get hung up on the word optimisation and funnel management, and you then get drawn into, how can we push people through to the next phase? And push people through to the next phase? And imagine if you're in an attraction, and yeah, you might make certain parts, physical areas, a place where you would want people to go to, but you wouldn't have somebody walking up and nudging them in the back, pushing them down the aisle and stopping them from turning around and staying in one place.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Stephen Priestnall: And yet, that's often what happens in the digital world. It becomes an optimisation process to kind of channel a particular behavior that we think is optimal for the organisation. So the world of CX stands back from that, identifies the needs that were satisfying, and looks at Paul and Stephen as two individuals who are unique as individuals, and can be defined by a set of age, gender, sociological, economic characteristics. But actually, Paul and I might have five or six relevant needs for the attraction of which two are consistent. And, you know, two or three are completely different. So we can't treat Paul as Paul and Stephen as Stephen. We have to understand the relationship between the needs that we have as individuals and the thing that we're doing, or the point of the point on the journey we're on.
Stephen Priestnall: And I think that's tricky to kind of link the digital and the in real life worlds together. But that's the trick I like to think the kind of CX approach would bring.
Paul Marden: Yeah. Just as you're saying that it can be hard to think about the person. But also many of the attractions that we work with have very different offerings. And so consequently they have very different audiences that have very different needs. And, you know, are you trying to serve online an audience that's never going to attend? How do you serve those people's needs? If you've got an educational remit, how do you serve those people's needs whilst at the same time serving the needs of the people that you want to bring in and spend money on site with you? If you're a historic house that also has a golf course and it has a hotel and it has some sort of kids attraction associated with it, there's so many different audiences.
Paul Marden: So that kind of CX thinking can help you to step back.
Stephen Priestnall: Absolutely. And actually just maybe think of a great triangulation process between three different clients that we've been working with recently that show that kind of breadth of differences. So we work with the saudi arabian government on a new, one of their giga projects on a new destination out in the desert near Rhea called Duria. And that is an amazing set of destination components. Golf courses, equestrian centres, hotels, business centres. And that's creating a destination for a country which has never had any tourism in it before. So with a whole bunch of high net worth individuals that you've got to think about, then also a challenge to get people who live in Saudi to not spend the $90 billion a year that they do going to visit the rest of the world and to actually visit somewhere in Saudi.
Stephen Priestnall: So we've had a set of kind of challenges around how do you drive a customer journey, a visitor journey for that. And we've been working with an organisation called Marketing Manchester, helping them devise a new segmentation so they can, I'm going to use the term, attract the right kind of visitors to go to Manchester to hook in with their sustainability strategy. They don't just want people in the shopping malls and going to the football, sports events or shows, albeit they would like that. They also want to understand the community engagement, the cultural engagement and the environmental footprint that they leave behind. And then we're just in conversations with North York Moore's National Park. And then there's a whole different set of conversations about engagement with the local community, communities, a little bit arms folded about tourists. How do you make that come together?
Stephen Priestnall: And all of this is about people and it's about understanding people's relationship with people and things.
Paul Marden: Brilliant. So let's have a little think about given that those are the ideas behind CX thinking. If you were starting out down this road, what are the simple things that people can do to start to bed the customer at the heart of their thinking as they're planning their services? And I'm thinking in terms of, we've got very different types of attractions in this country, very small, up to, you know, big international attractions. Let's pick the small guys. Yeah. Imagine you're running a small town museum and, you know, you've got a handful of people working in the team. How can you start to embed the customer into your thinking to improve the service?
Stephen Priestnall: So I think, I don't think the principles change with scale. I think that the executional methods will change with scale, but the principles. And you can have, you know, if you've got a small team of three or four people, you can have these three or four people working together in a room. You can support a research or not, if you can afford the research that great. If you can't, then you use. So we use a term called foundational intelligence. So before we start any research with a client which might go and look at their customers or prospective customers or visitors.
Stephen Priestnall: We say, “Right, let's go all of the information in your organisation on the surface, first, because there's however many people around the room's years of experience, which is not necessarily formed in a cx way, but if we get that on the table, we've probably got a 60, 70, 80% starting point for what we're going to need to know in the end. I think that's the first thing I would say, is take confidence in the fact you've got some foundational intelligence about customer experience. But there might be a clever way of bringing that out through a little workshop. So you ask the right questions of each other. And one of the ways which I think is useful to do and quite practical is to think about three different ways of looking at people as individuals.
Stephen Priestnall: So think about themselves as a, you know, a standard attribute based, if you like, cohort or segments, you know, age, demography, all those things that we talked about, but then move those to one side and then ask a relatively straightforward question, what needs are being satisfied by your services? So it's kind of, what's the point of what you do? Yeah, well, harsh question.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Stephen Priestnall: But it's devoid from, if you like, knowing your customers at that point, devoid from any transaction based evaluation or business case to say, what's the point of what we do? Why do people turn up and then be quite hard about answering those questions. And when you get the first answer in your head, which is based on what you've always thought you've always done, just go right. Is that really why people turn up?
Paul Marden: Is that right?
Stephen Priestnall: Really why people walk through the door? Is that really why people tell their friends about us?
Paul Marden: There's a little bit of lean thinking there, isn't there? You've got five whys, haven't you? You could go, but why? But why? But why? Just to keep pushing yourself to think that hard thought.
Stephen Priestnall: Exactly. Whatever, you know, whatever little mental games you want to play with it, that's the kind of point. What's the point? And then the next lens to look at it is the journey your visitors are on in order to not just get to your destination, but get out of your destination and be reflecting on it to their I, peers, friends, colleagues, family. And that journey doesn't mean I book a ticket, I turn up, I walk around the attraction and then I go home. It means what are the component parts of that journey when they're in planning more just you asked me earlier on about whether I plan a picnic. What are they planning? How likely are they to plan? Do they not want to plan? Do they just want to turn up?
Stephen Priestnall: You know, when they're getting to, when they're coming, when they're traveling to the destination, how are they traveling? What's their preferred method of travel? And then what are the different ways in which people engage with the attraction itself? And then what happens afterwards when they walk out? Do they walk out and go for a beer? Forget about it. Did they do that thing you do in a golf club where you spend the next 3 hours talking about what you did for the last 3 hours? And what's the version of that could be done in social media afterwards? And again, do that. Do that without necessarily worrying too much about who does what. So you end up these kind of journey components.
Stephen Priestnall: Now all these things can be really heavily researched if you've got resources and the time to do that, but you can do it in a room with three or four people in 2 or 3 hours. And what you'll end up with is a set of right. The people who visit us look a bit like this. Typically, here's five or six types of people, here's a pool type, here's a Steven type, here's a whoever else type of. We've got ten or eleven needs. Well, who knew we had ten or eleven needs? That were satisfying.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Stephen Priestnall: So you write those down. Oh, look, we got a journey which looks like planning, engagement, reflection. And I use those three terms because we use them all the time because they're nice and easy to get your head around. Planning, engagement, reflection, and within engagement here are all the different bits that are happening in engagement here. At the different bits that, all right, we might have a dozen, maybe even two dozen components underneath those kind of three big things. And you've then got a bit of a jigsaw. And it's also objective at that point as well. You've then got this objective jigsaw to say, which of those five or six groups of people have which of those needs do we think you might end up with that funny place where.
Stephen Priestnall: Oh, actually that cohort doesn't have any of those needs, so we think they really like coming to us, but we're not doing anything to satisfy their needs or this other group that we don't get many of. Look how many needs we're satisfying in that group. Maybe we should be targeting that group.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Stephen Priestnall: So whether you're. Whether you go outwards and change your segmentation, your targeting, or whether you come in with and change your service design, you've already got some things to think about. And then when you map the journey on top of that, and again, you know, nice. It could be a done on paper, it could be done. There's loads of tools online you can do this without getting too scientific. You've then got the points at which, all right, so if that need is being satisfied for those people at that point, we now have a design intervention to work out. So we now have, essentially, we have a brief, we have a specification now that might be a piece of digital interaction, it might be a piece of communications design, it might be a piece of signage in the attraction, it might be a follow up social media nudge.
Stephen Priestnall: You're then not inventing what you think it is that you need to do for your attraction. We use a phrase which I think clients are pretty comfortable with in the end because it. It's a real reflection. It's completely normal for organisations to kind of end up with an inside and view of the world. Everything is all about the product and the service because that's where the investment goes, that's where the thinking goes. And what we try and do is just to persuade people to take an outside in view. So actually look at this from the point of view of the customer. And I think what the exercise I've just described does is help you take that outside in view.
Paul Marden: I'm smiling for those listening. I'm smiling because I just, it reminds me of so many times where I can, you know, I can see observing in the projects that we do or just, you know, interacting with the outside world, where you can tell that people often take a very parochial internal view and they'll communicate with the outside world in their own internal language. They will try and, you know, influence people to do things rather than thinking, how does this appear outside?
Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, and it's, it, but it's also, it's not a critique. It's normalised behaviour. If you just think about how organisations grow, you end up with an idea, you know, where often it is about the customers. You've got this entrepreneurial, innovative spark that kicks the idea off, satisfying the needs. And then you build up a bunch of teams who, by definition, have broken out into departments with different roles and responsibilities. And then, and then the sense of self of the people in those teams is derived from the departmental responsibility.
Paul Marden: Yes.
Stephen Priestnall: But as a consequence, you then are trained, naturally trained to be inside out.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Stephen Priestnall: And so, it's normal. And then when that, then when the salesperson comes back and says, “Why did you build it like that?” You know, the designer, the product person says, “Well, because that's the best way of doing this thing.” And the salesperson says, “I can't sell that.” And that actually, and I don't know how much. In your podcast, Paul, you talked about agile, but this is when the concept of squads really can work. I think that you have to take real care with squads because they can end up creating rooms of people who don't understand each other. I think unless there's one other thing I would say about the human part of CX, you have to take this into the culture of the organisation as well. So you asked me earlier, how do you present a CX focus for an organisation?
Stephen Priestnall: Well, you can't just drop the results of that little workshop on top of everybody, because it's the going through the process of looking at those three lenses that puts you in a different mindset. If you then just end up telling the product people or telling the sales people or telling the ops people, can you do it like this now? They'll just add that onto their list of things to do. It won't be a change.
Paul Marden: But when you bring those people into the conversation, I think it brings a different perspective, doesn't it? And I think that's the one thing I've learned from you in the few years that we've known one another is that when you boil it down, everything is a CX project. And I don't think I ever really thought about that. That there can be something which to me seems so navel gazing, internally focused as a technical project to deliver in the business. But actually, when you think, when you apply the rigor of thinking about the client, the customer, then you find that it is a CX driven project, even if it is completely internally facing. It can be about the communication between two teams, but in the end, because they don't have good communication, it's resulting in this poor customer experience over here.
Paul Marden: So when you think about it hard, then these projects have a CX focus, even when they are very kind of internally facing.
Stephen Priestnall: And it's sometimes difficult. I mean, I think that's a really good articulation of it. It sometimes can be a challenge to make that process seem worthwhile, because what you end up doing is spending more time challenging what you think is right at the beginning of the process. And there's always a desire from somewhere to move things on. I think that there's a little value based model that I always apply in my head, which if we treat this kind of CX phase as the planning phase, and then you go through a design phase, then you go through a build phase. For every extra hour you spend in planning, without spending that, you would spend ten more hours in design and a hundred more hours in production. So if you leave that hour aside, you're going to have a tenfold in design phase.
Stephen Priestnall: And if you don't deal with it in design phase, you'll have it 100 fold, then build phase. But choosing to do that extra hour, which is tension filled, it might be a bit of conflict, there might be a bit of defensiveness. It needs to be carefully managed and kind of cajoled, but the value of it is meant.
Paul Marden: Yeah. So you've described this kind of approach to take, identifying who the customers are, trying to use a little bit of intuition to be all science if you've got the budget to go and do the research, but to understand those customers in more detail and what their needs are, and then driving down and finding out where, you know, the journey maps onto that and where the gaps are and starting to look to fill those gaps. Is there room in the world for a dirty bottom up approach where you can see a problem already and you want to address that problem? Can you attack this from both angles or do you need to start from a top down approach?
Stephen Priestnall: I'm an arch pragmatist and if we know there's a problem to solve and it's screaming for a solution, then that's going to solve the problem. I would only cancel that try and stand back and look at the unintended consequences through a very objective lens. You don't need to spend long doing that. But I think the magnetism of solving a problem that's been a longstanding problem can also act as a set of blinkers. So that's the only thing I would say.
Paul Marden: Yeah, you can be distracted by the screaming problem that turns out not to be the real root cause. If you take the bigger picture of you.
Stephen Priestnall: If we got this horrendous problem just before checkout, whether that's a digital or at the attraction itself and queuing up going on, you know, there's a need to solve that through a piece of technology or extra stuff on the tills. But actually, it turns out that there's a funneling process going on in the start of the process that's causing everybody to end up at the checker at the same time. And that can be solved by a different distribution of products in the attraction itself, or bringing in some different content to inform people in the digital journey. That means they don't have to do task X and Y because they now know about it. You know, we've all had that before, which it looks like people can't get through this bit of the funnel. Let's try and make this bit of the funnel easier.
Stephen Priestnall: Let's try and do more things. More buttons, more. Let's just try and make it easier. But actually, it turns out, if only we'd given that visitor to the digital journey more time to consume content and not push them through the first stage of the transaction process so quickly, they would have entered the second stage much better informed and relaxed about completing the overall thing.
Paul Marden: It's just such a challenge, isn't it? Because I can just feel me even now with our fictitious scenario, all I want to do is squeeze them down the funnel. But you have to focus at the end about getting the right outcome, don't you?
Stephen Priestnall: There's another great metaphor I like to use, and we do this all the time because we talk about something called sustainable customer experience. And sustainable customer experience strategy isn't about a green CX strategy. It's about saying, if you get your CX strategy right, you will have to spend less money on acquiring new customers, so it's more economically sustainable and there's a really interesting kind of just different way of looking at it. So normally if you look at the typical retail conversion process, if you get 100 people on the top of a digital funnel, you might get five out the end as a conversion there's usually really simple numbers, five. So everybody works on how do we make five six? That's the big thing because that's like 20% improvement. If you get five to six, we've just put 20% on the bottom line.
Stephen Priestnall: Meanwhile there's 95 people. Do you care? Are you interested? I came here for a reason and you don't like me anymore, so. Well, goodbye then. So what we do is we say, right, we want to put as much effort into understanding the 94. It's not wasted effort. I'm a pragmatist, as we do making the five six, because if out of that 94 we can get another 20 over the next twelve months to do the same thing. We've not spent any money on customer acquisition. We've built and engaged in a relationship. We've had opportunities to talk and engage them, which probably means they're going and talking to other people and checking about the experience. So they're probably doing some recruitment for us anyway, which we can also nudge behaviour.
Stephen Priestnall: And then what that does, it changes the mentality inside the organisation to not just think about, we've got six out the other end. Yes. Celebrate. And actually think about. Because imagine if you did that physically. Imagine if physically you could see the hundred people in a queue and everybody went off celebrating the 6th that went through. And then you look back and you looked at these 94 people just milling around having a chat with each other and what just happened.
Paul Marden: Yeah, that would feel pretty uncomfortable, wouldn't it?
Stephen Priestnall: It will. Especially for an attraction.
Paul Marden: Yeah, for sure. Look, this has been brilliant. It's nice. I think sometimes to take a step back and look at that kind of the 101 class, the intro to the subject. And I think this is a subject that we will come back to again and again. We've talked about taking it back to its first principles a little bit today, but this is embedded within the attraction sector. They know and understand the people that come through the door. This is something that they take really seriously, obviously. But I think there are ways in which we can take what we've learned today and use that as a springboard into some more deeper conversations.
Paul Marden: Maybe in Season 6, which is coming up where we can talk a little bit more about, you know, your conversations about AI, the direction that you take these things in. How does AI help you in a world where you want to be cx centric? What does AI do for you? So thank you ever so much. This has been brilliant. Thank you.
Stephen Priestnall: Really enjoyed it.
Paul Marden: One last ask of you, though. We always ask our interviewees to come up with a book recommendation. And it can be fiction, it can be factual, it can be about the subject. But we will give this book away to the first person that retweets the show advert and says, I want Stephen's book. So what is the book that you'd like to share with the world?
Stephen Priestnall: Well, so I'd love to say it was. It was a book I wrote in 1986 on expert systems in context. I was doing AI back in the 80’s. That one is out of print. You definitely will get hold of it. Instead, it's a book that I think challenges, whatever your persuasions about understanding of the environment and climate, challenges your way of thinking about. It's a book by an activist called George Monbiot, and it's called Feral. And it's to do with the rewilding of Britain, the potential for rewilding Britain. And again, whether you're minded to think that's a good thing or not, it's a great book to just think, okay, that's my perceptions challenge. I hadn't thought of things like that.
Paul Marden: Excellent. So, listeners, if you'd like to get a copy of Stephen's book, then head over to X, find the show tweet that we put out and say, I want Stephen's book. And the first person to do that will get a copy. Stephen, this has been wonderful. Thank you all so much. And hopefully we will talk more about this in Season 6.
Stephen Priestnall: Thank you very much, Paul.
Oz Austwick: He's a really interesting guy, isn't he?
Paul Marden: He is indeed. I said to Stephen afterwards, it was such a nice conversation because we've been working together for years, and today I got to ask the questions I've been too embarrassed to ask for the last few years because I really should, at this point, know the answers to them. But today I was able to take the place of the listener and ask those questions without fear of embarrassment.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, there does come a point where you kind of feel that you probably shouldn't be asking this question anymore. You should already know this. Yeah, I love that. I thought, it's really interesting. I love this concept of nudging that he talked about, and it's something I've been aware of online for years, but the kind of putting it in the context of happening in the real world, I thought was really interesting. It gives you a bit of insight into how weird it is that we try and force people into certain pathways online. When you'd never dream of doing that in the real world, just having somebody outside a room just pushing you into it. Yeah, you wouldn't do that.
Paul Marden: You're in a queue for the log flume and you get poked in the back to say, “Do you want to buy your photo? Do you want to buy your photo? You really do want to buy the photo, don't you?”
Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, that does kind of happen, doesn't it? It's usually my children that are doing it, if I'm being honest. But, yeah, really interesting stuff.
Paul Marden: A nice way to round out some amazing interviews and fireside chats that we've had over Season 5 and look forward to Season 6.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, I'm really excited about Season 6.
Paul Marden: Yeah, we want to do something a little bit different, don't we?
Oz Austwick: Yeah, well, I mean, firstly, I'll get to start the season of the podcast. Because I wasn't here at the start of Season 5. I've kind of just weaseled my way in halfway through the season and gone, “Yes, mine now.”
Paul Marden: Tell listeners, what is it that we want to do differently?
Oz Austwick: Well, it feels a bit weird to me that we're creating a podcast all about the visitor attraction sector, which is designed to get people out of their houses to a place and actually experience it in the real world. And yet you're sitting in exactly the same room, and I'm sitting in exactly the same room. And as we pointed out not long ago, I'm wearing the same t shirt as I seem. This appears to be my podcast t shirt. And yet, you know, we're not getting out. So we're gonna get out. We're gonna get in a car and go to a place and record a podcast in an attraction with a person. And I think that's amazing.
Paul Marden: Yeah, I just can't wait. We've got a couple lined up. One's crazy, one's going to be a big event. It could be really fun, but we love listeners with attractions who would like two blokes and some cameras to turn up to invite us along. We would love to come and visit your venue. We would love to talk about whatever subject it is that you think our listeners would like to discuss, and we'll come along and we'll record it in real life at your place and see how amazing your venue is and talk more about the stuff that everybody's interested in.
Oz Austwick: Absolutely. But it's not just that we're going to do a little bit differently, is it? We're kind of focusing a little bit more on different groups.
Paul Marden: Yeah. There was some lovely feedback for those, for listeners that listened to Kelly's final episode, her swan song. When Ross from Drayton Manor came on and talked about his experience of being on the podcast and how influential it was for him to have his 15 minutes of fame for Skip the Queue, and how important that was to him in his stage, in his career, that prompted us to think about, can we use this platform now that so many people before us built to help to shine a light on new and emerging talent in the sector? So if you are in early stages of your career and you are doing something interesting in the attraction space, could be digital, it could be something customer focused in real life.
Paul Marden: There's so many different ways where we could have an interesting conversation about what it is that you do and why other people would find it interesting. You know, invite us in. We would love to have that conversation with people. If you know someone, if there's someone in your team who, you know, you can see is doing amazing things and could grow in their career with the spotlight shone on them, and there's lots of people like that, then point them in our direction. Point us in their direction. We can definitely do something to help them to share their story and hopefully to benefit from that springboard, that stepping outside and talking to the outside world about what you do can really have on a career.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's lovely that hopefully now, after five seasons, the podcasts kind of mature enough that we don't need to lean on those famous, influential people in the industry quite as much. And hopefully that maybe we've got enough loyal listeners and enough of us standing as a podcast that we can tell stories just because they're interesting. Yeah, you already know the name of the person we're talking to, so, yeah, that's going to be really exciting.
Paul Marden: But, you know, there are stories to be told that we don't know about yet that I'm sure will be going on inside listeners minds and, you know, hit us up, send us an email, send us a tweet, an X. I don't know what. I don't know. That's another story, isn't it? But send us a message by carrier Pigeon, if you can, that tells us what you think we should be talking about, the people we should be meeting and the stories that should be told. We would love to hear from you.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, and in the meantime, enjoy your two or three weeks without Skip the Queue.
Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully you're all busy working in your attractions, being absolutely swamped. If the attractions I've been to are anything to go by, it is a rip roaring success of a summer. We've had some pretty good weather and yeah, we'll be looking back at this September October time thinking what an amazing summer it was after a disappointing start to the year.
Oz Austwick: So yeah, well, fingers crossed. Absolutely.
Paul Marden: Thank you, Oz. It's been delightful. I've enjoyed every minute of it.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, me too. Here's to Season 6.
Paul Marden: Yeah, see you on the other side.
Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.
Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.
We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.
Download your FREE copy here
Why you absolutely should take part in the 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey
Saison 5 · Épisode 109
mercredi 17 juillet 2024 • Durée 41:54
Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.
If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.
Competition ends on 31st July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.
Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn’t know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.
Questions from the 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report, with Kelly and Paul from Rubber Cheese
Saison 5 · Épisode 100
mercredi 6 mars 2024 • Durée 56:28
Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.
If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast
Competition ends on 29th March 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.
Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn’t know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.
The future of the experience economy in a post-COVID world. With Ben Thompson
Saison 1 · Épisode 10
vendredi 24 juillet 2020 • Durée 36:36
Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.
If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.
Competition ends October 31st 2020. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.
The above article was written in collaboration by Ben Thompson, Carolien Nederlof, Klaus Hoven, Luca Liboa and Raymond Oude Groen.
Since recording the podcast, Ben has joined as their Chief Strategy Officer
How to build ‘digital things’ for GLAMs without a huge budget. With John Sear
Saison 1 · Épisode 9
jeudi 9 avril 2020 • Durée 55:20
The hunger for immersive experiences is stronger than it’s ever been. For this episode of the podcast, we speak to one of the pioneers of this trend, John Sear.
John describes himself as a Game Designer & Software Developer, Runner of Workshops and Maker of game-like things for public spaces like Museums, Galleries & Festivals.
One of his most impressive projects includes a 500 player, feature-length, collaborative game played using laser pointers, which he won the Indiecade Developer’s Choice Award (referred to as the Sundance of the Games Industry).
In this episode, we discuss John’s DIY tutorials for museums so that you can build exciting ‘digital things’ without a huge budget.
If you’re interested in creating an immersive experience, then you’ll learn a lot from John’s story.
With everything that’s happening in the world right now, this is a brilliant podcast to listen to explore what you can do to engage your audience when your attraction, museum, venue is ready to open again.
A few things we talk about:
Creating games that are fun, educational and true to venues
The importance of storytelling
How to build ‘digital things’ without a huge budget
Collaborative touch table experiences
Focusing on fun first, educational after
Using you venue for immersive theatre experiences, when it's usually closed
Heads up, this episode was recorded at the end of 2019, so some of the things we mention may be slightly out of context.
Creating connections in cultural organisations. With Marge Ainsley
Saison 1 · Épisode 8
vendredi 3 avril 2020 • Durée 49:26
Today’s podcast guest has spent the last 12 years helping a vast range of museums, galleries, libraries and theatres to understand their audiences and develop insight.
She was previously voted one of the top 50 freelancers in the UK, is a IPSE Ambassador of the Year Finalist and also helps to run the Museum Freelance Network. It’s safe to say that Marge Ainsley’s insight in bringing audiences and organisations closer together is second to none.
A few things we talk about:
Creating connections
Bringing audiences and organisations closer together
Helping staff to work more productively
Understanding barriers to visiting attractions
Breaking down perceptions
The value of cultural organisations on health and wellbeing
Interviewing 5000 people in one weekend at the Grand Prix
Heads up, this podcast was recorded in 2019, so there’s a few things mentioned that might be a little out of context.
We experienced a few technical difficulties - nevertheless, you're going to learn plenty from this brilliant interview.
Visitors are dead, long live the players! With Alex Book
Saison 1 · Épisode 7
vendredi 14 février 2020 • Durée 49:04
We're leaping into the future with today's podcast guest - talking to Alex Book, the Chief Operating Officer at Arcade.
Arcade specialise in using augmented reality (AR) to help visitor attractions engage their audiences more meaningfully. They're experts at creating immersive experiences designed to guide, educate, entertain and, most importantly, connect us more to the world and each other.
Alex is a big believer in "experience is king" - which we discuss at length in the interview along with why it might be time to say goodbye to the 'visitor'.
