Skip the Queue

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.

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Show references:

www.9degreeswest.london

www.linkedin.com/in/thompben

COVID-19 and the enduring strength of the attractions industry

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  Storyland Studios as their Chief Strategy Officer

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. 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.

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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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.

Show references:

http://johnsear.com/

https://twitter.com/MrJohnSear

http://johnsear.com/diy-museum-tutorials/

http://www.theotherwayworks.co.uk/category/productions/a-moment-of-madness/

Transcript

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.

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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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.

Enjoy!

Show references:

https://www.margeainsley.co.uk/

https://www.ofbyforall.org/

https://www.museumfreelance.org/

https://www.mrs.org.uk/

https://philbrook.org/visit/stay-connected/

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.

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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.

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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:

1. The importance of using augmented reality with a purpose
2. Thinking of visitors as players, rather than guests
3. How the heritage sector is embracing AR
4. Accessibility considerations with using AR
5. How AR will become a normal way of life
6. The opportunities for museums

Show references:

https://arcade.ltd/

Ready Visitor One….? Why it’s time to say goodbye to the ‘visitor’

https://www.lovecamden.org/index.php/Camden_Peoples_Museum

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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

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:

1. The importance of understanding our audience and catering specifically for their needs
2. If it’s difficult to integrate WeChat and Alipay for Chinese visitors
3. How to create a digital guest experience that’s second to none
4. Why you need to be proactive in changing and adapting your marketing strategy
5. Why you need to work with sector specialists
6. How empowering your front of house team to be super helpful creates the ultimate experience for your guests

We hope you enjoy!

Show references:

https://www.castlehoward.co.uk/

https://www.digipanda.co.uk/

https://www.wechat.com/en/

https://intl.alipay.com/

https://www.capelatraining.com/china/

https://www.globepay.co/

https://www.ukinbound.org/

https://www.visitbritain.com/gb/en

https://www.etoa.org/

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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

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:

1. The importance of creating content and building an audience
2. How to build a leisure business that’s not weather dependant
3. James’ five P’s formula for business success
4. The difference between good leadership and good management
5. Why you need to invest in customer service
6. The number 1 driver for creating a great customer experience

We hope you enjoy!

Show references:

https://jamessinclair.net/
https://jamessinclair.net/millionaire-clown
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTm2gK928YuBSEU0lvdFJoA

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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

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’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
• Theme books - what are they and how do they help?
• How to entertain guests in queues
• The secret formula to great storytelling
• And more

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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

In this episode, we speak to Tor and Christian Carver, the founders of William’s Den - a unique adventure attraction in East Yorkshire.

Five years ago, Tor and Christian constructed a plan to create a visitor attraction that offered children, and adults, the freedom to roam and play.

The duo both grew up on farms and took inspiration from the time they spent endlessly exploring pastures, building dens and using their wild imaginations to entertain themselves.

Since its opening in 2017, William’s Den has gained plenty of admirers and recognition. They were regional finalists in The Rural Business Awards North - and winners in the Remarkable East Yorkshire Tourism Awards (REYTA) and the RICS Awards (which showcase the most inspirational initiatives and developments in land, real estate, construction and infrastructure).

What will you learn from this podcast?

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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

We speak to Lynn Whitnall - she's the Director of Paradise Wildlife Park, a Fellow of the Institute of Travel & Tourism and she also sits on the council of the British & Irish Association of Zoos & Aquariums (BIAZA).

Paradise Wildlife Park is a much-loved and highly esteemed venue that’s home to over 800 animals, including the largest collection of big cats in Britain. As well as wallabies, wolves and white lions, they also have five adventure playgrounds and one of the UK's biggest and most spectacular animatronic dinosaur displays.

They’ve recently completed Drive4Wildlife - an epic adventure around East Africa where they donated funds and equipment to several projects along the way, including the African Wildlife Foundation and Ugandan Wildlife Education Centre.

What will you learn from this podcast?

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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

We’re speaking to James Ducker, the founder of CryptX Escape Rooms based in Cambridge.

James worked in banking for many years - he was at HBOS during the crash and became a whistleblower when he grew disillusioned with the financial sector.

In the summer of 2016, James took a family holiday to Barcelona, his children were eight, eleven, and sixteen at the time. Sick of hearing "Dad, we're bored" - James booked an escape room in the heart of the city, a move that would subsequently change his entire career from banking to escape room founder.

What will you learn from this podcast?

Download The Visitor Attractions Website Survey Report - https://www.merac.co.uk/download-the-visitor-attractions-survey

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