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 hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.

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Show references:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenpriestnall/

https://linktr.ee/oomphinc

Stephen Priestnall founded oomph, now an accredited B Corp, in 2005, acquired Decision Juice in 2009 and is globally recognised as a specialist in CX driven transformation projects and digital innovation. He has advised at a senior level across public and private sector organisations in the UK, Americas, Asia and the Middle East and is an instigator of international research studies into behaviour change. He is a Board Trustee with Aneurin Leisure Trust, advising on CX and communications strategy and a founding Director at Wellbeing Economy Cymru, part of the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance, advocating for a new approach to economic sustainability for people and planet.

Transcription: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. On today's episode, I speak to Stephen Priestnall, the CEO of oomph, a CX focused agency based in the UK and UAE who help clients to understand people and design better experiences. We're going to go back to first principles and understand what customer experience is all about and understand what attractions can do better to serve the needs of their customers. 

Paul Marden: Hello, Oz. 

Oz Austwick: Hi, Paul. So this is the last episode of Season 5, right? 

Paul Marden: Yes, that is right. Can you believe after we took the reigns from. From young Ms. Molson not too long ago, that we would actually make it to the end of the season? 

Oz Austwick: Do you know, it's crazy, isn't it? I mean, five seasons of a podcast. Most podcasts don't get through to the end of one season. And I can remember listening to this podcast years ago and actually sending people links as an example of what a good podcast is. And now here we are, you and I, at the end of Season 5. It's crazy.. 

Paul Marden: Yay. Guardians of this little baby. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, no pressure. So today's quite an interesting one, right? 

Paul Marden: Yeah. I've got a guest who has been a friend of mine for some time, Stephen Priestnall of Oomph agency. And we're going to talk a little bit about customer experience. So nice little chat between Stephen and I, and then you and I will come together in a little while and talk a little bit about. Let's reminisce about season five and talk a little bit about what might happen in Season 6. 

Oz Austwick: Awesome. Great. I'm looking forward to it. 

Paul Marden: Let's get on with it then. Welcome to podcast, Stephen. 

Stephen Priestnall: Nice to be here, Paul. Thanks for inviting me. 

Paul Marden: Good to have you on. Longtime listeners will know that we always start the podcast with some icebreaker questions, which hopefully not too challenging, but we get to know you a little bit better before we start talking about work. So both of my icebreakers are all about visiting attractions this time. So how organised are you in advance? If you go to an attraction, do you take a picnic with you, or are you always partaking of a cup of tea and a slice of cake in the coffee shop? 

Stephen Priestnall: I think it would have to be a particularly kind of informal attraction for me to have thought about taking a picnic beforehand. So normally it's just the anticipation of going to the place, and then I'll utilise the services in the place. 

Paul Marden: I love a good slice of cake in the coffee shop afterwards. Scone, cream, tea and scone that would be me. 

Stephen Priestnall: No way. Maybe a bit of our breath or fruitcake. It's probably more me. 

Paul Marden: Oh, lovely. I was at the Roman Baths yesterday with my little girl and we had a lovely wander around and they had a brilliant self guided tour. So if you've got a choice, do you go for a self guided tour? Do you wander around and follow your nose? Or would you rather have a guide take you around and tell you the stories? 

Stephen Priestnall: I almost never have a guide to take me around. And then sometimes I even find the self guided tours a little bit invasive. If I'm in a different country where there is kind of a language barrier, a filter, then I might use it then. But you know what? I kind of like that the ability just to bump from one bit to another. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Stephen Priestnall: And experience the experience through my own kind of filter. So that's what I would normally do. I haven't been able to wander around with the headphones on, almost never with a guy. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, they had a lovely one at the Roman Baths yesterday. So it had both adult interpretation and kids interpretation, and I found myself switching to the kids one so that I was experiencing what Millie was experiencing, because I was saying to her, “Oh, did they tell you what that was?” “Oh, no, that wasn't in the kids version.” So I swapped the kids one and it brought it to life. It was really. It became much more shared experience for us. 

Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, well, that's like that's like the horrible history stuff. Yeah. But actually, it's brilliant. Rattles that was what they were on about in the tudor period, then. I didn't get it until now. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, look, listeners, Stephen and I have known each other for quite some time. We've been working together a lot on different projects, and his agency, Oomph, does a lot of work in customer experience. And so today's episode is going to be a little bit more about a primer on what do we mean by customer experience? And really, what I'd like to get to the bottom of today is what can attractioners do better to serve the needs of their customers. Yeah. So, really, Stephen, what I want to do is pick your brains. Let's introduce this whole subject of CX and customer experience and help people to better understand a little bit about what does that mean and how can they bring that into their day to day work in running attractions and meeting customers. 

Paul Marden: So, before we start that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about you and a little bit more about Oomph. So that listeners can better understand the context. 

Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, thanks, Paul. We've positioned ourselves around the concept of customer experience for about ten years now, and customer experience ten years ago was a bit of an oddball place to be. It kind of grew out of the user experience, the UX world, with a little bit of event management thrown into it and a little bit of actually, you need to think about people in the middle of all of this. And we come from a background of combining digital and data quite successfully to kind of help devise communications campaigns, kind of brand engagements, that kind of thing. And what we could see was if you brought all these things together as data was getting more sophisticated, with digital interactions on the rise, that you could get yourself much more informed about the way in which people's customers were actually behaving. 

Stephen Priestnall: And not so much what they were actually how they were behaving, but also what their needs were that drove the behaviours. And so we have, we've grounded our work and customer experience around a very clear desire to understand the needs of our clients’ customers, and then to hold that mirror up for our clients and say, “Look, I know you have these products and services to sell and to engage with, but what we're going to do is a job of letting you know at the point of engagement they're hitting your customers needs in this way. And if you then flip the lens around from the customer need first rather than the product or service first, you might determine a different way of building that service or designing that interaction, or maybe even changing the way in which you invite customers into a journey with you.”

Stephen Priestnall: So a lot of data and digital inside are our space port that inform CX. And then in the last couple of years, AI has been another transformative technology that we've started to utilise. And we know we treat it as good AI. We know there's bad AI out there, but the good AI is really helpful. 

Paul Marden: That's really interesting. We know from the Rubber Cheese Survey this year that most attractions have dabbled. They've played with ChatGPT, or something like that. But there's still a large portion of attractions that have done nothing with AI. And then there's a couple that I would consider at the leading edge. So they're doing things beyond GPT. They're looking at AI enabled CRM or AI enabled workforce management solutions.

Paul Marden:  So there's some interest in here, but it's definitely, there's a conversation that we've had on the podcast just recently with Oz and I talking about the idea that we can't quite figure out if we're in a bubble because a lot of people that we talk to talk a lot of good game about AI, but when we're talking to the businesses, the clients, they're only just getting into this in the most shallow way. Agencies like yours and ours are kind of. We're leading the conversation on this, I think. 

Stephen Priestnall: Well, I think it's really interesting you frame it like that, because one of the things that has informed our approach to CX is the idea of understanding behaviour change, which is a science in itself. So if any listeners are familiar with behaviour change, you'll know how long the tail of kind of investigation evaluation that is. We launched a study in 2020 which ended up over three years and three waves, 10,000 respondents looking at the impact of Covid-19 on people's behaviour and their interaction with organisations. That is part of our research centre which we call tide of events, which is now about to launch another study which is going to be looking at the impact of AI. 

Paul Marden: Oh really? 

Stephen Priestnall: As employees, as citizens, as customers, as service users, as members, as supporters. I'm expecting some very interesting things to come out of that study as well. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, very interesting. So there's this idea of kind of CX thinking and embedding that, embedding it the heart of your agency, but you then helping your clients to embed it into the business. So how can CX thinking help an attraction to improve its offering? And I think if we can look at that in two directions, because obviously most visitor attractions are an in person experience, there's lots of thinking around their interaction and the experience that they feel when they're in the attraction itself. But there's a lot of us looking at either side of that interaction. How do we use marketing to get more people to want to do stuff? And then how do we make sure that they got the best experience after they did and reengage with us. How can CX thinking offline and online help an attraction? 

Stephen Priestnall: The principles of customer experience thinking, certainly from our perspective, is to deal with the reality of that there are people involved. And I think you and I both know, Paul, in the digital world it's kind of quite easy to forget as a person we spend a lot of time in front of technology, trying to get technology to do stuff that we think is helpful. And then it's easy to lose sight of the goal, which is to help a person achieve a task or do something which they have, they enjoy doing. I think in the world of attractions, destinations, then when you're in a kind of physical world, that you're sat in that environment designing something, and you're a physical person yourself. 

Stephen Priestnall: And as a designer, looking in that environment, feeling that, okay, well, if I walk from here to here, it's going to feel like that. If I put this in the wrong place, if my member of staff is trained in the wrong way and uses the wrong language, that's going to have a direct impact. So you kind of get brought back to the people side of it quite a lot when you're in it in person. So I would say that the world of CX thinking is about bringing the importance of the human into the overall experience. So you don't treat the digital experience with kind of it in a different frame set than you treat the in real life, in person experience. 

Stephen Priestnall: And that's quite hard to do, because sometimes you're trying to drive the digital experiences as a kind of conversion funnel to get people to do something and buy something or consume some content. And you can kind of get hung up on the word optimisation and funnel management, and you then get drawn into, how can we push people through to the next phase? And push people through to the next phase? And imagine if you're in an attraction, and yeah, you might make certain parts, physical areas, a place where you would want people to go to, but you wouldn't have somebody walking up and nudging them in the back, pushing them down the aisle and stopping them from turning around and staying in one place. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Stephen Priestnall: And yet, that's often what happens in the digital world. It becomes an optimisation process to kind of channel a particular behavior that we think is optimal for the organisation. So the world of CX stands back from that, identifies the needs that were satisfying, and looks at Paul and Stephen as two individuals who are unique as individuals, and can be defined by a set of age, gender, sociological, economic characteristics. But actually, Paul and I might have five or six relevant needs for the attraction of which two are consistent. And, you know, two or three are completely different. So we can't treat Paul as Paul and Stephen as Stephen. We have to understand the relationship between the needs that we have as individuals and the thing that we're doing, or the point of the point on the journey we're on. 

Stephen Priestnall: And I think that's tricky to kind of link the digital and the in real life worlds together. But that's the trick I like to think the kind of CX approach would bring. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. Just as you're saying that it can be hard to think about the person. But also many of the attractions that we work with have very different offerings. And so consequently they have very different audiences that have very different needs. And, you know, are you trying to serve online an audience that's never going to attend? How do you serve those people's needs? If you've got an educational remit, how do you serve those people's needs whilst at the same time serving the needs of the people that you want to bring in and spend money on site with you? If you're a historic house that also has a golf course and it has a hotel and it has some sort of kids attraction associated with it, there's so many different audiences. 

Paul Marden: So that kind of CX thinking can help you to step back. 

Stephen Priestnall: Absolutely. And actually just maybe think of a great triangulation process between three different clients that we've been working with recently that show that kind of breadth of differences. So we work with the saudi arabian government on a new, one of their giga projects on a new destination out in the desert near Rhea called Duria. And that is an amazing set of destination components. Golf courses, equestrian centres, hotels, business centres. And that's creating a destination for a country which has never had any tourism in it before. So with a whole bunch of high net worth individuals that you've got to think about, then also a challenge to get people who live in Saudi to not spend the $90 billion a year that they do going to visit the rest of the world and to actually visit somewhere in Saudi. 

Stephen Priestnall: So we've had a set of kind of challenges around how do you drive a customer journey, a visitor journey for that. And we've been working with an organisation called Marketing Manchester, helping them devise a new segmentation so they can, I'm going to use the term, attract the right kind of visitors to go to Manchester to hook in with their sustainability strategy. They don't just want people in the shopping malls and going to the football, sports events or shows, albeit they would like that. They also want to understand the community engagement, the cultural engagement and the environmental footprint that they leave behind. And then we're just in conversations with North York Moore's National Park. And then there's a whole different set of conversations about engagement with the local community, communities, a little bit arms folded about tourists. How do you make that come together? 

Stephen Priestnall: And all of this is about people and it's about understanding people's relationship with people and things. 

Paul Marden: Brilliant. So let's have a little think about given that those are the ideas behind CX thinking. If you were starting out down this road, what are the simple things that people can do to start to bed the customer at the heart of their thinking as they're planning their services? And I'm thinking in terms of, we've got very different types of attractions in this country, very small, up to, you know, big international attractions. Let's pick the small guys. Yeah. Imagine you're running a small town museum and, you know, you've got a handful of people working in the team. How can you start to embed the customer into your thinking to improve the service? 

Stephen Priestnall: So I think, I don't think the principles change with scale. I think that the executional methods will change with scale, but the principles. And you can have, you know, if you've got a small team of three or four people, you can have these three or four people working together in a room. You can support a research or not, if you can afford the research that great. If you can't, then you use. So we use a term called foundational intelligence. So before we start any research with a client which might go and look at their customers or prospective customers or visitors.

Stephen Priestnall: We say, “Right, let's go all of the information in your organisation on the surface, first, because there's however many people around the room's years of experience, which is not necessarily formed in a cx way, but if we get that on the table, we've probably got a 60, 70, 80% starting point for what we're going to need to know in the end. I think that's the first thing I would say, is take confidence in the fact you've got some foundational intelligence about customer experience. But there might be a clever way of bringing that out through a little workshop. So you ask the right questions of each other. And one of the ways which I think is useful to do and quite practical is to think about three different ways of looking at people as individuals. 

Stephen Priestnall: So think about themselves as a, you know, a standard attribute based, if you like, cohort or segments, you know, age, demography, all those things that we talked about, but then move those to one side and then ask a relatively straightforward question, what needs are being satisfied by your services? So it's kind of, what's the point of what you do? Yeah, well, harsh question. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Stephen Priestnall: But it's devoid from, if you like, knowing your customers at that point, devoid from any transaction based evaluation or business case to say, what's the point of what we do? Why do people turn up and then be quite hard about answering those questions. And when you get the first answer in your head, which is based on what you've always thought you've always done, just go right. Is that really why people turn up? 

Paul Marden: Is that right? 

Stephen Priestnall: Really why people walk through the door? Is that really why people tell their friends about us? 

Paul Marden: There's a little bit of lean thinking there, isn't there? You've got five whys, haven't you? You could go, but why? But why? But why? Just to keep pushing yourself to think that hard thought. 

Stephen Priestnall: Exactly. Whatever, you know, whatever little mental games you want to play with it, that's the kind of point. What's the point? And then the next lens to look at it is the journey your visitors are on in order to not just get to your destination, but get out of your destination and be reflecting on it to their I, peers, friends, colleagues, family. And that journey doesn't mean I book a ticket, I turn up, I walk around the attraction and then I go home. It means what are the component parts of that journey when they're in planning more just you asked me earlier on about whether I plan a picnic. What are they planning? How likely are they to plan? Do they not want to plan? Do they just want to turn up? 

Stephen Priestnall: You know, when they're getting to, when they're coming, when they're traveling to the destination, how are they traveling? What's their preferred method of travel? And then what are the different ways in which people engage with the attraction itself? And then what happens afterwards when they walk out? Do they walk out and go for a beer? Forget about it. Did they do that thing you do in a golf club where you spend the next 3 hours talking about what you did for the last 3 hours? And what's the version of that could be done in social media afterwards? And again, do that. Do that without necessarily worrying too much about who does what. So you end up these kind of journey components. 

Stephen Priestnall: Now all these things can be really heavily researched if you've got resources and the time to do that, but you can do it in a room with three or four people in 2 or 3 hours. And what you'll end up with is a set of right. The people who visit us look a bit like this. Typically, here's five or six types of people, here's a pool type, here's a Steven type, here's a whoever else type of. We've got ten or eleven needs. Well, who knew we had ten or eleven needs? That were satisfying. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Stephen Priestnall: So you write those down. Oh, look, we got a journey which looks like planning, engagement, reflection. And I use those three terms because we use them all the time because they're nice and easy to get your head around. Planning, engagement, reflection, and within engagement here are all the different bits that are happening in engagement here. At the different bits that, all right, we might have a dozen, maybe even two dozen components underneath those kind of three big things. And you've then got a bit of a jigsaw. And it's also objective at that point as well. You've then got this objective jigsaw to say, which of those five or six groups of people have which of those needs do we think you might end up with that funny place where. 

Stephen Priestnall: Oh, actually that cohort doesn't have any of those needs, so we think they really like coming to us, but we're not doing anything to satisfy their needs or this other group that we don't get many of. Look how many needs we're satisfying in that group. Maybe we should be targeting that group. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Stephen Priestnall: So whether you're. Whether you go outwards and change your segmentation, your targeting, or whether you come in with and change your service design, you've already got some things to think about. And then when you map the journey on top of that, and again, you know, nice. It could be a done on paper, it could be done. There's loads of tools online you can do this without getting too scientific. You've then got the points at which, all right, so if that need is being satisfied for those people at that point, we now have a design intervention to work out. So we now have, essentially, we have a brief, we have a specification now that might be a piece of digital interaction, it might be a piece of communications design, it might be a piece of signage in the attraction, it might be a follow up social media nudge. 