We experienced a few technical difficulties with this recording - but nothing that takes away from Alex's insight.
What we discussed:
The importance of using augmented reality with a purpose
Thinking of visitors as players, rather than guests
Castle Howard’s love story with China - as told by Abbigail Ollive
Saison 1 · Épisode 6
vendredi 31 janvier 2020 • Durée 46:39
Castle Howard is a stunning stately home in rural North Yorkshire, designed by Sir John Vanbrugh back in 1699 for the third Earl of Carlisle. Since the 50s, Castle Howard has been a visitor attraction, welcoming around 300,000 visitors a year.
In todays podcast, we’ll hear from Abbigail Ollive, Head of Marketing as she shares with us a beautiful story, of how China fell in love with the Castle, and how one wedding started a chain reaction of incredible events leading them to increase overseas visitors to around 60%.
Castle Howard was one of the first attractions in the UK to install the WeChat pay solutions across shops, restaurants, ticket office and we’ll hear all about the challenges, success and specialist they worked with to make that happen.
It’s a wonderful example of how implementing small things can make huge differences to a visitors experience, and we know you’ll learn a lot from their unique story.
A few things we discussed:
The importance of understanding our audience and catering specifically for their needs
If it’s difficult to integrate WeChat and Alipay for Chinese visitors
How to create a digital guest experience that’s second to none
Why you need to be proactive in changing and adapting your marketing strategy
Why you need to work with sector specialists
How empowering your front of house team to be super helpful creates the ultimate experience for your guests
Priceless business strategy tips from the 'Millionaire Clown' - James Sinclair
Saison 1 · Épisode 5
vendredi 17 janvier 2020 • Durée 42:36
Today’s guest started his career at just 15 years old - since then, he’s gone on to build a thriving entertainment business, consisting of indoor leisure units, laser arenas, day nurseries, plus a 50-acre farm attraction, water park and web-based soft toy business!
We’re talking to the multi-talented and hugely successful James Sinclair - otherwise known as “Jimbo the Partyman”.
His hard work and passion for putting smiles on people’s faces has won him many awards, including Young Entrepreneur of the Year and Growing Business of the Year.
He’s also a published author whose book “The Millionaire Clown” details his journey from a teenage children’s entertainer to multiple business owner, turning 8 figures and employing over 300 staff.
Just a head’s up, we experienced a few technical difficulties on this recording, but James’ story is pretty engaging, so you probably won’t notice!
Just a few of the things we talk about:
The importance of creating content and building an audience
How to build a leisure business that’s not weather dependant
James’ five P’s formula for business success
The difference between good leadership and good management
Why you need to invest in customer service
The number 1 driver for creating a great customer experience
The science of creating an incredible visitor experience with Andy White
Saison 1 · Épisode 4
mercredi 30 octobre 2019 • Durée 41:24
Andy White is the king of “Themed Experiential Entertainment” - the process of bringing Brands and IP’s to life with big ideas and innovative technology, creating something that customers will enjoy and remember forever.
His agency, Andy White Creative, uses skill and expertise to create entertaining and memorable experiences for all kinds of visitor attractions including; theme parks, resorts and retail destinations. He’s worked on some incredible projects including CBeebies Land Hotel, The Gruffalo River Ride Adventure and Sid’s Arctic Tours Ice Age Adventure.
We learnt loads about Andy’s process in this podcast and we talked a lot about how design really needs to emotionally connect to the target audience to create a positive visitor experience.
Andy is exhibiting at the Family Attraction Expo on the 6th and 7th of November 2019 - find him at stand FM 2350.
What will you learn from this podcast?
What’s involved in the process of bringing experiences to life - how to turn an intangible idea into a practical reality
How creating fantastic experiences translates into increased ticket sales
We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.
Oz Austwick is the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, he has a somewhat varied job history having worked as a Blacksmith, a Nurse, a Videographer, and Henry VIII’s personal man at arms. Outside of work he’s a YouTuber, a martial artist, and a musician, and is usually found wandering round a ruined castle with his kids.
Transcription:
Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. In today's episode, Oz Austwick and I talk about the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey. After six weeks of data collection, we've seen some really interesting insights that we'll share and we'll also announce a new digital sustainability initiative that we're really excited about.
Paul Marden: Hello, Oz. How you doing, mate?
Oz Austwick: Hi, I'm good, mate, I'm good. How are you?
Paul Marden: I am very good. On a slightly gray summer's day, hopefully, you know, all the private schools have broken up, so it should start to get busy in the attractions over the next couple of weeks and then we've got all the state schools breaking up in the next few weeks as well. So exciting times, hopefully. Hopefully busy times as well.
Oz Austwick: Yes. So what are we going to talk about today?
Paul Marden: Well, we are going to talk a little bit about the survey, but I thought it might be quite nice as well to talk a little bit about what's happening in the news because there's quite a lot at the moment.
Oz Austwick: There is been a bit of a change of boss, haven't there has been.
Paul Marden: A change of boss recently. But before we do that, shall we talk about where have we been recently? Tell me, tell me, which attraction have you been to recently?
Oz Austwick: So this is why you're here, to keep me on track. The most recent attraction I've been to is Hazelmere Museum in Surrey. It's a bit of an eye opener, to be honest. I've always had a bit of a love for these tiny little provincial, formerly council run museums that you find in little towns around the country because you come across some amazing gems hidden in them. But Hazelmere Museum is a little bit different. I mean, it's astonishing. It's got a vast catalogue of natural history stuff. I mean, hundreds of thousands of pieces in the catalogue there. They've got an Egyptian section as well, with a sarcophagus and a mummy. Yeah, it's a great place. It's hidden away in this tiny little market town and if you get the opportunity, go, because it's great.
Oz Austwick: But there is no parking, so you have to park in the town centre and walk along, which is the only downside I can come up with. How about you? Where have you been?
Paul Marden: Sounds awesome. I have been to a few tiny little museums, actually. Recently I went to Winchester with my daughter and we did some of the military museums in Winchester because there's quite a few regimental museums in Winchester. They are all of them, you know, hyper focused on a particular regiment doing very specific things. So, you know, there's a cavalry museum and infantry museums. And it's just really interesting. My brother was in the army. It's quite nice to be able to take Millie and walk her around some of these military museums and for her to connect with what he did when he was in the army. So we’re able to see, there's a little piece in one of the museums showing the war in Kosovo and how peacekeepers went over. And my brother had a medal from going to Bosnia.
Paul Marden: He went to in peacekeeping back in the ’90s. That was very interesting for her to be in a museum and connect with something that's of relevance to the family. He was slightly offended when I told him. Also, we saw model of Pegasus Bridge. And she was like, “Was he at Pegasus Bridge?” And I was like, “No, no. Uncle Barry's not quite that old. No, that's about 40 years too old for Uncle Barry.”
Oz Austwick: Yeah. Do you know, I remember I went to Pegasus Bridge completely by accident once. Literally. We were just driving back and went, “Hang on a minute. This looks familiar. “Yeah. We stopped off at the cafe and had a wander around the bridge. And you can still see the bullet holes in the walls of the cafe building. And there are still tanks. Amazing place. Anyway, sorry, I digress.
Paul Marden: No, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about what's happening in the news at the moment. Anything that springs to mind for you?
Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, obviously, the change of government, I don't think it came as a big surprise to anyone. Maybe the actual numbers were a little surprising, but the fact that we've now got a Labour Prime Minister with a fairly clear majority I don't think was a massive surprise. How that's going to play out in terms of the sector, I don't know.
Paul Marden: Yeah, we've got a different culture sector in place, haven't we, than were perhaps anticipating. So there's few changes of personnel than we perhaps anticipated.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, I mean, I guess we'll wait and see. It's probably just a result of the change, but I guess I'm feeling fairly optimistic that things might improve.
Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I feel an air of optimism that we haven't had for quite some time.
Oz Austwick: Yeah.
Paul Marden: Interesting times, other things in the sector. Interesting, exciting news. The Young V&A were awarded the Art Fund Museum of the Year. That's a, you know, a new museum that's doing lots of amazing work. We're real focused on kids and families. Lots of. Lots of co creation with young people involved in it. So that's quite exciting stuff. And it comes with a really hefty prize fund as well. So. So they got quite a nice pat on the back, a gong and some money as well to be able to fund their good work. So that's exciting.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Good for them. Anything else? Yeah, Bloomberg. I think we should probably talk a little bit about Bloomberg earlier in the year. We talked a lot about to a lot of people about the fact that Bloomberg philanthropies were awarding grants as part of their accelerator program for attractions, culturally significant attractions, to improve their digital presence. And that's kind of happened. A lot of awards have been made, attractions have got money to spend, and that's beginning to work its way out into the community now. So I'm really looking forward to seeing if that actually makes a significant difference to the overall level of websites. And I guess we'll probably have to wait until next year with the survey to find out if there's been a change in the sector.
Oz Austwick: But I think for those attractions that have received the money, it can't be anything but a positive thing.
Paul Marden: I was quite impressed because it's not just money that they're getting. They're getting help and support from Bloomberg as well to guide them in the use of that money. Because I think sometimes you see charities getting awarded large chunks of money and sometimes it can be a challenge for them to spend that money effectively, whereas by being provided guidance from Bloomberg, you know, you can see that money is going to be well spent and well used. So that's. I'm pleased about that. It'll be really exciting to see some of those projects come to fruition. I was pretty excited about a couple of science centre related news items. So we the curious in Bristol has reopened after two years of being closed in fire. So that was, I think that was monumental for them to be able to turn that around. It was really.
Paul Marden: I was really pleased to see them reopen. That's definitely on my list of things I need to do this summer, is go and visit them and see what amazing things they've done. Absolutely. And then we've also got Cambridge Science Centre as well, will be due to open in a couple of weeks time. So they've opened their ticketing up. So people can now buy tickets to go to Cambridge Science Centre who have been a little bit like we the curious. They've been without a physical home for a period of time and are reopening a physical offering again. So that's exciting to be able to go and buy your tickets and head on over to Cambridge Science Centre.
Oz Austwick: And Kids in Museums as well. I'm not going to talk about it because I know you know a lot more about it than me. But they're looking for volunteers, right?
Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we talked in a number of episodes about the Family Friendly Museum Awards and short lists of those have been announced. That includes Young V&A again. And we're looking for volunteer families to go undercover and do the judging. And I love it. The idea that families will get. They will have a contribution to the cost of money, pay expenses for them to go undercover and do this judging. And the feedback we get from those families is amazing. At the awards last year, each time an award was announced, we get a little snippet of what the undercover judges actually said and it's surprising what kids find important to them. The benches were comfy or the cafe was nice, you know, little things that perhaps adults might notice, you know, comes out in that undercover judging.
Paul Marden: So, yeah, Kids in Museums need volunteers. Head on over to the website to go and find out a little bit more about that undercover judging. If you'd like to get involved in it. That's the news. But what do we really want to talk about?
Oz Austwick: We really want to talk about our survey.
Paul Marden: We really do. It's exciting.
Oz Austwick: In fairness, we're kind of always talking about the survey at the moment. So now we're just going to talk to you about the survey rather than each other and anyone that will listen.
Paul Marden: Yes, absolutely.
Oz Austwick: We've been open for submissions for, what, six weeks now?
Paul Marden: About that, I think. Yeah.
Oz Austwick: A few weeks to go. It's proving really interesting.
Paul Marden: Yes.
Oz Austwick: Is that enough of the hook? Have we got you now? One of the things that I think is probably worth saying is that somehow, and whilst we wanted this to happen, I don't think we specifically planned for it, we've kind of lost a lot of the kind of fake submissions that we've had in previous years where people were clearly just having a look at the survey or not bothering to fill it in, or maybe it was bots doing it and we don't seem to have those. So the overall quality of the responses is just fantastic. And some of the venues that have submitted their data to the survey, I mean, they're astonishing. I'm not going to name any names because I don't know if I'm allowed to.
Paul Marden: No, you're definitely not allowed to.
Oz Austwick: Some of the biggest and most famous attractions in the country. Or even the world because we are worldwide this year.
Paul Marden: But more importantly, also the smallest museums you could possibly imagine are in that data set as well. So what have we seen? We got all of these amazing responses. We've still got a couple of weeks left to go. We don't want anyone to feel left out. We definitely want more people to respond over the next couple of weeks. But let's give some teasers. What have we seen that we thought was interesting?
Oz Austwick: Before we do, can I just make a couple of points that I think everybody needs to be aware of? The first is that any data you put in is absolutely confidential in every way. We're never going to release your data to the wider world. All the data that gets released is aggregated together and is done in a way that is completely anonymous. But what that does is it allows us to give sector wide data and we can give your data in comparison to that, so you can and see where you are. So there's no risk of anything getting out in the wide world that you don't want out there. It's completely non commercial. You know, we're not making money from this, we're not doing this, we're not asking for your data in order that we can make money.
Oz Austwick: This is to give back to the community. We want people to have the information so that they can make the right decisions. And also, you don't have to fill in everything. If you look at it and think, you know, I ought to fill this in, I want to fill it in, but I haven't got time to do the whole thing, do half of it, that's okay. Even if you only fill in one question, that will improve the value of that answer to the entire sector. I'll shush now. Sorry. Let's look at some action figures.
Paul Marden: Let's talk about some of the interesting findings. We've definitely found some things where we've gone. “Oh, really? Oh, how interesting.” So for me, one of them, I'm a tech geek. Everybody knows I'm a tech geek. Okay. Ticketing systems, content management systems, that's my bag. I was quite interested this year that we're seeing much more parity in terms of the ticketing system data that we're getting. So there is a number of ticketing systems where in previous years there's been a substantial number of people selecting Digitickets. In previous years we're seeing more. We're seeing more responses from other respondents this year with different ticketing systems. And I think we've said this before, it's nothing. These aren't necessarily indicating changes in the behaviour of the sector.
Paul Marden: It more speaks to the different people that are responding in different years and we're seeing more responses from different people this year. And so we are seeing different ticketing systems appearing alongside Digitickets as key. You spotted something that surprised you, didn't you, in that respect?
Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. When we designed the survey went through all of the ticketing systems that were familiar with and all of the names that we knew but hadn't had specific experience of working with. And we created what we thought was a really comprehensive listing of ticketing systems. But we allowed people to tick other and then write in what they were using and we clearly missed one big player from that list and they're probably the highest ranked so far. I haven't actually looked for the last week or so. They're certainly up there. They may not be the most popular but they're one of the most popular and it came as a complete surprise to us. So, you know, do make sure that you get your report because there is stuff in it that surprises even if it's just me, I mean.
Oz Austwick: But you may well be surprised by some of the results of that.
Paul Marden: Yeah, we saw interesting shifts. So we've done a little bit of year on year analysis as well. Already we've seen that there are more people selecting WordPress as their CMS. So that's now around half of all respondents have selected WordPress as their content management system.
Oz Austwick: I'm going to take issue with your phrasing there because I'm not sure that's an accurate description.
Paul Marden: Why?
Oz Austwick: Because I don't necessarily think we've seen more people selecting WordPress, but we've certainly had more people stating they use WordPress. They may have been using WordPress years, much like the ticketing system. What we've got is a snapshot of the people who have submitted.
Paul Marden: Yeah, so I meant selected the tick box as opposed to selected the technology platform. But you're absolutely right. It is indicative of the responses that we're getting this year. And it's not. They're not eating away market share from the other CMS's. I think we're seeing more people being able to tell us what the CMS that they're using is. So fewer people are saying I don't know or I can't track this, and actually giving us answer.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, we made a real conscious effort to try and reduce the number of people just saying other. And I think that's probably made a big difference to these.
Paul Marden: Yeah, up around is around 11% now, up from 4% in 2023. So that's quite interesting. We're definitely going to do some analysis this year to try and see. Can we slice and dice some of the other data by technology platforms to see if any of these platforms give those people that select them an edge in terms of their performance or their sustainability scores or things like that?
Oz Austwick: I know one of the things that we noticed last year was that the bigger, more successful venues were more likely to use Umbraco or perhaps the other way around. The venues that used Umbraco were more likely to be the bigger, more successful venues, but there was no way of telling which was cause and which was effect or whether they were just completely disconnected at all. And hopefully now, because we've got a slightly bigger sample size, we might be able to be a bit more accurate with that. Rather than stating this is a correlation, maybe there's something we can actually action from this.
Paul Marden: Yeah. You had some interesting stuff that you saw around how easy people find it to find stuff, didn't you?
Oz Austwick: Yes. There's been a long debate that's been going on for longer than I've been with Rubber Cheese about the value of self reporting. And I know that there were some conversations with the Advisory Board that we put together to help design the survey this year about whether that was a valuable thing to do. And I think that, because that's how we've done it for the last few years, we've stuck with it. But also, I think as long as you're open about the fact that this is self reporting, the figure is still accurate. So when we ask people how easy it is for visitors to their website to find what they're looking for, over half of them ranked 8, 9 or 10 out of 10, so that it was very easy.
Oz Austwick: And nobody ranked zero, one or two, so nobody thought that it was really difficult to find stuff on their website. But 50% of sites have never actually tested the site or collected feedback from users. So how valuable that figure is a different question. Yeah, we'll come to that later, because there's an important point that I think we're going to make later on about how we can make that figure more valuable.
Paul Marden: You also saw some stuff around personalisation, didn't you?
Oz Austwick: Yeah. The personalisation things are really important because as a marketer, you go along to agency groups and conferences and workshops and webinars, and for years, if not decades, people have been talking about how important personalisation is. If you've got anybody in your organisation that works with email newsletters, personalisation is absolutely key. And it's really clear that the more you personalise, the better you do. And 90% of the people who filled in the survey agree that personalisation is more important than not. However, only 9% of websites are offering personalised content.
Paul Marden: It's a bit heartbreaking, isn't it?
Oz Austwick: Yeah. Obviously we don't know why and we can say that even at this point, without the survey having finished, that's already up from last year. It was 6% last year and now it's at 9%, which doesn't feel like a big improvement, but it's a 50% increase.
Paul Marden: It'd be interesting to slice that again and see is that the 9% that have personalisation, are they the attractions with larger footfall and larger budgets and that's why they can afford to do this and that's the big barrier to entry? Or is there a something else that actually know that smaller sites with less traffic and less footfall at the attraction can still offer personalisation? It's not just about budgets and some people can use this stuff and get really good outcomes from it, or spending all that time and effort mean that you get no real outcome of it anyway, and that all of those people that think it's really important are kidding themselves. And that's the great thing about the survey, isn't it, that we've got all of this data and we can start to draw those conclusions from it?
Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is going to be a really interesting one to follow over the next year or two to see if. Is this year's number an actual increase or is it just a more accurate number? Yes, and I guess we can only see that as a trend over time.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Oz Austwick: Now, you were very keen that we included some questions about AI and the use of AI.
Paul Marden: Yeah.
Oz Austwick: Have there been any interesting findings there?
Paul Marden: Yes. So the majority of people have used some sort of AI content generation tool, so they've used ChatGPT or the like to be able to do generative AI, writing, copy and that kind of thing. We've not gone into depth about how much they've used it. Do they use it extensively? Is it part of their day to day work? It was simply a question of have you used any of these tools? So, you know, over half have used a tool like that. There is also hidden in that data set there's a few attractions that are doing some pretty innovative things with AI as well. So there's a couple that are using things like AI powered CRM or AI powered scheduling or workforce management. So earlier on you said everybody's submissions is completely anonymous. That is completely true.
Paul Marden: But I am definitely going to be tapping up those people that gave us the interesting answers to say, “Would you like to come and tell the story in more detail?” So, yes, you're right, we're never going to share anybody's data, and we're never going to share anybody's stories without their permission. We will definitely, over the next few weeks and months, as we're planning the report, we're definitely going to go to the people that have given us interesting data that has made us go, that's very interesting, and talking to them. So we'll find out a little bit more about what those people are doing. But you had an interesting observation, didn't you? If half of the people have used something like ChatGPT, that leaves about half the people that haven't used it.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, it's really difficult to know from where we sit as a digital agency that is constantly trying to stay ahead of the curve and understand new technologies and how they might be relevant and how we can use them to help our clients. You know, we may be, are we more familiar with this than most people, or is the way we see it representative? It's really hard to know. And I find it really hard to believe that the approaching half of visitor attractions simply haven't even looked at it. They've not even gone to ChatGPT and said, you know, find me a title for this blog post or something like that. It just seems that maybe they're missing a trick.
Oz Austwick: And I'm not suggesting that you should go out and get vast amounts of content written by AI and plaster it all over your site. We know that Google is specifically and deliberately penalising sites it knows are doing that, but you can certainly use it to maybe improve your language. Or if you can't come up with a catchy title, you can ask for twelve different suggestions for titles and pick and choose. I find it really hard to believe that half the people haven't even done that, but that could just be my context.
Paul Marden: I think you might be sat in a little bubble of your own making. I sat with people recently and walked them through. How do you prompt ChatGPT? What does prompting even mean? And talking about how is it doing it? And talking about the idea that it's all just probabilities. It's not intelligent, it's just using probabilities to figure out what the next word is. Yeah. And what does that actually mean to people? I definitely think that we sit in a bubble where we are. We are not experts. Neither of us, I think, would consider ourselves experts at best, gentlemen amateurs. But I think we sit in a bubble of people that are using this a lot and are experimenting with it. I don't know.
Paul Marden: I think there's a place for Skip the Queue to look at this next year, to look at what are the innovative things that people are doing. But also starting at the 101 class, what does it all mean? What are these things? How could they be useful to you? How could you make use of ChatGPT to accelerate your content creation, to come up with new ideas that you haven't potentially thought of? So definitely, I think there's space in Season 6 for us to delve into this in more detail. There's one more area that I think we added this year that we're really excited about, isn't there, around sustainability.
Paul Marden: Not because we think we are thought leaders on this, not because we think we're on the cutting edge, but because we're learning so much around this at the moment and really changing the way that we work, aren't we?
Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a really important point. It's something that. Oh, which conference was it? I think were both there. One of the agencynomics conferences, Joss from Enviral, made the point that this is actually our problem. If websites are out there and they aren't sustainable and they are causing damage, it's the fault of the companies that have built them. And really, that's us. So we kind of feel that we have to be at least trying to take the lead in helping fix that. And you can't do anything to fix the issue unless you've got the knowledge and the understanding of where you are. And I guess that's where we are at the moment. We've asked a few really basic questions, but they've given some quite interesting statistics.
Paul Marden: Yeah. So most attractions have got good intentions, so most have got a sustainability plan in place. We've not asked what that plan looks like or how comprehensive it is. It was simply, does your attraction have a sustainability plan? And most people have said yes to that.
Oz Austwick: When you say it's a majority, I think it's quite important to note that this isn't like 56%, this is a huge majority. The vast majority of sites have sustainability plan to the point where you could say almost everybody does. Not quite everybody, but almost everybody. But that does make the fact that very few have actually specifically measured the carbon footprint of their website a little bit more shocking.
Paul Marden: So that's the big, “Oh, really moment” for us was the idea that most people have got a sustainability plan. Some have even actually taken action to improve the sustainability posture of their website, but very few have actually ever measured the CO2 emissions of their website. So they don't, they're not benchmarking. This is not a coherent plan where you measure, take action, measure again and then replan. Very few of the attractions have actually done that measurement process. We know, we know from recent episodes where we talked about sustainability, the importance of measuring in terms of helping you construct a plan and working in a methodical way to improve the CO2 emissions and improve that sustainability posture. And I think we've recognised as a result of doing the survey that there is some impediment that is stopping people from measuring.
Paul Marden: We're not entirely sure we understand what the impediment is, but there is definitely something getting in the way of people being able to measure. And I think that's our. There's the big thing that I wanted to be able to share today that we have decided as a result of doing the survey and then started to run through, we could see that most people haven't tested the CO2 emissions. So what we have done is we've enriched the database of all of the respondents that we've had this year and gone and done the CO2 emissions tests of their websites for them. Now, obviously, we're going to keep that private to us. We're not singling anybody out, but we are going to be able to aggregate together what the whole industry looks like as a result of the testing that we have done.
Paul Marden: The testing, to be fair, is not just restricted to the people that have responded to the survey. We are also going and testing more widely across the entire sector to be able to get an understanding of what the CO2 emissions of the websites of the wider sector look like. So that's been, that's something that we've been really pleased that we've been able to do and it's something that we want to be able to offer out to everybody that has taken part in the survey. So one of the things that I guess we're announcing today that is a key thing that we've not talked about throughout the whole survey process, is we're going to give everybody that has taken part in the survey the opportunity to download the CO2 emissions report that we have gathered for them on their website.
Paul Marden: So they will be able to see a grading of A to F as to what their CO2 emissions look like. They'll also see that broken down in a little bit more granular detail around the page size, the amount of CO2 that is emitted by the page, one page of their site, and a rough estimate of what that turns into in terms of CO2 emissions for their entire site. And that's something that we will share with everybody at the end of the survey. So this year, it's not just going to be one large survey that aggregates everybody's data together. We will also give individualised reports to everybody for them to be able to see where their CO2 emissions are in terms of their website.
Paul Marden: With ideas we're hopefully going to work with friends of Skip the Queue and supporters of the survey to be able to come up with ideas around how you can actually improve that CO2 posture, which could, that could be an amazing thing for us to run the survey again next year, gather that data again and see today, as we're recording, BBC is running the Michael Mosely just one thing in memory of Michael Moseley. I think we can take inspiration from that. What if every attraction that got access to their report did just one thing to improve the CO2 posture of their website? What difference is that going to make to us as a sector as a whole in that one year process?
Paul Marden: Because there will bound to be a few little things that you can do, knobs to twiddle and features to add on your website that will just improve that CO2 emissions posture just a little bit and make everybody better as a result of it.