Stephen Priestnall: You're then not inventing what you think it is that you need to do for your attraction. We use a phrase which I think clients are pretty comfortable with in the end because it. It's a real reflection. It's completely normal for organisations to kind of end up with an inside and view of the world. Everything is all about the product and the service because that's where the investment goes, that's where the thinking goes. And what we try and do is just to persuade people to take an outside in view. So actually look at this from the point of view of the customer. And I think what the exercise I've just described does is help you take that outside in view. 

Paul Marden: I'm smiling for those listening. I'm smiling because I just, it reminds me of so many times where I can, you know, I can see observing in the projects that we do or just, you know, interacting with the outside world, where you can tell that people often take a very parochial internal view and they'll communicate with the outside world in their own internal language. They will try and, you know, influence people to do things rather than thinking, how does this appear outside? 

Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, and it's, it, but it's also, it's not a critique. It's normalised behaviour. If you just think about how organisations grow, you end up with an idea, you know, where often it is about the customers. You've got this entrepreneurial, innovative spark that kicks the idea off, satisfying the needs. And then you build up a bunch of teams who, by definition, have broken out into departments with different roles and responsibilities. And then, and then the sense of self of the people in those teams is derived from the departmental responsibility. 

Paul Marden: Yes. 

Stephen Priestnall: But as a consequence, you then are trained, naturally trained to be inside out. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Stephen Priestnall: And so, it's normal. And then when that, then when the salesperson comes back and says, “Why did you build it like that?” You know, the designer, the product person says, “Well, because that's the best way of doing this thing.” And the salesperson says, “I can't sell that.” And that actually, and I don't know how much. In your podcast, Paul, you talked about agile, but this is when the concept of squads really can work. I think that you have to take real care with squads because they can end up creating rooms of people who don't understand each other. I think unless there's one other thing I would say about the human part of CX, you have to take this into the culture of the organisation as well. So you asked me earlier, how do you present a CX focus for an organisation? 

Stephen Priestnall: Well, you can't just drop the results of that little workshop on top of everybody, because it's the going through the process of looking at those three lenses that puts you in a different mindset. If you then just end up telling the product people or telling the sales people or telling the ops people, can you do it like this now? They'll just add that onto their list of things to do. It won't be a change. 

Paul Marden: But when you bring those people into the conversation, I think it brings a different perspective, doesn't it? And I think that's the one thing I've learned from you in the few years that we've known one another is that when you boil it down, everything is a CX project. And I don't think I ever really thought about that. That there can be something which to me seems so navel gazing, internally focused as a technical project to deliver in the business. But actually, when you think, when you apply the rigor of thinking about the client, the customer, then you find that it is a CX driven project, even if it is completely internally facing. It can be about the communication between two teams, but in the end, because they don't have good communication, it's resulting in this poor customer experience over here. 

Paul Marden: So when you think about it hard, then these projects have a CX focus, even when they are very kind of internally facing.

Stephen Priestnall: And it's sometimes difficult. I mean, I think that's a really good articulation of it. It sometimes can be a challenge to make that process seem worthwhile, because what you end up doing is spending more time challenging what you think is right at the beginning of the process. And there's always a desire from somewhere to move things on. I think that there's a little value based model that I always apply in my head, which if we treat this kind of CX phase as the planning phase, and then you go through a design phase, then you go through a build phase. For every extra hour you spend in planning, without spending that, you would spend ten more hours in design and a hundred more hours in production. So if you leave that hour aside, you're going to have a tenfold in design phase. 

Stephen Priestnall: And if you don't deal with it in design phase, you'll have it 100 fold, then build phase. But choosing to do that extra hour, which is tension filled, it might be a bit of conflict, there might be a bit of defensiveness. It needs to be carefully managed and kind of cajoled, but the value of it is meant. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. So you've described this kind of approach to take, identifying who the customers are, trying to use a little bit of intuition to be all science if you've got the budget to go and do the research, but to understand those customers in more detail and what their needs are, and then driving down and finding out where, you know, the journey maps onto that and where the gaps are and starting to look to fill those gaps. Is there room in the world for a dirty bottom up approach where you can see a problem already and you want to address that problem? Can you attack this from both angles or do you need to start from a top down approach? 

Stephen Priestnall: I'm an arch pragmatist and if we know there's a problem to solve and it's screaming for a solution, then that's going to solve the problem. I would only cancel that try and stand back and look at the unintended consequences through a very objective lens. You don't need to spend long doing that. But I think the magnetism of solving a problem that's been a longstanding problem can also act as a set of blinkers. So that's the only thing I would say. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, you can be distracted by the screaming problem that turns out not to be the real root cause. If you take the bigger picture of you. 

Stephen Priestnall: If we got this horrendous problem just before checkout, whether that's a digital or at the attraction itself and queuing up going on, you know, there's a need to solve that through a piece of technology or extra stuff on the tills. But actually, it turns out that there's a funneling process going on in the start of the process that's causing everybody to end up at the checker at the same time. And that can be solved by a different distribution of products in the attraction itself, or bringing in some different content to inform people in the digital journey. That means they don't have to do task X and Y because they now know about it. You know, we've all had that before, which it looks like people can't get through this bit of the funnel. Let's try and make this bit of the funnel easier. 

Stephen Priestnall: Let's try and do more things. More buttons, more. Let's just try and make it easier. But actually, it turns out, if only we'd given that visitor to the digital journey more time to consume content and not push them through the first stage of the transaction process so quickly, they would have entered the second stage much better informed and relaxed about completing the overall thing. 

Paul Marden: It's just such a challenge, isn't it? Because I can just feel me even now with our fictitious scenario, all I want to do is squeeze them down the funnel. But you have to focus at the end about getting the right outcome, don't you? 

Stephen Priestnall:  There's another great metaphor I like to use, and we do this all the time because we talk about something called sustainable customer experience. And sustainable customer experience strategy isn't about a green CX strategy. It's about saying, if you get your CX strategy right, you will have to spend less money on acquiring new customers, so it's more economically sustainable and there's a really interesting kind of just different way of looking at it. So normally if you look at the typical retail conversion process, if you get 100 people on the top of a digital funnel, you might get five out the end as a conversion there's usually really simple numbers, five. So everybody works on how do we make five six? That's the big thing because that's like 20% improvement. If you get five to six, we've just put 20% on the bottom line. 

Stephen Priestnall: Meanwhile there's 95 people. Do you care? Are you interested? I came here for a reason and you don't like me anymore, so. Well, goodbye then. So what we do is we say, right, we want to put as much effort into understanding the 94. It's not wasted effort. I'm a pragmatist, as we do making the five six, because if out of that 94 we can get another 20 over the next twelve months to do the same thing. We've not spent any money on customer acquisition. We've built and engaged in a relationship. We've had opportunities to talk and engage them, which probably means they're going and talking to other people and checking about the experience. So they're probably doing some recruitment for us anyway, which we can also nudge behaviour. 

Stephen Priestnall: And then what that does, it changes the mentality inside the organisation to not just think about, we've got six out the other end. Yes. Celebrate. And actually think about. Because imagine if you did that physically. Imagine if physically you could see the hundred people in a queue and everybody went off celebrating the 6th that went through. And then you look back and you looked at these 94 people just milling around having a chat with each other and what just happened. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, that would feel pretty uncomfortable, wouldn't it? 

Stephen Priestnall: It will. Especially for an attraction. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, for sure. Look, this has been brilliant. It's nice. I think sometimes to take a step back and look at that kind of the 101 class, the intro to the subject. And I think this is a subject that we will come back to again and again. We've talked about taking it back to its first principles a little bit today, but this is embedded within the attraction sector. They know and understand the people that come through the door. This is something that they take really seriously, obviously. But I think there are ways in which we can take what we've learned today and use that as a springboard into some more deeper conversations. 

Paul Marden: Maybe in Season 6, which is coming up where we can talk a little bit more about, you know, your conversations about AI, the direction that you take these things in. How does AI help you in a world where you want to be cx centric? What does AI do for you? So thank you ever so much. This has been brilliant. Thank you. 

Stephen Priestnall: Really enjoyed it. 

Paul Marden: One last ask of you, though. We always ask our interviewees to come up with a book recommendation. And it can be fiction, it can be factual, it can be about the subject. But we will give this book away to the first person that retweets the show advert and says, I want Stephen's book. So what is the book that you'd like to share with the world? 

Stephen Priestnall: Well, so I'd love to say it was. It was a book I wrote in 1986 on expert systems in context. I was doing AI back in the 80’s. That one is out of print. You definitely will get hold of it. Instead, it's a book that I think challenges, whatever your persuasions about understanding of the environment and climate, challenges your way of thinking about. It's a book by an activist called George Monbiot, and it's called Feral. And it's to do with the rewilding of Britain, the potential for rewilding Britain. And again, whether you're minded to think that's a good thing or not, it's a great book to just think, okay, that's my perceptions challenge. I hadn't thought of things like that. 

Paul Marden: Excellent. So, listeners, if you'd like to get a copy of Stephen's book, then head over to X, find the show tweet that we put out and say, I want Stephen's book. And the first person to do that will get a copy. Stephen, this has been wonderful. Thank you all so much. And hopefully we will talk more about this in Season 6. 

Stephen Priestnall: Thank you very much, Paul. 

Oz Austwick: He's a really interesting guy, isn't he? 

Paul Marden: He is indeed. I said to Stephen afterwards, it was such a nice conversation because we've been working together for years, and today I got to ask the questions I've been too embarrassed to ask for the last few years because I really should, at this point, know the answers to them. But today I was able to take the place of the listener and ask those questions without fear of embarrassment. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, there does come a point where you kind of feel that you probably shouldn't be asking this question anymore. You should already know this. Yeah, I love that. I thought, it's really interesting. I love this concept of nudging that he talked about, and it's something I've been aware of online for years, but the kind of putting it in the context of happening in the real world, I thought was really interesting. It gives you a bit of insight into how weird it is that we try and force people into certain pathways online. When you'd never dream of doing that in the real world, just having somebody outside a room just pushing you into it. Yeah, you wouldn't do that. 

Paul Marden: You're in a queue for the log flume and you get poked in the back to say, “Do you want to buy your photo? Do you want to buy your photo? You really do want to buy the photo, don't you?”

Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, that does kind of happen, doesn't it? It's usually my children that are doing it, if I'm being honest. But, yeah, really interesting stuff. 

Paul Marden: A nice way to round out some amazing interviews and fireside chats that we've had over Season 5 and look forward to Season 6. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, I'm really excited about Season 6. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, we want to do something a little bit different, don't we? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, well, I mean, firstly, I'll get to start the season of the podcast. Because I wasn't here at the start of Season 5. I've kind of just weaseled my way in halfway through the season and gone, “Yes, mine now.” 

Paul Marden: Tell listeners, what is it that we want to do differently? 

Oz Austwick: Well, it feels a bit weird to me that we're creating a podcast all about the visitor attraction sector, which is designed to get people out of their houses to a place and actually experience it in the real world. And yet you're sitting in exactly the same room, and I'm sitting in exactly the same room. And as we pointed out not long ago, I'm wearing the same t shirt as I seem. This appears to be my podcast t shirt. And yet, you know, we're not getting out. So we're gonna get out. We're gonna get in a car and go to a place and record a podcast in an attraction with a person. And I think that's amazing. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, I just can't wait. We've got a couple lined up. One's crazy, one's going to be a big event. It could be really fun, but we love listeners with attractions who would like two blokes and some cameras to turn up to invite us along. We would love to come and visit your venue. We would love to talk about whatever subject it is that you think our listeners would like to discuss, and we'll come along and we'll record it in real life at your place and see how amazing your venue is and talk more about the stuff that everybody's interested in. 

Oz Austwick: Absolutely. But it's not just that we're going to do a little bit differently, is it? We're kind of focusing a little bit more on different groups. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. There was some lovely feedback for those, for listeners that listened to Kelly's final episode, her swan song. When Ross from Drayton Manor came on and talked about his experience of being on the podcast and how influential it was for him to have his 15 minutes of fame for Skip the Queue, and how important that was to him in his stage, in his career, that prompted us to think about, can we use this platform now that so many people before us built to help to shine a light on new and emerging talent in the sector? So if you are in early stages of your career and you are doing something interesting in the attraction space, could be digital, it could be something customer focused in real life. 

Paul Marden: There's so many different ways where we could have an interesting conversation about what it is that you do and why other people would find it interesting. You know, invite us in. We would love to have that conversation with people. If you know someone, if there's someone in your team who, you know, you can see is doing amazing things and could grow in their career with the spotlight shone on them, and there's lots of people like that, then point them in our direction. Point us in their direction. We can definitely do something to help them to share their story and hopefully to benefit from that springboard, that stepping outside and talking to the outside world about what you do can really have on a career. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's lovely that hopefully now, after five seasons, the podcasts kind of mature enough that we don't need to lean on those famous, influential people in the industry quite as much. And hopefully that maybe we've got enough loyal listeners and enough of us standing as a podcast that we can tell stories just because they're interesting. Yeah, you already know the name of the person we're talking to, so, yeah, that's going to be really exciting. 

Paul Marden: But, you know, there are stories to be told that we don't know about yet that I'm sure will be going on inside listeners minds and, you know, hit us up, send us an email, send us a tweet, an X. I don't know what. I don't know. That's another story, isn't it? But send us a message by carrier Pigeon, if you can, that tells us what you think we should be talking about, the people we should be meeting and the stories that should be told. We would love to hear from you. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, and in the meantime, enjoy your two or three weeks without Skip the Queue. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully you're all busy working in your attractions, being absolutely swamped. If the attractions I've been to are anything to go by, it is a rip roaring success of a summer. We've had some pretty good weather and yeah, we'll be looking back at this September October time thinking what an amazing summer it was after a disappointing start to the year. 

Oz Austwick: So yeah, well, fingers crossed. Absolutely. 

Paul Marden: Thank you, Oz. It's been delightful. I've enjoyed every minute of it. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, me too. Here's to Season 6. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, see you on the other side. 

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.

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

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.

Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.

Competition ends on 31st July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://rubbercheese.com/survey/

https://carbonsix.digital/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/

Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn’t know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.

https://rubbercheese.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thatmarketingbloke/ 

Oz Austwick is the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, he has a somewhat varied job history having worked as a Blacksmith, a Nurse, a Videographer, and Henry VIII’s personal man at arms. Outside of work he’s a YouTuber, a martial artist, and a musician, and is usually found wandering round a ruined castle with his kids.

Transcription: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. In today's episode, Oz Austwick and I talk about the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey. After six weeks of data collection, we've seen some really interesting insights that we'll share and we'll also announce a new digital sustainability initiative that we're really excited about. 

Paul Marden: Hello, Oz. How you doing, mate? 

Oz Austwick: Hi, I'm good, mate, I'm good. How are you? 

Paul Marden: I am very good. On a slightly gray summer's day, hopefully, you know, all the private schools have broken up, so it should start to get busy in the attractions over the next couple of weeks and then we've got all the state schools breaking up in the next few weeks as well. So exciting times, hopefully. Hopefully busy times as well. 

Oz Austwick: Yes. So what are we going to talk about today? 

Paul Marden: Well, we are going to talk a little bit about the survey, but I thought it might be quite nice as well to talk a little bit about what's happening in the news because there's quite a lot at the moment. 

Oz Austwick: There is been a bit of a change of boss, haven't there has been. 

Paul Marden: A change of boss recently. But before we do that, shall we talk about where have we been recently? Tell me, tell me, which attraction have you been to recently? 

Oz Austwick: So this is why you're here, to keep me on track. The most recent attraction I've been to is Hazelmere Museum in Surrey. It's a bit of an eye opener, to be honest. I've always had a bit of a love for these tiny little provincial, formerly council run museums that you find in little towns around the country because you come across some amazing gems hidden in them. But Hazelmere Museum is a little bit different. I mean, it's astonishing. It's got a vast catalogue of natural history stuff. I mean, hundreds of thousands of pieces in the catalogue there. They've got an Egyptian section as well, with a sarcophagus and a mummy. Yeah, it's a great place. It's hidden away in this tiny little market town and if you get the opportunity, go, because it's great. 

Oz Austwick: But there is no parking, so you have to park in the town centre and walk along, which is the only downside I can come up with. How about you? Where have you been? 

Paul Marden: Sounds awesome. I have been to a few tiny little museums, actually. Recently I went to Winchester with my daughter and we did some of the military museums in Winchester because there's quite a few regimental museums in Winchester. They are all of them, you know, hyper focused on a particular regiment doing very specific things. So, you know, there's a cavalry museum and infantry museums. And it's just really interesting. My brother was in the army. It's quite nice to be able to take Millie and walk her around some of these military museums and for her to connect with what he did when he was in the army. So we’re able to see, there's a little piece in one of the museums showing the war in Kosovo and how peacekeepers went over. And my brother had a medal from going to Bosnia. 

Paul Marden: He went to in peacekeeping back in the ’90s. That was very interesting for her to be in a museum and connect with something that's of relevance to the family. He was slightly offended when I told him. Also, we saw model of Pegasus Bridge. And she was like, “Was he at Pegasus Bridge?” And I was like, “No, no. Uncle Barry's not quite that old. No, that's about 40 years too old for Uncle Barry.”

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Do you know, I remember I went to Pegasus Bridge completely by accident once. Literally. We were just driving back and went, “Hang on a minute. This looks familiar. “Yeah. We stopped off at the cafe and had a wander around the bridge. And you can still see the bullet holes in the walls of the cafe building. And there are still tanks. Amazing place. Anyway, sorry, I digress. 

Paul Marden: No, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about what's happening in the news at the moment. Anything that springs to mind for you? 

Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, obviously, the change of government, I don't think it came as a big surprise to anyone. Maybe the actual numbers were a little surprising, but the fact that we've now got a Labour Prime Minister with a fairly clear majority I don't think was a massive surprise. How that's going to play out in terms of the sector, I don't know. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, we've got a different culture sector in place, haven't we, than were perhaps anticipating. So there's few changes of personnel than we perhaps anticipated. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, I mean, I guess we'll wait and see. It's probably just a result of the change, but I guess I'm feeling fairly optimistic that things might improve. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I feel an air of optimism that we haven't had for quite some time. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. 

Paul Marden: Interesting times, other things in the sector. Interesting, exciting news. The Young V&A were awarded the Art Fund Museum of the Year. That's a, you know, a new museum that's doing lots of amazing work. We're real focused on kids and families. Lots of. Lots of co creation with young people involved in it. So that's quite exciting stuff. And it comes with a really hefty prize fund as well. So. So they got quite a nice pat on the back, a gong and some money as well to be able to fund their good work. So that's exciting. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Good for them. Anything else? Yeah, Bloomberg. I think we should probably talk a little bit about Bloomberg earlier in the year. We talked a lot about to a lot of people about the fact that Bloomberg philanthropies were awarding grants as part of their accelerator program for attractions, culturally significant attractions, to improve their digital presence. And that's kind of happened. A lot of awards have been made, attractions have got money to spend, and that's beginning to work its way out into the community now. So I'm really looking forward to seeing if that actually makes a significant difference to the overall level of websites. And I guess we'll probably have to wait until next year with the survey to find out if there's been a change in the sector. 

Oz Austwick: But I think for those attractions that have received the money, it can't be anything but a positive thing. 

Paul Marden: I was quite impressed because it's not just money that they're getting. They're getting help and support from Bloomberg as well to guide them in the use of that money. Because I think sometimes you see charities getting awarded large chunks of money and sometimes it can be a challenge for them to spend that money effectively, whereas by being provided guidance from Bloomberg, you know, you can see that money is going to be well spent and well used. So that's. I'm pleased about that. It'll be really exciting to see some of those projects come to fruition. I was pretty excited about a couple of science centre related news items. So we the curious in Bristol has reopened after two years of being closed in fire. So that was, I think that was monumental for them to be able to turn that around. It was really. 

Paul Marden: I was really pleased to see them reopen. That's definitely on my list of things I need to do this summer, is go and visit them and see what amazing things they've done. Absolutely. And then we've also got Cambridge Science Centre as well, will be due to open in a couple of weeks time. So they've opened their ticketing up. So people can now buy tickets to go to Cambridge Science Centre who have been a little bit like we the curious. They've been without a physical home for a period of time and are reopening a physical offering again. So that's exciting to be able to go and buy your tickets and head on over to Cambridge Science Centre.

Oz Austwick: And Kids in Museums as well. I'm not going to talk about it because I know you know a lot more about it than me. But they're looking for volunteers, right? 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we talked in a number of episodes about the Family Friendly Museum Awards and short lists of those have been announced. That includes Young V&A again. And we're looking for volunteer families to go undercover and do the judging. And I love it. The idea that families will get. They will have a contribution to the cost of money, pay expenses for them to go undercover and do this judging. And the feedback we get from those families is amazing. At the awards last year, each time an award was announced, we get a little snippet of what the undercover judges actually said and it's surprising what kids find important to them. The benches were comfy or the cafe was nice, you know, little things that perhaps adults might notice, you know, comes out in that undercover judging. 

Paul Marden: So, yeah, Kids in Museums need volunteers. Head on over to the website to go and find out a little bit more about that undercover judging. If you'd like to get involved in it. That's the news. But what do we really want to talk about? 

Oz Austwick: We really want to talk about our survey. 

Paul Marden: We really do. It's exciting. 

Oz Austwick: In fairness, we're kind of always talking about the survey at the moment. So now we're just going to talk to you about the survey rather than each other and anyone that will listen. 

Paul Marden: Yes, absolutely. 

Oz Austwick: We've been open for submissions for, what, six weeks now? 

Paul Marden: About that, I think. Yeah.

Oz Austwick: A few weeks to go. It's proving really interesting. 

Paul Marden: Yes. 

Oz Austwick: Is that enough of the hook? Have we got you now? One of the things that I think is probably worth saying is that somehow, and whilst we wanted this to happen, I don't think we specifically planned for it, we've kind of lost a lot of the kind of fake submissions that we've had in previous years where people were clearly just having a look at the survey or not bothering to fill it in, or maybe it was bots doing it and we don't seem to have those. So the overall quality of the responses is just fantastic. And some of the venues that have submitted their data to the survey, I mean, they're astonishing. I'm not going to name any names because I don't know if I'm allowed to. 

Paul Marden: No, you're definitely not allowed to. 

Oz Austwick: Some of the biggest and most famous attractions in the country. Or even the world because we are worldwide this year. 

Paul Marden: But more importantly, also the smallest museums you could possibly imagine are in that data set as well. So what have we seen? We got all of these amazing responses. We've still got a couple of weeks left to go. We don't want anyone to feel left out. We definitely want more people to respond over the next couple of weeks. But let's give some teasers. What have we seen that we thought was interesting? 

Oz Austwick: Before we do, can I just make a couple of points that I think everybody needs to be aware of? The first is that any data you put in is absolutely confidential in every way. We're never going to release your data to the wider world. All the data that gets released is aggregated together and is done in a way that is completely anonymous. But what that does is it allows us to give sector wide data and we can give your data in comparison to that, so you can and see where you are. So there's no risk of anything getting out in the wide world that you don't want out there. It's completely non commercial. You know, we're not making money from this, we're not doing this, we're not asking for your data in order that we can make money. 

Oz Austwick: This is to give back to the community. We want people to have the information so that they can make the right decisions. And also, you don't have to fill in everything. If you look at it and think, you know, I ought to fill this in, I want to fill it in, but I haven't got time to do the whole thing, do half of it, that's okay. Even if you only fill in one question, that will improve the value of that answer to the entire sector. I'll shush now. Sorry. Let's look at some action figures. 

Paul Marden: Let's talk about some of the interesting findings. We've definitely found some things where we've gone. “Oh, really? Oh, how interesting.” So for me, one of them, I'm a tech geek. Everybody knows I'm a tech geek. Okay. Ticketing systems, content management systems, that's my bag. I was quite interested this year that we're seeing much more parity in terms of the ticketing system data that we're getting. So there is a number of ticketing systems where in previous years there's been a substantial number of people selecting Digitickets. In previous years we're seeing more. We're seeing more responses from other respondents this year with different ticketing systems. And I think we've said this before, it's nothing. These aren't necessarily indicating changes in the behaviour of the sector. 

Paul Marden: It more speaks to the different people that are responding in different years and we're seeing more responses from different people this year. And so we are seeing different ticketing systems appearing alongside Digitickets as key. You spotted something that surprised you, didn't you, in that respect? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. When we designed the survey went through all of the ticketing systems that were familiar with and all of the names that we knew but hadn't had specific experience of working with. And we created what we thought was a really comprehensive listing of ticketing systems. But we allowed people to tick other and then write in what they were using and we clearly missed one big player from that list and they're probably the highest ranked so far. I haven't actually looked for the last week or so. They're certainly up there. They may not be the most popular but they're one of the most popular and it came as a complete surprise to us. So, you know, do make sure that you get your report because there is stuff in it that surprises even if it's just me, I mean. 

Oz Austwick: But you may well be surprised by some of the results of that. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, we saw interesting shifts. So we've done a little bit of year on year analysis as well. Already we've seen that there are more people selecting WordPress as their CMS. So that's now around half of all respondents have selected WordPress as their content management system. 

Oz Austwick: I'm going to take issue with your phrasing there because I'm not sure that's an accurate description. 

Paul Marden: Why? 

Oz Austwick: Because I don't necessarily think we've seen more people selecting WordPress, but we've certainly had more people stating they use WordPress. They may have been using WordPress years, much like the ticketing system. What we've got is a snapshot of the people who have submitted. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, so I meant selected the tick box as opposed to selected the technology platform. But you're absolutely right. It is indicative of the responses that we're getting this year. And it's not. They're not eating away market share from the other CMS's. I think we're seeing more people being able to tell us what the CMS that they're using is. So fewer people are saying I don't know or I can't track this, and actually giving us answer. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, we made a real conscious effort to try and reduce the number of people just saying other. And I think that's probably made a big difference to these. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, up around is around 11% now, up from 4% in 2023. So that's quite interesting. We're definitely going to do some analysis this year to try and see. Can we slice and dice some of the other data by technology platforms to see if any of these platforms give those people that select them an edge in terms of their performance or their sustainability scores or things like that? 

Oz Austwick: I know one of the things that we noticed last year was that the bigger, more successful venues were more likely to use Umbraco or perhaps the other way around. The venues that used Umbraco were more likely to be the bigger, more successful venues, but there was no way of telling which was cause and which was effect or whether they were just completely disconnected at all. And hopefully now, because we've got a slightly bigger sample size, we might be able to be a bit more accurate with that. Rather than stating this is a correlation, maybe there's something we can actually action from this. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. You had some interesting stuff that you saw around how easy people find it to find stuff, didn't you? 

Oz Austwick: Yes. There's been a long debate that's been going on for longer than I've been with Rubber Cheese about the value of self reporting. And I know that there were some conversations with the Advisory Board that we put together to help design the survey this year about whether that was a valuable thing to do. And I think that, because that's how we've done it for the last few years, we've stuck with it. But also, I think as long as you're open about the fact that this is self reporting, the figure is still accurate. So when we ask people how easy it is for visitors to their website to find what they're looking for, over half of them ranked 8, 9 or 10 out of 10, so that it was very easy. 

Oz Austwick: And nobody ranked zero, one or two, so nobody thought that it was really difficult to find stuff on their website. But 50% of sites have never actually tested the site or collected feedback from users. So how valuable that figure is a different question. Yeah, we'll come to that later, because there's an important point that I think we're going to make later on about how we can make that figure more valuable. 

Paul Marden: You also saw some stuff around personalisation, didn't you? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. The personalisation things are really important because as a marketer, you go along to agency groups and conferences and workshops and webinars, and for years, if not decades, people have been talking about how important personalisation is. If you've got anybody in your organisation that works with email newsletters, personalisation is absolutely key. And it's really clear that the more you personalise, the better you do. And 90% of the people who filled in the survey agree that personalisation is more important than not. However, only 9% of websites are offering personalised content. 

Paul Marden: It's a bit heartbreaking, isn't it? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Obviously we don't know why and we can say that even at this point, without the survey having finished, that's already up from last year. It was 6% last year and now it's at 9%, which doesn't feel like a big improvement, but it's a 50% increase. 

Paul Marden: It'd be interesting to slice that again and see is that the 9% that have personalisation, are they the attractions with larger footfall and larger budgets and that's why they can afford to do this and that's the big barrier to entry? Or is there a something else that actually know that smaller sites with less traffic and less footfall at the attraction can still offer personalisation? It's not just about budgets and some people can use this stuff and get really good outcomes from it, or spending all that time and effort mean that you get no real outcome of it anyway, and that all of those people that think it's really important are kidding themselves. And that's the great thing about the survey, isn't it, that we've got all of this data and we can start to draw those conclusions from it? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is going to be a really interesting one to follow over the next year or two to see if. Is this year's number an actual increase or is it just a more accurate number? Yes, and I guess we can only see that as a trend over time. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Oz Austwick: Now, you were very keen that we included some questions about AI and the use of AI. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Oz Austwick: Have there been any interesting findings there? 

Paul Marden: Yes. So the majority of people have used some sort of AI content generation tool, so they've used ChatGPT or the like to be able to do generative AI, writing, copy and that kind of thing. We've not gone into depth about how much they've used it. Do they use it extensively? Is it part of their day to day work? It was simply a question of have you used any of these tools? So, you know, over half have used a tool like that. There is also hidden in that data set there's a few attractions that are doing some pretty innovative things with AI as well. So there's a couple that are using things like AI powered CRM or AI powered scheduling or workforce management. So earlier on you said everybody's submissions is completely anonymous. That is completely true. 

Paul Marden: But I am definitely going to be tapping up those people that gave us the interesting answers to say, “Would you like to come and tell the story in more detail?” So, yes, you're right, we're never going to share anybody's data, and we're never going to share anybody's stories without their permission. We will definitely, over the next few weeks and months, as we're planning the report, we're definitely going to go to the people that have given us interesting data that has made us go, that's very interesting, and talking to them. So we'll find out a little bit more about what those people are doing. But you had an interesting observation, didn't you? If half of the people have used something like ChatGPT, that leaves about half the people that haven't used it. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, it's really difficult to know from where we sit as a digital agency that is constantly trying to stay ahead of the curve and understand new technologies and how they might be relevant and how we can use them to help our clients. You know, we may be, are we more familiar with this than most people, or is the way we see it representative? It's really hard to know. And I find it really hard to believe that the approaching half of visitor attractions simply haven't even looked at it. They've not even gone to ChatGPT and said, you know, find me a title for this blog post or something like that. It just seems that maybe they're missing a trick. 

Oz Austwick: And I'm not suggesting that you should go out and get vast amounts of content written by AI and plaster it all over your site. We know that Google is specifically and deliberately penalising sites it knows are doing that, but you can certainly use it to maybe improve your language. Or if you can't come up with a catchy title, you can ask for twelve different suggestions for titles and pick and choose. I find it really hard to believe that half the people haven't even done that, but that could just be my context. 

Paul Marden: I think you might be sat in a little bubble of your own making. I sat with people recently and walked them through. How do you prompt ChatGPT? What does prompting even mean? And talking about how is it doing it? And talking about the idea that it's all just probabilities. It's not intelligent, it's just using probabilities to figure out what the next word is. Yeah. And what does that actually mean to people? I definitely think that we sit in a bubble where we are. We are not experts. Neither of us, I think, would consider ourselves experts at best, gentlemen amateurs. But I think we sit in a bubble of people that are using this a lot and are experimenting with it. I don't know. 

Paul Marden: I think there's a place for Skip the Queue to look at this next year, to look at what are the innovative things that people are doing. But also starting at the 101 class, what does it all mean? What are these things? How could they be useful to you? How could you make use of ChatGPT to accelerate your content creation, to come up with new ideas that you haven't potentially thought of? So definitely, I think there's space in Season 6 for us to delve into this in more detail. There's one more area that I think we added this year that we're really excited about, isn't there, around sustainability. 

Paul Marden: Not because we think we are thought leaders on this, not because we think we're on the cutting edge, but because we're learning so much around this at the moment and really changing the way that we work, aren't we? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a really important point. It's something that. Oh, which conference was it? I think were both there. One of the agencynomics conferences, Joss from Enviral, made the point that this is actually our problem. If websites are out there and they aren't sustainable and they are causing damage, it's the fault of the companies that have built them. And really, that's us. So we kind of feel that we have to be at least trying to take the lead in helping fix that. And you can't do anything to fix the issue unless you've got the knowledge and the understanding of where you are. And I guess that's where we are at the moment. We've asked a few really basic questions, but they've given some quite interesting statistics. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. So most attractions have got good intentions, so most have got a sustainability plan in place. We've not asked what that plan looks like or how comprehensive it is. It was simply, does your attraction have a sustainability plan? And most people have said yes to that. 

Oz Austwick: When you say it's a majority, I think it's quite important to note that this isn't like 56%, this is a huge majority. The vast majority of sites have sustainability plan to the point where you could say almost everybody does. Not quite everybody, but almost everybody. But that does make the fact that very few have actually specifically measured the carbon footprint of their website a little bit more shocking. 

Paul Marden: So that's the big, “Oh, really moment” for us was the idea that most people have got a sustainability plan. Some have even actually taken action to improve the sustainability posture of their website, but very few have actually ever measured the CO2 emissions of their website. So they don't, they're not benchmarking. This is not a coherent plan where you measure, take action, measure again and then replan. Very few of the attractions have actually done that measurement process. We know, we know from recent episodes where we talked about sustainability, the importance of measuring in terms of helping you construct a plan and working in a methodical way to improve the CO2 emissions and improve that sustainability posture. And I think we've recognised as a result of doing the survey that there is some impediment that is stopping people from measuring. 