Oz Austwick: Yeah. And I think it's really interesting that even though we haven't got the full data yet, and we've not put it together in any meaningful way, it's already changed the way we work as an agency. But not only that, there are other changes going on in the wider community as well, because the website briefs we're getting through from attractions are talking about this more. So I guess from a personal perspective, if you're putting together a brief for a new website or an app or some kind of new digital service, put this in there, ask that somebody pays some attention to the footprint and the impact of your new site and make it part of the decision making process.
Paul Marden: Procurement managers have the control. I absolutely believe that the person that holds the purse strings gets to set the direction of the project. And just like accessibility is always on, every tender, sustainability should be there. This is a easily, trivially measurable thing. And when procurement managers hold us to account, the industry will improve as a result of being held to account like that.
Oz Austwick: Yes. Now, the sustainability reporting isn't the only new thing that we're going to do. There's one more big thing that we're going to do as part of the survey to try and make. Make the data far more valid and applicable. Do you want to say what it is?
Paul Marden: Yeah, I'll take this one. Because this was an idea I had. It was an idea I had a few months ago. I would love to get real end consumer input into the survey. We asked attractions, how important is personalisation? Have you done user testing? How easy was it for people to traverse your website? We're actually going to go out and survey people who have visited a large attraction in the last year and ask them, how easy was it to buy your tickets? We could be asking them about personalisation. We could be asking them about, is sustainability a key deciding buying factor for you? There's lots of things that we could ask people as part of this consumer research piece that we're about to embark on.
Paul Marden: I think it's really exciting to be able to join up the voice of the consumer with the voice of the attractions in the Rubber Cheese Survey as a whole.
Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. Not only will it give us that knowledge from the other side of the transaction, but it'll let us know really very quickly whether the self reporting that people are doing as part of the survey is actually accurate. Is your view of how easy your website is to use, is that accurate? Is that the same view that people coming to your website for the first time have? Because we're all familiar with our own website and if you've designed the user experience, you probably think it's great and it may well be, but unless you actually test it and ask people, you can't know either way. So I think this is a really exciting thing to do and it allows us to kind of draw in more important information that can help us all as a sector improve.
Paul Marden: Completely. And we've got a little ask in terms of that, haven't we? We would love to hear from you if you have got input into that consumer research, if you've got ideas of things, we could be asking real people that go to real attractions about how they use the website. You know, let us know. We'd love to hear feedback either. You know, send us a message on Twitter, reach out by email. There's links all in the show notes that will help you to make contact with us. But please just make contact and let us know. We've got amazing feedback from the advisory board and we will be talking about this piece of research with the advisory board before the survey goes out to the real people. But you've got a chance at the moment to be able to input to that.
Paul Marden: So please do let us know what you think would be interesting.
Oz Austwick: And whilst we're asking things of you, I've got a few more things that we want to ask.
Paul Marden: Go on then. What do you want? What do you want?
Oz Austwick: Well, all sorts of things. But for today, if you haven't filled in the survey, please do go along to rubbercheese.com. There's a link on the homepage through to the survey. There are different surveys for different parts of the world. Just click on the link, fill it in. You don't have to do the whole thing. Even if it's a partial response, it's still helpful. So please go along, give it a try. I'm led to believe, and I haven't tested this so I'm not going to state for effect, but if you half fill in the survey and then go away and come back on the same computer using the same browser, you'll go back in at the point that you'd got to so you can finish it. It depends on your cookie settings, but that's what is claimed.
Oz Austwick: But even if it doesn't happen, you know, a half survey response is better than none.
Paul Marden: We'd also like you to nag your mates as well. You know, I've been messaging people that have been responding and so many of the marketers that are filling in the survey are part of communities of other marketers. They're parts of communities, regional communities, Wales communities, or they're parts of sector specific. There's so many different groups and organisations that are working together. If you can, please raise the profile of the survey, stick a link in your WhatsApp group with all the people that you work with around you. We would really appreciate that. Obviously, the more people that submit, the better the data set. The more money we'll donate to Kids in Museums as a result of what we do.
Paul Marden: And of course now everybody that submits will get their personalised sustainability report at the end as well, which is another great incentive to get involved.
Oz Austwick: I guess the other thing is that if you filled in the survey before and you don't think you've got time to do the whole thing again from scratch, do let us know because we can quite happily provide you with all of the previous answers that you've given that are relevant to this year's survey and then you can just update or fill in the gaps. We're very happy to do that if it would be helpful. And still for those multi site organisations, if that's an easier way for you, for us to provide you with a spreadsheet that you can just put data into, we're very happy to do that too.
Paul Marden: Absolutely. And the spreadsheet approach again lends itself very well. You don't have to answer everything. If you don't want to share information about the technology platforms you're using, that's fine. If you don't want to share information about your Google Analytics, that's fine. The more data that we get, even if it is partial data, it enriches what we've got and we get a better picture of the entire sector as a result of that. So, yeah, really keen to get input from more people. So that's our call to action. You've got one more thing you want touch on, don't you? You've got your book recommendation that you want to share with us. So tell us what your book is.
Oz Austwick: Well, before I do, there are a couple of things I have to say. The first is that I realise that this is tangentially connected to the visitor attraction sector. That'll become clear, I'm sure, as soon as I reveal the book. The other is that I am an absolute massive history geek. So the book I would like to recommend that if you haven't read this is The Mary Rose by Margaret Rule, which is the story of the excavation and recovery of the Mary Rose itself. I don't know how old you are, dear listener, but I remember sitting in the hall of my school, my primary school up in Yorkshire, with a big TV in a box on a stand with this on the BBC Live and watching it be raised from the depths. And that's kind of stuck with me.
Oz Austwick: So it's lovely to read the story of it from the person who kind of made it happen. And then when you've read the book, go down to Portsmouth and have a look because it is a visitor attraction.
Paul Marden: Now, I guess it helps you with diving the 4D because you get the fuller picture of the whole story and then you go and do dive the 4D experience and you get to experience a little bit of what that excavation was actually like. And I bet you like any good book to a movie. The book tells the story in much more detail than the movie ever can.
Oz Austwick: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt. In fairness, it's going to be tricky to get a copy of this book to somebody because I don't think it's in print anymore. So it will be a secondhand copy. I've checked. You can get them. Abe books has a few.
Paul Marden: Are you going to bankrupt me?
Oz Austwick: No, no. It's not one of those secondhand books. Don't worry, it's probably cheaper than a new one. Now all the booksellers that are listening are going to put their prices up. But, yeah, comment on Twitter. Sorry, Twitter x. If you want the book and the first person will send it out to.
Paul Marden: Yeah, so go find the show announcement, retweet it and say, I want Oz's book. And yep, we will find that and we will send a copy of the book. That will be a challenge for the team behind us that do all of the behind the scenes production to actually try and figure out how you order a secondhand book and get it delivered to somebody different. It's easy on Amazon. Not so easy on a secondhand book site, so that'll be interesting.
Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, eBay Books is owned by Amazon, so, you know, there'll be a way.
Paul Marden: I'm sure that's a wonderful book, is a wonderful location. If you haven't been before. It's an amazing attraction to go and visit. They've got a pretty good website as well. I think we've said it before.
Paul Marden: Yeah, they seem happy. Great to talk to you again. As always, our little fireside chats are very enjoyable. We do tend to ramble on. We've got one more episode left of Season 5, but planning is underway for season six in the autumn, so nearly we're in the home straight now.
Oz Austwick: Definitely do make sure you follow and you won't miss season six.
Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.
Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.
We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.
Kelly Molson is the Founder of Rubber Cheese, a user focused web design and development agency for the attraction sector. Digital partners to Eureka! The National Children’s Museum, Pensthorpe, National Parks UK, Holkham, Visit Cambridge and The National Marine Aquarium.Kelly regularly delivers workshops and presentations on sector focused topics at national conferences and attraction sector organisations including ASVA, ALVA, The Ticketing Professionals Conference and the Museum + Heritage Show.
As host of the popular Skip the Queue Podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions, she speaks with inspiring industry experts who share their knowledge of what really makes an attraction successful.Recent trustee of The Museum of the Broads.
Transcription:
Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. In this new monthly slot, Rubber Cheese CEO Paul Marden joins me to discuss different digital related topics. In this episode, we're answering your questions from the 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report, asking what more you'd like to see in this year's survey and sharing more on how you can get involved next time. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.
Kelly Molson: Hello.
Paul Marden: Well, hello.
Kelly Molson: This is nice. So the two of us haven't been together for a podcast episode for a while.
Paul Marden: It does feel like, well, happy new year to start with.
Kelly Molson: Way too late for that malarkey. We've just been busy, haven't we've got lots of exciting projects that are coming to. Well, I don't like to say the end, but they're coming to point of launch.
Paul Marden: The launch, yeah. The exciting bit.
Kelly Molson: The very exciting bit. So we've all been pulled here, there and everywhere. So I've had lovely guests to speak to and you've had a little bit of a break from this. But we're back. We're back.
Paul Marden: Absolutely.
Kelly Molson: And we're going to start like we always do with these ones. With what attraction have you visited most recently and what did you love about it?
Paul Marden: I have been to Mary Rose Museum and I went with a bunch of nine and ten year olds. We basically went down there for the Kids in Museums Takeover Day. It's one of the kind of showpiece Kids in Museums events that they run every year all around, putting the ownership of the museum into the hands of kids. I managed to wangle my way to Mary Rose, which is relatively close to me. And I took my daughter's class, who I run a coding club for. So interestingly, theme around our coding club this year is all around the arts and how you put art into StEm and make it steam just like an amazingly.
Kelly Molson: I can't believe how well that's worked out.
Paul Marden: It gets better. The very first session of our club was all about what is the job of a museum curator. And so we took that theme and went and took over the Mary Rose and became curators for a day. So the kids got to go around the museum and have fun and see all the cool stuff that's going on there. They did the 3D Dive, the Mary Rose experience, and it was amazing watching a bunch of nine and ten year olds reaching out and popping these bubbles that were on the 3D screen in front of them. And then they went off and they designed their own interactive display around whatever was the thing that excited them about the museum.
Paul Marden: So there was lots of dog themed ones because there's a dog that is the kind of subject of a lot of the kids stuff focused around Mary Rose. But there was all different sorts of interactive displays, augmented reality within the glass lift that looks onto the Mary Rose and how you could gamify it. The kids just had a whale of a time and I just strolled around the museum and watched them having fun and say, that wasn't a tough day at all.
Kelly Molson: I'm actually really jealous as well because were due to go and then you got the opportunity to go because of that thing happening and I still haven't been.
Paul Marden: I know. And it's an amazing place. We had so much fun. They welcomed us. We had all the education department looking after us and making us feel special. It was just such a brilliant day. Apart from trying to park a minibus with 15 kids somewhere near the Mary Rose, which scared me whitlets.
Kelly Molson: Oh, you actually drove a bus?
Paul Marden: I did not drive the bus, no, I was a navigator. I had to find the parking spot. It's a level of responsive.
Kelly Molson: You were bus driver dad as well that day.
Paul Marden: There's a character in Peppa Pig, isn't there? I can't remember who she is, but she works in the supermarket. She drives the minibus.
Kelly Molson: This rabbit is the hardest working rabbit you'll ever meet in your whole.
Paul Marden: Exactly.
Kelly Molson: No, I'm going to put her on par. Sorry, I'm actually going to put her on par with Mrs. Rabbit, who has got hundreds of kids who doesn't work, but she has to look after those. So she is probably the hardest working rabbit that you'll ever find. So there you go. Digress into Peppa Pig. You can see where my world is right now, can't you? That just gave you an insight into where I'm spending my time.
Paul Marden: So tell me about where have you been recently?
Kelly Molson: I have been recently to the Museum of the Broads. I don’t ever really spoken about this on the podcast that much. But I am a trustee of the Museum of the Broads and it is a lovely museum. It does not get as much love and attention as it should. So I felt that today was a good opportunity to highlight it. It's wonderful. It's on the broads, obviously, it's in Stallham. And it is such incredible value for money because you can buy a ticket to the museum and a boat trip. And the boat trips are phenomenal. Last year these were really popular, so they introduced some afternoon evening boat trips where you could go and spot kingfishers because that stretch of the broads is absolutely like prime Kingfisher viewing area.
Kelly Molson: I have only ever seen one Kingfisher out in real life, and they're so quick, like it was a flash of blue and I didn't have my glasses on it. She wasn't going to see anything in great detail. That is incredible. On one of the trips last year, on the boat trip, they saw ten kingfishers. It might have been the same kingfisher, just like, who knows? I'm going to say ten. I'm going to take the ten. But the museum itself is wonderful. Some of the artefacts they have there are just really fun and really engaging. And obviously they've got lots of information about the boats and the broads themselves and what the broads were traditionally used for and how they've developed over the years. It's a lovely little museum. It's volunteer led. They have, I think, two or three members of paid team there.
Kelly Molson: So much work goes into the management and the development of those museums when it's volunteer led as well. So it's lovely. It is really lovely.
Paul Marden: We both started doing trusteeship type stuff at the same time. So I started at Kids in Museums because I wanted to see a broad view of things. You started at Museum of the Broads because you wanted to see the inside running of the museum itself. What has the experience been like for you?
Kelly Molson: It’s so different. It's such a different environment to what I'm used to. So, I mean, it won't surprise you to know that museums are not quite as dynamic as an agency, or they're just not as fast paced as an agency. So I think the speed at which some things happen is I find it a bit of a challenge, if I'm honest, because we're used to kind of going, should we try this? Okay, let's talk it. Okay, great. Let's not someone run with it. And it's sort of just, I don't know, there's a speed at which stuff happens in an agency that it's incomparable to any other organisation. So it's nice in some ways that kind of take a bit of time to kind of think things through. I've really enjoyed understanding about all of the different facets that are required within an agency, within a museum. Sorry.
Kelly Molson: And the things that you have to understand about. Even when we had an office, there's a level of HR and a level of safety management that you have to do, but it's a whole other level when it's a museum and you've got members of the public coming along. So that's been really interesting to understand and learn about. I've really enjoyed kind of looking at how they're developing certain areas of the museum as well. So when there's a new exhibition that's on. So last year, the Pippa Miller exhibition launched. Pippa Miller was a really famous artist that was connected to the broads, and the museum was entrusted with some of her artwork when she passed, and it's the only place you can come and see it. It's a wonderful exhibition.
Kelly Molson: So understanding about how those exhibitions are developed and put on and watching those happen as well. And there's another one this year that will happen, which is an exhibition on peat, which I know that probably doesn't sound that interesting, but it really is my mate Pete. No, not your mate Pete. No, actual Peat. Peat soil Pete. So, yeah, that's been really nice to see and kind of understand how those things progress and are developed and the ideas that go into them. It's fascinating.
Paul Marden: Cannot imagine the effort that goes into curating a whole exhibition like that.
Kelly Molson: It's vast. And I will give a huge shout out to Nicola, the curator at the Museum of the Broads, because she works tirelessly there to just bring these stories to life. That's essentially what they do. They bring the stories of the broads to life. This is a little plea from me, actually. A little shout out to everyone that's listening. If everybody listening to this podcast, I mean, we get hundreds of people listen to these episodes. If everyone went and bought a ticket from the Museum of Broada that's listening to this episode today, it would make such a massive difference to that little museum. So if you are thinking about booking a little staycation this year, head to Norfolk, get a ticket to the Museum of the Broads, go and check out the broads themselves.
Kelly Molson: It is just a wonderful experience to go and see that museum and take a boat trip down the broads.
Paul Marden: There's a very nice place nearby to stay as well, isn't?
Kelly Molson: Yeah, I mean, a certain podcast host does have a lovely little place in Norfolk that you could rent out, which is literally 25 minutes from this museum as well. Just heads up.
Paul Marden: Incidental.
Kelly Molson: If you want to give me a shout, I can put you in the direction of 28 Millgate. Or you could just search that on Google. No, honestly, genuinely, if you are thinking about having a staycation and you're heading that way, put it top of your list because it's a lovely afternoon out. Thank you. Thanks for listening to my podcast.
Paul Marden: So what are we actually talking about today then?
Kelly Molson: In this episode, we are going to be answering some of the questions that we've received from the 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report. So, as you can imagine, we launch the report, we do the survey. All you lovely people fill in our survey for us and we launch the report, which gives you an analysis of what that survey data has meant. And it's a huge undertaking. It really is a huge undertaking. And I don't say that lightly. It's massive. It takes over our whole lives. And there is so much data in the report that we send out, but there's always questions, there's always more, and there's always more that we can do as well. And I think it just is an awful lot of work. Right.
Kelly Molson: So what happens is we launch it goes out, people digest it, and then they send us emails and they say, “This is really great. Thank you for this bit. Is there any insight into this thing?” And there's quite a lot of those emails that come in and most of them we probably can answer. It just, again, takes a bit of work to go back and look at the data and crunch the data and see if there is any answers to those questions. So we have had some of these questions in and we thought, well, let's do it as a podcast. And then everybody can hear the answers to these questions because it might be something that other people are thinking about as well.
Kelly Molson: So we're going to talk through some of the ones that have been sent in, and then we are going to give you a bit of a heads up about what's happening with this year's report and survey and talk a little bit about that. Sound good?
Paul Marden: Does sound good. I need to get my geek hat on my numbers. Geek hat.
Kelly Molson: It's time for Paul to nerd out. I will be asking the questions. Paul will be nerding out on the answers. Right. Okay. One of the questions we had in was how many respondents were return respondents from 2022 to 2023?
Paul Marden: Yeah. This was a question that somebody asked in relation to. They saw some changes, I think it was in terms of ticketing systems that were being used and they wanted to know, “Oh, if there's been a change in the ticketing systems that were used, could that because we've got different group of people, or is it the same people changing systems?” So, yeah, I dug into that. It was actually relatively hard to figure this out because what people type in as the name of their attraction is not always exactly the same. It's sometimes different people, sometimes they'll write the same name in a slightly different way. So actually, comparing apples with apples turned out to be quite challenging and I had to change some of the data to normalise it between the two groups.
Paul Marden: I could see they were the same attraction, although their names were subtly different. What I worked out was two different views of the same thing. But essentially, in the 2023 data set, 20% of the respondents were return respondents from the previous year. But of course, the 2023 data set was much bigger than the 2022 data set. So if you look at it from the other direction, how many people that filled in a survey in 22? Filled in a survey in 23? It's 50% of the 2022 respondents replied in 2023. So we had a good return rate? Yeah, for sure. But there was 50% of people didn't reply. So that made me think, there's a job of work to do this year.
Kelly Molson: Where did you go 50% of you. Cheeky little monkeys.
Paul Marden: And they vary. Some of them are smaller institutions, some of them are much bigger institutions. There's the reasonable amount of movement of people in the sector, isn't there? So you can easily imagine. Actually, there was an interesting one there, isn't it? What if I were to match the names of the respondents? Did we actually get a reasonable number of returners, but they were in a different job with a different institution?
Kelly Molson: Yeah, that's really a good point, actually, because I do know that people, I know people personally, that I know that they've moved on and gone to different places, and actually, some moved out of the sector and moved into completely different roles altogether.
Paul Marden: There is a decent cohort of people that returned and responded in 23, but the 23 data set was much bigger. So when you do see swings between 22 and 23, some of that is just a sample size thing with the best will in the world. We talk to lots of people and lots of people respond with data to us, but we have not captured the whole entire set of all attractions in the UK, and so we will get sampling errors out. If one year we sample a different group of people than we did the previous year, the comparisons can be a little bit harder.
Paul Marden: If we could just get more people responding and we had more data, then you'll get that the role of chance and the role of sampling errors will have less impact on the data and you'll be able to compare more year on year outcomes.
Kelly Molson: Yeah. Okay, well, there's your call out to get involved this year we'll let you know how.
Paul Marden: There's going to be lots of those.
Kelly Molson: Okay, second question. Can we break down the responses in the other type category? This is an interesting one, isn't it? Because we detailed out as many different visitor attraction types as we possibly could think of or find on internet and gave everybody the opportunity to be able to select what they specifically were, but we still had a huge amount of people put other. What's the reasoning behind that?
Paul Marden: Can I give you facts and then tell you what I think the reasoning is? Yeah. So there's some things that I know. Okay. 37% of all respondents mark themselves as the other. It skews when you drill into that 37%. It's a big group of people. It was like the second or third largest group of people in the report itself. They tended to be attractions that had lower visitor numbers. So they were under 100,000 visitor numbers in that other group. So it was about 45% of people were under 100. About 37% were between 100 and a million visitors. Those are the things we know. Then I started having a play with the data.
Paul Marden: So what if I were to group those people that were in other because they had the opportunity to type some stuff in for free text box, and could I make a grouping out of that? One thing that I did notice, and this is observation as opposed to fact. Okay. So I could see many of the places that chose other because we didn't allow them to choose multiple types and they were an attraction that had multiple things. So one of them was one of our clients. And they have a historic house. They have a guest house, they have a beach, they have outdoors activities. They've got.
Kelly Molson: So how do you categorise yourself based on all of those? Actually, with that client, I probably would have said historic house because that was what I would have put my hat on for that one.
Paul Marden: But then I met somebody yesterday. Not too dissimilar. Yeah. Primarily a historic house, but it's a historic house that has a hotel, bar, golf on the site. And if you ask them, it would totally depend on who you spoke to as to what they primarily were. There were people that ran the historic house who would have you believe that they were primarily a historic house, but there were other people that would say, “Well, actually the revenue is generated elsewhere in the organisation and primarily we are a hotel and golf destination and alongside we have a historic house.” So I think there was a nuance in the way that we asked the question, please choose what type of attraction you are. And the only option for the people that had lots of these things was to say other.
Paul Marden: And actually, I think going forwards we probably need to say, what are you primarily, and do you have other things and give people the option to choose multiples?
Kelly Molson: Yeah, I was going to say, because even if you put multi, it causes the same challenge, doesn't it? Without being.
Paul Marden: But when I had to play around with that group and I tried to assign them to things partly based on what they replied on their questionnaires and partly by looking at their websites and having a guess, a lot of them had some element of outdoor activity. A lot of them had food and drink. There was a large group that weren't multi activity. I don't know what a better way to describe those historic houses with other things going on, but there was a decent size of people or decent sized number of attractions that were tv themed and they were primarily a behind the scenes tour or something themed around a tele program. And we didn't have that. There was nothing like that in any of our categorisations.
Paul Marden: So again, it just comes down to refining the questionnaire every year to try to improve what we've got. Give people the option to choose multiples and include some other groups. But avoid getting to a point when you look at all the categories we gave, because you mentioned, we gave lots of categories, there was a very long tail. There was a large number of the actual categories where it had one or two attractions within that grouping. And then it's like, is that a meaningful way of slicing and dicing the data? So we have to be really careful not to throw too many categories at it, but at the same time give people some choices.
Kelly Molson: Yeah. You also have to feel that the people have to feel that they are included within this as well. So if those one or two people came along and they couldn't choose what they were, would they feel excluded from it?
Paul Marden: Yeah. Would they drop out? Because this clearly isn't for me.
Kelly Molson: Exactly. I'm all for having more choice in that. It's a tick box. That's fine. There's other stuff that we can take out, don't worry.
Paul Marden: And that's because you're not looking at the data. Add more numbers.
Kelly Molson: I'm all for cutting stuff out if it makes life easier for people and more people will be able to fill it in and that. But I think that one particular thing is not one that we need to cut back on.
Paul Marden: No, I agree with you. Totally agree.
Kelly Molson: Were all attractions who responded to the survey paid for, or how do those ecommerce results break down between those that have an entry fee and those that are free? This was a good question.
Paul Marden: Yeah, it really was. In many of the questions that we've got, some people chose not to answer us. Within this group, there's a group of people in the whole set of data that chose not to answer this, either because they didn't know or they felt they didn't want to answer the question. But if we take everybody that reported an entry fee, 15% of those people were free of charge. So they ticked the box that said they had no entry fee. That's already a fairly small group amongst the whole data set. So we're asking questions here that zero in on a smaller and smaller group. This sounds like I'm giving excuses before I give you my homework. Yeah. But as the groups get smaller, then the role of chance and sample error means that the data becomes less and less reliable.
Paul Marden: And I got to be honest, within that 15%, there was a large number of people that didn't tell us a conversion rate. So you're down into a very small number of people now. 85% of the free to enter attractions didn't tell us what their conversion rate was or said they didn't know or couldn't measure it.
Kelly Molson: So that's interesting in itself, because this is some of the things that we've been talking about in terms of the conversion rate and how we measure that effectively, because some of those free museums obviously will have probably smaller teams, less budget, less ability, maybe just less understanding of what we're asking in the first place. My assumption is that they will use off the shelf ticketing platforms that they might not be able to get the conversion rate from. So you've got that limitation in the data that they can actually then supply us because they genuinely just don't have it, they don't know it.
Paul Marden: Or because they're free. They don't think about the concept of conversion. But in that instance, how much does it matter the number of people that come to your website and then the number of people that actually buy? If there is no ticketing, if you're free to enter and you don't even need a ticket to pre book to enter, does it even matter? And I would argue absolutely, it definitely does. Because instinctively, I would believe that there is definitely a relationship between the number of people that visit your website and the number of people that visit your attraction. And if you can improve the ratio between those two, you'll get more bookfalls through the attraction.
Paul Marden: And even if you're free to enter a considerable portion of the money that you make out of the attraction is going to be from donations, from people walking through the door. It will be food and beverage sales, it will be gift shops, it will be memberships that they join to get other things. All of those things need bums on seats, don't they? If you don't get bums on seats, you don't generate that revenue. But it can be hard, I think, to join the dots between that big number of people that visit your website, hopefully, and the number of people that are actually walking through the door and creating a correlation between, or creating a relationship between the two.
Kelly Molson: It's when there's no purchase made from that thing to that thing, there's almost nothing to tie them together.