Paul Marden: We're not entirely sure we understand what the impediment is, but there is definitely something getting in the way of people being able to measure. And I think that's our. There's the big thing that I wanted to be able to share today that we have decided as a result of doing the survey and then started to run through, we could see that most people haven't tested the CO2 emissions. So what we have done is we've enriched the database of all of the respondents that we've had this year and gone and done the CO2 emissions tests of their websites for them. Now, obviously, we're going to keep that private to us. We're not singling anybody out, but we are going to be able to aggregate together what the whole industry looks like as a result of the testing that we have done. 

Paul Marden: The testing, to be fair, is not just restricted to the people that have responded to the survey. We are also going and testing more widely across the entire sector to be able to get an understanding of what the CO2 emissions of the websites of the wider sector look like. So that's been, that's something that we've been really pleased that we've been able to do and it's something that we want to be able to offer out to everybody that has taken part in the survey. So one of the things that I guess we're announcing today that is a key thing that we've not talked about throughout the whole survey process, is we're going to give everybody that has taken part in the survey the opportunity to download the CO2 emissions report that we have gathered for them on their website. 

Paul Marden: So they will be able to see a grading of A to F as to what their CO2 emissions look like. They'll also see that broken down in a little bit more granular detail around the page size, the amount of CO2 that is emitted by the page, one page of their site, and a rough estimate of what that turns into in terms of CO2 emissions for their entire site. And that's something that we will share with everybody at the end of the survey. So this year, it's not just going to be one large survey that aggregates everybody's data together. We will also give individualised reports to everybody for them to be able to see where their CO2 emissions are in terms of their website.

Paul Marden: With ideas we're hopefully going to work with friends of Skip the Queue and supporters of the survey to be able to come up with ideas around how you can actually improve that CO2 posture, which could, that could be an amazing thing for us to run the survey again next year, gather that data again and see today, as we're recording, BBC is running the Michael Mosely just one thing in memory of Michael Moseley. I think we can take inspiration from that. What if every attraction that got access to their report did just one thing to improve the CO2 posture of their website? What difference is that going to make to us as a sector as a whole in that one year process? 

Paul Marden: Because there will bound to be a few little things that you can do, knobs to twiddle and features to add on your website that will just improve that CO2 emissions posture just a little bit and make everybody better as a result of it. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. And I think it's really interesting that even though we haven't got the full data yet, and we've not put it together in any meaningful way, it's already changed the way we work as an agency. But not only that, there are other changes going on in the wider community as well, because the website briefs we're getting through from attractions are talking about this more. So I guess from a personal perspective, if you're putting together a brief for a new website or an app or some kind of new digital service, put this in there, ask that somebody pays some attention to the footprint and the impact of your new site and make it part of the decision making process. 

Paul Marden: Procurement managers have the control. I absolutely believe that the person that holds the purse strings gets to set the direction of the project. And just like accessibility is always on, every tender, sustainability should be there. This is a easily, trivially measurable thing. And when procurement managers hold us to account, the industry will improve as a result of being held to account like that. 

Oz Austwick: Yes. Now, the sustainability reporting isn't the only new thing that we're going to do. There's one more big thing that we're going to do as part of the survey to try and make. Make the data far more valid and applicable. Do you want to say what it is? 

Paul Marden: Yeah, I'll take this one. Because this was an idea I had. It was an idea I had a few months ago. I would love to get real end consumer input into the survey. We asked attractions, how important is personalisation? Have you done user testing? How easy was it for people to traverse your website? We're actually going to go out and survey people who have visited a large attraction in the last year and ask them, how easy was it to buy your tickets? We could be asking them about personalisation. We could be asking them about, is sustainability a key deciding buying factor for you? There's lots of things that we could ask people as part of this consumer research piece that we're about to embark on. 

Paul Marden: I think it's really exciting to be able to join up the voice of the consumer with the voice of the attractions in the Rubber Cheese Survey as a whole. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. Not only will it give us that knowledge from the other side of the transaction, but it'll let us know really very quickly whether the self reporting that people are doing as part of the survey is actually accurate. Is your view of how easy your website is to use, is that accurate? Is that the same view that people coming to your website for the first time have? Because we're all familiar with our own website and if you've designed the user experience, you probably think it's great and it may well be, but unless you actually test it and ask people, you can't know either way. So I think this is a really exciting thing to do and it allows us to kind of draw in more important information that can help us all as a sector improve.

Paul Marden: Completely. And we've got a little ask in terms of that, haven't we? We would love to hear from you if you have got input into that consumer research, if you've got ideas of things, we could be asking real people that go to real attractions about how they use the website. You know, let us know. We'd love to hear feedback either. You know, send us a message on Twitter, reach out by email. There's links all in the show notes that will help you to make contact with us. But please just make contact and let us know. We've got amazing feedback from the advisory board and we will be talking about this piece of research with the advisory board before the survey goes out to the real people. But you've got a chance at the moment to be able to input to that. 

Paul Marden: So please do let us know what you think would be interesting. 

Oz Austwick: And whilst we're asking things of you, I've got a few more things that we want to ask. 

Paul Marden: Go on then. What do you want? What do you want? 

Oz Austwick: Well, all sorts of things. But for today, if you haven't filled in the survey, please do go along to rubbercheese.com. There's a link on the homepage through to the survey. There are different surveys for different parts of the world. Just click on the link, fill it in. You don't have to do the whole thing. Even if it's a partial response, it's still helpful. So please go along, give it a try. I'm led to believe, and I haven't tested this so I'm not going to state for effect, but if you half fill in the survey and then go away and come back on the same computer using the same browser, you'll go back in at the point that you'd got to so you can finish it. It depends on your cookie settings, but that's what is claimed. 

Oz Austwick: But even if it doesn't happen, you know, a half survey response is better than none. 

Paul Marden: We'd also like you to nag your mates as well. You know, I've been messaging people that have been responding and so many of the marketers that are filling in the survey are part of communities of other marketers. They're parts of communities, regional communities, Wales communities, or they're parts of sector specific. There's so many different groups and organisations that are working together. If you can, please raise the profile of the survey, stick a link in your WhatsApp group with all the people that you work with around you. We would really appreciate that. Obviously, the more people that submit, the better the data set. The more money we'll donate to Kids in Museums as a result of what we do. 

Paul Marden: And of course now everybody that submits will get their personalised sustainability report at the end as well, which is another great incentive to get involved. 

Oz Austwick: I guess the other thing is that if you filled in the survey before and you don't think you've got time to do the whole thing again from scratch, do let us know because we can quite happily provide you with all of the previous answers that you've given that are relevant to this year's survey and then you can just update or fill in the gaps. We're very happy to do that if it would be helpful. And still for those multi site organisations, if that's an easier way for you, for us to provide you with a spreadsheet that you can just put data into, we're very happy to do that too. 

Paul Marden: Absolutely. And the spreadsheet approach again lends itself very well. You don't have to answer everything. If you don't want to share information about the technology platforms you're using, that's fine. If you don't want to share information about your Google Analytics, that's fine. The more data that we get, even if it is partial data, it enriches what we've got and we get a better picture of the entire sector as a result of that. So, yeah, really keen to get input from more people. So that's our call to action. You've got one more thing you want touch on, don't you? You've got your book recommendation that you want to share with us. So tell us what your book is. 

Oz Austwick: Well, before I do, there are a couple of things I have to say. The first is that I realise that this is tangentially connected to the visitor attraction sector. That'll become clear, I'm sure, as soon as I reveal the book. The other is that I am an absolute massive history geek. So the book I would like to recommend that if you haven't read this is The Mary Rose by Margaret Rule, which is the story of the excavation and recovery of the Mary Rose itself. I don't know how old you are, dear listener, but I remember sitting in the hall of my school, my primary school up in Yorkshire, with a big TV in a box on a stand with this on the BBC Live and watching it be raised from the depths. And that's kind of stuck with me. 

Oz Austwick: So it's lovely to read the story of it from the person who kind of made it happen. And then when you've read the book, go down to Portsmouth and have a look because it is a visitor attraction. 

Paul Marden: Now, I guess it helps you with diving the 4D because you get the fuller picture of the whole story and then you go and do dive the 4D experience and you get to experience a little bit of what that excavation was actually like. And I bet you like any good book to a movie. The book tells the story in much more detail than the movie ever can. 

Oz Austwick: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt. In fairness, it's going to be tricky to get a copy of this book to somebody because I don't think it's in print anymore. So it will be a secondhand copy. I've checked. You can get them. Abe books has a few. 

Paul Marden: Are you going to bankrupt me? 

Oz Austwick: No, no. It's not one of those secondhand books. Don't worry, it's probably cheaper than a new one. Now all the booksellers that are listening are going to put their prices up. But, yeah, comment on Twitter. Sorry, Twitter x. If you want the book and the first person will send it out to. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, so go find the show announcement, retweet it and say, I want Oz's book. And yep, we will find that and we will send a copy of the book. That will be a challenge for the team behind us that do all of the behind the scenes production to actually try and figure out how you order a secondhand book and get it delivered to somebody different. It's easy on Amazon. Not so easy on a secondhand book site, so that'll be interesting. 

Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, eBay Books is owned by Amazon, so, you know, there'll be a way. 

Paul Marden: I'm sure that's a wonderful book, is a wonderful location. If you haven't been before. It's an amazing attraction to go and visit. They've got a pretty good website as well. I think we've said it before. 

Oz Austwick: It's true. I've heard good things about their website. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, they seem happy. Great to talk to you again. As always, our little fireside chats are very enjoyable. We do tend to ramble on. We've got one more episode left of Season 5, but planning is underway for season six in the autumn, so nearly we're in the home straight now. 

Oz Austwick: Definitely do make sure you follow and you won't miss season six. 

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.

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

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 Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.

Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.

Competition ends on 17th July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://aerstudios.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesliweb/

Tools for Sustainability:

https://ecograder.com/

https://www.websitecarbon.com/

James Hobbs is a people-focused technologist with over 15 years experience working in a range of senior software engineering roles with a particular focus on digital sustainability.
He is Head of Technology at creative technology studio, aer studios, leading the technology team delivering outstanding work for clients including Dogs Trust, BBC, Historic Royal Palaces, and many others. Prior to joining aer studios, James was Head of Engineering at digital agency Great State, where he led a multi-award-winning software engineering team working with clients including the Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, Honda Europe, the Scouts, and others.

He also has many years experience building and running high-traffic, global e-commerce systems while working at Dyson, where he headed up the global digital technical team.

Transcription: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. 

The last twelve months have been the warmest of any twelve month period since records began. And while over 70% of attractions have a sustainability policy, only 12% have actually tested the CO2 emissions of their website. In today's episode, we're joined by James Hobbs, Head of Technology at aer studios and a member of the Umbraco Community Sustainability Team. James shares some easily actionable tips to reduce the emissions of your website. 

Paul Marden: James, welcome to skip the queue. Lovely to have you. 

James Hobbs: Thanks for having me. 

Paul Marden: So we always start with some icebreaker questions. So it would be unfair if I didn't inflict the same pain on you. 

James Hobbs: Go for it. 

Paul Marden: Let's start with a nice one, I think. What actor would you want to play you in a film about your life? 

James Hobbs: I mean, instinctively, I'd say someone like Jack Black. Just think he's really funny. A lot more funny than me. I'm not sure how much of a resemblance there is. He's got a much better beard than I do someone. Yeah. If there's gonna be an adaptation, I'd like it to be funny. 

Paul Marden: I like the idea of that one. I think I'd struggle with that one. I'd struggle to pick. Yeah, you know, it's gotta be an archetypal geek that would play me in the story of my life. I'm not sure who that would be. 

James Hobbs: Not John Cena or something like that. 

Paul Marden: So the next one, I'd say this one I found really hard, actually. What was your dream job when you were growing up? 

James Hobbs: Oh, okay. So I can answer that one easily because my parents still take the Mickey out of me for it. So when I was quite young, I told them very kind of certified. When I grow up, I want to be part time mechanic, part time librarian. 

Paul Marden: Well, that's an interesting job, shed. 

James Hobbs: Yeah, it's really random, I think, because I like, I love books. I love reading. Did back then, still do now. I also like dismantling things. I was never very good at putting them back together and then continuing to work. But, yeah, that was my aspiration when I was a kid. 

Paul Marden: I remember going to careers advisors and just some of the tosh, they would tell you. So everybody was told they could be an undertaker and you got your typical finance jobs. But I really. I desperately wanted to be a pilot. And I was told by the optician I couldn't because of eyesight, which was nonsense. But actually, I couldn't have done the job because I have a zero sense of direction. So later in life, when I trained for my private pilot's license, I got hopelessly lost a couple of times. The RAF are very helpful, though, when that happens. 

James Hobbs: They come up, fly alongside you and tell you to get out of their airspace. 

Paul Marden: They don't like people invading the Heathrow airspace. And I was dangerously close to it at the time. 

James Hobbs: Nice. 

Paul Marden: That's another story, though. But no, they sent me from my work experience to work in the local council finance department. Department, which I don't think could be more different than being a pilot if you actually tried. 

James Hobbs: I mean, it's not the most glamorous, I mean, it's important, but, you know, it's not quite Top Gun, is it? 

Paul Marden: No, no. Exactly. There you go. Tom Cruise. That can. He can play me in the film of my life. James. So we want to talk a little bit about digital sustainability. So I thought it'd be quite nice for you to tell the listeners a little bit about your background in digital and more specifically the stuff that you've been doing more recently in digital sustainability. 

James Hobbs: Okay, I'll give you the most succinct property history I can. So I guess my background 15, 16 years ago started off as a developer, not a very good one. And since then I've worked for a range of different sorts of organisations. So everything from a local council, national charity, global manufacturing company, and then two digital agencies. For the last ten years or so, I've been more in leadership positions, obviously have to stay close to the technology. And in more recent years, one of the big passions of mine, I suppose, or something I'm really interested is the sustainability side of digital, because I think it's interesting and that we can make a massive impact, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. 

James Hobbs: But my current role is I'm Head of Technology at a creative technology studio called aer studios, who also share my enthusiasm for sustainability. So I'm excited to do some work there. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. And my background stalking of you told me that air does some work in the attraction sector as well, doesn't it? So you work with a few attractions? 

James Hobbs: Yes, that's right. Yeah, we've got a few. 

Paul Marden: So there's some form here. 

James Hobbs: Yeah, I would say so. 

Paul Marden: Cool. One of the things that I know that you've been working with is so we're both. We've spent a lot of time in the Umbraco community, and Embraco is a content management system that a few attractions use not many, but some tend to be larger organisations that use Umbraco typically. But we've both spent time in the Umbraco community going to lots of events and talking to a lot of people. But one of the contributions you've made over the recent period is joining the Umbraco Sustainability Team. What is it, what does it do and who's involved in it? 

James Hobbs: Okay, so the Umbraco has this concept of community teams, which I think is a, Umbraco is a very unique organisation. Anyway, you know this because you're part of community as well, but they have a very strong connection and link with the community of developers. And not just developers, anyone who has anything to do with Umbraco and works with it. And the sustainability team is one of the several community teams that exist. The idea is that it brings together people from Umbraco's and people from the community who have a shared passion in something relevant to Umbraco to help steer it, share knowledge, and ultimately achieve a goal. And for the sustainability community team, the goal is to, I guess it's multifaceted. Firstly to make Umbraco as a product more sustainable, which is brilliant. 

James Hobbs: Secondly, to raise awareness of what organisations or individuals need to do to be able to improve the sustainability posture of whatever they're up to, which is brilliant as well. So there's a very umbraco focused side to it, but there's also a wider kind of awareness raising, educational side of it too, because this is a very, its a quite a new, say, it's a relatively new thing. I think digital sustainability as a concept completely hasn't really existed for that long, unfortunately. But now it does. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, exactly. And theres been some impact as well that the team has had on the product and the direction of the product isn't there. 

James Hobbs: Yeah. So and again, this is, there's several of us in this community team and I want to make it really clear that like a lot of work's gone on. It's not just me doing it. So we've managed to achieved a few things. So first of all, the Umbraco website, they launched a new website a little while ago. Its sustainability posture wasn't great. So we've worked with them, people that internally built that to improve it, and that's made a massive difference. 

Paul Marden: Excellent. 

James Hobbs: It's gone from being dirtier than a large majority of websites to being cleaner than most, which is great. We've pulled together some documentation for covering all sorts of areas from front end, back end development, content editing and so on, to educate people on how to build more sustainable websites. And some of the team members as well have built an Umbraco package, an open source package that you can install into Umbraco, and it will advise you in terms of the pages that you're making, whether they are good from a carbon footprint point of view or not. And we'll give you a rating, which is superb because it brings that whole thing in much closer to the end users who'll be making the pages. So that was a really nice piece of work. And on top of that, we do appear on things like this. Do webinars and talk at conferences and stuff. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, and I think Andy Eva-Dalefrom Tangent is one of the members of the team. And honestly it was Andy who totally opened my eyes to this whole subject when I first started seeing him talk about it and giving some stats, and we'll talk a little more about those later on. There's definitely an impact that the team is having and it's really weird, isn't it? I mean, I don't want to geek out too much about Umbraco and the community, but there is something quite special about this commercial organisation that has open source software that gets given away for free, that collaborates with the community to build a product which is easy to use, pretty cool, really effective, but also sustainable as well. There's not many organisations that work in that way. 

James Hobbs: Yeah, it's unique and I love it. I think it's great. It just shows you it's possible to run a business and make money, but also have a really engaged community of passionate people and work together. I think it's brilliant. 

Paul Marden: Look, let's just take a step back from geeking out about Umbraco. Then I want to set the scene. Longtime listeners will know that Rubber Cheese run a visitor attraction website survey. We've done it for two years in a row. This year we simplified the survey down to make space for some more questions. And one of the key questions we've talked about is Sustainability. We are still just over the halfway point of the survey period, so there are still lots of responses coming in. But based on the data that we've got so far, we know that 72% of attractions in the current survey have got a sustainability policy, but only 12% of attractions have ever tested the CO2 emissions of their website. And we'll come to in a minute why we think the measurement and focusing on CO2 emissions in digital is important. 

Paul Marden: But whilst very few are actually testing their site, nearly half of all of the respondents so far have attempted something to reduce the CO2 emissions of their website. So there's clearly action going on, but it's not necessarily driving in a coherent direction because there's no clear benchmarking and target setting and retesting. So I think what I'd like to cover today is for us to understand that a little bit more, get under the skin of it a little bit, and then talk a little bit about how we can actually reduce the CO2 emissions, how can we actually make things different and why we might want to do it. Because it's more than just kind of the ethical, we all should be doing something. There were some real business benefits to it as well. My next question, without stating the bleeding obvious. 

Paul Marden: Okay, why do you think digital sustainability matters? I mean, the obvious answer is just because it does. But it's important, isn't it, as a contributor to global warming? 

James Hobbs: Yeah. So, I mean, there's lots of statistics knocking around, one of which I think it shows you the scale of the impact of the digital industry is. I think the total carbon footprint emissions of the digital industry is greater than global air traffic. And if you go and look on something like Flightradar or Skyscanner or whatever, and look at how many planes are in the air at any given moment in time, that's a pretty sobering statistic. There's lots of other ones as well, in terms of the amount of electricity that's being used, and water compared to even small countries like New Zealand. So we are generating a hell of a lot of carbon directly and indirectly, by doing all the things that we do. 

James Hobbs: And every time you hold up your phone and you load up Instagram or TikTok or download something, there's a massive disconnect cognitively, because it's just there and it just works and it doesn't feel like it's using up electricity and so on, but it is. There's a whole massive supply chain behind all of the lovely things we like to do on our devices that is hungry for electricity and generates pollution and that kind of thing. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. So my background was at British Airways and I was there for ten years. It really wasn't that hard to spot the fact that environmentally, that we have a challenging problem. Because when you stood on the end of Heathrow Runway, you can see what's coming out the back end of a 747 as it takes off. But I don't think I ever quite understood the impact of what I do now and how that's contributing more to CO2 emissions than what I was doing previously, which. Yeah, I just don't think there's an awareness of that more broadly. 

James Hobbs: No, yeah, I'd agree. And it's complicated. 

Paul Marden: In what way? 

James Hobbs: I guess it's complicated to quantify the carbon impact of the type of work that we do in the digital industry, because I guess there's what we're shipping to end users, which is one thing. But most modern websites and applications and stuff are built on a big tower of cloud services providers, and all of their equipment has to be manufactured which has a carbon impact. And rare earth metals need to be mined out of the grid. All of that stuff. There's a big supply chain backing all this stuff and we can influence some of that directly, but a large chunk of it we can't. So it makes choosing your suppliers quite important. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're going down the road, if you accept the premise that this is a big contributor and making small gains on any of the stuff that is of interest to us and marketers who are owning websites attractions, I think for me, probably the first step is testing and trying to figure out where you are. Do you think that's a useful first step? Is that important as far as you're concerned, James? 

James Hobbs: I think it's important because with any sort of improvement, whether it's related to sustainability or not, I think quantifying where you are at the start and having a benchmark allows you to see whether you're going in the right direction or not. And improvement doesn't always go in one direction the whole time. There might be a two steps forward, one step back, depending on what you're doing. But I think without measuring where you are, and ideally regularly measuring your progress, it's hard to say what impact you've had and you might be going in the wrong direction and bumping up the wrong tree or whatever. So I think it's important. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, it's super important. And is it something that marketers themselves can do, or is this something that only a sustainability consultant can do, or is there somewhere in between? Is it the techy geeks that run the website that do this? Or is it a little bit of all of those things? 

James Hobbs: Well, that's a really good question. So I think this is still quite a new kind of industry. There are some tools out there that you can use to help you quantify the carbon impact of what you've got out there in the wild now. So the big one that most people talk about is websitecarbon.com, which is the website carbon calculator that was built by, I think a combination of an agency and some other organisations come up with an algorithm. It's obviously not going to be 100% accurate because every single website app, it's slightly different and so on. But as a consistent benchmark for where you are and a starting point for improvement, tools like that are really good. Ecograder is another one. Those offer non technical routes to using them. 

James Hobbs: So for the website carbon calculator, you just plunk a website address in hit go and it'll run off and tell you that's not very scalable. If you've got a 10,000 page website, or if you've got a large digital estate, there are also API level services that are provided that might make that easier to automate. But again, you then need someone who knows how to do that sort of thing, which raises the barrier to entry. I think what I would like to see is more and more vendors building carbon dashboards into their products and services so that the rest of us don't have to run around and build this stuff from scratch. Azure, for example, Microsoft's cloud platform, has a carbon dashboard that is scoped to your resources. That's really interesting and useful to see. 

James Hobbs: The stuff I mentioned about what we're doing with Umbraco and building a sustainability package, we're hoping to get that built into the core product. And again, the idea being that if you're a content editor or a marketer, you shouldn't have to know how to wire up APIs and do all this stuff, you should be able to see at a glance. Okay, well, that page I've just built actually is a little bit on the heavy side. Maybe I need to look at that. So I think the way to democratize it is to make it easier to do the right thing. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So these tools are giving you, they're giving you a grading? Yeah. So some of them are like a to f. I think it is for Website Carbon, Ecograder gives you a score out of 100. I think it is. Are there any advantages to one or the other? Or is it a good idea for people to use both of them and see the differences that the two different tools can give you? 

James Hobbs: I think it will come down to, well, for me anyway, I think using a tool in the first place is a step forward from what the vast majority of people are doing currently, which are not even thinking about it. So in many ways it doesnt really matter. I think it will depend on what people find easier to use. I think when people start to integrate this sort of sustainability measurements into their build pipelines, for example, release pipelines. That's where you will need to maybe think more carefully about the kind of data that you're interested in and what criteria you want to look at. Because, for example, at the moment, a lot of organisations who write software, hopefully their developers, will be writing some unit tests. And if the tests fail, then you don't deploy the website that should fail the build. 

James Hobbs: I think it would be good to move to a world where if your sustainability posture regresses and gets worse than similar things. There are other tools outside of those websites that we've been talking about, though. So there's an organisation called the Green Web Foundation, a nonprofit who do a lot of work in this space. And they've created a couple of tools. One's called CO2.js, which you can integrate directly into your website that can actually be a bit more accurate than the carbon stuff. And they've also built a tool called the Grid Intensity CLI. And without going into loads of horrible detail, what that is, essentially it knows when the electricity grid is at its most, what's the right word? At its most pollutant. When it's generating the most carbon. 

James Hobbs: So you can use that to figure out when to run background jobs or do lots of processing. You can do it when the grid is at its most renewable. So there's things like that as well. There's lots of options out there. You can go deep as you want. 

Paul Marden: Amazing. One thing that you just mentioned that I thought, oh, that's really interesting. I've never thought of that before, is the idea that you can drop a URL into Website Carbon or Ecograder and it will give you the score of that page. But actually, if you've got lots of pages on your website, you need to be testing across multiple pages. That should never occur to me before. 

James Hobbs: Yeah, because I think a lot of people plunk the homepage in and go, cool. It's a. I guess it's effort versus reward thing. No one's going, well, hopefully no one's going to spend time manually entering 10,000 website URL's into a tool like that. Not least because it would probably take the tool down. There are probably better ways of doing it than that. And also, homepages are typically quite different to the rest of a website. It serves a different purpose. So I think testing a representative portion of your digital services is probably the way to go. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I've been wondering recently whether buyers should be thinking about this as something that's part of the requirements of a new website. So if you're going out to tender and buying a new website, oftentimes you and I will both see requests for proposal that have accessibility requirements in them. But I genuinely don't remember a time that I've ever seen an RFP say, “You must achieve grade c or above on website carbon across the majority of the pages on the site.” And I think when buyers start to do that you'll begin to see agencies doing more of this sort of stuff. I think baking it into contracts will make a big difference. 

James Hobbs: Yeah, yeah and it's that kind of selective pressure isn't it? Clients start requiring this stuff, then agencies will have to step up. And it's unfortunate that might well be the catalyst but actually I don't care what the catalyst is as long as we’re going in the right direction. Its the main thing really, which is lessening our impact. Yeah absolutely. But yeah that whole supply chain thing is huge. That’s one way we can make a big impact is by mandating certain things. And there’s actually a certification, a green software engineering certification. It's offered for free that developers or technical architects can go through to educate them a bit on green software engineering techniques and things like that. 

James Hobbs: And that's the kind of thing that hopefully in the future companies who are putting RFPs out might say, “We want your engineering team to be aware of green computing techniques” and so on and be able to prove it. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised as well that it gets legislated for as well. So in the same way as you know, public sector bodies have got to meet certain accessibility requirements. I would not be surprised if we enter a world soon where there's a statutory obligation for these things to be done in a sustainable way as well. 

James Hobbs: Yeah. 

Paul Marden: So getting your act together now is a really good thing to do because there's going to be less work later on when you've got no choice but to do it. 

James Hobbs: Exactly. Get ahead of the game now. 

Paul Marden: So we've made the case, people have bought into it, they're going to go and do some testing and they realise that they've got a smelly, polluting, rich website. What can they do next? How can your average head of marketing, head of digital influence their website to get better? 

James Hobbs: Yeah. Okay, so this is where I think there's a really nice angle here. We did talk about this earlier on, but there is a fairly close link between the things that will make doing the things that will make your website, your digital services more sustainable and kind of KPI's and metrics that will probably make it more commercially successful as well, depending on what you're doing, with a bunch of caveats that I won't go into. So, for example, sustainable websites are typically lightweight, they're fast, they're optimised for getting the right things in front of the user as quickly as possible, which can include everything from content delivery networks to optimising images to a whole host of stuff. Doing all of those things will also typically positively impact your search engine optimisation, positively impact your conversion. 

James Hobbs: Because if you look at Google's guidance, Lighthouse guidance, the different things it looks at and so on, it's very clear that fast, relevant websites are what get prioritised and what Google's looking for. Fast, relevant websites that are served from locations close to the user are also likely to be sustainable. So there is a link there. And what that means is there's a built in business case for doing the sustainability stuff. 

James Hobbs: So if you've got a hard nosed suite of executives who couldn't care less about the planet, not that I'm saying that's what everyone's like, but, you know, the commercial world that we live in, it's a hell of a lot easier to sell this stuff in by saying, “You know what as well, like we can do an MVP or a pilot and we're confident that we might be able to improve conversion by 0.1%, 0.5%”, whatever it might be. It's also typically a good way to save money by being smarter about what you're computing and where and when and using some of those tools that I've talked about, you can save yourself potentially a bunch of money as a business, which again, is a commercial win. 

James Hobbs: So I think whilst the ethical side of it is really important, and, you know, none of us want to be boiling to death in 50 years time because we've ruined the planet. Making small changes in digital can have a massive impact because the amount of people that are using them. And I think it's easier to sell in because of the commercial. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm guessing there's stuff that you can do at key stages in the design and development of a site. So what are the things that people should be thinking about during the design of the site that could make it more sustainable? 

James Hobbs: So, okay, so that's a really good question. So this is a huge topic. So I can give you some examples of the kind of things you should be thinking about. So. And I guess we could divide them up into two sections. So when we're designing a website. There's how it looks and how the user experience work. There's also the technical design. As with anything, the further, the earlier you start thinking about this kind of stuff, the easier it is. Crowbarring in. It's a bit like accessibility, you know this, try and crowbar it in the last week of the project, it's not going to work. So from a design point of view, and some of this stuff is difficult to quantify its impact in detail, but things like not having massive 4k full bleed videos at the top of your webpage. 

James Hobbs: So being very careful and intelligent use of things like that, because they are large, they have to be transferred from wherever you're serving them from to the user. There's a big energy cost associated with that, not using loads and loads of external dependencies on your web pages. And that could be anything from fonts to JavaScript libraries to the vast myriad of tools that are being used. The more things you're throwing down the pipe to your end user, especially if your hosting infrastructure is not set up in a distributed way, the more energy intensive that thing is. You can even go as far as looking at the color choices that you're using. So certain darker themes are typically less energy intensive. Yeah, because of how OLED screens and modern screens work. Again, very hard to quantify. 

James Hobbs: And then we go down the rabbit hole of yeah, but where does the electricity that charges my phone come from? And you try and quantify all that stuff, it gets very head explodey. But there are things you can do in that sense. Some of them are easier to quantify than others. The weight of the page is a very easy thing to measure. If you keep that low, it will be easier to cache, it will load quicker for users, it will better for SEO, and faster pages tend to have better conversion. 

James Hobbs: And that works whether you're selling things from an e commerce point of view or you're trying to register interest, whatever it might be, from a technical angle, I think one of the most impactful things you can do, beyond making sure that your code is optimised and is running at the right times, at the right place, is simply to consider using a Content Delivery Network. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with a content delivery network, a CDN is something that all of us have interacted with at one point or another, probably without realising in the traditional way of serving or having a website, you've got some service somewhere, in a data centre somewhere. When someone types your website address in, it goes and fetches that information from the web server and back comes a web page in the simplest sense. 

James Hobbs: Now, if your website servers live in Amsterdam and your users on the west coast of America, that's a big old trip for that information to come back and forth. And it's got to go through lots of different hops, uses up lots of energy. A content delivery network is basically lots and lots of servers dotted all over the planet, in all of the major cities and things like that can keep a copy of your website. So that if someone from the west coast of America says, “Oh, I'm really interested in looking at this website,” types the address in, they get the copy from a server that might be 1020, 50 miles away from them, instead of several thousand across an ocean. 

James Hobbs: So it loads quicker for the user, which is great from a user experience, SEO, all that stuff I talked about, but it's also great from an energy point of view, because it's coming from somewhere nearby and it's not having to bounce around the planet. That's one thing that you could do that will make a massive and immediate impact commercially and from a sustainability point of view. 

Paul Marden: So you get those kind of performance improvement for the people all the way around the world accessing the site, but it's going to take load off of the server itself, so you might need less powerful servers running. One of the big issues that attraction websites have got is that it's such a cyclical market. The people that, you know,

James Hobbs: Spiky.

Paul Marden: Exactly when the Christmas meet Santa train is released at an attraction, or the traffic to the website is going to peak. If you can keep some of that traffic off of the web server by using that Content Delivery Network instead, you're going to be able to withstand those really peak times on the website without having to spend lots and lots of money on improving the resilience of the service. So it really is a win win win, isn't it? 

James Hobbs: I think so. And also it can help potentially avoid things like the dreaded queue where you log on to a website that's busy and it sticks you in a queue and you're 41,317th queue or whatever. Exactly like you say. If you can leverage this tech to take the load off your back end systems and I, you'll be delivering a better user experience. 

Paul Marden: One of the measures that I know a lot of the algorithms that are assessing CO2 emissions look at is the type of hosting that you use. So they talk about green hosting. What is green hosting? And is all green hosting the same? 

James Hobbs: No. So yeah, again, this is a big topic. So I guess hosting generally runs the spectrum all the way from kind of one boutique sort of providers who can set up VMS or private servers or whatever all the way through to the big goliaths of the Internet, the AWS and Azure and so on and everything in between. So green hosting is broadly hosting that is carbon neutral, powered by renewables, that sort of thing. So in theory shouldn't be pumping more pollutants into our atmosphere than it's saving. So if we look at the big cloud providers initially, so they've all made some commitments in terms of improving their sustainability posture. And this is really good because when one does it, the other one has to do it too. And obviously there's Google Cloud platform as well and they're doing similar sorts of things. 

James Hobbs: But it's almost this, I like the competitive angle of this because all it means is the sustainability posture of all of them will get better quicker. So it's good. So for example, I'll try and do this off the top of my head, you should check yourselves. But Azure and AWS and Google all have some pages that talk about their commitments and primarily they're focused on carbon neutrality and using renewable electricity. Aws have done a good job of that. So in certain AWS regions the year before last, they were completely 100% renewable powered, which is brilliant. 

Paul Marden: Really. 