Paul Marden: Yeah, but it makes it harder to think about which, when you're a small attraction in those sorts of circumstances, if it's harder to think about, then it's not going to be a priority for you. But I would argue it would be a super important thing to do because you tweak those. We're all about tweaking the dials, aren't we? We're all about trying to increase.
Kelly Molson: Marginal gains.
Paul Marden: Exactly. And in that instance, it can be hard to see the point. But I definitely believe there really is a point to it. If I go one more thing, I would say, and this is where the data.
Paul Marden: I don't think the data is reliable, but were into this small group of people that we had, 15% of people say that they were free, and in that group we had a small number of people tell us what their conversion rate was, and it varied. There were some attractions that had a 1% conversion rate. There were some attractions that chose the 5% conversion rate, which was the higher end of the bracket, which was the average over the whole group. I bet you there's more data that would help us to understand what the difference between the 1% and the 5% was. Is it chance or is there something materially different between those two types of institution? I don't know, but there's a debate there.
Paul Marden: And is it valuable for us to investigate that there's only so much time to be able to put to these things?
Kelly Molson: Well, I think this is why it's important. Well, this is why we value people asking the questions about the report. This is why we encourage people to give us feedback and to send us these questions in, because it all adds to the conversation and it all helps us make this better and better every year because we can understand what you send us a question and then that gives us an understanding of what's really important for you right now. So we can start to incorporate some of the ways to get the answer to that question into the survey and the report for this year.
Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely.
Kelly Molson: So send us more questions. As a midway to this podcast, definitely send us some more questions. You can send them to me, Kelly@rubbercheese.com, or you can send them to paulm@rubbercheese.com but whatever you do, just send them in. And then we can again start to look at how we incorporate some of those questions into this year's.
Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely.
Kelly Molson: Okay, next question. It's around ticketing platforms. One question came in and they noted the apparent percentage drop in use of access gamma in the past year. So what we saw was Digitickets and Merack both seemed to kind of hold their share, and they're UK based. With over 70% of the 188 respondents UK based and about a quarter of European. We found it a little odd that there was such a drop here in such a short space of time and wondered if you had any further insight. Interesting one, isn't it, because we all noted that access had dropped off a little bit.
Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to caveat this again. I can go into more depth and understand the differences between the two, but I would caveat it that if we had more responsive, we could be more confident in the reliability of the difference across years. But we've gone from a large, but a sample in 22, a bigger sample in 23. The 23 sample included some of the 22 people. But really, I think what the question I was getting at is how many of those people actually switch ticketing platforms between that group? And I think that is unlikely to be the reason why we saw these changes. Yeah, of course people change ticketing platform, but it's the beating heart of the business. They don't change it on a whim and they don't change them dramatically very quickly. Yeah.
Paul Marden: By the way, there's no evidence to this in that respect. There could be changes, but my instinct is it's unlikely to be a wild change on the basis of the number of people because it's just not that easy to.
Kelly Molson: No. And we speak to agencies, our own clients have been through these processes, and we know how long they take and we know how embedded those systems are within an organisation and how difficult it actually is to switch from one to another and the time frame that it takes. So I would agree with you.
Paul Marden: On the basis of that. I think the differences are more easily explained by we got more different people included. And we're seeing more of what the sector buys. Now, whether, when we get into 24, whether we see another swing again. Well, that's entirely plausible, because the sample sizes, they're not big enough to be statistically valid. They give an indication, but they will suffer from chance in some areas. And it could just be the group of people that we've got, we know within the year demonstrates the usage of the ticketing platforms within the group of people that responded within that year, but unlikely to be comparable across the years. Only 20% of this year's data were responses that had been given in 22 as well.
Paul Marden: So we've only got a small group. Within that group the data has changed dramatically in that year, mainly with people telling us they chose an other not listed system. So it was not one of the big ones that were familiar with, and no one reported anything in that group last year. So this is where you know as well as I do, we get people asking us for copies of their data that they've submitted, because there's a big period of timing between when they submit stuff and the report being published, and then they want to see what they did, what they gave to us, don't they? So people remembering what they wrote last year and putting it in again this year, it's no wonder we see differences between the two year groups. Apart from other not listed, which was by far like a country mile than largest number of responses.
Paul Marden: The biggest absolute change in the number of responses within the repeating group was digitickets. Digitickets had more people within that returning group saying that they were using their ticketing platform.
Kelly Molson: And I can't remember this off the top of my head, but where people are selecting other not listed, are we giving them the opportunity to write who they are using? So did we give them an open.
Paul Marden: Such an unfair question? I can't remember the answer.
Kelly Molson: I genuinely can't remember. But if we didn't, well, then we need to, because that space, I mean, there's a lot of ticketing platforms already, but there are new ones popping up all over and there are ones that are specifically focused on accessibility for an example. There are ones that are relatively similar in terms of what they're doing to everyone else, just packaged up in a different way. So it would just be interesting to see some of the names that people were putting forward and where people are swinging to.
Kelly Molson: We know that there's Tessitura, for example, and Spektrix that are used quite predominantly in theatre world now. People have always talked really positively about those two platforms and it would be interesting to see if they are looking to make that transition over into the attractions world.And maybe some of these people are starting to kind of move over to those. Who knows?
Paul Marden: There's a few systems lots of people know about because they're not just pure ticketing, are they? They're ticketing. So they manage the ticket inventory, they do online sales, they do walk ups, they do EPOS, they manage a shop, they manage a catering, they do everything to operate the entire attraction. And then there were other systems that focus purely on ecommerce and the sale of the tickets themselves online. There are other people that focus purely on the EPOS offering. And actually, there's a lot of complexity within these systems that go to running the attraction itself. And maybe again, we need to give people more choice about what they choose and give them the opportunity to choose multiple things. Because we might say, do you use gamma or do you use Merac or do you use Digitickets?
Paul Marden: And there may well be people that use digitickets for their e commerce sales, and they might use Merac for their membership, or they're running the epochs in the shops and their food and beverage. I don't think we give people the opportunity to have the nuance of selecting multiple things that they use.
Kelly Molson: Yeah, for like, I literally just had a conversation with someone who uses Digitickets for their ticket in, but Merac for their K-Three, for their till. So, yeah, I totally see where we need to do that. Okay, good. Two more questions. Is there future scope to develop comparisons against other science centres?
Paul Marden: Yes is the short answer, and yes, we have done that. It's quite interesting because you and I both have been talking about this year's survey at different places and the science centres one is a good example. It’s good because I was the one talking. Well, it's good because I was the one, but. So I went to the Association of Science and Discovery Centres conference in Belfast. I talked about that one of the pods just recently, and I had a table talk where I was talking about essentially observations that I found about the data about science centres. But you've done talks in numerous different locations.
Kelly Molson: All over the place. I was all over the place last year. Here, there and everywhere.
Paul Marden: Slicing and dicing the data to talk to the group of people that you were talking to. So you were in Ireland and you talked about comparisons of the attractions that we've got in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. And then you talked to know that's a different slice of larger attractions. And in both cases, were slicing and dicing the data and trying to find what made that group of people special or what were the observations that we had, weren't they?
Kelly Molson: That was one of the nice things about the report this year, because the data set was so much larger, we could make the things that were talking about so much more specific for people. So the ALVA talk was really great, actually. So I was very kindly invited along to speak at one of the ALVA council meetings. And it was at Bletchley Park, oh my goodness. In their new auditorium that were the first group to speak in there. It was wonderful, such a good experience.
Kelly Molson: But that was lovely because I was able to talk about how ALVA members are performing and give them a specific breakdown of the things that they're doing well, some of the things that they potentially not doing so well, and give them some real insight into how they can improve on the things when they're not doing so well. So that was lovely. And then the same at AVEA. It was great to be able to give, again, a breakdown of how irish attractions are performing in terms of the rest of the country, but also showcase attractions that are doing really brilliantly from those areas. So actually in the talks I could highlight a specific Irish attraction that was doing an absolutely phenomenal job in terms of great website, great conversion rate, all of those things.
Kelly Molson: And it was really nice to be able to shine spotlight on people this year as well.
Paul Marden: So pick out some examples of that. Yeah, so let's just pick out some of the examples from the science centre. So the ASDC members, it was interesting because ASDC members tended to have higher football than when you compared it to the whole group of respondents that we had. That surprised me. ASDC members tended to have higher entry fees than all respondents. ASDC members tended to have substantially higher mobile usage than all respondents. So you're up into 90% of traffic for ASDC members or ASDC members tended to have upwards of 89%, 90% mobile traffic, whereas when you look at the whole group of everybody, it was down into 60%. So still the majority, but not as big a majority.
Kelly Molson: That's interesting.
Paul Marden: So again, is this chance or is there something interesting about the audience that buy tickets to go to a science centre. Are they genuinely different than people that go to the all set?
Kelly Molson: Well, yeah. Is this stereotypically because someone is really interested in science and technology, therefore they are more digitally advanced potentially as an audience. And that's why that's higher. That's interesting.
Paul Marden: ASDC members tend to spend less of their gross profit on marketing. 18% of ASDC members spent more than 5% of their turnover on marketing, whereas when you look at the whole group, 24% of all respondents spent more than 5%. So it's interesting, isn't it, this difference in the outcomes and the difference for the inputs. ASDC members were much more likely to track their conversion rate, but most of them didn't track their cart abandonment rate. So they don't know how many people were giving up partway through. ASDC members were more likely to have a top level conversion rate. And of the ones that did tell us what their cart abandonment rate, it was more likely to be lower than the average. They updated their websites more frequently and they tend to spend more on their websites each year than the average.
Paul Marden: So there was markedly different things that happened across the different groups when you looked at ALVA, much larger organisations. So footfall is higher because that's a minimum entry criteria. They spend more on marketing and they have better outcomes. They had better conversion rates than average.
Kelly Molson: Unsurprising.
Paul Marden: Unsurprising completely. But what was interesting was within that group, the averages marked quite relative poor performance. So there were some examples where there were attractions spending a large amount on their site, but achieving poorer conversion rates than the average.
Kelly Molson: Hopefully those aren’t clients. Fingers crossed.
Paul Marden: So yeah, there's group averages and you can see differences by the different groups. I think in future, wouldn't it be interesting if potentially we did this sort of analysis based on the type of organisation? If you're a museum, are you more likely to have a higher conversion rate than you are if you're all respondents?
Kelly Molson: Well, this is the thing.
Paul Marden: What's of interest?
Kelly Molson: Yeah, exactly. We can say, oh, this is interesting. Wouldn't this be useful to know? But actually is it useful to know for you? One of the things that we did talk about doing was doing a regional breakdown of how attraction is performing. And I think that's probably on the cards for the next month or so to get that out. We raised that and got some quite good feedback on having that. So that's definitely top of the list.
Kelly Molson: But yeah, again, are these things going to be useful for you? We've always had the ethos that any kind of information or support documentation or essentially our marketing has to be useful for you. Right? What's the point otherwise? We need to know what you need. So more questions, please more. Do you have this? Can we have this? If we can't do it, we'll tell you, but if we can do it, we'll damn well work hard to get you it.
Paul Marden: You can just imagine that some people find the full written port to be report to be really useful. It gives a fixed set of slices and dices and it gives interesting insights and it gives recommendation. But people might be interested more in more group comparisons or geographical comparisons with less of a large report and more of a. Well, I want to see a white paper about my sector or my location or what is special about me compared to everybody else, as opposed to telling me everything that is good in the sector. Where do we focus our attention to have the best value for people at the end of this?
Kelly Molson: Good. Last question. Is there a correlation between conversion rate and visitor numbers?
Paul Marden: It's really interesting because this got me playing with the data. I'm all over a pivot table in excel. All right, so I did loads of analysis.
Kelly Molson: I am not.
Paul Marden: No. We've got our strengths and weaknesses and complement each other very well, I think when I did this first time round and I was working with a team of people that were analysing data, but I was slicing and dicing in different ways and I looked at these things and I thought there was no great relationship. But when this question came in, I had another stab at reorganising the data. And actually I did a heat map version of what is your average sales conversion rate? And we've got like zero to one to two, three to four to five and more than five. And then what is your annual visitor numbers in groups?
Paul Marden: And actually, the larger the annual footfall on site, the more likely you were to have a high conversion rate.
Kelly Molson: Just for our listeners, this data is quite difficult to visualise. We've got a graph, we've got some pre pictures that will explain this better, which we will put out on social media. If you follow our Twitter account, or if you're connected with us on LinkedIn, or follow our LinkedIn Rubber Cheese, or Skip the Queue LinkedIn pages, we'll put all of that on there. What we'll also do as well is when we edit this podcast, we always do a video. The videos don't get a lot of love, but there's loads of videos up on our YouTube. So head over to the Rubber Cheese YouTube channel and within this episode we will insert what we're talking about as well. So it's just a bit easier to digest.
Paul Marden: So yeah, there is definitely a relationship between these two factors. The more footfall there is, the more likely you are to have a high conversion rate. Just intuitively, they must be related variables. This is not just a relationship between the two. There is somehow one is feeding into the other the more footfall you have, the more budget you're going to have, the more you'll be able to invest in marketing, the more you invest in marketing, you'll have more people focusing on different elements of your marketing and you'll have more budget to spend on digital people that can focus on conversion rates and marginal gains. I don't know whether that's true. The data doesn't prove that. That's just my instinct that spending money on people like me is probably a worthwhile investment. But that's just instinct. There's no proof for that.
Paul Marden: The heat map shows there's a relationship, but there's loads of factors involved in what goes on. As I said to you before, spending more money does not guarantee you great outputs. And you have to measure these things, make regular changes, because just because you've got a large number of people coming through the door does not guarantee you a high conversion rate. And you need to graft to get to the point where your website is converting as best it possibly can. One major redesign does not an increased conversion rate may you need to do lots of little things regularly to nudge it in the right direction.
Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's just the start. Yeah. That comes back to what I said at the beginning about. I was just about to say we're at the end of the project. I'm like, no, we're not star of the project because the project is launching. That's the starting point for the rest of the process.
Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely.
Kelly Molson: Oh, this has been really good. Well, look, listeners, hopefully you found that useful. Hopefully some of the listeners that are listening, we've answered your questions as well. We'll send this out to all the people that did ask the questions specifically as well. But yeah, coming back to what we've said, is there something that is a burning question from you, from the data that we've already released? Is there something that would be so incredibly useful for you that we haven't released that we might potentially have? We just don't know. Or we don't know that you need it. And what does this year's survey hold and what would be useful for the survey and the report to hold for you this year? So we are at the point now where we're gearing up for the 2024 survey.
Kelly Molson: Last year we launched it in May at the fabulous Museum and Heritage show. Plans are afoot at the moment for when we launch it, but nothing is diarised yet. So it's a really good opportunity to get involved and have your say about what you'd love to see in it this year.
Paul Marden: Yeah. There's some key themes that have come out of our kind of retrospective. We've been belly button gazing and questioning what do we do next year? And there's obvious things that come out of it. One of our big things was we want to simplify 2024. We asked too many too complex questions last year and it took too long for people to submit their responses. And that's not fair.
Kelly Molson: It's a big ask that we're asking of you to trust us with your data as it is. We don't want you sitting around for like half an hour having to fill it all out.
Paul Marden: So we want to simplify, we want less questions, and we're going to look at potentially a different questionnaire platform. We've done different platforms each year in the last two years and I don't think we found the right answer yet. So that might be an area that we try and simplify things. My instinct of, and this is just based on my own struggles with life. Okay. I am struggling with Google Analytics 4 for everybody. All of my data has moved and I don't know how to answer my questions. And that data that's in GA4, it's the core of the questions that we ask in the questionnaire. And I'm thinking, if I do this every day, what must it be like for all of you guys listening? So what can we do to help you understand how to gather the data and how to submit it?
Paul Marden: Because there's obviously going to be a disparity, isn't there, between people that do this every day and people that do this as part of a bigger job and they don't do it all the time and they need advice and guidance.
Kelly Molson: Yeah. So one of the ideas that's been floating around is that we actually put on little workshop or little webinars, which it shows you how to go and get the data that actually is needed to fill in the survey. And then that's with you. It's a reference point. You can keep hold of that for the following years and the following, the subsequent years. And we might look at, we've got a brilliant circle of fabulous suppliers that we work with that are all attractions focused, and so we could potentially partner up with them and run the workshops and do something like that.
Paul Marden: The questions that we're asking, the data that we're gathering is likely to be marketers' dream dashboards anyway. So it's not just of use to the survey itself, it's of use to your day to day month to month reporting and demonstrating the efficacy of what you're doing. We want to increase the number of people that are responding from large multi site organisations. So the plea call to action here for digital markets is in large multi sites. We were interested in talking to you about. If you've got 50 odd sites that you manage ticketing for and multiple attractions all over the country, filling in the questionnaire based form approach that we've given may not be the right way for you to share data with us. No, we're really flexible. We want data. We want to ingest more data because it improves the quality of the responses.
Paul Marden: So we'll be completely flexible around what different large multi site organisations can provide and the method with which it makes most sense for them to provide it.
Kelly Molson: So what are we doing? We're doing a vocal shout out here to National Trust, English Heritage, et cetera, to say if you want to be part of the survey and the subsequent report and the process that we're offering you, it doesn't work. You're not going to sit there 50 times, however many sites you've got and fill in this data. That's ridiculous. We can give you a better process of doing that and we can work with you one on one to work out how that works best for you as well.
Paul Marden: Completely.
Kelly Molson: If you do want to be involved, don't let the process of how we collect the data put you off. We can solve that challenge for you.
Paul Marden: Shout out, call to action. Really for everybody that submitted last year and would be thinking about this year's survey is tell us what key themes are of interest to you. We have what we think is interesting and we'll follow our noses and ask questions and ruble around the data to try and find the answers. But we don't know what you want as well as you know what you want. So tell us, as you said, Kelly, ask questions about what you'd like to see, but tell us what you'd like us to do. We might be able to do something really easily based on the data that we've already got. We might need to ask another question. There was a question that somebody asked that weren't able to answer.
Paul Marden: They wanted to know whether you were primarily educationally focused as an institution or primarily focused on selling tickets, whether that had an impact on your conversion rate. And actually, without us guessing, it's impossible for us to answer that question. And what's the point in us guessing because we're going to give you meaningless data if we ask the right questions. What's the primary focus of your website? What are the secondary focuses of your website? If we do that, then we might be able to slice and dice the data. So ask us the questions now because we can use that to influence what questions we include in the survey.
Kelly Molson: I would add to also as well, if you are well, to say thank you. We had a phenomenal amount of support with the survey last year and the report. But for us, being able to move from 70 respondents in year one to nearly 200 in year two, the difference in that was all of the membership organisations that supported. It's a mammoth task. There's no way I could have done that on my own just by sending it lots of people and hitting people up on LinkedIn and posting across social media. The biggest difference there is the support we've had. I mean, ALVA, ASVA have been huge supporters of us from the start, which we're super grateful for this year. We had AVEA come on board and help us. We've had AIM help us. We had ACE help us.
Paul Marden: We had ASDC.
Kelly Molson: ASDC. I mean there were just so many. I've got a huge list of all of the attractions and all of the kind of Hampshire's best attractions and these smaller regional attraction organisations that have supported Devon's top attractions. Without their support, we could not have done that, made that happen. So I guess what I'm asking for is continued support, please, would be great. And are there any other organisations out there that we should be talking to? And if there's any listening that haven't been involved in helping us distribute the survey this year, if you're up for it, give us a shout. I mean, the benefit to your members is phenomenal, right? What we produce for them and it's all free. It's all for free. Come and get it.
Paul Marden: That is a nice segue because yes, it's all for free, but it doesn't cost nothing. And actually what we would also like help with is sponsorship for 2024. So if there are organisations around the listening public, as it were, that would be interested in supporting the work that we do on this and would like to influence and help guide what we do, then we would be really keen on talking to people that would like to sponsor and that sponsorship could be gifting kind. So some people might be able to help us by doing things with us. Some people might be able to help us by financially supporting the data analysis or the production of reports or production of specific analyses of a slice of the sector that is of interest to them.
Paul Marden: There's lots of ways in which people could support the work that we do. And obviously the more support that we get, the bigger we can make this thing, because it is. I mean, it's a herculean task that you dreamt up two and a half, three years ago, isn't it? And you did the first one and it was amazing and you got a decent number of respondents and I think you were both amazed at the number of people that gave us data and downloaded the report and interacted with us. And then were blown away in 23. But we need to do more. There's a market for this. There's a value in what we're doing. It's not just chance. It wasn't a crackpot idea you had three years ago to do this.
Kelly Molson: It was not a crackpot idea about it at all. No, it wasn't a crackpot idea. It's really nice, actually. You've just given me a really good flashback, actually. The Museum and Heritage Show has played like a part in this for years, actually, because the survey itself launched last year at the MandH. But the previous year I sat down at the MandH and had a chat with Bernard Donoghue about. I've got this idea, Bernard, and I think this is good. I think this would deliver some real good value to the sector. Would ALVA be happy to help get the word out and stuff? And that was where it started. So isn't that funny that's a connection? I'd forgotten all about that. It's not crackpot. It is amazing and I'm so happy that we've been able to produce this.
Kelly Molson: The value that it delivers to the sector, I get. People tell me about the value. So this is not me going, it's definitely delivering value. The feedback that we've had has been so incredibly positive on it and it's just been wonderful to be part of that. So let's make next year's bigger and even better. But maybe some less questions so it doesn't take you as long.
Paul Marden: Yes, more rows in my spreadsheet, less columns in my spreadsheet.
Kelly Molson: Less time taken up. If you can do it over a cup of tea and a biscuit, then that's perfect, right?
Paul Marden: I reckon so.
Kelly Molson: Hopefully that's going to produce some good value today and we'll see you next time.
Paul Marden: Cheers. Take care.
Kelly Molson: Bye.
Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned.
Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.
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Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. These chats are fun, informative, and hopefully always interesting. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.
In today's episode, I speak with Ben Thompson. Ben is chief storytelling officer at 9 Degrees West, a strategic consultancy specialising in brand and marketing strategy for theme parks, visitor attractions, and brand homes. An IAAPA speaker, Ben has previously worked at Mars, the Walt Disney Company and Merlin Entertainments. We discuss the future of the experience economy and how organisations may need to adapt in a post-COVID world.
Kelly Molson:
Ben, welcome to the podcast. It's really great to have you on here.
Ben Thompson:
Thank you very much, Kelly. It's great to be here. Great to be talking to you and the dog today.
Kelly Molson:
Yes. So look, we are recording these in semi-lockdown or easing out of lockdown. So we're kind of at home, my dog is behind me.
Ben Thompson:
And I've left my dog Barney at home. So I'm actually in a nice quiet office. So it's all good on my side.
Kelly Molson:
I'm glad that you read the prep notes accordingly, Ben, well done. Well done for following instructions. So we're going to start off a little bit with a bit of a quick fire round, just to get to know you in a little bit of detail. We've spoken a couple of times previously, but we don't know each other super well. So I've got some quick fire questions for you. So, think I know the answer to this one already. Cats or dogs?
Ben Thompson:
Definitely dogs. Cats are rubbish. It's all about dogs.
Kelly Molson:
And what's top of your bucket list?
Ben Thompson:
Oh, my word. I think it is taking a long trip to Australia. We've got quite a lot of relatives over there. I've never been, it's one of the few continents I didn't get to go to when I was traveling the world with Merlin Entertainments. So yeah, definitely probably going to Ayers Rock, doing some of the islands getting down to Tasmania and so on. I think that's probably, yeah, I need to do that.
Kelly Molson:
Great choice, Ben. Do you know what actually, we got engaged at Ayers Rock.
Ben Thompson:
Oh, really? Oh, fantastic.
Kelly Molson:
Yeah, it's a really special place for us. Really, really special.
Ben Thompson:
Or Uluru as I probably should be should be calling it, yeah. But yeah, no, I'd love to get down to Aussie and meet up with my... My mother's brother went out there and he had five children. They all got married. I think there's about 50 Thompsons that are out there now. So yeah, looking forward to catching up with them one day.
Kelly Molson:
Oh, good. Well yeah, you've got a lot of people to visit out there. Sounds fab. Okay. Tell me one thing that you're not very good at.
Ben Thompson:
Oh, my word. I mean, how long have you got? I'm really, really impatient. I'm an ENTJ in Myers Briggs terminology, so extroverted blue-sky thinking. So I'm brilliant on the future and possibility and what could it look like? I get very bored very quickly with what I consider to be the mundane administrative tasks. And I'm terrible at hiding my feelings. So if I'm bored about something, it's written all over my face. You definitely can't air this now, this is far too personal.
Kelly Molson:
I'm really worried that I'm going to start looking at your face soon. And sense that boredom coming across as well, Ben, you're giving too much away.
Ben Thompson:
Good question.
Kelly Molson:
One last question. Tell me something that you believe to be true that nobody else agrees with you on. So what is your unpopular opinion?
Ben Thompson:
Oh, my word. Listen, these questions are really good and terrible. Okay. So I believe that cricket is the very, very best sport in the world, bar none. And I have a really solid argument as for why that is the case and hardly anybody apart from a very tiny percentage of people agree with me.
Kelly Molson:
Do you want to share that argument just in case we've got any listeners that share this opinion?
Ben Thompson:
In a nutshell, it's the ultimate combination of the individual and the team game and conditions and everything else, skills and experience sort of wrapped into one and it has different formats. You can have a really short game, like only three hours or quite a nice leisurely version of five days where you can have a draw at the end.
Kelly Molson:
Okay. I mean, I will agree to disagree on that one, Ben.
Ben Thompson:
Well, there we go.