James Hobbs: Yes. Not everywhere. Azure are going down a similar path and they've made the same commitment in terms of the year when they're going to hit renewable powered everything. They've also made commitments to water positivity. Enormous amounts of water are used during the operation of data centers and there are a lot of these data centres. So they've made commitments I think by 2035 or 2040 please double check to be net water positive, which is great. And the other thing that people don't think about, and this is I guess the supply chain thing I was talking about earlier, all those servers got rare metals in them. They've got all kinds of stuff in them thats been dug out of the ground, often in areas where there's a lot going on from a human point of view. 

James Hobbs: So Amazon, AWS, Google, et cetera, they're looking at that angle too. How can they keep servers in commission for longer so they don't need to be replaced as often? Where are they getting their materials from, et cetera, all that kind of stuff, because they're not just a computing company know they're invested in the hardware and getting this stuff out of the ground and manufacturing it and all the rest of it's a very big operation. So that's something we can't influence beyond pressuring them as consumers, but it is something that they're doing something about, which is great. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. And if we go back to that point I made earlier on, buyers are in control of this. If they are choosing to include that in their contracts to buy new web services, that it needs to be green by offsetting or green by using 100% renewable power, then that drives change, doesn't it? Procurement managers drive change through that kind of thing. 

James Hobbs: Yeah, absolutely. And just one final point on the greenhosting the Green Web foundation, who I mentioned earlier, the nonprofit who work in this space, they maintain a list of green web hosts. So hosts that are known to be green that you can use without having to worry too much. So it's worth looking at that as well. And it's a kind of impartial list. 

Paul Marden: Excellent. Do you think this is a story that attraction should be telling? So they're going to be, we're hoping that people are going to become energised by this and they're going to want to go on a digital sustainability journey. Do you think that is that something that they could be shouting about? 

James Hobbs: I think so, if done in the right way. Obviously, you've got to be careful of the sort of, we planted some trees and now everything's fine, because I don't think that's necessarily the case. But I think talking about it in the right way, which is we know we're not perfect, but we're doing something about it, and this is our plan, and being transparent about it, I think, is a good thing. I think it will also foster competition between different attractions, and everyone's a winner, really, because it will make everyone more sustainable. 

Paul Marden:  Yeah. 

James Hobbs: And yeah, I don't see why you shouldn't talk about it. I think its something thats important. And to your point earlier about consumers being able to influence some of this stuff, I really, truly hope that the generation of youngsters that are coming up now are going to be more hyper aware of this sort of thing, and they're going to care a lot more because it's likely to affect them more than it will us. So I would like to think that they will be selecting products, services, attractions, whatever it might be that can demonstrate that they're actually doing something to lessen the impact of their operations. 

James Hobbs: I've got two relatively young children, and I can already see them asking questions and being interested in this kind of stuff in a way that wouldn't have occurred to me when I was a kid, just didn't think about it. I cant change that. But what we can do is try and improve the world that were going to be leaving to the the youngs.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So, one last question for you. Is there anything. Is there anything happening in this space that you think is really cool and interesting to think about? 

James Hobbs: That's a good question. I mean, like, I hope this isn't a non answer. I think the thing. The thing that is exciting me most is that more and more people are talking about this stuff. More and more people are asking questions about this stuff and I've done a lot of talks and webinars and things on this topic and the thing that really makes me feel positive and excited about it is that nearly all of them afterwards, people come up to you, they message you and say, “I just didn't realise.” The fact that we're able to raise awareness is brilliant because we can start to build up a bit of momentum. I think the thing that. I think I mentioned it earlier, products and services, building this sort of stuff into their platforms in terms of helping users use their services more efficiently, I think that's the area that I'm most excited about, because otherwise it's people kind of hacking stuff together. I think it should be a first class part of any solution, really is like, carbon impact of what I'm doing. That's what I'm probably most keen to see more of. 

Paul Marden: James, thank you. One last thing. We always ask our guests for a book recommendation and you've already said you're an avid reader, so no pressure, but I'm quite excited to hear about this one. 

James Hobbs: Well, there's two and I thought I'd just make the decision when you asked me the question about which one to recommend. So I'm going to go with my legitimately favourite book, which is the Player of Games by Iain M Banks. It's part of the culture series of novels and I'm a bit upset because Elon Musk has been talking about it. I feel like he's tarnished it slightly. A magnificent series of novels. I remember finishing the 10th one and sadly, the author died a while ago and I genuinely felt slightly bereft that there weren't going to be any more of them. It's a brilliant book. It's exciting. Yeah, it's exciting. It's so creative and inventive. It makes you think differently about things. It's definitely not one for children. 

James Hobbs: You know, there's a lot of violence and all kinds of other things in there. But it's a fascinating book. All of his books are fascinating. My favourite author. So if you're going to, if you think about getting into his books and specifically the culture novels, that's a great point to jump in at. It's accessible and it's absolutely brilliant. I love it. 

Paul Marden: That's quite the recommendation. So, listeners, if you want to get into this culture series of books, then when we post the show notice on X, get over there and retweet the message and say, “I want James's book.” And the first person to do that will get that sent to them. James, this has been brilliant. There's a couple of takeaways I want people to go and think about, one from me, which is go and test your site and then jump into the Rubber Cheese website survey. 

Paul Marden: Go to rubbercheese.com/survey, tell us all about your attractions website and one of those questions will be about have you tested the CO2 emissions of your site and have you done anything about it? The more we understand what the sector is doing, then the more we can understand how we can all help and improve things. 

Paul Marden: James, you had one idea of a place where people could go and find out more about this sort of stuff. 

James Hobbs: Yeah, I mean, there's some organisations that I mentioned. So the Green Web Foundation is one that's got lots of interesting material on there, both tools that they've made, but also they fund research in this space, which is really important. It should be treated like a specific discipline. I suppose they're doing some great stuff there. There's the Green Software foundation, which confusingly similar name, doing some good work in this space. There's also lots of interesting groups on discord forums that are out there. I guess my main message would be we're all learning more about this field. No one has all the answers, but there are organisations out there that you can come and speak to that can help you understand where you are currently. 

James Hobbs: And I definitely encourage you guys to fill in the surveys, Paul said, because the more information that we've got, you know, the better we can understand where things are. 

Paul Marden: James, this has been a lot of fun and really interesting. Thank you ever so much. Thank you for joining the podcast. 

James Hobbs: Thanks for having me on. Thanks a lot. 

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.

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

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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 Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.

Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.

Competition ends on 3rd July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

• Lego House in Billund
• Sutton Hoo (National Trust)
• Sutton Hoo at the British Museum
• The Dig on Netflix
• Sutton Hoo mask on Lego Ideas
• The Dig: Lego version of Sutton Hoo treasure 'amazing' (BBC News)
• Events at The Hold Ipswitch

Andrew Webb is a LEGO enthusiast who uses bricks in outreach programmes for teams and organisations as diverse at Arm, Pinset Mason, The National Trust, English Heritage, and the Scouts. During the UK's second Lockdown in early 2021, He made the 1500 year old Sutton Hoo Helmet out of LEGO bricks and submitted it to LEGO Ideas. The build achieved international media coverage, and has since been donated to the National Trust. Andrew continues to help attractions and institutions with LEGO programmes. By day, he works as a global head of content marketing for a B2B tech company. Find out more at http://teambuildingwithbricks.com

Transcription: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. Today I'm talking to Andrew Webb. By day, Andrew is a content marketer for a tech firm, but in his spare time helps attractions to use Lego as a tool to attract and engage diverse audiences and enable them to interpret history and culture. We're going to talk about what it means to be an building, a model of anglo saxon helmet, and the 24 skills that are used when building with Lego. 

Paul Marden: So welcome to the podcast. 

Andrew Webb: Thank you. 

Paul Marden: On Skip the Queue, we always start with some icebreaker questions that you know nothing about. So let's launch into a couple of those. Book and a pool or museums and galleries for your city break. 

Andrew Webb: Museum and galleries.

Paul Marden: Yeah. I'd expect nothing less given what we're about to talk about. This is one from one of my colleagues, actually, who is really good at icebreakers whenever we do a team building eventually. So he said, “Would you rather have it and lose it or never have it at all?”

Andrew Webb: Oh, gosh, I'll have it and lose it for sure. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, gotta be. That one's from miles. Say thank you, Myles. That was a cracker. 

Andrew Webb: Do you remember the word there was a great one. Would you rather eat ten donuts or raw onion? 

Paul Marden: Oh, ten donuts, hand down. I could easily do that. 

Andrew Webb: I'd get onion. I'd get onion. Every time I would take an onion over ten donuts. I'd be sick after ten donuts. 

Paul Marden: Oh, no, I reckon I could take that. No problem. 

Andrew Webb: Okay. 

Paul Marden: Okay. So we're going to talk a little bit about your adventures in Lego over the last few years. So why don't we kick off and talk a little bit about your original interest in Lego? Because I know it goes back not a long way, because that would be rude. But it goes back to a few years ago, doesn't it? 

Andrew Webb: It does. I mean, like most people growing up in what we might loosely term the west, I had like, I was a kid, you know, I think most of us grew up with it like that. And then like, you know, growing up in that first age of plastics with Heman, Transformers, Lego, Star wars, all of that sort of stuff. 

Paul Marden: You're just describing my childhood. 

Andrew Webb: It's funny because that was. It was all sort of ephemeral, right? I mean, the idea was that the reason why that boom happened, just to dwell on why they're going plastic things. Before that, toys were made out of either tin or wood. So, you know, they were very labour intensive produce there's certainly injection moulding comes along and we could just have anything coupled with the tv shows and the films and all this sort of stuff. So we all grew up in this sort of first age of disposable plastic, and then it all just gets passed down as kids grow up. It gets given away, gets put in the loft and forgotten about. There's a moment when a return of the Jedi bedspread doesn't look cool anymore, right? You hit about 13, 14 and you're like, “Mom, I really want some regular stuff there.”

Andrew Webb: So like everybody, you know, I gave it all away, sold it and whatever, but I kept onto my lego and then fast forward, you know, I become a parent and Lego starts to come back into my life. So I'm sort of at a stage where I'm working for a travel startup and I get a press release to go to the Lego House, which if no one has heard about it, where have you been? But also it is a fantastic home of the brick, which Lego built in, opened in 2016. And it is a phenomenal temple to Lego. Not in terms of like a Legoland style approach with rides and things like that, but it's all about the brick and activities that you can do in a brick. 

Andrew Webb: There is great pools and huge pits of Lego to play with there, as well as displays and all this sort of stuff. They've actually got a Lego duplo waterfall.

Paul Marden: Really? 

Andrew Webb:  Oh, I mean, it's a fantastic attraction. And the way they've done it is just incredible. So they blend a lot of digital things. So if you make a small fish and insert it into this thing, it appears in the tank and swims around and this sort of stuff and the way you can imprint your designs on things. I should just quickly tell you about the cafeteria there as well, just really quickly. So the cafeteria at the Lego House, everyone gets a little bag of Lego and then whatever you build and insert into this sort of iPad sort of slots type thing, and that's what you're. 

Andrew Webb: So a pink brick might be salmon, a yellow brick might be chicken, whatever, and you put it all in and it recognises it all and then it comes down a giant conveyor belt in a Lego. Giant Lego box and is handed to you by robots. I mean, mind blowing stuff. This is not like with a tray at the National Trust place or somewhere like that for us to come. It is a technological marvel. Absolutely fascinating. So, of course, on the day went, it was a press preview, so there was no canteen workers, so there was no food in the box when me and my daughter, so went without that data, was a bit disappointed. 

Andrew Webb: But that started that whole reappreciation of Lego, both as a toy to play with my daughter, but also as a way of using Lego in different ways. And that manifests itself in lots of different things. So currently, now, you know, fast forward a little bit. I use Lego for team building exercises, for workshops, for problem solving with organisations, and also just for having fun with adult groups as well as kids. And I think one of the biggest things we've seen since this kind of started around 2000s with the sort of adults reading Harry Potter, do you remember that was like, why are you reading this children's book type of thing? 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Andrew Webb: And then all the prequel Star wars films came out and Lego made sets about both those two things. And it kind of. I mean, Bionicle saved the company, as only AFOL will know, but it started that whole merchandising thing and adding Lego into that firmament of IP. Right. And we fast forward now, and it's Marvel and Star wars and everything. 

Paul Marden: You just said AFOL. I know what an AFOL is, but many of our listeners may not know what AFOL is.

Andrew Webb: Just to go for acronyms here. So an AFOL is an Adult Fan of Lego. And we've seen actually Lego in the past five years, even earlier. I mean, Lego always had an adult element to it. And one of the original founders used to use it for designing his own house. And there was a whole architectural system called Molodux. So it's always had that element to it. But just recently we've seen, you know, almost retro sets. So we see the Lego Atari 2600 video game system from 1976, which, yeah. 

Paul Marden: An original NES wasn't there. 

Andrew Webb: Exactly. NES that's come out. I've got a Lego Optimus prime back here for transformers, you know, all that kind of stuff. So with what's been really interesting is this kidault or whatever, however, call it. And I think that's really fascinating, because if we think about Lego as a toy, we are rapidly approaching the age where we might have three generations of people that have grown up with Lego. Lego first came around in the very late ‘60s, early '70s. And so it's not inconceivable that you might have three generations that had Lego as a child, especially if you grew up in Denmark. A little bit different when it would come to the rest of Europe as they expanded out. So I get to this point, and I'm getting into Lego and doing all this sort of stuff. 

Andrew Webb: And then, of course, COVID happens and then lockdown happens and we all think the world's going to end and no one knows. Everyone's looking for hobbies, aren't they? They say you were either hunk, drunk or chunk after lockdown. You either got fit, got fat or got alcoholic. So try to avoid those three things. And, you know, everyone's looking for stuff to do, so you have so much banana bread you can bake. And so I stupidly, with my daughter's help, decided to make the Lego Sutton Hoo helmet, the 1500 year old Sutton Hoo helmet found at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, now in the British Museum. Out of Lego, as you do. 

Paul Marden: I mean, just exactly. Just as you do. So just a slight segue. I was at the National Attractions Marketing Conference yesterday and there were two people presenting who both talked about their experiences of wacky things that they did during lockdown. There was one person that opened a theatre in her back garden and had various different stars just randomly turn up in her backyard up in North Yorkshire. And you choose to build a Lego Sutton Hoo helmet.

Andrew Webb: Lockdown, there will be a time, I think, as we look back, tragic though it was, and, you know, a lot of people died, but it was that moment when society sort of shuffled around a bit and people sort of thought, “Well, if I don't do it now, why not?” People were launching bakeries in their kitchens and serving their community and like. And that element of it. And so people have that. The good side of that, I suppose, is that people did find new outlets of creativity. And Joe Wick's yoga class is in their front row walking groups, you know, all this sort of stuff and beating beaten horsemans and learning to play the violin and dust and stuff. Suddenly we all had to find hobbies because we're all just in. 

Andrew Webb: No one was going to restaurants, no one's going to bars, no one's going to gigs, nightclubs, theatres. We like to make entertainment at home. It was like the middle ages. So I decided to build the Lego Sutton Hoo helmet, as you do. And so I start this in lockdown, and then, like, I get wind that Netflix is making a film called The Dig. And The Dig is all about, I think it's Lily James and Ray Fiennes in it, and it's all those other people. And it's all about when they found theSutton Hoo helmet. And the guy who found it was called Basil Brown, and he was asked by Edith Pretty, who owned the land, to excavate these humps in the ground that were on her estate. 

Paul Marden: Okay, so she owns this big estate, in Suffolk, right? And, so she can clearly see there's burial mounds in the back garden, but doesn't know what's in them. Doesn't have any clue that there's treasure locked up inside this. 

Andrew Webb: I'm not even sure she knew there were anglo saxon burial maps since it was. 

Paul Marden: They were just lumps of ground in the garden. 

Andrew Webb: Yeah. I mean, she may have had inkling and other stuff I've turned up over the years and whatever. And some of them were robbed sort of georgian times around then. So some people knew what they were and they were somewhere excavated and gold was taken to fund the polynomial wars and whatnot. But she asked Basil Branson, he was like an amateur archaeologist, right? And so he was just like this local guy would cycle over and do. And the film goes into all that, and the film kind of portrays it as working class. Basil Brown should know his place against the sort of British Museum who are sort of the baddies in this film who think they know what. And of course, this is all set against the backdrop of war. So they escalated it all, then they had to rebury it. 

Andrew Webb: And then it was used as a tank training ground, so lots of tanks rolled over it. So it's a miracle anything was ever found. But when he did find the Sutton Hoo, who told me and a bunch of other things, clasp brooches, shields, weapons and whatever, when he did find it, so people think it kind of popped out the ground as a helmet, but it didn't. And if you look at the photos, it came out the ground in hundreds of pieces. 

Paul Marden: Oh, really? So you look at this reconstructed mask that's now in the British Museum, and you think, “Oh, so they just found that in one piece,” lifted out as if it was a Lego hat, you know, for a minifig. In one piece? No, not at all. 