Kelly Molson:
But maybe some of our listeners... Well, I mean, tell us, let us... Yeah. Tweet us and let us know if you agree with Ben, I'd love to hear. Thank you for sharing. I always like to do that. I think it's quite nice to get a little bit of an insight into people's mind. And also what I really enjoyed is that the thing that you said that you're not very good at actually showcased the things that you are very good at, which is talking about the bigger picture and the future and what things look like. And that's really one of the reasons that I have asked you to come on the podcast because you've got an incredible background in attractions and the experience economy, and it's challenging for many in that sector at the moment. And I'm really keen to get your opinion on how it's been and what you see the future to be. But could you just kind of give us what a typical project is for you, Ben?
Ben Thompson:
Yeah. I mean, obviously the immediate answer is there's no such thing as a typical project because every client is different and that is true. The kind of golden threads that I get involved, it's all about storytelling. I call myself a chief storytelling officer and that is what I do. I've always loved books and narrative and kind of rich tapestries. I love Lord of the Rings as a kid, I loved all of the kind of The Hobbit, all that type of stuff. And I read voraciously and as I got kind of older, I read a lot of psychology books, really fascinated by how the brain works. And Danny Kahneman is my sort of absolute number one fan in the... He wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, and Kahneman worked with a guy called Amos Tversky and Kahneman ended up being a Nobel Prize winner and basically invented kind of behavioral economics.
Ben Thompson:
And I find all that stuff fascinating at the point where kind of story and narrative meets in a meaning, how we interpret the world around us. I think that story forms views, it forms culture, but it can also transform. So Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore talk about that they're at this stage of the transformative economy where the product is the change I see in me as a customer or a guest when I engage with your brand. And I think story has a huge role to play in creating those kind of transformative experiences. So that's sort of a big thread that runs through it. But back to my sort of personality and loving the new, I'm often working on new projects. So that could be like Tony's, which we released our beautiful video, which we produced with Storyline Studios.
Kelly Molson:
So this is Tony's Chocolonelies.
Ben Thompson:
Yeah, Tony's Chocolonely. Yeah, exactly. So that is an amazing brand that has got a fantastic story, wants to transform the industry in which it's working and wants to create a visitor experience to immerse people in that brand and to create advocates for their mission, which is to end slavery in the chocolate industry. And our role was to take that from very basic, "Okay, we want to do this and it's going to be kind of this size and it's going to be this location. Oh, and by the way, it's going to have a roller coaster." To, "Okay, how do we actually put an immersive narrative around that?" And what we've done successfully is this, it's either a great story when you stand back and you sort of, you think about it, it's so simple. Our approach to that was a three acts, heart, head, and hands. So we'd engage you with all of the joy and the fun of what chocolate is all about. Chocolate is ultimately about happiness and sharing.
Ben Thompson:
So we do all of that great color, great richness, texture, and so on, but then we do a twist and we go into the head, which is about saying, "What's the bitter side of the sweetness of chocolate?" It's the reality of people working on cocoa farms in West Africa, Ghana, Ivory Coast, where it's a really kind of terrible situation. Then we educate. So how can it be done differently? That's the rest of the head piece. And then we move into hands, which is all about impact. That particular brand is all about engaging people to make a difference with their decisions, with their activism, all that kind of stuff that we do. And that's where we segued into the roller coaster. So when you get on the coaster, which we're going to call something like the impact express or whatever, you're actually going to be shrunken down to the size of a bar and fired out into the world to have an impact.
Kelly Molson:
Wow!
Ben Thompson:
Not literally fired out, health and safety will be taken into consideration here.
Ben Thompson:
So that has been an awesome project. I have an amazing client in Brazil who are largest park operator out there, they run the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, they run the Equis Sioux falls down in the South of the country, which is the number one waterfall in the world, they have a big aquarium and so on. And there it's all been about kind of, how do you go from being an organization that's grown through acquisition, has around 6 million guests a year, but in kind of silo style businesses. And how do you create the sort of structure that sits above that? A little bit like Merlin, where you can get great synergies, get great best practices, and a lot of that's in your world of digital and get right structures and so on. So they can get the good data, make the good decisions and so on.
Ben Thompson:
And we've got other projects that we can't talk about yet.
Kelly Molson:
Of course, there's always secret projects.
Ben Thompson:
Which is so frustrating. We've got two amazing, amazing clients that we're working on. One in Europe and one, a global company, but based on the East Coast where the work we're doing is just going to be incredible, but you're going to have to watch this space.
Kelly Molson:
All right. Well, we definitely will watch this space. And that brings me to my next question, really, because I'd like to know if you're having to advise your clients differently at this point, because we are still in the middle of a pandemic. As we sit here, it's the 1st of July, attractions in the UK can start to open safely from this weekend, if they are able to. And we're seeing a really big demand, actually. We've seen a huge demand for ticket sales for London Zoo, Whipsnade Zoo, for example. And we know that Shanghai Disney Resort sold out its capacity in three minutes. So we know that there's demand there. We know people want to go back. And what are those conversations like at the moment with your clients that are looking to open their experiences in a year from now, two years from now? Are you having to talk to them very differently about things?
Ben Thompson:
It's a great question. I think the first thing to say is, I'm not at all surprised that there's a massive pent up demand. And I think I've been fairly consistent with that, with my clients and stuff that I've written about. Disney have the most amazing metaphor for this, to explain why there would be this pent up demand and they call it the " Closing Window ". And as a parent of children, I can really relate to this. So the idea of the Closing Window is, if you have children, let's say you have two or three kids. You don't really want to go to the big park experience until they're sort of five or six, because they don't really get it. The rides maybe aren't quite ready for them, unless you go to Legoland of course. And by the time they get to be 15 or so, and I've got a 16 year old, so I can relate to this, parents are deeply uncool and they want to go off and do their own things.
Ben Thompson:
So you've kind of got maybe eight or nine summers to go and make the memories that last a lifetime. And actually, that's not that many summers, so if you take one away, you're like, "Oh wow. I just lost a really big opportunity to go and do something amazing with my family." And if you think about the experience for parents with their children in parks, basically, it's the best you ever feel in the whole year as a mum or a dad. I think particularly as a dad, by the way, because you've put so much energy into it, it can be really expensive and it's a day that you'd never have to say no to your kids, typically. At least the way I try and do it. So you feel great, right? And those memories kind of reinforce your sense of yourself and the story that you tell yourself.
Ben Thompson:
So that's the power of the industry that we work in, and if you close the doors on people and say, "You can't go," and then they open up again, no surprise, there's going to be a kind of a rush to the doors. I think indoor is going to be different from outdoor. I think outdoor's obviously going to have the benefit of it's going to feel safer for the more risk-averse folks out there, like my wife. But the thing about indoor is still a massive role for it. It all depends about whether you've refreshed the experience. A big part of our industry is about suspense, surprising people, "Oh, I didn't know they were going to do that. Oh, that's different from last time," or, "I want to go further into that experience than I could the time before." I think that's why escape rooms are such a great trend, because you want to do it quicker. Maybe they change a few things and it's a different experience each time. So I think for anybody who is still waiting to get open, please don't try and open with the same experience that you did last time, because I think people are going to be looking for something new.
Kelly Molson:
That's really good advice. I guess there are some experiences that can't open at all at the moment, and that's a huge challenge. So I read last week about the Poster museum who is allowed, they are allowed to open and the restrictions have been lifted. However, they can't make it safe enough for people to come in because they've got restricted space and actually restricted space on the postal ride that they have, the actual experience. And so it is still really, really difficult for the industry. And I guess how can you advise... I guess you can't advise them if they physically can't look at the safety implications and they can't make it safe for people to come, that's a very different story. But so your advice to attractions is to refresh what they're doing. Don't just open as they have previously.
Ben Thompson:
I think that's right. One of the most important things I feel is about empathy. So I engaged a few of my colleagues in IAAPA organization, in February I think, with an idea around how we might recognize our healthcare and key workers once we opened. We called the idea Healthcare Heroes, and actually a number of people have taken it on. People in China have done it, a load of the folks in Europe have done it as well. And the idea there was just simple way of... The first people who come through the doors of our attractions ought to be the people who put their lives on the line to help us during COVID. So doctors, nurses, people working in healthcare. Actually teachers as well, by the way, my wife's a teacher. Teachers get a bad rap most of the time, but they had to go back into their workplaces a long time before anybody else.
Ben Thompson:
I thought that was a good idea for two reasons. One, is it shows that the people who are running that organization understand and care and empathize with what people are going through. There's a sense we're all in this together. Secondly, I think it allays risk. So if you are more on the kind of cautious, risk-averse side, if you can think, well, actually these guys are going to get healthcare workers are going to come through and they'll help them check out their facilities and run the rule over their sanitation measures and so on. Then you can have a double win.
Ben Thompson:
So yeah, I think empathy is good, and I think just communicating with people, what you're doing and why. The guys over in Shanghai, when they opened earlier in May, I thought they did an outstanding job of just being right up front. Here are the guidelines, this is what we're following. We're not putting the full number that we can put through from the get go. I think they had the right to go up to sort of 25, 30,000 people a day, I think they put 5,000 in on the first day and then it kind of moved up to 10 and so on. And that shows a really, again, kind of a sensitive mindset. It's not all about shoving as many people through as possible to try and generate some revenue. It's a bit more caring than that.
Kelly Molson:
Yeah, absolutely. Again, that's one of the things that we've been talking about in the office the last couple of weeks is we talk quite a lot about getting visitor numbers through the door, we've got an ebook, Double Your Visitor Numbers. You can't do that at the moment, so you've got to try and kind of maximize the revenue of the people that can come through, but also caring about their health and safety and making sure that they are safe is the fundamental thing that you need to be hearing about when you get those visitors back through the door.
Ben Thompson:
Yeah. I mean, I think, again, I wrote another piece on this about guest centricity as opposed to customer centricity. I've always thought that the metaphor of the host at the dinner table is the right one for any kind of hospitality business. When you invite people to come into your home, you're treating them as if they are a member of your family. You do anything for them. You want to understand all about them, their needs, their preferences, whatever it is. I think in the article, I kind of used the example of so many of the CRM platforms where you get asked your name five times, or I have to fill in the same details, yeah. It's the equivalent of after the second course say, "Oh yeah, what's your name again?" And, "Oh, is your husband... Dave is it? Oh, James, oh, sorry." So I just think that mindset of being all about the guests and caring for them and their day will stand us in good stead.
Kelly Molson:
See, it's really interesting actually. I think I'm going to hook you up with a past guest who's on our season one of the podcast. We spoke to Alex Book from Arcade. So they are a big VR agency and they actually talk about not calling guests, guests, or visitors. They talk about calling them players. And it was a really interesting discussion around how you engage with them and what that kind of message is. I think that the two of you should have a chat about that. That would be... Maybe on here. Maybe on here actually.
Ben Thompson:
That'll be great. Language is important. One of the things Joe talks about is the idea of staging an experience. They say work is theater. It's not a metaphor. We're not saying, "Think of work like theater." They're saying, "It is theater." You go to work every day to play a role and when you have an organization that is like a theatrical production, everyone playing their parts, staging the experience for the guests, whether that's a pharmaceutical company looking after patients, or a retail organization looking after shoppers or Alton Towers or Disneyland looking after families and so on in the theme park.
Kelly Molson:
Yeah. So on that note actually, with Disney, we were discussing last week about the Disney magic and how they still create that feeling. I mean, it's super exciting. I've been to Disney about four or five times when I was a kid and my parents love it, and there's not one part of that experience that isn't magic. I can remember my dad parking the car, even getting on the little tram that takes you into it. Every part of it is exciting. How do they keep that up with the measures that they have to have in place now?
Ben Thompson:
Yeah. The funny thing about Disney, and I was trying to explain to people as you, with all the talk that we've just been talking about, guest centricity, you would think that Disney were the ultimate guest-centric company, but they're not. They're not guest centric, they're cast-centric. I went to the IAAPA Leadership Summit in March of this year just before lockdown happened, actually. And I attended a presentation and met with a lady called Chris Tyler. Chris is the operations VP at Disneyland, Anaheim, California. And she took us through the launch of Galaxy's Edge, and I'd had the kind of privilege of seeing Galaxy's Edge, both in Anaheim and in Florida and I think it's outstanding. Anyway, Chris just talked about the cast. She talked about the long lead-in to that opening and about how they invested in education, in programs to tell the backstory of the characters, the narratives, all the different movies, how they approach costuming, how they allow personalization of costuming, how they chose the staff, the cast who actually ended up taking up those frontline roles.
Ben Thompson:
And then the launch event that they ran, and actually they did a fashion show where the kind of key Imagineers, people like Scott Trowbridge, Chris Beaty, Margaret Kerrison dressed up in the new costumes for Galaxy's Edge for Batu, the new world, which they've created. Or should I say the existing part of the Star Wars universe which they've brought to life, because that's what it is, it is an existing part. And so, basically the philosophy is about happy cast equals happy guests. That's the mantra of the Disney Institute, which is the external-facing management consultancy part of the organization who train companies all round the world. And if you're listening, guys, I'd love to partner with you one day.
Ben Thompson:
But that simple principle is the reason why when you go into any Disneyland park, chances are 98 times out of 100, you're meeting somebody who is happy to be there, and they are super motivated. They believe in what Disney are trying to do, whether it's somebody who works in the janitorial department, whether they're doing the laundry, whether they're in frontline guest service, whether it's ride ops, whatever it is, they know they're there to create a magical experience and magical memories. And they're generally some of the happiest staff that you're going to find. And that, in my view, is the reason why Disney will endure, the magic will endure, because they've done a pretty good job of looking after people and they'll continue to do so.
Kelly Molson:
I love that. Yeah, I love that. Happy team makes for happy visitors, for sure.
Ben Thompson:
I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it?
Kelly Molson:
Yeah.
Ben Thompson:
So much of... Whenever I've done research on launching parks, and there's so much of... The fantastic experience comes down to staff. Probably 25% of the overall piece. It isn't the coast, it isn't the... Well, it is those things, but those guys make up so much a part... And we forget that at our peril.
Kelly Molson:
Yeah, you're right actually, and I can draw a parallel to one of our clients for exactly the same reason. So we work with Eureka, the National Children's Museum and their team are called enablers. And every single one of them, every time I've been, is happy. They are engaging. They are genuinely really so delighted to be there and to welcome you and to help you. And it is just lovely. And that is part of the whole experience for me, that front of house team are so incredibly caring and dedicated to the people that are coming through the doors. And that is a big part of what that makes that experience brilliant.
Ben Thompson:
Absolutely.
Kelly Molson:
Big, big question for you. So what do you think the experience economy is going to look like post-COVID? Are experiences like Tony's, for example, are they going to need to have a different focus? Are they going to need to look at things that are more virtual continuing? We've seen a lot of that during lockdown. Virtual museum tours, virtual tours, virtual experiences, is that going to continue, or do you think things are going to go back to how they were?
Ben Thompson:
It's a bit like the saying in the Hollywood industry, in the film industry. Nobody knows, right? You get a lot of people who'll say, "Oh yeah, it's going to be like this. The world's going to change." No, the world isn't going to change. It's going to be exactly the same. How do you say whether a film is going to be a success or not? Nobody knows. We do a lot of work benchmarking what we think are really successful brands who've understood what the transformational economy is all about, and we showcase their work. So good example, not in our industry specifically, but they are an experienced provider, Peloton. Peloton they provide the program of how you become a better cyclist. I actually think it's about becoming a better looking cyclist as well, by the way, because it's a very sort of sexy brand.
Ben Thompson:
The products of Peloton is wellbeing, how I feel about myself. Yes, my fitness, but my sense of belonging, being in something part of in myself, bigger than myself. My sort of competitive juices flowing and all that kind of stuff. People who love the brand, they would not lose their whatever it is, hour in the morning or at the end of the day, or whatever, for anything. It's a sort of super positive drug, effectively, if you kind of think about it like that. Now, interestingly, that's an experience that's in-home. They connect it around the world through these super cool screens and you've got people from all different parts of the world, and that's sort of the point of the online community.
Ben Thompson:
I'm sure though, that there's a version of that that could go from, in the home, to in a physical space with lots of other people. And a good example there would be eSports. So eSports has grown out of gamers sat in front of a screen like this, maybe one or two together, playing in multiplayer. Now you've got leagues, franchises. When the London resort launch in X number of years time down in Kent, there's talk of an eSports franchise, having their physical home. Like Arsenal or Chelsea Football Club. The equivalent of them having it there and having stadiums full of people, sort of watching the gamers. So the point is it can go both ways. We're talking about physical theme park visitor attraction, brand homes, museums being places where people go to and we're worried about will they kind of come back?
Ben Thompson:
Well, I think lots of good examples of organizations creating virtual digital experiences and they're obviously revenue-driving opportunities as well. So we're about to do some work with the distillery industry, they are a provider, a curator, if you will, of really, really high-end product that, unless you tell the story... So bottles of whiskey or gin or whatever that are selling for hundreds and hundreds of pounds, you're never going to buy that in Waitrose. But if you wrap a story around it and talk about the provenance and the heritage and the characters who put that together in the years and years and whatever, then I think you're going to stand more chance of being successful. And all that can be done virtually just as well as it can in a... And often more effectively with some of the latest digital technologies.
Kelly Molson:
Yeah, absolutely.
Ben Thompson:
I almost certainly haven't answered the question, but I at least hopefully gave some thoughts.
Kelly Molson:
Oh, I don't think the question can be answered, can it? It's impossible at the moment. It's like you say, we just don't know. At the moment we don't know what's coming in the next couple of weeks, let alone the next couple of years. So I think I really enjoyed your answer though. And distillery is something that we know a little bit about Ben, so I feel like, I feel like there might be something happening there.
Ben Thompson:
Okay. Let's talk, let's talk.
Kelly Molson:
Let's talk. Do you know what, we connected quite early on at the beginning of lockdown, and one of the things that I really enjoyed, you wrote an article, a brilliant article, actually on Blooloop. It was called COVID-19 and the enduring strength of the attractions industry. What I have really enjoyed about the content that you've been sharing and the things that you've been talking about over this period, is how unbelievably positive that you have been about the industry. And you've talked a lot about the overriding resilience that attractions have. I kind of wanted to know, that article came out right at the beginning of lockdown. If you could go back, is there anything that you would add to that now, having seen what you've seen over the past few months?
Ben Thompson:
Well, first of all, I collaborated. It was my idea to write it, but I collaborated with four brilliant Dutch people. And we actually... We love the idea of putting a Zoom collaboration together. Obviously, we did it on Google Docs and whatever. So Raymond and Luca and Caroline, and I've forgotten the other guy's name. Oh, I'm sorry.
Kelly Molson:
Don't worry. Let me know. We'll put it in the show notes. So there'll be..
Ben Thompson:
Yeah, put it in the show notes. Yeah. So they helped me sort of put that together. I don't think I would change anything. If I had a bit more time, I would like to have gone more into the psychological drivers, the deep kind of reasons why... Joe and Jim have this experience framework. So you've got education, entertainment, aesthetic, which is the sort of art appreciation, and then escapism in this sort of four box grid. And then they overlay that with things like edutainment and escatainment. What I think is really interesting is why do we feel the need to be entertained? What happens when we appreciate art? In our mind, in our heart, in our soul, what's actually going on there?
Ben Thompson:
And often it gets down to transformations. We as human beings, I think, are always looking to better ourselves. We have an idea of ourselves that's bigger, more perfect, better than the way we kind of realize we are, and we're always striving to try and get there. And I think brands that can help that sort of journey, help me understand my ambitions, achieve some of those ambitions, contribute to the world. I sometimes think... I oscillate between thinking we're all fundamentally selfish and we're all fundamentally good. And I think the truth is we're both. Successful businesses in our industry will be those who can really create the environment where we can be our best selves. Now, I've forgotten what the question was, but... Oh yeah, would I change anything about the article. I would love to go into more of that, kind of the sort of psychological approach to it, and what psychology can teach us in the entertainment industry, but the article was way longer than we started out, so.
Kelly Molson:
There was a lot to talk about.
Ben Thompson:
Charlie Read at Blooloop would probably have got his editing pen out.
Kelly Molson:
Well, I'll ask him, he's coming on air in a few weeks.
Ben Thompson:
Yeah.
Kelly Molson:
We are coming up to the end of the podcast interview. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to you, Ben.
Ben Thompson:
Yeah, me too.
Kelly Molson:
I think you've got a really great take on what things are going to be like future. I know we can't be so specific at the moment, but I think some of the things you're working on just sound so incredibly exciting, and I'm really pleased to see that there's still that kind of overriding resilience in attractions. They're going to come back bigger and stronger.
We like to ask our guests at the end of the podcast, if there's a book that you'd recommend that has helped shape your career in any way.
Ben Thompson:
Yeah. So there's two books, actually, if I can be cheeky-
Kelly Molson:
You can.
Ben Thompson:
If you have marketing in your job title at all, or you have any responsibility to do marketing, you need to read a book called How Brands Grow. It was written about 15ish years ago by a guy called Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute down in South Australia. I had the privilege of being trained by Byron and his team when I was at Mars. It's incredibly simple concept of how brands grow, obviously, hence the title, around mental availability, so that the memory structures that sit in your mind. So if I say Coca-Cola to you, now you're thinking about the colour red and swirls and the silvery writing and the shape of the bottle with the little glass pieces, which if you drop it on the floor, it's so recognisable that every shard will look like your worst Coke bottle.
Ben Thompson:
That's mental availability. And physical availability is the concept of being at arms reach. Whenever the desire to purchase from that category is triggered, that's the concept. But the book kind of goes into much more depth than that. And then I think for anybody in our industry, they need to get the latest copy of Joe's book, Joe and Jim's book The Experience Economy for which I really should be on commission. So I think Joe, we need to have a word about that. I just think you can't operate in this space without having understood that. Authenticity is also a really good one, which is the followup to experience economy.
Kelly Molson:
That's three books, that's super greedy, but I'm really glad that you shared The Experience Economy because it is a fantastic book. And I'm sure that many of our audience have read it. And if you haven't, you definitely need to. So what we like to do is if you'd like to win a copy, I mean, Ben, this is two books. So this is a double whammy. So if you'd like to win a copy of both of those books, then if you head over to our Twitter account, and if you retweet this episode announcement with the comment, "I want Ben's books," then you could be in with a chance of winning a copy of both of them. You've just upped my costs for this podcast, Ben.
Ben Thompson:
I actually have several spare copies of How Brands Grow.
Kelly Molson:
Oh, maybe Ben will send you one, personally.
Ben Thompson:
So, I'll put one in the post, well thumbed.
Kelly Molson:
Great. Ben, is there anything else that you'd like to share with us before we head off today?
Ben Thompson:
I think we're good. This has been really, really enjoyable. Apart from all the skewering you did at the end and made me talk about all the things I was rubbish at. Which is good.
Kelly Molson:
Just trying to get under the skin, Ben.
Ben Thompson:
Yes, you did that. Definitely need to edit that out. No, no, it's been great. I think this is a fantastic industry. We've taken a bit of a punch, but there's no limbs broken, we'll come back stronger. We've been growing 3 or 4% Kager for the last 10 years and the industry, entertained a billion people last year, probably slightly more and strong growth across the regions. I think it's a great place to work and have fun.
Kelly Molson:
That is a lovely place to end the podcast to us both today. Thank you so much for joining us, Ben. It's been a pleasure.
Ben Thompson:
Pleasure. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kelly.
Kelly Molson:
Thank you.
Kelly Molson:
Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you by
Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.
We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.
Kelly Molson: Today, we're speaking to John Sear, builder of magical collaborative experiences for public spaces.
John Sear: We were trying to imagine what was coming in the future. What would collaborative play as a kind of visitor experience look like.
Kelly Molson: John describes himself as a games designer and software developer, runner of workshops and maker of game-like things for public spaces like museums, galleries and festivals.
John Sear: When you look at the kind of money people are willing to spend to go to the big experiences, the Punchdrunks and the Secret Cinemas, they're spending hundreds of pounds a night and when you start to mention those numbers, suddenly there are a few people in the museum where they go, okay, that sounds interesting. Different audiences and we could earn money from it, maybe.
Kelly Molson: He's multitalented and incredibly creative. Developing projects such as A Moment of Madness, which is an urban game where players are on a live stake out in a car park and Renga, the 500 player laser game.
Kelly Molson: In this episode, we discuss all of those things, plus John's DIY tutorials for museums, so that you can build exciting digital things without a huge budget.
John Sear: That's what's good about in the modern age is that the tools are out there that are free and open source and a lot of cases that allow you to build these things very quickly and cheaply and then once you get started, it's kind of like the limits are just your own imagination.
Kelly Molson: We'll take a look at John's approach for creating games that are fun, educational, and true to the venue and also learn the importance of storytelling. We really enjoyed speaking to John and we think that you're going to enjoy this too.
John Sear: Get people excited first and then worry about the kind of educational content afterwards.
Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast that celebrates professionals working in the visitor attraction sector. What do we mean by visitor attractions? Well, it's an umbrella term for a huge range of exciting organisations that are must sees. Think museums, theme parks, zoos, farms, heritage sites, tour providers, escape rooms, and much, much more. They're tourist hotspots or much love local establishments that educate, engage, and excite the general public.
Kelly Molson: Those who work in visitor attractions often pour their heart and soul into providing exceptional experiences for others. In our opinion, they don't get the recognition that they deserve for this. We want to change this. Each episode we'll share the journeys of inspiring leaders. We'll celebrate their achievements and dig deeper into what really makes their attraction successful, both offline and digitally. Listen and be inspired as industry leaders share their innovative ideas, services, and approaches.
Kelly Molson: There's plenty of valuable information you can take away and put into action to create better experiences for your own guests. Your host of this podcast, and myself, Kelly Molson, and Paul Wright. We're the co-founders of Rubber Cheese, an award winning digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for visitor attractions. Find out how we can create a better experience for you and your guests at rubbercheese.com. Search Skip the Queue on iTunes and Spotify to subscribe.
Kelly Molson: You can find links to every episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast. We hope that you enjoy these interviews and if there's anyone that you think that we should be talking to, please just send us a message.
Kelly Molson: John, welcome to our Skip the Queue Podcast. Thank you for coming on today.
John Sear: Thank you so much for inviting me on.
Kelly Molson: Now your bio describes you as a builder of magical collaborative experiences for public spaces and I think that is probably one of the coolest job titles I've ever read. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
John Sear: Thank you. I mean, yeah, I kind of flip and flop a lot really about what my job title should be because it's quite confusing as well as being cool. So at the moment I am a real world game designer. That's my kind of brief, but that kind of confuses people as well because it's making video games but via games that take place in the real world. And I know when I've explained it to people before, like half of my job is kind of tech, half of it is kind of design.
John Sear: So I was at a tech conference recently talking about what I do and at the end of it the guy was like, "That sounds like a really nice hobby you've got there." And I was like, "Yeah, that's actually my job."
Kelly Molson: Oh, gosh.
John Sear: There you go. I confuse most people I think. But yeah, basically all it means is that I take my game design skills and my software engineering skills and sort of the kind of modern making and kind of put that altogether to build experiences that take place in the real world. So that can be things like escape games, immersive theatre, things that take place in museums, galleries, libraries, festivals, car parks, theme parks, all sorts of crazy places. But yeah, most people think my job sounds amazing, so I should probably not ruin that illusion for them.
Kelly Molson: How did you get to where you are now? You've got a long history in game design, how did you go from that to what you do now?
John Sear: Sure. So I'll do the short version and then you can decide if you want me to dip into the longer version, because it's about 20 years. So, I left university and did what I thought was my dream job of working in the games industry, Proper, the AAA games industry. So when we think of video games on Xbox and PlayStation and PC, so I did that for about four years and while it was enjoyable and I worked with some amazing people, it wasn't where I wanted to be.
John Sear: So then I left the AAA world to go and work in academia. So I set up a degree course teaching people how to get jobs in the games industry. But with the caveat that I'd left the games industry because I didn't really enjoy it loads, and then while doing that, I had a few other companies on the side.
John Sear: So I had a company that made iPhone games and Xbox games during the kind of first, there was a kind of digital download rush when the iPhone was first released in 2008, 2010, that sort of era. And then eventually it got to this where I was doing all these things. There was a big rush in the iPhone world, which produced a lot of wealthy people in a short amount of time. But gradually that space got very saturated and the games you can make in that space were kind of less interesting and you needed more money to do it, and there'd been this big rise in independent games.
John Sear: So people that were experienced in making games, leaving bigger developers to go it alone. This was kind of the first time, that sort of period, like 2008 to 2010 where people could do that. They could actually make games for Xbox or PlayStation or iPhone without a big publisher behind them, and so it meant there were a lot of kind of indie developers then. And so I sort of tried to jump onto that bandwagon and I was kind of getting bored of making things for small devices like Xboxes or iPhones or Android tablets and wanted to make things that took place in the real world.
John Sear: So me and a friend of mine started a business and we made a game called Renga, which probably gets mentioned somewhere on my website, which was a 500 player game experience that took place originally for movie theatres, but it got shown outdoors as well at festivals. And so that was my kind of, that's my transition really from doing things for indoor spaces to the kind of... We use different times in different industries that we would call that the out-of-home experiences-
Kelly Molson: All right.
John Sear: ... Or visitor attraction experiences. So the jump from making things for small scale to making things for festivals, and obviously I sort of left behind all of my knowledge from AAA world of how to sell boxed products or sell digital download games to suddenly having to sell games where people bought tickets for it or it took place in a cinema or took place at a festival, and so it was quite different. And I'd say that back then there were a lot of people from theatre who are making things that were more game-like.
John Sear: So you might have come across people like Punchdrunk in the kind of immersive theatre world or Secret Cinema but there were very few people going the other way, taking their games knowledge and going into kind of theatrical things. And still, I think that's quite a niche thing. So from about 2010 to 2013 we built and toured this giant Renga game, and then since then, I've just been attracted by making experiences for public spaces, and that's really what's led me to work with museums and castles and art galleries because they have people and they have amazing spaces. So it kind of all makes sense.
John Sear: Sorry, that was supposed to be the short version. It wasn't really very short, was it? But that was the transition anyway.
Kelly Molson: That's perfect.
Paul Wright: So can you give us a bit of an idea of what a 500 person game for a festival or cinema looks like?
John Sear: Yeah, I should have done that really, but yeah, that's a good question. So Renga was built so that it still looks a bit like a video game, but it's really about how 500 people organise themselves. So we've shown this in lots of different spaces, but the classic is in an enormous auditorium in a movie theatre.
John Sear: So you have 500 people seated, we give out laser pointers to the audience, the laser pointers are used to control the action that happens on the screen. So it's a 90-minute experience. I mean, it's quite a deep strategic game and it looks a bit like a space retro game when you're playing, but it's really an exercise in how do 500 people somehow collaboratively control the experience.
John Sear: So it's quite unusual in the sense that people don't make these huge games, but from a technological point of view, it's a bit like turning the cinema screen into a giant touchscreen. So each of the laser points acts a bit like a finger that can kind of touch the screen and anything you want to do in the game you have to do as a group. So you have to somehow sort of self organise yourself just purely by laser dots of light on the screen into doing different things.
Kelly Molson: Oh, gosh.
John Sear: Yeah, it's quite unusual, and it's one of those things that people go, "I don't think I really want to play that." Until they actually start playing it and they go, "Oh wow, this is quite different to what I was expecting." It doesn't matter how many times I explain it. I never do a very good job, I'm afraid. But it's just a really interesting thing of like how you can get different experiences happening in theatres.
John Sear: So we showed it at loads of film festivals because they would be showing traditional films, and then alongside that they'd go, okay, people are making games for cinema now. So let's have a look at one of those. And then what they would do is they would invite actually quite a lot of the top directors actually got to see this because we showed it at places like the New York film festival and the Toronto film festival and some of the bigger ones, and they would invite directors into the auditorium to go look what's happening, right? Because there's obviously there's a limit to sorts of feelings and experiences you can create with film and it's a different experience when people are playing a game.
John Sear: So suddenly you've got people within the audience that love and hate each other and are high fiving and hugging and running around. It's very much like a midnight madness experience as people try and control it. Ultimately everyone's got an individual laser pointer. Everyone can do anything they want. No one's in control of them. But some people get the game a bit more than others and so they're shouting out a vice or standing up in front of the screen even to try and organise teams into doing things. Did that make any sense?
Paul Wright: It sounds amazing. What other examples of games like that have you created?
John Sear: I mean that's the biggest game I think I've created in terms of there's 500 simultaneous players over a 90-minute experience. Often I talk about the work I do as been a bit like escape rooms. So I started doing this stuff in about 2010 and we were trying to imagine what was coming in the future, what would collaborative play out of the home as a kind of visitor experience look like, and we dismissed experiences like escape games really back then because we thought that even though they didn't really exist on mass, there'd been a few experiments into them and it felt like people wouldn't be willing to pay the 20 or £30 a person for a one-hour experience that they absolutely are willing to pay, it turns out.
John Sear: So we kind of misread the future direction but one of the advantage of escape games existing, I mean, I can just say, "Well the things I make are a bit like escape games." And with that, I do go to escape games. So I build large scale escape games as well. I think they're the closest things that I do to Renga in terms of 500 players. So for a number of museum conferences or site centre conferences, both in Europe and over in Asia, I built sort of 100 player escape game experiences.
John Sear: So whereas in a normal escape game there might be six of you or 10 of you locked in a room, and it sounds like you guys have played a few of these.
Kelly Molson: We have.
John Sear: So I've built a number of pop-up experiences where you might have, I've made 10 tables in a room and each table has got a mini escape game on it, and then those mini escape games kind of interact with each other. So you might put I don't know 10 people around each table, and then as the game progresses, it turns out in order to complete the game, the tables have to kind of collaborate together. So I think the largest ones I've done of those are about a hundred people.
Paul Wright: So older games and there are digital games on each table?
John Sear: No, I mean, not always. I mean, because my background is digital, I use a combination of digital and physical or analog. Yeah, so most of the games I make have a digital element. So for example, most of my escape games would have probably at least a device such as a phone or something that is a phone, but is masquerading as some other piece of equipment, which might unlock parts of the story, or you might use it to scan things.
John Sear: So I'm a big fan of technologies like iBeacons and Near-field communication. So you might use the phone to scan physical objects and that might play a video or play some audio on the phone as you're using it, but sometimes that phone is in a case. So it's some kind of piece of equipment that the players have found. It's a useful scanning device. It might be masquerading as a hospital scanner or something. So you scan a patient and then you get some readout, but essentially it's a mobile phone in a fancy case.
Kelly Molson: John, one of the questions I had for you is, I know that you work with galleries, libraries, archives, museums, which are classified GLAMs. When you're talking to these venues, what do you think is the biggest benefit of them using you? What's the biggest benefit to them to having a game or some kind of interactive element in those venues?
John Sear: I guess the biggest reason to what it means is because I'm kind of quite a nice person really. That's a good reason.
Kelly Molson: You are John. You are, it's good enough for us.
John Sear: I mean it depends what they're looking for, right? I build different things for museums. So sometimes I build what we'd call I guess an interactive, so it kind of stands alone experience that might be like a touchscreen or something that you interact with, with a camera, like a Kinect Sensor. And I did do quite a lot of collaborative touch table experiences for museums, particularly around Birmingham actually. There's still quite a few of those installed. That's a piece of technology I actually really like because I'm interested in bringing people together in these spaces.
John Sear: So the idea that you can have an experience in a museum that you can't have at home I think is quite important, and things like large scale touchscreens allow that. So yeah, I build those kinds of things, one off interactive things. But I think probably what I'm more passionate about is building experiences that are a bit more kind of museum or gallery wide.
John Sear: So one way you could think of it is a bit like a kind of a more high tech version of a trail. We are on a way that we take people, take visitors around the museum but in a different way to what they're normally doing and maybe get them to look at different things.
John Sear: So while I'd like to use a lot of technology in what I make, generally I like to kind of keep the technology hidden away, which is why I often talk about it as being magical but mostly about not trying to detract from what's already there, like museums and galleries and castles and all of these places, they're already amazing scenarios, right? They're already incredible spaces.
John Sear: So what I try and do is not to detract from that, but to enhance it with technology. So often I use a lot of audio in what I do. So perhaps the device, the technology stays in your pocket while you're still kind of walking around the space, that works quite nicely. I've been doing some stuff with the National Trust property, which is closer to immersive theatre. So a bit like an escape game, but you play it around the entire venue. And if you think of some of the escape games that are out there and probably some that you've played often what they're trying to do is they're trying to replicate these spaces that already exist in the cultural space.
John Sear: So they might be trying to make the office where Sherlock Holmes is based or they might be trying to replicate a castle. Well in the cultural attraction world or the GLAM world, we've already got those spaces and they're already completely authentic because they all exist. So what I like to try and do is kind of layer a game experience on top of what's already there.
John Sear: So one that hopefully will go in a National Trust property sometime next year is actually one where players are essentially spies. They're working for a secret organisation and they are operating within this National Trust property. But one of the advantages of being a spy is that the whole point is you're not supposed to get caught, right? So, you're supposed to be acting as if you are a normal visitor, and this is one of the problems, right? When you set a game in a space like a museum or a castle or a historic building, people behave differently and we don't always want them to behave differently when there's all these kind of priceless artefacts everywhere.
John Sear: So using these themes whereby the whole point is you're not supposed to get caught and you're supposed to be like a visitor, but secretly you're a spy doing interesting things. That mechanism works quite well I think, and that we reuse it again and again.
Paul Wright: I'd love to get a bit of an understanding of what happens with these venues, what do they decide? Do they decide they would need some immersive game in their venue and then they put a brief out there, and then you come up with ideas for that brief or is it, how does it work?
John Sear: Yeah.
Kelly Molson: How do they know they need you?
Paul Wright: Yeah.
John Sear: How do they know? They don't really. Often, I mean, I think probably some people see me talk at conferences and things or they might have used, I've got a series of kind of free tutorials online, which are designed to kind of help museums build their own things.
John Sear: So I think most people talk to me first and then I try and convince them that they need me rather than they know that they need me and come looking for me, if that makes sense?
Kelly Molson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Paul Wright: Yeah.
John Sear: Normally they say, "Okay, we're looking to build an interactive in a museum that does this." Or "We're looking to build an app that visitors use." And then that is normally the start of a conversation of, well, why do you need an app? Or why do you think you need an app? And what are you trying to do with that? And these are all the problems with that, and these are the costs of it and these are the other things you could do with the same amount of money and then people would normally look pretty terrified.
John Sear: So yeah, I mean, occasionally some museums are aware of things like immersive theatre and they're interested enough to go, okay, how could we use these new types of experiences within our spaces. But I mean I think most places are kind of feeling that out at the moment. They don't really know they need it, they're not really sure they want it. There's a few places that are like, they can see the benefits, we can attract a different audience demographic or we can open at different times.
John Sear: So with National Trust properties, typically they have a lot of business with a certain demographic during the day, but then those properties are closed in the evening. Well actually, at least a couple of nights a week, we could actually set a large scale immersive theatre piece in there, which would bring people in and you could also sell to them food and drinks. When you look at the kind of money people are willing to spend to go to the big experiences, the Punchdrunks and the Secret Cinemas, they're spending hundreds of pounds a night. And when you start to mention those numbers, suddenly there are a few people in the museum where they go, okay, that sounds interesting. Different audiences and we could earn money from it, maybe.
John Sear: But there aren't many kind of big examples of that to look to. So it's definitely still early days in that sense.
Kelly Molson: So I guess it comes back to something that keeps coming up over and over again in terms of using tech, it's about using tech to enhance the venue and engage with a different audience at different times. So essentially it is about driving more footfall from different people.
John Sear: Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the appeal I think, and I think people realise they need something that's a bit more unique, that's a bit more attractive, and it's not just, okay, everyone has got an app now, we need to make sure we've got an app. Well, there's quite a lot of evidence out there that they're showing that's not really working, and generally it's a bit of a block, isn't it?
John Sear: I mean, you've probably had experience with this, but like a museum produces an app because they feel like they need an app, and then of course, the problem they've got is how do they convince their visitors to install the app? And they probably haven't done it before they've arrived at the venue. So then they've got to get on the wifi and they've got to download it and then they have to use the most precious thing in the world, which is their battery life on their phone, right? Nobody wants to give up their battery life on their phone.
John Sear: So, who knows? There's lots of issues with that an app is the solution to everything, and that's not to say that I don't use apps for some of the venues that I work with, but most of the time I will try and persuade them to also supply the phones with it. I mean that's always a difficult sell because the reason that museums love things like apps is because it means that I have to manage the technology-
Kelly Molson: Yeah, exactly.
John Sear: ... Which is a huge headache. But if you want people to actually use it in really big numbers, it's much easier just to hand them a device as they walk in the building than it is to go, okay, we need to get you on the wifi and then you need to download this thing and then you need to set up an account and then you need to go, all of that. Each one of those things is a barrier. So it slows it down and you lose people.
John Sear: So obviously we're seeing more people move towards just websites that allow people to hook straight into it and use things in conjunction with the space rather than the kind of full download of an app.
Paul Wright: Or progressive web apps as well.
John Sear: Exactly, yeah.
Kelly Molson: John, you talked a little bit earlier about the game where you could pretend to be a spy, so it was kind of keeping people acting in a certain way. You also talk a lot about the importance of storytelling, which I mean that's important to us as well. It's one of the key things that we talk about in terms of your website. How do you work with the museums and the galleries to find those stories? Do you help them create them collaboratively? Do you suggest what would work best for their space?
John Sear: Yeah, I guess it's a combination really. I mean that's one of the best things about working with cultural spaces, right? Is they have so much history and so much storytelling. I mean, it's what they do, why they collect stories from throughout the ages and they've got thousands to draw on. So really, I mean, the problem is, choosing from all of those when you've got so much, and so what are the stories that they've already got that fit in best with what we're trying to do?
John Sear: I mean, there's no right answer to all of that. I mean, often the kind of shortcut I guess is that people are interested in people, right? So, normally if you can find a story that's got a good character, a good protagonist, a real person at the heart of it. That's normally where we start from I think. But yeah, the problem is choosing from the many varied stories rather than kind of building something from scratch.
Paul Wright: If we go back to the game making, I'm really interested about this, about how you come up with ideas for games. Would you have any tips how to create interactive games?
John Sear: That's a big question. I used to run a four year degree course on this very subject.
Paul Wright: Oh, well.
John Sear: So, if I can summarise that in 10 seconds. I think probably one of the problems I have, and I mean, my company is called Museum Games, which is a kind of like, it does what it says on the tin type name, but I actually find making games for museums is one of the hardest things because normally what we're thinking about, we're thinking about an interactive.
John Sear: So a single place within the museum or cultural space where you go to and interact with a device of some kind. That might be a touch screen, it might be something with big buttons on it, it might be a camera based thing, so all of those, and for me the things that I'm most interested in about games is the kind of deepness to them.
John Sear: They're quite deep experiences, they're really engaging, you can learn from them, but we're trying to do that in a public space, in museums, it makes it much harder. How do you get people properly engaged in the experience when potentially there's an audience around them watching what they do, that makes it quite hard. And also the museums themselves, as great as they are to work with, obviously one of their primary reasons is to educate the public, and so it's really hard to drop the educational part.
John Sear: I mean, this would be, the biggest tip really for me, is to make games that are firstly fun experiences and less focus on the educational part. If you're busy playing a game for 10 minutes, you can have a really fun experience. You can have a great time, you might get some good photos out of it for social media but ultimately we want you to be excited and then keen to learn more about whatever the topic is we've chosen, and they, the tutor period or something, but I'm not going to build a game that's going to mean that you're going to learn all the kings of England, for instance.
John Sear: And I think that's one of the problems and one of the barriers to working with museums is there's a kind of like, "Okay, there way this game needs to be all of those things that all these other games are, but it also needs to be educational." And you're like, "Well, if I sat down a player with the list of Tudor kings or something for the next 10 minutes and made them revise it, by the end of it, they probably wouldn't remember these things anyway."
John Sear: So for me it's much more about let's make a thing that is fun and enjoyable and makes people want to spend time in the museum and makes people want to learn more about these things going forward. So if you used a particular character from history in the game and as long as afterwards there's some sort of direction that says, "Okay, you can learn more about this particular king or there are some interesting stories about this queen." Or whatever it is. As long as there's a kind of hand holding to the next thing, I mean that's the thing that I'm most happy about really.
John Sear: Get people excited first and then worry about the kind of educational content afterwards. Sorry, I turned that question and there wasn't really a kind of tip on how to make interactive games. That was really my gripe I guess.
Kelly Molson: No, it's great. I mean it really comes through how passionate you are about it. I guess it's again coming back to kind of making sure that whatever you're creating from a gaming or technology basis ties in with their culture and the heritage and the education side of the venue that you're in as well. So it's about in you're own too.
John Sear: Yeah, you've said much better than I did actually. I think it's just very hard to make a game that... And games, the best part of them is how deep they are and how immersed you can get in them when actually people are walking through a space, and have only got a few minutes to play this game and actually from the museum point of view, we don't want them standing there playing a game for two hours because that uses up the device, the interactive.
John Sear: So to make a game that's deep and also quick is quite hard. So, I mean, a lot of the games that you see in museums are really much more toy-like. They're these kind of little things you can have a little play with for a few minutes but really we need to get you on and moving around the space to see the next thing.
Kelly Molson: So tell us a little bit more about DIY Museum Tutorials because you actually give away a lot of kind of free content and a lot of things to help museums do this themselves as well, don't you?
John Sear: Yeah, I do. It's nice of me, right?
Kelly Molson: It's very nice.
John Sear: Well, I mean obviously there's other good reasons, right? To be sharing stuff and ultimately the stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis, I'm always learning and there's loads of people online that share their knowledge that helped me get to the place I am. So it's just sort of my way of contributing something to the kind of shared knowledge sphere, should we say?
John Sear: So this set of tutorials was really designed for museums that can't afford to or don't have a lot of technological skills in house. I mean, most museums don't have a lot of money at the best of times. They might get money when they have a round of funding coming for a particular project, but the rest of the time they're kind of scraping things together.
John Sear: So it was really about taking some of the projects that I've worked on where I've actually been paid to do them, and then trying to show people how you could build a kind of a simpler version yourself. Not quite to the same level, but without spending much money, and spending a bit of time.
John Sear: So either you've got people in your museum who have got a little bit of an interest in tech or you've got volunteers in your museum that are happy to kind of have a bit of a play. And so these tutorials, there's about seven or eight now, they're very much geared towards smaller museums who have got no money but might have some volunteers, and that volunteer is happy to kind of get their hands a little bit dirty.
John Sear: So I mean it doesn't go very technical, it's always designed. So the hardest thing is kind of using an app on a mobile phone. It's not even things like setting up a Raspberry Pi or setting up an Arduino, which I know is a big barrier.
John Sear: I mean it's lovely for me that these get used so widely. I get fantastic messages from all over the world where people have set up one of these things in New Zealand or Africa or America, which is really lovely to hear about. I mean the most popular ones are the Babbling Beasts tutorial, and that is using a technology called NFC, Near-field communication to trigger media, and it started off as a project to kind of make cuddly toys talk.
John Sear: So you basically take a cuddly toy and you put a mobile phone inside the cuddly toy and you record some audio, a bit like a kind of build the bear type thing, you record it straight onto the mobile phone, you put some NFC tags around your space, and if you've not seen NFC technology before, you've probably used it at some point because it's the same technology every time you go to Tesco's and buy something with your contactless credit card. It's that same wireless connectivity.
John Sear: So all of the media, all of the audio stays on the device. So that means you don't need to have any kind of wifi access, which is great if you're a National Trust building or a castle where you've got big thick walls. And then it's just a case of literally you take the cuddly toy over to your tag, your marker and when you scan it the cuddly toy talks to you. And so you can do a serious version of that. It doesn't need to be in a cuddly toy. Your mobile phone can be in anything you like, you can put it in a little wooden box or you can make a little case.
John Sear: We've had people, they've had knitting groups, knit cases for them, which has been lovely for some museums but essentially a way of just triggering audio or video but without even needing to touch the device. You just literally hold the device up to some kind of tag, and again, the tag can look like anything you want because the tag can stay behind something. So you can put it behind wood if you want to or behind a sign or you can put an array of tags out there. So any way you touched your phone against the whole display would trigger the audio.
John Sear: So it's very much a thing of like let's get people in and using technology really quickly, and then once you've got the hang of it, you can see how far you want to go with it. So you can push it further and further. So there's some ideas there by, you can do multi-language versions of this toy if you want, where you can do a French version and a German version, an Italian version, as well as your English version, and so before the tour starts or at any point in the tour, you can scan a flag and then as you go round you get the tour in that particular language-
Kelly Molson: Oh, that's brilliant, isn't it?
John Sear: ... Or we've done versions with kids and adult tours, so that the tags are the same throughout, but one is told in a kind of more serious way, and another one might be told through a character, like a small dog or a cat or something.
Kelly Molson: So I guess that's a really good way of trialing something, seeing what the uptake is. It's an MVP, isn't it?
John Sear: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kelly Molson: Minimum viable product. Try this out, see what happens, you can do this all yourself and then if it's brilliant and it gets the results you want, get us in and we'll do your bigger version of it.
John Sear: Yeah, I mean, ultimately that would be nice. But at the same time I'm totally happy for people not to call me in to do it. If they've made something brilliant, great. And the idea being is once they've started doing it, they get a bit more confidence. They might want to make that more game-like or so it could be a Choose Your Own Adventure style thing, it could be quiz based. But yeah, you're right.
John Sear: Some people do then call me and afterwards build a kind of a more advanced one. So I've just finished doing a National Trust version with a company called Outside Studios and that's running up at the Workhouse near Nottingham and that's using phones as kind of media players, and so as you walk around the space, which doesn't have a lot of interpretation in the space, a lot of it comes through the phone or the tablet. You can just scan things as you go, and so we've made a nicer version. It's a bit more flashy, it does a few more things. It's got better housing, different updates.
John Sear: So, yeah, there's lots of ways that I can sort of do better versions for people, but you absolutely don't need to call me in for this. The idea is, yeah, build your own and if you're happy with that then great.
Kelly Molson: I love that. Do you get people kind of sending you, look what we've done?
John Sear: Yes.
Kelly Molson: We've used your tutorial and look what we've created?
John Sear: It's lovely, yeah. I love getting emails from people from all over the world telling me what they've done with it, and then yeah, like photos on Twitter, you just see kids with cuddly toys in museums and you're like, oh, it's brilliant. It's really nice. So it's-
Kelly Molson: That's really cool.
John Sear: ... Nice to be able to share and put something back. And so yeah. So the Babbling Beast one is popular. There's a touch screen one that's very popular as well. Like how to build really simple touchscreens, using PowerPoint. Most people kind of cringe a little bit when I say PowerPoint, but the good thing is, is that everyone can use PowerPoint or have been forced to use PowerPoint at some point in their life to create a horrible slideshow, but you can build interactives with it, and the latest version is really impressive actually.
John Sear: I ran a workshop a couple of weeks ago, which was using PowerPoint to build projection mapped experiences in museums and the latest version of PowerPoint supports 3D models. So you can have animated 3D models and it also has quite a lot of motion graphics in there as well. So you can do some quite fancy looking interactives using PowerPoint and no one would ever guess that you were using it. But again, it's this idea of, let's say a minimum viable product, but just giving people enough confidence they can build a little thing with it, and once they've got over that first hurdle, they go, okay, what can it do next? Okay, how do we add video to this? How do we add audio? How do we add a 3D model? And it's just nice that you can build out really quickly and then build on that knowledge.