Andrew Webb: It was actually more like a big parlour Lego in the fact that it was just in hundreds of thousands of pieces. And so there was the first guy to have a go at it was an elderly architect at the British Museum who was, I think, blind in one eye. And he had a go at putting it all together. And he used an armature and clay and pins and whatever, put it all together and said, “Yes, I think it was this.” And then actually it wasn't. He got it all wrong. Lots of different pieces after some more research, and then it falls to this. Nigel Williams is another sub architect, and he was famous for. 

Andrew Webb: There was a famous Portland vase that was broken in a museum by someone pushing it over as a sort of what you might call, like a just stop oil type of protest now, I can't remember what the call was, but someone smashed an exhibit. And he had painstakingly pieced all this together. He was a total dapper dude. Three piece suit, Chelsea boots, proper swinging sixties, and he had to go and put it all together. His version is the one that's in the British Museum, but he was a massive jigsaw fan. And if you think about Lego, what it is a 3d jigsaw. You get a bunch of pieces and you have to make. Make it into a 3d sculpture. So that was one reason, the dig was the other reason. 

Andrew Webb: The third reason was that the relationship between East Anglia and essentially Denmark and Billand and Anglo Saxon and Jutland and all that area, I'm talking like Vikings and Anglo Saxons and invasions and all this kind of stuff against the native British, there is essentially a relationship between East Anglia, a trade relationship and a conquest relationship between them. So I built this thing and I frantically put it together and I'm late nights and just losing my marbles trying to get this thing to work. Because Lego is not designed to make, like, spherical shapes, necessarily. It's quite blocky. Right. Everyone knows this. It's the square. 

Paul Marden: Really easy to make a car, really easy to make a house. A spaceship. 

Andrew Webb: Houses. Brilliant. Yeah. Square stuff is fantastic. But baking, not only a sort of a semicircle, but a hemisphere, which is what essentially a helmet is. Is even harder because you have to get the Lego to bend in two directions. And so a lot of work went into that just to get the actual face piece came together quite easy. And there was once I had the scale of the pieces under the eyes that formed that sort of thing, and then I could build the nose and face. Ideally, it was going to be so that I could put it on my head. I've actually got a massive head. So in the end, I had to realign that and sort of make it into this sort of child sized head. 

Paul Marden: But it's a wearable thing, right? 

Andrew Webb: It is. It is wearable. I mean, at one point, it was probably more fragile than the one in the British Museum because it just kept dropping to pieces. So there's a lot of sub plates that are holding together the outer plate. So it's actually sort of. So just quick Lego terminology here. So bricks, obviously are bricks. The flat things with bubbles on are called plates and then the smoother ones are called tiles. Okay. And used a combination of these to create. There's also a technique called SNOT, which stands for Studs Not On Top. We love acronyms in the Lego community. Right? 

Paul Marden: Completely.

Andrew Webb:  So if you say, “Oh, man, I'm an AFOL covered in SNOT,” people know what you want to know what you mean. So after a night in the tiles, I got covered. Yeah. 

Andrew Webb: Anyway, so I make the helmet, I make the thing, and then, you know, I get a lot of support from the National Trust, specifically East of England National Trust and Sutton, who site itself because it's there. It's their crown jewels. The British Museum, not so much, because they was like, we've got a billion exhibits here. No, it's just one of them. When you've got the Tippecar moon and the Rosetta stone, it kind of pales into significant. But actually, they were helpful. And one of the curators there, who was on Twitter, who sent me a link to some 3d photos, because if you. If you google it's all pictures at the front. That's fantastic. But what does the back look like? 

Paul Marden: Oh, right, okay. 

Andrew Webb: So actually, buried deep in the British Museum's website, in their research department, under a filing cabinet, in the back of a server somewhere, are some quite technical photographic images of it, turning every sort of 30 degrees so that. That it's documented as to what it looks. Because you got to remember that everything on the helmet is symbolic of various different things. There is symbols that mean there's a guy on a horse who's sort of fighting and all this sort of stuff. And it all has quite a lot of meaning. I can occur from different parts of history as well. So there's some sort of roman influencing things there and symbols. And so this whole thing is designed to be not only a battle helmet, but it is also because, remember, crowns haven't been invented yet. Crowns are a later mediaeval sort of invention. 

Andrew Webb: So this is both a symbol of authority, headwear, like a crown, but also a weapon or a piece of defensive armour and equipment. So it has several functions in its life. So it's quite a complex piece of equipment, that this symbol of authority. So I make all this and then I also submit it to a thing called Lego Ideas. So Lego Ideas is a fantastic programme where anybody in the world, members of the public, can submit Lego Ideas, right? And they go onto a website. There's certain criteria, they have to meet a certain checklist, but then the rest of the public can vote for them. So, I mean, if Taylor Swift just stuck together a load of blocks and said, “Vote for this,” she probably hit the 10,000 threshold instantly. 

Andrew Webb: But I'm not sure Lego would necessarily take that forward as a build. So there is a judging panel that. But actually, some of the most recent really fantastic sets have come out of Lego Ideas. Members of the public, and they're designing things that the Lego designers wouldn't have thought of themselves. So I think that's been kind of interesting. Sadly, Paul, we didn't make the 10,000 threshold. We did a lot of media coverage. By then, lockdown was over and were sort of getting back to our lives and all this sort of stuff. And my daughter was entering her dark ages. And so it sat in my studio for another sort of year and a half and I thought, “What am I going to do with this?” And so in the end, I thought, “Well, you know what? It's gathering dust here. I'm fed up with it, dustin it.”

Andrew Webb: And so I actually approached Josh Ward at the National Trust at Sutton Hoo, who has been a fantastic advocate for Lego and for this particular project, and I have to thank him immensely for that. And they got some money and some funding to build a cabinet and also to house it. So I donated it to National Trust and it is now on display there as part of their firmament of interpretational trail. 

Paul Marden: That must feel pretty good fow you. 

Andrew Webb: Yeah, it is quite good looking in there and watching kids go, “Wow.” Because Lego is one of those things instantly recognisable for kids. But certain hill as a site is quite complex for children to contextualise because essentially it's several mounds in the ground. And the helmet itself is at the British Museum. Right. They've got a replica built by the royal armouries. There were several of those. They've got those. They have loads of dress up, they have great explainers and videos and they do a lot of work to show the size and shape and things as a cast iron sculpture, to represent the boat, to show just how big it was when it was pulled up from the sea, because he's buried in a boat. So do a lot of that work, sort of that sort of work as well. 

Andrew Webb: But having this extra funding in the. They opened up Edith's pretty's house now, and having this room where we've got some other things as well, like crayons and paper and other tools and drawings and colouring in and Lego and big chest of Lego just helps, particularly smaller children who, by the time they've walked from the car park around the site, and it has probably flagged it a little bit. And so just providing that little support for them, it's been a fantastic way to contextualise and another way to interpret that. And I think more and more venues could look into that. When you think, well, how else can we add stuff, particularly for children to help tell the story of this place? 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We went to. It was half term last week and went to the City Museum in Winchester. So they've got some mediaeval, they've got some Roman finds there, and there was lots of fun, but they had. It was full of lots of ways for kids to engage, so there was trails to go around, there was colouring in, make your own mediaeval shield. And all of these things are ways that, you know, my ten year old could engage with it because there's only so many glass cabinets of stuff dug up from the ground that she actually wants to look at. 

Andrew Webb: I mean, I love. I love pit rivers, right, in Oxford, my favourite museum. 

Paul Marden: It's crazy, isn't it? I love it. 

Andrew Webb: But basically, he just went around the world nicking stuff. Right, but as a collection of objects, It's fantastic. 

Paul Marden: It's deeply unnerving. 

Andrew Webb: Sorry, sorry if any pit rivers curators are listening there, nick, and stuff about it, but, it is my favourite museum because it's just for kids. It's probably really kind of like, how do you tell that story? I also think there was an article in the garden recently that, you know, the cost of living crisis as well. Parents are looking for value solutions now and so I think it wasn't Peppa Pig World, it was Paddington World. And a family ticket is 170 pounds. That is a huge dent in the family finances for a 70 minutes experience. If you are watching the pennies, if you can afford that and save up for it, whatever. And I know these things are, you know, memory making and all that sort of stuff, and I've been to Harry Potter with my daughter. 

Andrew Webb: That is not cheap, but it's a fantastic day out because once you're in, you spend the whole day there. If you take a packed lunch, you can save a lot of money on that, on the thing. But I suppose what I'm saying is that, you know, our museums and galleries, particularly traditionally, the what you might call free spaces, public spaces, are facing unprecedented demand in terms of parents looking for cost effective value days out, as well as funding being cut from central government and that sort of. So they have to do a huge amount with less and less for a bigger audience. And that is a strain on any institution and things like that. Other examples of places that get this. 

Andrew Webb: So obviously with the Sutton Hoo helmet, the hold in Ipswich, which is Suffolk Council's kind of flagship museum in the county town of Ipswich, but instead of calling it, you know, the Museum of Suffolk, they've called it The Hold, which is a reference to the fact it's on, I think it's either because it's on the shore or it's doing sheep, I'm not sure anyway. But a fantastic space, contemporary modern space  had a Lego exhibition a few years ago, borrowed my helmet, had some Lego exhibition stuff to do. And the good thing about that is when these teams have to do quite a lot of comms marketing and, you know, that has a cost as well, but often you see different demographics than perhaps would normally go to a stones and bones museum, if you know what I mean. Right. 

Andrew Webb: You'll see that it makes it more accessible to the community and to different people who don't like going and looking at the Magna Carta or whatever. For some kids, a day at the British Library is fantastic. Look at all these old books for more, maybe more boisterous children. That's probably not a really great idea. So I think galleries can take a leaf out of this and think, or museums or any institution really can take a leap out of this and think, “How can we do more for less? And what tools can we have that perhaps we haven't considered before, like Lego, as a way to open up our interpretation and our offering?” So this could work in Museum of Docklands, for example. This could work in the royal armouries. 

Andrew Webb: There's lots of places where if you looking to improve your children's offering that some form of lego, I mean, it ends up all over the floor, it ends up being taken away. Sometimes you've got to watch out for things like that. But that's why I always recommend, like, just the basic blocks and plates, not minifigures and stuff like that, because, you know, they just end up in kids' pockets and trousers. But I do think it is a fantastic tool for developing that interpretation piece. 

Paul Marden: So I run a coding club using Lego. Okay. So I work with years four, five and six, typically. And we normally start off by the end of two terms, we will be building robotics, programming things, doing amazing things. But we start at the very beginning with just open up a box, and it is amazing what a bunch of seven, eight and nine year olds can do with a two by four red brick just given bricks. Yeah. And they will build amazing things. Yeah. And they will tell you amazing stories. And you also see real diversity in the behaviours of children, because some children, in that free play context, they do not have the skills to do that. And I had one girl recently who hasn't played with Lego, and free play just blew her mind, and she was in tears because she couldn't embrace the creativity of it.

Paul Marden: But then the following week, when we were following instructions, she was great at building from a set of instructions, You can do that from a limited palette and give them a mission. Sutton Hoo, build a, I don't know, a sword, build a shield, build something to interpret what you have seen. You're in the transport museum. Build, build. How did you get to the museum this morning? Give them something to do and then let them go. And half an hour later, you will be amazed by what they will have built. 

Andrew Webb: I actually did something this at the National Archives down in Kew, where they had a kids exhibition. Well, an exhibition in the summer about wacky inventions, because obviously the National Archives holds the patents for all these things, and they've got things like Victorian top hats with umbrellas in, and, you know, all this kind of crazy Heath Robinson style stuff that, you know, forks with four sets of tines, so you can eat four times as much. It just bonkers. Really interesting things. The curators had gone through and found this wacky world, sort of. What's his name? The guy that illustrates Roald Dahl. They got illustrations and all that. 

Paul Marden: Quentin Blake. 

Andrew Webb: Yeah, Quentin Blake, yeah. So they had this Quentin Blake sort of stuff, and, like, there was activities. And I came down for some special stuff because they had the first Lego brick patent in the UK. When it was first launched in the UK, 1963, I think it was. That's when they filed the patent. 

Paul Marden: And I bet. So that patent would be exactly the same as a two by four brick, now, won't it? 

Andrew Webb: The patent was for a one by four brick. Isometrically dawn. Just three diets. Just three views with what? It was a construction toy. And then the page. Sorry. And the address was just Railway Station Billund.  There wasn't like, just all the mail just went to the railway station in Billund just addressed for attention of Lego. And it's only like. I mean, it's not even a sheet of A4, It's a piece like this. And after it is something like a lamp that won't blow out on a thing, and before it's like some special kind of horse comb, but it's kind of this bonkers catalogue of just these things. But again, it was about, “Right. We did some work. The curators and interpreters looked, you know, had kids analyse the painting to think, what could it be? And look at the dates and structure. Look at that.” 

Andrew Webb: And then I came out and, like, did some Lego. So we did things like, who can build the longest bridge? Who can build the tallest tower out of a single colour? Those sorts of exercises. But then also the free play was build your own wacky invention. And kids are building automatically dog washers, where the dog ran on a thing and it scrubbed its back. And one kid built something that was like a thing for removing getting pips out of apples. It was just like this sort of like this crazy little tool. They like some sort of problem that he had. 

Andrew Webb: And I think what this also speaks to is developing those stem skills in children and adults and building that engineering, because I've also ran Lego workshops with explorers who I used to, I thought were between Cubs and scouts, but are actually after scouts. So I did this in my local town, here in Saffron Walden, and was like, “Oh, my God, these kids are like, 15, 16. They're not going to want to play Lego. Some of them are in my daughter's year at school, so. Hello, Amy.” And it was really interesting because we did a series of challenges with them. So the egg drop challenge, can you protect an egg and drop it from the floor? And can you build this and work together? Another good one is looker, runner, builder. 

Andrew Webb: So you give everybody two sets of the same bricks, and one person is the looker, one person is the runner, one person is the builder. So the looker can't touch, but he can tell the runner. The runner can't look at the model, he can only tell the builder, and the builder can't speak back. And so this is a really useful exercise. And I've done this with teams where, because this is exactly what businesses see, engineering will build a product. Sales or their marketing are like, what the hell is, you know, or whatever it might be. 

Paul Marden: It's that. It's that classic cartoon of a Swing, yeah. 

Andrew Webb: Yeah. So it's that, you know, this is what the brief said. Engineering interpreter does this. Marketing saw it. So it's a great tool for things like that. Especially when you put people like the C Suite or CEO's or leaders at the end, because all they're getting is the information and it. It's there and it's how to build communications. Because in life, the fluctuations reverse. A CEO says, “Let's do this.” And by the time it's cascaded down to engineering, who don't get a say, it's not at all what he imagined so, or they imagined so, it's. It's an interesting case of using tools like that. So I did that with these kids and it was fascinating because they're 14, 15, 16.

Andrew Webb: A group of three girls won two out of the three challenges and probably could have won a third one if I felt that I couldn't award it to them again because it would just look weird. And they were smashing the looker runner builder thing. They were working together as a team, they were concentrating, they were solving problems, they were being creative, they took some time to prototype, they refined and iterated their design. They were doing all this sort of work. And it's brilliant because 15 year old girls don't often take engineering related STEM subjects at GCSE. Certainly, probably don't take them at a level and more than enough. And I think that I once interviewed Eben Upton, who invented Raspberry Pi, and he said, “We think about the eighties as this sort of like golden age of computing, but actually it was terrible. It was terrible for diversity, it was terrible for inclusion.“

Andrew Webb: And he said, “Like growing up, there was one other kid in his town that had a computer, you know, so there was no sort of way to sort of getting other people involved and make this accessible.” And part of the reason now computers have got smaller. Some of the work I did at Pytop was like trying to make technology more accessible and seeing it not just video games and things like that, but actually I can use this in a fashion show, or I can make music, or I can use this to power some lights to do a theatre production, and trying to bring the, I guess, the creative arts into technology. And that's when we start to see the interest application of technology. 

Andrew Webb: And Lego plays a part in that, in the fact that it is a tool, a rapid prototyping tool that everybody is familiar with. And it is also, you know, clean, safe. There's no, you don't need blow torches and saws and those sorts of things to kind of prototype anything. You don't even need a pair of scissors, you know, it's completely tool free, unless you're using that little mini separator to get your bricks apart. And so I think that just circle back on, like, how the Science Museum or what's the one down there? Isabel Kingdom Brunel Museum and things like that. I can see those guys could be and should be thinking about, “How could we have a Lego programme?“

Andrew Webb: You don't have to have a permanent deployment like they've got at Sutton Hoo although that is great because they've got the mast there as the head piece of it. But certainly a programme of events or summer camps or summer events, because I did this with English Heritage at Kenilworth Castle as well. They were having, like, a big Lego build and the public were invited in 15-minute shifts into a big marquee and everyone got given a tile. And the idea was to build the gardens because the gardens at Kenilworth Castle were laid out to impress Elizabeth the first. And so everybody got there was like bunches of stuff and regular bricks, also flowers and this sort of stuff. And it was like, “Come on, we've got to build something to impress a queen.” 