Kelly Molson: That's brilliant.
Paul Wright: I've noticed in your bio you're interested in interactive fiction.
John Sear: Oh, yeah.
Paul Wright: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
John Sear: I mean, so interactive fiction covers a wide range of experiences. I mean originally it kind of meant the Choose Your Own Adventure books, if you've come across those?
Kelly Molson: Oh yeah. Yep.
John Sear: So I grew up with these and there's a number of different versions of them but I grew up with a kind of original Choose Your Own Adventure. I think more recently they're called Goosebumps, people know them as. But there was a lot of different versions of this and we've even seen it I think last Christmas through Black Mirror, the Bandersnatch.
Kelly Molson: Bandersnatch, yeah.
John Sear: On a side note, I actually, for that workshop I did recently showing people what you could do with PowerPoint. I built a mini version of Bandersnatch, as in, taking the video clips from it and I built that in PowerPoint to show you could do it.
Paul Wright: Wow.
John Sear: Sorry, that's a completely aside really.
Kelly Molson: I love that.
John Sear: But I don't work for Microsoft and I don't earn anything if you use it, but it's actually a really good bit of equipment, a really good tool these days, and it's got like [crosstalk 00:37:08]-
Kelly Molson: Of the presentation software is available.
John Sear: ... I'm sure it is. But just use that, definitely, it's too fine now, it's 30 years old. So it should be reasonable. So interactive fiction obviously started with people like Edward Packard, who's the kind of one of the fathers of these Choose Your Own Adventure books back in the kind of late 70s, early 80s, I want to say somewhere around then. And so they had the classic thing of, you'd read through a page or two of the book, and at the end of it you would get to make choices, do you want to go into the cave or do you want to leave and jump on a horse and ride out into the wilderness.
John Sear: You'd make those choices and ultimately you'd have like a hundred pages and maybe 20 different endings you'd go through. And so, I quite enjoyed playing those, but they're quite a simple touch point that most people understand in terms of building things that are interactive. The simple choices you get to make as you go through is quite a commonly understood thing. So in the Babbling Beasts example, we could actually very easily make those trails, Choose Your Own Adventure style trails. But actually in more recent terms, I mean interactive fiction is a kind of it means a wider thing.
John Sear: It means like any type of fiction or text based experience where you can have some kind of choice in it, and in the last five or 10 years, there's been some fantastic tools that have made this much easier. So in the old days you might have experienced like text adventures on kind of BBCs and spectrums and PCs, back in the kind of 80s and 90s. I don't know if you're quite as old as me, but these were the-
Kelly Molson: We are John, we are.
John Sear: ... Okay. so you might've experienced these things. But then more recently there's been some fantastic web-based tools like Twine. And again actually, I've got a tutorial based on this because I quite enjoy teaching people how to build their own interactive fiction stories, and Twine is an incredibly simple piece of technology to use. And again you start simple building Choose Your Own Adventure style choices, then as you get more into it, you can use more programming language variables and things to make it a bit more richer. But yeah, I've seen people do all sorts of interesting stuff in tools like Twine.
John Sear: I mean that's what's good about in the modern age is that the tools are out there that are free and open source and a lot of cases that allow you to build these things very quickly and cheaply. And then once you get started, it's kind of like, the limits are just your own imagination. So, there's been a whole movement really with Twine where people that aren't really anything to do with games have come from different spaces and have been able to build really quite complicated and interesting games telling very personal stories, which has been really interesting, and every year there's interactive fiction competitions.
John Sear: So you can look at the kind of things that people are making in this space. And then I did some work, we're trying to put these in museums. So if you go back through my kind of website history, you'll see me discussing this a few years ago, there were some fantastic experiences where you were in the museum while having a similarly related experience. So for example, there was an experience where you had a book that was written, it was a film script, and you could sit in the museum and read the script, and actually what they'd done is they built the set around you out of things that were in the museum.
John Sear: So as you read about, I don't know like someone playing a piano off in another room. Actually there is a piano just off in another room and it turns out someone might be playing that at the same time or there might be a bookcase alongside you, and some of the books that are being referenced in the story you're reading are actually on that bookcase.
John Sear: So it's something powerful about experiencing the story while you're sitting in the space. So I was actually trying to get museums to build interactive fiction games or stories while being in the space, using technology like Twine. So you might have, I don't know, a castle and actually you don't interact directly with the space at all, but you just stand or sit in the space while the story happens.
John Sear: You can intertwine the real experience of you being in the real physical space with the virtual, which in this case, the interactive fiction games could be played on a touchscreen or you could play them on a website. So you could play them on your mobile phone, but it might be that in the interaction fiction game in order to progress, you might need to know the name of the painter in the painting in the far room.
John Sear: So actually while playing the game, you have to physically walk into the fire room, look at the painting, and engage with it, perhaps look for something in the scene or look at who the painter was and then use that in the virtual game that you're playing as well.
Kelly Molson: That's cool.
John Sear: So we're kind of tying these two things together, but technically it was incredibly simple and if you want to do this again there's a tutorial available which teaches you how to and really simple and I just wanted to see more museums kind of play with the idea. Building games that are set in the space they're already in but without getting too worried about the technology.
Kelly Molson: We will be for our listeners be linking to all of the things that John's been talking about today. So they'll be in the show notes and we will also be having this podcast transcribed as well.
Kelly Molson: John, I want to ask you about a challenge that we keep hearing over and over and over again from kind of museum world and visitor attraction world and some of the challenges they have are obviously engaging with new different audiences, which we've talked about, but one of the biggest challenges that comes up is repeat visitors and how they can engage with the same people and get them to come back over and over again. What kind of advice can you offer in terms of how to bring people back to a space and then how often do you have to be looking at refreshing the game or the interactive activity that you've got to kind of reengage with the same people? That's probably a really long question.
John Sear: It's a very good question. Yeah, because the repeat visitor thing is quite a hard one and there's lots of different reasons that people go back to museums or cultural things again and again. I mean a lot of this comes down to a problem that all of us face with building visitor attraction type experiences. It's just that people are generally quite time poor. They don't have a lot of time. Once they get through all the kind of day-to-day grind and work and family and commitments, often they're out seeking things that are kind of new and unique.
John Sear: That is difficult obviously with the repeat visitor thing. I mean, the classic way that most of the larger institutes deal with this is obviously through their temporary exhibition spaces that you would refresh every three to six months or whatever to give people a new thing they come and see. And then obviously there's problems with that, which is often those are paid experiences and they're quite premium products unless perhaps you're on an annual pass of some kind.
John Sear: I know a lot of the smaller museums, they make the basic stuff work really well, right? Like the cafes and things. The things that you're going to use again and again. So this is very technical obviously. So for us in Birmingham, we use two of Birmingham museum trust places a lot. We use the BMAG, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and we use Thinktank, which is the kind of science museum because of they've got fantastic cafe spaces and they're quite family friendly. So often we'll go in there knowing that it ticks those boxes and then we'll go and see other stuff. I mean, I'm going in there for the cultural reasons. The rest of my family, not so.
John Sear: So normally we start off there with people having a coffee and things and then I'll drag them off to go see different things every time. But I mean that's more from a kind of personal point of view. From kind of the game wise thing, I mean it depends on the types of games you're making and who you're targeting it at. I mean obviously kids generally will play the same game again and again, whereas adults generally don't. We're constantly looking for the new thing. We're looking for the new show, the new film, we're not watching the same series again and again generally. We're waiting for the next series to come.
John Sear: So we're expecting to see something new every time, whereas kids actually like the familiarity of doing the same thing again, which makes it quite difficult I guess to make something that's engaging for both parents and families. With games, there are different types of games, right? There are games which are much more a single play through, which might be a story based thing where it's about unlocking all of the story. But on subsequent play throughs you could have more things you can unlock, right?
John Sear: So, I mean you can have side quests that you might not do the first time round, but the second time you might do, or we have things like score based games whereby you play the game again and again in order to get a better score. Yeah, I'm not sure whether those are enough reasons that people would come back again, and again. I'm generally happy if people come once and play the experience and often that means that some of the things I run will run at set times. So they might run as part of a festival.
John Sear: That is the model that people like the funders such as arts council seem to be following now, which is we know that the visitors will come out for new interesting things, right? So again, talking about Birmingham and specifically, we're quite lucky that during the summer months particularly, we have different festivals happening just about every weekend and so then every time you come to somewhere like a museum, one of the big museums, there'll be a different offering because it's taking part in a different festival.
John Sear: So there'll be a few of the front of house things are changing, but often that means is that some of the games that I build or I help people build are built very quickly with the idea they might only run for that one weekend or it might be used for a number of kind of temporary things, but that also means we can use live people to add to the game experience as well, which is quite nice.
Kelly Molson: That sounds really fun, and I guess you've got quite a lot of flexibility in what you're doing because you're having to be a bit more agile about the time that it's on, the time of year that it's on, the venue space that it's going to be on and how many people are going to be coming in, and playing those games.
John Sear: Yeah, I mean, with solely digital games. So some of the games I make are kind of entirely digital and they're not supervised. So you might pick up a tablet or something or a device that you play on, but then there's no involvement from anyone else. Well that means that game has to kind of work flawlessly all the way through and it takes a lot more work to do.
John Sear: It needs to deal with all the cases where people get lost and aren't sure where they're going. The game needs to handhold them through it. Well, obviously if you're building something for a festival, for a short experience, the game doesn't have to be quite like a hundred percent proof because we know there's going to be people around to augment the game, but also to kind of help the players along.
John Sear: So it means you can cut corners a bit. You go, well we think people would get lost on this floor at this point in the game, but we don't really mind because there's going to be loads of other people playing the game anyway and there's going to be some volunteers around the space who will kind of direct them in the right direction.
John Sear: So yeah. So I find it easier and cheaper and quicker to make games that are kind of temporary than it is to make a game that's a hundred percent foolproof and works in every possible case.
Kelly Molson: John, earlier in the podcast you mentioned immersive theatre. Is there an experience that you have at the moment that we could go and be part of?
John Sear: Good question, you could actually. So there's a game I've been working on it for a few years now with a company called The Other Way Works and they are a theatre company who build interactive theatre and I'm a games company that builds theatrical games should we say, and together we've worked on a experience called A Moment of Madness, which is currently touring actually.
John Sear: It's about to go to Lincoln as part of the Frequency Festival. It's been in Birmingham and London and up North to Stockton and hopefully next year it'll tour again as well. So this is kind of approach to immersive theatre and it's a hybrid immersive theatre escape game and it takes place in a car park. So, an urban stake out.
John Sear: To give you the kind of rough overview, it's about a politician. He's called Michael Makerson. We think he's a good guy, but as with most politicians, he's got a bit of a-
Kelly Molson: Who knows?
John Sear: ... Shady past or a shady present, and what we know about today is that he is going to give some kind of press conference about a deal that he's struck with an electric car company, which is, it's good in this kind of post Brexit world to have connections with electric car companies.
John Sear: So he's going to do an announcement about that in about 90 minutes time in the kind of run up to that. We know that he's going to have a meeting in a car park, which perhaps has got some kind of dodgy connotation to it. So that's the kind of starting point. The game is played by 24 players at any one time. They're split up into six teams of four and each of those teams is eventually assigned a car, so they're going to be staking out a car park. The car is stationary by the way. They're not going to be driving around after him.
John Sear: People always ask me that, "How do you get insurance for people to drive cars?" I'm like, "They don't. They're on a stake out. They're supposed to be hiding." You buy a ticket and you turn up for the experience under the pretence that you're coming to a business seminar. So we are hosting a kind of fake business seminar in a conference centre and obviously then once they come in, they get their lanyard and things which actually assigns them to a colour coded team.
John Sear: They come into the space and when the business seminar starts, the doors close, and actually we reveal the real reason, which as everybody in the room knows, we are working for MI5 and we're investigating this politician, Michael Makerson and what he's up to. So we're tasked with this mission of going into the car park, sitting in the car and kind of watching what he gets up to.
Kelly Molson: This sounds great. I should get a ticket.
John Sear: It is actually. I'm not trying to do a really good job of selling it, but it is a really good experience.
Kelly Molson: I'm sold.
John Sear: Okay. Come and do it. Come to Lincoln and do it. So yeah. So you spend the kind of middle section of the game, which is 45 minutes, watching what he gets up to in the car park, who does he meet and while you're kind of trying to see what he's up to, you've got a list of suspects essentially of who you might be meeting and who they are and you can investigate them.
John Sear: So a lot of the story happens through a mobile phone as you can see the connection. I like using mobile phones. You find a mobile phone, a burner phone in the car along with the collection of items that the MI5 has left for you, and what it turns out is that working for us is his personal secretary who's called Andrea.
John Sear: So she suspects he's up to something and she's working for MI5 as well. So what she's going to do is she's going to text us throughout the hour or so we're in the car and tell us what he's up to.
Kelly Molson: I feel like you shouldn't tell us any more, John, because I want to-
John Sear: Well, I'm going to stop before I get to the...
Kelly Molson: ... You need to stop.
John Sear: Yeah, because obviously there's a lot that happens and there's a lot that I'm going to give a talk on this actually later in the week where I do all the spoilers. But ultimately in this game you're having this conversation with Andrea, she's given you things to do, things to watch out for, keeps you posted as to what Michael is up to. But there are escape room style puzzles that happen.
John Sear: So you're trying to collect information about him and because it's an immersive experience each car has kind of leeway to go down the investigation direction they want to go. So one particular car might investigate his relationship with his wife or another car might investigate, what's happening with him and his business partner, and so then ultimately you're going to come back together, and then the players, the MI5 agents, get to kind of present all the information they've got and then make a decision about whether or not to kind of, what should we do with this information? Should we try and stop his career or do we support him on his way to becoming prime minister? And so, yeah, we've been running that around the country, and actually one of the things the politician has is this kind of a blonde wig, which makes him very visible, and it wasn't the intention when we started out, but it ended up looking quite a lot like a certain prime minister we have now.
Kelly Molson: Wow, wow. So current.
John Sear: So he gets, yeah, it's surprising. All of that stuff that we wrote about four years ago is all coming true. So I think we take a lot of the blame for all of the mess of the political spectrum at the moment.
Kelly Molson: John, thank you so much for sharing that.
John Sear: But I should say because it's supported by the arts, this show, it's incredibly cheap to come to because we don't want to make the cost of attending a barrier. So whereas like an escape room of 90 minutes is often 50, £60 a person. This is normally £40 a car and in some spaces it's been entirely free actually, which is quite nice.
Kelly Molson: Oh, wow.
John Sear: So there's no barrier to playing normally.
Kelly Molson: Brilliant. John, thank you. We have absolutely loved speaking to you today. It's been so much fun. As I said, we'll put all of the links to all of John's information and the DIY Tutorials and where you can go and buy those tickets in the show notes. But John, thank you for coming on Skip the Queue. It's been awesome.
John Sear: No problem at all. Thank you so much. It's been lovely to talk to you both and now I can get back to talking about Tottenham, right?
Kelly Molson: Maybe not. We'll save that for another podcast, John.
John Sear: Thank you so much.
Kelly Molson: You can find links and notes from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast or search Skip the Queue on iTunes and Spotify to subscribe. Please remember to leave a rating. It helps other people find us.
Kelly Molson: This podcast was brought to you by Rubber Cheese, an award winning digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for visitor attractions. Find out how we can create a better experience for you and your guests at rubbercheese.com.
We have launched our brand-new playbook: ‘The Retail Ready Guide to Going Beyond the Gift Shop’ — your go-to resource for building a successful e-commerce strategy that connects with your audience and drives sustainable growth.
Download your FREE copy here
The ‘great guy’ we mention at the end of the podcast who helped us with your survey is Adam Pearson, of Pearson Insight.
Transcript
One tiny blooper - 0.08 we say Marge was voted top 500 freelancers in the UK, however it was one of the top 50. Still an incredible achievement!
Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast that celebrates professionals working in the visitor attraction sector. What do we mean by visitor attractions? Well, it's an umbrella term for a huge range of exciting organisations that are must sees. Think museums, theme parks, zoos, farms, heritage sites, tour providers, escape rooms and much, much more. They're tourist hotspots or much loved local establishments that educate, engage and excite the general public.
Kelly Molson: Those who work in visitor attractions often pour their heart and soul into providing exceptional experiences for others. In our opinion, they don't get the recognition that they deserve for this. We want to change this. Each episode, we'll share the journeys of inspiring leaders. We'll celebrate their achievements and dig deeper into what really makes their attractions successful both offline and digitally.
Kelly Molson: Listen and be inspired as industry leaders share their innovative ideas, services and approaches. There's plenty of valuable information you can take away and put into action to create better experiences for your own guests.
Kelly Molson: Your hosts for this podcast are myself, Kelly Molson, and Paul Wright. We're the co-founders of Rubber Cheese, an award winning digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for visitor attractions. Find out how we can create a better experience for you and your guests at rubbercheese.com. Search 'Skip the Queue' on iTunes and Spotify to subscribe. You can find links every episode, and more, over on our website rubbercheese.com/podcast. We hope that you enjoy these interviews, and if there's anyone you think we should be talking to, please do send us a message.
Kelly Molson: Marge Ainsley, it is so lovely to have you on the Skip the Queue podcast this morning, so thank you for joining us.
Marge Ainsley: Well thank you for having me.
Kelly Molson: Now we want to talk a little bit about ... Well, we want to talk a lot about what you do and how you work within the cultural, museum and visitor attraction sectors. So can you just tell us a little bit about what you do?
Marge Ainsley: So I've been freelance 11 years this year, and I tend to work with museums, galleries, theatres, archives, visitor attractions, heritage sites, helping them with their marketing audience development and visitor research or evaluation work.
Marge Ainsley: So I suppose if I gave you a sense of an every day or an every week, that could look like me going and working with, say, an independent museum who don't have in-house expertise in audience development or visitor research, and supporting them either strategically or very practically. It could be training them as an organisation as well, through to working on large capital projects. So I get involved in a lot of museum refurbishments where there needs to be a lot of upfront visitor research, especially with people who aren't using those places at the moment.
Marge Ainsley: So I can be one day working with a collection in a very small, independent museum in the middle of nowhere, through to a really big, well funded organisation the next day. So it's a real big mix.
Kelly Molson: And when you talk about kind of communication and evaluation work that you do for them, can you give us an example of how you specifically helped one of those organisations?
Marge Ainsley: It could be something as simple as working with an organisation on their copywriting. So for example, whether that's their interpretation or whether it's marketing collateral where they don't have that kind of copywriting expertise in-house, or it could be ... For example, I worked on Silverstone Experience, which is about to open this year, working right before any of the concepts were designed for that new attraction on non-user research and user research. So that could be talking to potential audiences about what they want to see in that attraction and where they go now, how they would work out how to get there. All that kind of concept testing work.
Marge Ainsley: So it could be something very, very practical with an attraction that's already open, through to looking at one that isn't open yet and what people want to get out of their experience. So it's a real range.
Paul Wright: What process do you go through to do the research?
Marge Ainsley: Sometimes I work by myself, but if it's a big project I'll work with a team of associates. And so it might be that we work with, say, an exhibition design company who come up with the concepts and we kind of scrutinise those and look at who the target audiences are. And then once we've worked out who the target audiences are, we would then go out to those.
Marge Ainsley: So, for example, it could be ... I spend a lot of time sitting in [inaudible 00:05:55] with families. So I'll go out to particular areas where those target audiences are and just talk to them. So it could be me being in a soft play centre talking to families. For example, just [inaudible 00:06:09] the larger organisations.
Marge Ainsley: I do a lot of work for libraries, so recently I've been going and talking to families about why do or don't they use their local library service. Did they know that there's an arts and cultural offer at their local library service? How do they typically find out about activities in their area? So that, for me, is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job actually; going out and talking to people who don't engage with us at the moment and working out what those barriers are.
Marge Ainsley: So that practical process is from working out who they are, using data to inform where those people are located, going to those locations, drawing up a discussion guide with relevant questions and then going through that process of interviewing them and analysing the data afterwards and then presenting it back to the client. That could be anything from a library organisation, an archive, a huge capital project, but it's still pretty much the same process.
Kelly Molson: So I guess if you're working with an organisation that's kind of already up and running, for example, you would be brought in if they had a challenge with engaging with people that aren't necessarily coming to their museum or their visitor attraction already, and they want to be able to put an offering together for them. So they might bring you in at that point?
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, that's right. So a lot of the organisations I work for, they're kind of saying, "Well, we know we're getting this type of visitor coming through the doors. How do we either get more of them, or how do we get the kind of lapsed people to come back?"
Marge Ainsley: So sometimes when I go out and I'm talking to different kinds of potential visitors, some of those may have gone to a museum or gone to a library as a kid years and years ago, or gone for a visit once and never gone back again. So it's about finding out what their perceptions are, why they've not been back enough. You know, you'll come up against perceptions such as, "Well, it was like this when I went as a school child on a school trip 25 years ago and I've never been back since." Or, "Isn't that the place that they have weddings? Why would I want to go there?" You know, they've just got maybe a mismatch in terms of perception, or they don't really understand the 2019 version of what that organisation looks like.
Marge Ainsley: So, for example, a lot of the work I do with libraries at the moment is to kind of get that 21st perception about libraries out because a lot of people, I think, still perceive libraries to be those places where we have to be really, really quiet, whereas many of them have got a really vibrant cultural offer.
Marge Ainsley: So it's just about kind of understanding what those barriers are and those perceptions, and then working out with the libraries ... And I suppose this is the other part of my job, kind of audience development, what we call audience development planning ... Working with them to create different kinds of strategies really to engage those people who don't have a level of awareness, or have an incorrect perception I suppose of what that place is like now.
Kelly Molson: That bit must be quite exciting for you as well, because you get to see a real kind of change in perception and you get to see the progress that that organisation can make with the help that you've been able to support them with.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, that's right. And I think one of the most interesting bits actually at the moment is around the difference that these organisations are making to people's health and wellbeing. So you've probably seen a lot in the media and out there in terms of data around social prescribing and the fact that actually, people are now recognising the value that museums and galleries and other cultural organisations can have on our everyday lives and how important they are in terms of contributing to the amazing places that we live.
Marge Ainsley: And so when I go and ... The other side of my work is evaluating projects, so I don't just do the kind of, why aren't people visiting? I do a lot of evaluation of projects as well. It's really interesting when you talk to people about the difference that these places and projects are making to their lives. So, for example, I was running a discussion group not so long ago where it was a group of people who were real advocates for this particular organisation. They were just talking quite frankly and openly with me about how they'd never left the house before, they had real anxiety problems, they might not even get dressed in the daytime and this particular place, they'd managed to be persuaded to go to this cultural activity and cultural provision that was happening, and how it had just totally turned their life around.
Marge Ainsley: One gentleman had written on a card and left it at the workshop and it said this particular project had saved his life. It's those type of research groups that you just think, "Oh, this is why the jobs that we do in the art sector." So yeah, it is really interesting. You know, it's not always about the positives either. A lot of my work is about working out what's failed and why. That's an area I think we're starting to get a little bit better on in terms of evaluation and the cultural sector. It's still not quite there yet.
Marge Ainsley: And what I mean by that is when I work with a client, often ... Of course they're interested in advocacy around their project as well and what's worked really well. But often, it's been a bit of a battle in terms of getting people to talk openly about what's not worked, and I think there's a few reasons for that. Some of it's around not wanting to be seen as failing. Some of it's around funders of projects not releasing the [inaudible 00:11:50] of money until you've submitted an evaluation report. There's a lot going on there, but we've seen a shift change in that recently.
Marge Ainsley: And so a lot of my work is about looking at, "Okay, where were the challenges? Where were the issues on that? And what have you learned? What are we going to do differently next time?" And a lot of organisations as well, they're not just waiting to do evaluation at the end of the project. So more and more I'm encouraging people to really kind of use that what we call formative evaluation, so really looking across a project period. Say it's like 18 months, really looking right from kind of quarter of the way through, half the way through and all the rest of it at what's working well and not, and then actually reporting that back in to make a change during a project rather than waiting until the end when it's all kind of done.
Marge Ainsley: So that's the other aspect of the work I'm really interested in. Yeah, I've worked with quite a few really interesting organisations recently who have been really up for that kind of formative evaluation process.
Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. That sounds very much like kind of our agile design and development process as well-
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, [crosstalk 00:13:03].
Kelly Molson: Do a little test, yeah, and then reevaluate. So Marge, one of the large capital projects that you worked on recently has been for Silverstone Race Circuit, which is a brilliant visitor attraction, but could be quite different from the cultural sector that you're used to working with. How did you find that project? And [inaudible 00:13:23]?
Marge Ainsley: I mean, it was so exciting for me working with kind of a large commercial organisation. And so it was really interesting in terms of just how the organisation works, but also just having the opportunity to conduct visitor research on a bigger scale.
Marge Ainsley: So for example, for that project we, again, looked at who the target audiences were going to be for the new experience there, what the concepts were for the displays. But we ended up working for the whole of the Grand Prix weekend, so this is going back a couple of seasons now, right at the beginning, which was great. So we had a giant, huge marquee at the Grand Prix. Now, I'm not a massive motor sport fan, but just to have that experience of thousands and thousands of people there, so doing surveys. We had a roaming kit box that we took out and about. We got items from the collection were displayed in the marquee and we were talking to potential visitors about those were and what they found exciting and what they didn't find exciting. They were voting at that point on what the attraction might be called, what the kind of themes were.
Marge Ainsley: It was just really great to actually be in that space where there was real, passionate motor sport fans who were just actually really keen to come and talk to us. I think we had something crazy like 5000 people that we interviewed that weekend. It was something bonkers. But just having that opportunity to be at a world leading, world stage event to do that kind of research. And of course, opening soon, I think it's the end of October 2019 they're due to open, just seeing all that research come together because often I'll work on a project, and it might be an evaluation report, for example, that I do for an organisation and then I kind of deliver it and then I move on, whereas with this kind of upfront user and on-user research, more exploratory research, it's really interesting to see how that then gets used by an organisation into a capital project. So I'm really looking forward to going down there and seeing what the final result is when it opens.
Marge Ainsley: But it's the same with whatever. I mean, with the copywriting examples, you know, I worked on Merlin's SEA LIFE Centre that they're building over in Chongqing. There's these whole crazy, giant projects that I work on from afar ... I didn't have to go to China ... I work on all these really interesting, exciting projects and then I see them come to fruition. That's just a really rewarding part of my job.
Marge Ainsley: But then I also get a lot of satisfaction from working with what I call the smaller organisations that have big ambitions. I mean I work with a lot of independent museums, like I say, where they're voluntary run. They may have like one part-time member of staff, but otherwise it's volunteers that run the whole site. So for example, I'm working with Calderdale Industrial Museum in Halifax. You know, the Shoreditch of the north I think we're supposed to say now, next door to the [inaudible 00:16:31], and it's a really ambitious organisation, but they just need that little helping hand with their marketing and comms work.
Marge Ainsley: So I've got this privilege of working with those smaller organisations who have these amazing collections and amazing opportunities to engage audiences, versus those really giant, juggernaut organisations as well. And I guess that's one of the benefits of being a freelancer, isn't it? It's that variety and the different clients that you get to work with.
Kelly Molson: It is, yeah. I think one of the things that we've always thought is how much museums in the cultural sector can learn from visitor attractions and vice versa. I guess that kind of ties in with what you're saying as well, is actually, it doesn't matter the size or scale of the project that you're working on or the organisation that you're working with, they actually do have exactly the same challenges which is why you're able to help them.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, absolutely. It would be interesting actually to talk to some of these museum organisations because some of them might not even see themselves defined as a visitor attraction. I think a lot of maybe the independent museums who are part of kind of Independent Museum Networks do, but I think a lot of organisations I work with just don't kind of categorise themselves as visitor attractions. I know that sounds a bit odd, but I just don't think they even use the same terminology.
Marge Ainsley: You know, I've been talking to you guys previously and the kind of terminology around, how do we welcome our guests? For example. Sometimes visitor attractions talk about guests. Well that word itself is quite interesting when you talk to museums because I don't think ... I'm going to say we here ... But I don't think we would ever talk about ... Well, maybe we would, but we don't always talk about museum visitors as guests because it's very much about their place, their collection. Museums are wanting to try and give the welcome to visitors, audiences, users, whatever you would call them, that it's their collection, it's their place to hang out. You know? It's of them, it's by them, it's for them.
Marge Ainsley: There's this whole campaign and initiative that I should mention really, called OF/BY/FOR ALL. It's run by a woman called Nina Simon over in The States, and it's this kind of concept about if you're wanting to be a real inclusive museum, you need to be of the people, by the people, for the people, that kind of thing. And so this whole guest terminology, I think, around visitor attractions doesn't almost maybe sit well with that because we don't want them to be guests. We want them to feel like it's theirs. I don't know. I don't know what you guys think of that, but I think there's something interesting there with the terminology between the two.
Paul Wright: That's got to be difficult if you're writing copy for, say, websites as well, especially in terms of say SEO, search engine [inaudible 00:19:24] and what you actually say. It's a real minefield, I suppose.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a big job to be done around tone of voice actually.
Marge Ainsley: It's something I do help museums with in terms of their brand and kind of the copy and tone of voice and their values, because I think, again, it comes back to some of the challenges that particularly museums face that I work with. I mean, they're doing an amazing job with the resources they have, but if you imagine an independent museum that is volunteer run, that doesn't necessarily have marketing expertise in-house and then just layering on that even ability to copyright effectively on a website. Or not even thinking about the tone of voice element, just actually thinking about the fact that when you write copy for web, it's different to print. That's just not potentially on their radar.
Marge Ainsley: So I think that is actually a challenge for a lot of the museums that I work with, just purely because they don't have that capacity and expertise. And you know, I'm not digital marketing expert, I don't do a lot of digital work these days, but we do still see that kind of approach by museums of like, say, with social media, "We must setup every single channel that we should do with social media," because again, that expertise isn't there, rather than just thinking, "Right, let's get our own website in order first and get that looking and working effectively on mobile," and those kind of things.
Marge Ainsley: But it is purely down to capacity and knowledge. They have to prioritise looking after the collections and getting the doors open. Some of these places I work, they're only opening one or two days a week potentially and rostering on a whole set of volunteers to be able to open. So it's very different. You talk about, say, Silverstone where they've been recruiting for the new experience and they'll have a full team. That versus the kind of independent museums that I work with where there's just a couple of them. It's really, really tricky and I'm just dead proud of those ones for just achieving what they can and they're doing so much good work. But I guess that's where I come in, isn't it? In supporting them with it.
Marge Ainsley: But yeah, tone of voice and the way that museums are selling themselves I think, and the USPs as well. So I do do a lot of work with museums where they might have five or six different sites all under the same banner. I spend a lot of time working out with them, "Well is it everything for everyone? Who's the target audience for all of these different sites? Is the messaging different? What are the features versus the benefits of those individual sites?" But yeah, I'm not sure that they would be referring to people as guests anyway.
Paul Wright: How often do you review their copy?
Marge Ainsley: It depends what the project is. I mean I'm working with a group of museums in Cheshire at the moment and we did a kind of a print audit the other day looking at their What's On brochure like, for example. We pull apart other people's brochures and we look at theirs and we think about target audiences, and we look at kind of the copy and imagery and what they're wanting to say.
Marge Ainsley: But that's part of a whole program I'm working with them on audience development, so it depends on the project. If it's, say, like a training session I'll tend to run that. So I'll do training on copywriting, brand and tone of voice. That's kind of separate. But with audience development, that's just such a broad piece of work.
Marge Ainsley: So for example, I might get involved in writing audience development strategy. People often get marketing and audience development confused, or they might think very differently about the two, and it all comes down to semantics. I mean, most people, if you were to ask them, would say, "Well, marketing is kind of the numbers. It's the bums on seats. It's the getting people through the door," whereas the audience development is not just more visitors, but diversifying those visitors as well, diversifying those audiences.
Marge Ainsley: When we sit down and do an audience development strategy, we really involve everybody from across the organisation because it could be, you know, programming, it could be collections, it could be the comms, it could be anything in terms of the interpretation. It's a whole range, all those different kinds of things that I can do to diversify the audiences. It can be internal as well, so making sure the staff are trained.
Marge Ainsley: So when I'm doing audience development strategic planning, the copywriting and the kind of messaging just forms one part of that piece of work which takes place over quite a long period of time. And then ultimately, it's either some kind of audience development manual or practical guide. Definitely not an 80 page strategy that sits on a shelf. It needs to be something proactive that that organisation uses.
Marge Ainsley: So it's a real small part, whereas if I was working, say, on copywriting for SEA LIFE Centre Chongqing, their entire seahorse gallery for example, that's me just focused on that piece of work and it's just purely to do with copywriting or copy editing. So I'm kind of hopscotching around a little bit, but that's just reflecting my portfolio I suppose and the different types of work that I do.
Kelly Molson: So you've been freelancing for 10 years now?
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, 11.
Kelly Molson: 11 years.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, don't forget that one.
Kelly Molson: 11 years of freelancing. So we know ourselves from running a busy agency how complex it can be, how many balls you're juggling at any time. But one of the amazing things that you do is you actually set up the Museum Freelance Network. Can you tell us how did that even come about? Because it sounds like you're busy enough.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, I've got quite a few side projects, but then you ask any freelancer and they've got a list of side projects as long as their arm. But I didn't actually set it up. So it was Christina Lister and Laura Crossley set it up about four years ago and then I came on board quite soon after they started it to give them a helping hand really.
Marge Ainsley: Ultimately, in a nutshell, the network was really setup to kind of champion and support and lobby for freelancers working within the cultural sector. So we specifically focus on freelancers working in museums, libraries, archives, galleries and heritage sites.
Marge Ainsley: Gosh, the community's grown substantially in those four years really. We have an annual conference where we have around 80 to 90 delegates coming along to that. We run a training workshop every three months for people who are new to freelancing, or thinking about freelancing. We've been amazed how popular that is.
Marge Ainsley: I suppose one of the things we do with Museum Freelance, we're collaboration rather than competition. So it's not about, "Well, I've done that. Why would I say to that person how I've done it?" It's about supporting each other. And so when you come to conference, or if you come to a training workshop, or indeed if you're on the community ... So we have like a LinkedIn group which has got about, I think it's 800 we've got on there now. We have regular Q & As on Twitter and on social media as well. If you get involved you'll notice that we're very much about thinking like a business. So it's not, even though it's specifically focused on freelancers within the cultural sector, it's very much about those broad business skills that everybody needs as a freelancer.
Marge Ainsley: So at the conference, whether you're someone who's a visitor services expert, or visitor experiences expert, or whether you're an archivist, or whether you're a painting restorer, or a marketing freelancer, it doesn't matter. It's all kind of ... I don't want to use the word generic, that's not quite right, but it's broad. So we'll have talks about coaching and health and wellbeing. We'll have talks about finance. We'll have talks about staying motivated as a freelancer.
Marge Ainsley: So it's really broad. And we set it up and have continued it because we just felt that that was missing in terms of specifically the cultural sector. And so we're there not to just support freelancers, but kind of do that lobbying behind the scenes as well that wasn't happening. And what I mean by that is making sure that we have a seta around the table when it comes to new strategies and new policies being developed by organisations such as the Museums Association, or the Association for Independent Museums. These kind of larger membership organisations. Arts Council England have got a consultation out at the moment on their next five year strategy, so how do we make sure that freelancers are part of that discussion?
Marge Ainsley: One of the things that we're doing at the moment is we recognise that there isn't a lot of robust data and research out there about specifically museums and galleries and those kind of cultural organisation's freelancers. There's plenty there in terms of, say, creative industries around, what does that freelance landscape look like? Who are they? Where do they live? What kinds of people are they? What are they charging? What are they working on? But nothing really similar exists in the cultural sector.
Marge Ainsley: So at the moment, we're working on kind of a mapping survey that we're going to be sending out which will hopefully give us that data we need, that shows us kind of not just what the demographics are like and what people are charging, but also gives us the opportunity to look at what the challenges are that are facing freelancers within our sector. And then to be able to use that data to be a bit more informed in terms of that lobbying, or informed in terms of our own evaluation.
Marge Ainsley: So for example, with our conference at the moment, we don't know if the people coming to conference are representative of the museum freelance sector at large. So hopefully having a mapping survey that tells us more about those things will be useful for us as well as for other organisations working with freelancers in the sector.
Paul Wright: The data from this survey, when is it going to be released?
Marge Ainsley: So we're hoping to put the survey out in the new year. We're working on it at the moment, so yeah, watch this space. I should say ... And Christina will be listening to this, I'm sure ... She will say, "Don't forget, it's just us." We are volunteer run. We're not a membership organisation, so everything that we do with Museum Freelance, whether it's the conference, the kind of community side of things that we do, it's just me and one other person at the moment.
Marge Ainsley: So we're tied to the time we have outside of our client work as to how much that we take on. But you know, we're both really passionate really about just kind of keeping it going and keeping support in the freelancers that are out there, because yes, there are the wider networks like Being Freelance and Freelance Heroes and Doing It For The Kids, and all of those that are there to support freelancers working across sectors, but there isn't really anyone there to fight the corner of cultural freelancers.
Marge Ainsley: So things that everyone is picking up on, payment for freelancers and being paid on time and things like that, but also looking at how organisations within the cultural sector can work more effectively with freelancers as well. So this isn't us ... And we very much position ourselves like this ... This isn't us having a moan about freelancing at all. We do a lot of celebrating about freelancing. But it's also about mutualness, it's reciprocal, so we do a lot of work with organisations within the cultural sector supporting them in terms of how to write a decent freelance brief, understanding fees and what to charge, what the budget should be.
Marge Ainsley: So like Christina, this week she's off to the Museum Association conference talking to museums there about how to work best with freelancers. So it's not just us supporting the freelancers, we also work with organisations as well on what they can do to help and how that can make their lives easier and their work more effective too.
Kelly Molson: This is something that we've talked about at great length independently of this podcast, Marge, isn't it? When we met up in London a few months ago we discussed the tendering process, particularly around cultural organisations and how that could potentially be improved. So it's lovely to hear that you are actually actively involved in working with those organisations to be able to make positive change in that area.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, and I think we have to kind of recognise that some organisations, especially again, the smaller independent ones that I would work with, you know, they haven't got lots of experience in working with freelancers. They might not have written a brief before, so it is about helping them. And also thinking about stuff as a freelancer that makes sense to you around, "Well, I need two weeks to put a proposal together," or, "I should be interviewed on Skype. Do I need to be interviewed? What's the process between when the brief goes out to when I'm supposed to be starting the contract?"
Marge Ainsley: That's normal to us. We know what our timescales are, but an organisation who isn't used to working with freelancers might not have the same understanding of that. Similarly just like that language as well. So one thing that we are doing quite a lot of championing of at the moment is making sure that organisations know that when something is a freelance role versus when it should be a paid full-time or part-time PAYE member of stuff.
Marge Ainsley: So you'll see a lot of language around jobs or job specification, or you might see a brief that has a full long list of, "You must be here at this time and you must do this work," which will all fall foul of HMRC's, "This is not a freelance job. It should be an actual paid position." And that's not them necessarily on purpose trying to get away with a freelance contract when it should be in-house where they would pay for NI and all the rest of it. It's just, I would say, 99.9% of the cases we see, it's just naivety on behalf of the organisation just not understanding the difference between the two and the rules that exist around there in terms of HMRC. I won't go into those, but you know.
Marge Ainsley: I think the organisations that we've supported with it and when we've done talks at conferences about it, the museums are welcoming that support because again, it's just not been there really. But there is only so much that we can do and we've got so many ambitions for the network. Yeah, watch this space.
Kelly Molson: We absolutely will, Marge.
Paul Wright: I'd like to talk a little bit about surveys. We've had a bit of experience lately trying to put one together and I thought it was going to be quite easy to do, but actually it was really, really, really, really difficult.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I'm a qual rather than a quant girl, I have to say. Give me a discussion guide and a consultation group any day rather than a survey.
Paul Wright: Yeah.
Marge Ainsley: But you know, I find that within some of the work I do it needs a mixed methodology, so I do put together surveys and I do train people as well in terms of evaluation research methods. So I have a whole session in the afternoon about what makes a good and a bad survey. That's quite an eyeopening part of the session.
Marge Ainsley: But I guess, for me, when I see a really awful survey, there's a few things. It's typically if someone doesn't actually have a really good grasp on what their research objectives are in the first place, what it is they're trying to find out. I always say to people, "Measure what matters. Why are you asking that question?" And I'll go through a survey audit with people if they've already got one and I'm like, "So what are you actually doing with the results from that question?" And they go, "Well, I don't know. It's just been like that since 2008." I'm like, "Right, okay."
Marge Ainsley: It's about actually putting together that, what is it we want to find out? What are the research or evaluation objectives from the offset, and designing the questions effectively from that. So there's a little bit there in terms of sometimes people just kind of stick their finger in the air and go, "We'll ask this for no reason."
Marge Ainsley: I also see some horrendous surveys in terms of the questions. So there might be double questions, or there might be questions that don't make any sense, they're in the wrong order, surveys too long and you give up, especially if it's on mobile these days. You know, people will design a survey on some free software and then bash it out and it's all you've got to do endless scrolling, or they put pictures in that never load up because they're too big. There's a lot to think about really in terms of the overall look as well as the questions and how it works across different platforms.
Marge Ainsley: So that would be another thing I would say; think about where people are filling that survey in. Think about how long they've got. We'll see random introductions as well to surveys, or no introductions at all. So you must kind of tell people what the point of this survey is. You know, are you going to incentives it? If you are going to incentivise it, then you need to be looking at the Market Research Society's code of conduct around incentives and how that works. Are you collecting data from the surveys as well? Are you within GDPR?
Marge Ainsley: There's so many things to think about and I think that's why often you'll get external or independent evaluators or research people to give you a hand because people will say to me, "Why are you charging me this amount of time to put a survey together?" And they're really surprised about how long it takes to design a decent survey.
Marge Ainsley: And I suppose just as a final point on that, because I could go on all day about surveys, is to test it. The amount of time I say to people, "Did you try this out before sending it to a mailing list of 50,000 people?" And they're like, "Oh no, we've not done that." It's the best thing that you can do. You know, I've been writing surveys a long time and I still make mistakes in them in terms of maybe the wording isn't right, or a question isn't phrased properly, or maybe the order isn't quite right or the routing doesn't work.
Marge Ainsley: So the best thing that you can do is test it, whether that's on a colleague or a member of the target audience you're aiming for, just to give it a bit of a sense check because without fail, there will be something. There will be something with it.
Paul Wright: Thanks for that. I wish we had talked to you before.
Kelly Molson: I have to say, we did ask the experts in the end. We got a great guy in to help us.
Marge Ainsley: I might be able to guess who that is.
Paul Wright: It definitely took us a lot longer than we expected. It was one of those things where we started it and then it was only until we got really deep into it we just realised, "We really need some help with this."
Marge Ainsley: Yeah. I think that's the thing as well. And when I go and do the training, a lot of the projects that I work on I will always build in some element of training because ... And it might be doing myself out of future work, but the kinds of organisations I work with, they are being restructured, they are having their budgets cut left, right and centre and they're not going to be able to afford to buy in a freelancer or an independent or a consultant all the time, and so just having that training where they can embed those skills. If I can leave them with something sustainable, then that to me, that's great. That's what I want.
Marge Ainsley: So a lot of the time at training, we pull those surveys apart, but I also give them the skills in terms of how to write it, what pitfalls to look out for, but also how to analyse it as well and how to write it up. Because I think the other thing with it is we're awash with data, aren't we? We're awash with giant 100 page reports and big data and all this data around us, but it's really hard to cut through that. And so a lot of the time I'm kind of teaching organisations about how to not just analyse their data, but how to present it and how to tell a story as well.
Kelly Molson: So we're coming up towards the end of the podcast, Marge, but there's a few extra questions we want to run by you. One of the things that you talk about is about being really interested in creating connections. What we wanted to ask you is, from your understanding and research, what do you think that people really want from organisations in the cultural sector? And when we say people, we mean visitors.
Marge Ainsley: I think it depends who the target audience is, doesn't it? I mean I do a lot of work with families who they are simply looking for a wet weather afternoon activity that is free. But it doesn't really matter which visitor you talk to, they're wanting that welcoming space. They're wanting somewhere where they can learn, somewhere that they can take time out. Somewhere where they can be entertained.
Marge Ainsley: We talk a lot about motivation within arts and culture, and I think we can probably do a lot better in terms of tapping into those motivations as well. I mean, I'll give you a really good example. Recently, you might have seen it in the media, the Harris Museum in Preston, they have partnered up with their local NHS Trust ... So it's like an NHS Foundation Trust, and that particular branch of it's called the Lancashire Recovery College ... And every Monday now, they've partnered with them to basically work out of the museum. So on a Monday you can go and do all these different types of health and wellbeing activities, for example.
Marge Ainsley: I think people ... I don't know if they know this or it's just us putting this on them, but I think some people are wanting this ... It's just that space that is within their community. So you know before I was talking about the OF/BY/FOR ALL, just changing the perception of museums not being stuffy, not being unwelcoming places, places that are for the likes of them. I think one aside of that is this sense of community. Whether you're going there for a social experience, having a cup of tea, whether you're going to do yoga, or whether you're going to do a kind of art and therapy event like this Monday at the Harris.
Marge Ainsley: Manchester Art Gallery ... I'm talking to you from Manchester here ... They have a kind of an And Breathe space where you can go and just sit and contemplate the work. Those kind of safe spaces where you can just take a breather from busy lifestyle.
Marge Ainsley: So think people are wanting different things depending on which target audiences they are, but I think more and more we are, and I think should be, looking at museums ... I'm conscious I've talked a lot about museums, but museums as spaces that the community feels are for them. I don't know whether that's answered your question.
Kelly Molson: No, no, it does and it's a really interesting discussion. I saw something actually on Twitter a couple of days ago ... And I will find who Tweeted this and I will credit them in the show notes ... But they talked a lot about museums and cultural spaces opening themselves up as co-working spaces. And I thought, "What a brilliant idea."
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, no, I was in on that conversation actually.
Kelly Molson: Oh, great.
Marge Ainsley: I linked in to Battersea, because Battersea Arts Center have opening up a co-working space. In fact, they were presenting at the IPSE National Freelancer's Day this last year about their work.
Marge Ainsley: And so yeah, I think it comes down to the museum's purpose ultimately, doesn't it? And what they believe that they stand for. I'm not suggesting that every single museum and gallery is going to want to be everything to everybody, or behave in a particular way and become a community centre. But from my perspective, certainly with audience development and with getting people to engage with our collections and engage with us as organisations, we've got to be more open, we've got to be more responsive to what those audiences are looking and what their needs are. Break down these barriers around, you know, "Not for the likes of me."
Marge Ainsley: We talk in the cultural sector a lot about audiences are hard to reach. I kind of stamp my foot a bit about that because I don't think they're hard to reach, I think we're the ones that are hard to reach, you know? So I think there's so many good projects and organisations out there doing amazing things in terms of audience development, but I think we've still got a way to go in terms of just changing that perception around what a museum could and can be.
Marge Ainsley: When you go to somewhere like the Whitworth here in Manchester and they've got a beautiful park outside where they combine a visit to the park and poetry in the park with what's happening inside the museum and are linking the two. You go to other places and there's amazing events and workshops going on to help the local community members who've got English as a second language and they use the paintings and the collection to support that language development. There's so many good projects. But it is something that I know is going to be a hot topic in the sector at the moment about that sense of community.
Marge Ainsley: If you want a good example of this, if you look up Philbrook Museum in Oklahoma, there's a guy, the director there spoke a big museum conference called Museum Next, and he spoke at this conference about how they've totally revolutionised this historic house in the middle of what is quite a deprived area in Tulsa in Oklahoma. Just little changes that they've made to make the community feel like it's a place for the, rather than a place that isn't and it's for people who are rich and have loads of money to go and visit.
Marge Ainsley: Little things like when the director started, they weren't allowed food in the gardens. It's got these beautiful gardens around it. So he just turned that on its head and started doing barbecue burger Fridays, and they have hundreds of the local community go now. They're closed on Mondays, but then they put this kind of Me Time Monday into place where members of the local community could kind of pitch to come and spend the whole day in the museum by themselves, like whilst the staff are there. The whole museum's shut and they just can blog and they can draw and they can do what they want.
Marge Ainsley: They've changed little things like the retail offers, so rather than selling stuff that no one wants they sell like paracetamol and nappies. Just really little changes, but it's revolutionised the way the community perceive that museum and it has made them feel like they're welcome there.
Marge Ainsley: I think that's really what we need to do more of in the sector, and that's why I love working with audience development and audience development strategy because it's not necessarily the typical things that you would have on a marketing and communications plan. It's not, "Let's change the leaflet." There's a bit of that. There's a bit of, "Is the leaflet going to the right place? What are we doing with our website?" But there's a lot more in terms of audience development like going out to people, bringing the collection and taking it out to people, working with particular community partners to access different groups. So there's a lot more to audience development than just, "Are we distributing our leaflets in the right places?"
Kelly Molson: And it kind of comes full circle to what we talked about earlier about creating connections. It is really about creating connections between those people and that organisation and that venue, and how they can use it to support them as part of their own personal development, which is just lovely.
Marge Ainsley: Yeah, it's exactly that. I mean within a work context, for me, it could mean getting organisations to work better with their partners, or facilitating meetings internally to get teams working more effectively.
Marge Ainsley: So another side of my work which we've not touched upon, it is a facilitation. So I will get asked to go and help on away days and meetings so that they can kind of just take a step back from actually running them themselves. So that connections could be just getting organisations to work better together as well, get better communication between the staff, or it could be like we've talked about; those connections in terms of getting museums to understand their non-user audiences a bit better by going and doing that research, or getting them to do the research.
Marge Ainsley: I'm working some organisations at the moment where I've kind of given them some homework to go out to particular marketplaces and actually stand and talk to people. And you'll find quite a few museums do this now. It's kind of like back to the shop floor, because a lot of office staff don't have that opportunity to go and talk to visitors. So people will roster whatever level of the organisation you're on, you'll go and do a visitor services job for an hour every so often just because then you really do get a sense of what people are talking about, what they're struggling with in the museum and just have that connection with them.
Marge Ainsley: I've always had this thing really around, whether it's my personal or professional life, about creating connections, and I suppose that's why I really enjoy what I do too.
Kelly Molson: Marge, thank you. We have absolutely loved speaking to you today. We're going to write up all the show notes, everything that you've discussed and all the things that you've mentioned we'll link to and we'll give everyone shout outs too. But thank you for your time. We've had a great time.
Marge Ainsley: You're very welcome. Thank you.
Kelly Molson: You can find links and notes from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast, or search Skip the Queue on iTunes and Spotify to subscribe. Please remember to leave a rating. It helps other people find us.
Kelly Molson: This podcast was brought to you by Rubber Cheese, an award winning digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for visitor attractions. Find out how we can create a better experience for you and your guests at rubbercheese.com.
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