Andrew Webb: He said to kids, like, “Yeah, you've got to impress. Bling it up, like, dial it to ten.” And were just getting these enormous, like, avatar sized trees with just incredible bits hanging off it. And like, “There she has a teapot because she might want a cup of tea.” And you're like, “Brilliant, excellent. Of course she does.”  And so I think that. And then they moved through. Some of the Legos were selected to be displayed and things like that. So there's different ways you can do it. You can either do it as like. And I'm a big fan of the drop in sessions because kids and parents can just naturally build it into their day rather than the pre built. My child was. We were rubbish at, like, organising things. 

Andrew Webb: People like, “Oh, great. Half term, it's a chocolate thing, sold out ". And you're like, yeah, because there's 30 spaces for three and a half thousand kids who want to do it. Whereas if it's like a walkthrough or a. In groups phase through and then the activity, small kids kind of conk out after about 20 minutes, half an hour anyway. You get much more people through and much more people get to enjoy the experience rather than the 30 organised people who got up early and booked. So that's my other top tip to any institution, because it's heavily weather dependent as well. Sun comes out, everyone piles pass into the nearest sort of stately home, national attraction. All of those places can definitely benefit English Heritage. Did a really big push this half term, just gone on Lego at several events. 

Andrew Webb: We had one here at Audley End, there was one at Kenilworth that I was at. There's been pairs of the ones all around the country, because again, you just need a marquee, which most venues have access to because they use them for other things or some sort of space in case it rains. And you just see someone like me and a whole massive tub of Lego and you're off to the races. 

Paul Marden: Exactly. So we were talking about this at the conference yesterday about ways in which. So for many attractions, people turning up is a literal flip of a coin. Is the weather good or is the weather bad? What can you do to adapt your attraction to be able to deal with when it's bad? And then what can you do to bring people when you have made that adaptation? So, you know, you've now got a marquee and you have a Lego exhibit that you can put into there. So it's just dumping a pile of Lego and a bunch of well trained volunteers or visitor experienced people who can facilitate that, police it, little Johnny sticking minifigs in his pocket. 

Paul Marden: And then you turn on your Google Adwords and show that you've got this, you know, bad weather reason to go to a stately home that my daughter would turn her nose up to all of a sudden, “Okay, we're going to go and do that. We're going to go and have afternoon tea and you're going to go and play with some Lego and see some animals, maybe.” Yeah, what can you do to attract that extra audience and adapt to the bad weather and service different sorts of people? 

Andrew Webb: I think that comes down to a bear in mind. I convert some of my Lego lens rather than a venue lens. But I think speaking as a parent and someone who does this is you need a reason to go back to somewhere that you already know. Okay, so you go to Stonehenge, you go and look at the stones, you go, “Wow.” You look at the visitor centre and then it's ticked off. I mean, you see busloads of tourists. Stonehenge is at Cambridge, maybe, or Oxford people, when people do England, Lambeth, Heathrow, London Crown Jewels, Tower Bridge, West End, day trip out on a coach to Stonehenge, maybe to Cambridge, and that's it, off to Paris. Right? So parents like British people like that too. Like why go to Stonehenge four times a year? Or why go to any venue when you're familiar with it? 

Andrew Webb: It's always about offering something new and something different. Audley End up near where I live, I think, is English Heritage. All through July, every Sunday, they're just doing music. So there's a string quartet or someone with a harp or maybe someone with a guitar or whatever. And you've got a book, but it's. It's not like there's 30 places and it's a bonfight. It's just like, “Oh, wow, they've done something different.” They do a really great thing. Like, they do victorian falconry, for example. So they get someone in who talks about how Victorians use falconry for hunting as a sport, but also for the kitchen table, and they're flying falcons around and doing the whole bit of meat on a string and all this sort of stuff. And everyone, like, “They do a world war two one.”

Andrew Webb: I mean, the editorial calendar for any venue's got to look like, “Go and make Christmas food. January, we're closed to kind of dust and clean everything. Valentine's Day, chocolate make you put. It's daffodils”, it's whatever it might be. And then you just build that. Build that programme in and you need. This is why I think that venues now, again, I'll just come back to that. You talk about AdWords, but that, again, is more spend. It's like, how'd you build that mail list? How do you drop into the local Facebook groups and Mumsnet and all that kind of stuff? You know, that's where you can do it organically rather than. Because people don't sit in front of Google necessarily, or think, like, what should we do? 

Paul Marden: You sit on the sofa on a Thursday night trying to figure out what on earth are we going to do this weekend? Yeah, so you're completely right. The mum's net, the content marketing, is hugely important, isn't it? 

Andrew Webb: Which is my job. But also it's kind of like how can institutions become part of that? When I say community, if you think about most people travel a thin hour to go somewhere. I mean, people go further afield, you know, but. But basically it's like, what? My mom turns, like, a tea and a pee. So you've got to go somewhere. You've got to have a cup of tea, visit the loos. It's all about tea. It's all about canteens and loos, basically. You could have a World Heritage Site, UNESCO World Heritage site. And it's like, how good's the caf? And are the toilets clean? Yeah, that's what people remember. Gar went hens at dawn. I was awed by the majestic. But that Looney D cleaning, you know, it's not good. It's all that people come home with. 

Andrew Webb: So, you know, institutions go into place that they are trying to offer different things. Like late nights. We've talked about that. How can we use this space after hours? Because if you think about it, if your institution's open 10 till 6, most people are at work five days a week, you're gonna have students and pensioners who are gonna be not great spenders, either of those two groups. So, late nights, I went to a great one in the National Gallery when the James Bond film. I was kind of sitting royale or whatever. He's still on the top of the National Gallery overlooking Trafalgar Square, and they've got the national dining rooms there and they had Vesper Martini, everyone got a cocktail. 

Andrew Webb: And then went to look at the fighting Temeraire, which is the bit where he's standing with Q, the new Q, who voices Paddington, whose name escapes me and gives him, like, a gun and a radio, but they're like the fighting Temeraire by Turner is this little thing. And so, you know, you've got to make hay out of that, right? You've got to sort of, like, do a late night, various ones. And so all it was a few cocktails in the cafe next door and are taught by the curator and stuff like that. But 30 people just looking for an experience. And so if venues are clever, of course, the dark side of this is when you get Willy Wonka world up in Scotland. 

Andrew Webb: Or interestingly, some of the Lego events that have been happening at NEC have caused a massive online backslash in the community for just being exceptionally bad value for money. And so you read about these things that people have said, “Come and visit Santa's grotto, and it's just a muddy field with a tree in it,” so you've got to be careful. But I think those events, those sort of fly by night kind of institutions, don't really work. But how galleries can leverage the creativity of what they're doing? Whether they are come and paint in our, you know, our local gallery, come and have an art class, come and do that. People are looking for stuff to do that is value for money. That isn't always drink lead, you know, it's not always cocktail making or things like that. 

Andrew Webb: And that comes with a whole heap of other things and dietary requirements for cookery courses and just clean up and the mess and all that kind of stuff. So I think that, yeah, canning organisations, the ones that can really think about that, and I'm happy to help organisations who want to think about this, especially through the life of Lego. They will be the ones that will start to add and build out and develop their. What you might term this whole sector needs a name. The kind of extracurricular offering, we might say, above and beyond their collection and then their traditional interpretation and if they're. 

Paul Marden: Thinking of doing this. So there's a good why. Yeah, the why is you can reach diverse audiences, helps people with interpretation. 

Andrew Webb: Quite cheap. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. It's a cheap way of extending your offering and diversifying what you do. You can bring in event elements to this, but how do they do it? Apart from engaging with somebody like you? And I'm going to guess there's not many people like you. So that's going to be a tricky thing for some people to do. But if they were starting from scratch, how would they go about doing this? You said earlier, “Don't go mad with buying the bricks and spending a fortune on.”

Andrew Webb: There are people like me that can do all this as well as myself. I think that the first thing is plan it. Plan what you need to do. You can't throw this stuff together. You might be looking at. Already the hold have been contacting me for a late night they're doing in September. They contacted me April. 

Paul Marden: Okay. 

Andrew Webb: Because if you're a creator, you're planning exhibitions, you are thinking on that long term cycle. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, completely. 

Andrew Webb: And so what you need to do is bake this in as part of that curational process or part of the interpretation of things at the start, rather than like, “Right, we're doing exhibit on Peter Rabbit, let's chuck in a load of fluffy bunnies or whatever.” You know, it's got to be. You've got to think about it and have it contextualised. I think the best things are. What success looks like is, first of all, you need a space. Now you can hire a marquee that comes with a cost. If you're a venue and you've got your own or you've got a hall or a stables or interpretational room or something like that, often spaces, specifically bigger ones, will have classroom spaces for school groups anyway. So that's often that can be where you can host these sorts of events. Kids are very familiar. 

Andrew Webb: The chairs are all small wall colour, you know, etc. Industrial strength carpet in case stuff gets built. So locations like where you're going to stage this? 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Andrew Webb: Secondly, I think you need to think about, what do we want people to do? What is the experience? What is the narrative piece? Because you can't just say, here's a big part of Lego. Kids will just build cars and houses, right? You know, they need context. You know, if you give a kid a sheet of paper, you could draw anything. They're like, well, what? And so you need to give them a mission almost. They need a task, I think. Also think about, as I said before, keeping the tasks around 20 minutes, because actually adding the time running out jeopardy element is quite fun for kids because they'll go, “Well, I've only got five minutes left.” And often that's when it all falls apart and then they have to iterate the design. 

Andrew Webb: So think about that kind of moving people through in 15 to 20 minutes cycles. We had kids at Kenilworth, that would go out the exit and just walk back around and come in the front like that. Like four or five times. One boy came in, he was loving it. So think about that. Think about how you're going to move people through the space. Think about what you need to envisage it. So the Kenilworth, for example, there was me hosting it from dawn toward dusk. We had another builder there who was helping take break it all down and put them against the model that we built. There were two members of staff who were letting people through, so just monitoring it from an entry exit point of view, walkie talkies, in case people had issues and things like that. 

Andrew Webb: And think about when you're going to do it. Okay, so half term is a good one. It's a good thing to do. We saw a lot of this at Kenilworth, but I've seen other places as well, particularly half terms and things like that. You often see grandparents caring for grandchildren, right? Because parents are at work and grandparents can only walk around the site so much before they want to sit down. So sometimes have it, like, think about where they can. And when I was at Kenilworth, grandparents came in with their two grandkids, and the kids started playing and I was like, you could join in, too. Oh, no, I don't want it. You know, they were almost like, “I can't do this. It's like, come on, get in, get in. Come on, grandma. Come on. I'll show you how it works. “

Andrew Webb: By the end of that session, they were memory making. I then took their photo with their phones, they'd have this sort of grandparent. But, you know, you always say it like, my grandfather taught me to fish. Like Sean Connery says in the hunt for red October. This sort of moment where sort of, it's a Hollywood trope that grandfather knowledge is sort of passed on type of thing. Right. And so you can see that where you could have this, almost either the reverse of that, of kids showing grandparents, but also they're all having this event outside of the parental unit. So it's a new type of experience. It adds value, it gets people to play with their grandkids. 

Paul Marden: Priceless. 

Andrew Webb: So I think that's kind of an interesting way. So think about when, think about where and think about what will be my three sort of tips for any institution looking to put this together. 

Paul Marden: You gave one the other day which I thought was priceless, which was, don't give them wheels. 

Andrew Webb: Oh, yes. 

Paul Marden: Don't include the wheels. 

Andrew Webb: Take the wheels out of any sets, unless you are the Transport Museum or the, you know, a car based museum, because kids will do wings as well. I'd probably suggest taking those out because kids have just built cars. Some kids have just built cars, you know, even if you give them a mission. Unless that is the mission. The other thing that I would think that venues could do as well as sort of all day events, because it's quite a time drain, you know, on staff and this sort of stuff, but it is a value. The other thing you can think about is one off evening events for adults. Yes, I've done this. I did this at my local add them shops. Bricks, beers and bubbles challenges supercompass teams. Think of it like a pub quiz with brick is the answer. 

Andrew Webb: So build me a thing that does that kind of thing. Teams all get together, you can race them, you can see who goes the furthest. You can do all this stuff. And the hold is what I'm doing at the hold in September. I did it at the hold a couple of years ago. And what was interesting was that we had quite diverse groups of adults. We had just couples who were clearly AFOLs and were like, “Yeah, I'm going to go to that.” We had a group of friends. One of them had just come back from years travelling and they didn't want to go sort of straight to the pub and just interrogate him about his travelling, whatever. 

Andrew Webb: They kind of like, “Well, we wanted something to do where we could have a beer and have a chat, but were doing something else whilst we’re doing that.” And that's the joy of Lego. Your hands are doing the work and you're almost like the back of your brain is doing the work and you're like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. Before you kick them.” And the concentration levels are there and then you can kind of get into that state of flow. And so they were just having this lovely chat, had a beer, talking about stuff, but also memory making in terms of when he came back from his travelling. So I think that's really important. 

Andrew Webb: Did you know that this is your brain, right? And then your brain on Lego, there are 24 discrete skills that are happening in your brain. So Lego research this, things like fine motor skills, cognitive sort of thinking about things, future planning, my favourite emotional regulation that is not going, “Oh, my God, it's not working. And smashing all to pieces.” So I've seen this as well with children, is that when you give them a Lego, if you gave them jelly and a football, they'll all just. They're a high energy kind of things, right? And that's fine, great outdoors, kids want to burn off energy. Here's a load of balls. Go crazy, right? Or ball pits, trampolines, bouncy castles, those sorts of things. When you get on Lego, what actually happens is it's very hard to be anarchic, to use a wrong word, but a word. It's very hard to be anarchic with Lego because you can't really do it. 

Andrew Webb: And so you can get a group of kids together and they'll almost self invigilate. And at one point, I ran it at a local toy shop and the parents are all hanging about and like, “I've never seen them so quiet.” They were just in the state of flow. And so, I think, you know, again, back to the. Back to the explorers and the scouts, that was one of the best sessions that those kids had done as teenagers because the reason was they were given permission to play with Lego. They still had the muscle memory from when they were smaller children. They were solving. They weren't just being told to play with Lego, they were actually solving engineering challenges. How can you design a bridge that will take this weight? How can you protect an egg? How can you think about this? 

Andrew Webb: And so you need to think about the challenge and the what. You need to think about that, the where and you think about the when, as I said, and get those right. You can have a very exceptional visitor experience for not a huge amount of effort. It's not highly costly, it's not highly technical, it's just a bit of elbow grease and a bit of forward thinking in terms of what we might need. And I think that parents appreciate just that minute away where they can. It's almost like a 20 minute babysitter, right, where they can just go, “Don't touch that.” You know, you're walking around a stately home, “Don't sit there, don't touch. Mind the lady.” All that kind of no data that parents give out institutions, they can just take a breather and check their phones and whatever. 

Paul Marden: And the kids are just having an amazing time. 

Andrew Webb: Yeah. And the kids are happy. And at the end of the day, as a parent, we all do our best and you just want, you know, them to be playing with something screen free, getting along and learning something. And, you know, that is the win. That is the ultimate takeout. You can layer on your own institution in context and rev up the visitor experience, bring in new visitors, attract a more diverse group of people that perhaps wouldn't normally come to a Regency Rococo style villa or whatever it might be, then that's all to the better, because, you know, you can start to use this in your planning and you can do what Suntton Hoo did? And go, right, well, we've done this and it's really worked. 

Andrew Webb: And then I can apply for funding for it and I can expand and I can make it permanent and then I can sort of say, well, this now becomes a tool and a string and arbo for our educational. It doesn't have to be split between visitor attractions and development. It can, you know, you can split it between several parts of the institution and use it in different ways, use it for educational purposes as well as visitor experience. So the world's your oyster with a bit of thinking. 

Paul Marden: With a bit of Lego and a bit of thinking. 

Andrew Webb: Bit of Lego, yeah. A few bricks and a couple of tricks and you're off to the races. 

Paul Marden: Andrew, this has been brilliant. Thank you ever so much. 

Andrew Webb: You're welcome. 

Paul Marden: I've got one more question for you before we finish. Now, you bottled this earlier on when I said we always have a book recommendation from our guests. And in spite of having the fullest bookshelf I've seen in quite a long time, you've bottled it on a book. But you did offer me a favourite movie. And so what would be your movie recommendation of choice? 

Andrew Webb: My go to movie would probably be Withnail and I, Richard E. Grant's first film. Every line has came down from God on a tablet. I mean, it is just. Yeah. Richard Griffiths as Uncle Monty, Paul McGann. It's just one of my favourite films and, you know, cult classic that no one's really. Well, people have heard of it now, but again, they even make stuff out with Alan Eyright. So you can go and watch a screening of it at the farm at Crow Crag up in Penrith, you know, and everyone dresses up and everyone comes with Mister blathering sets tea and I come on holiday by mistake and Jessie says, Danny. 

Andrew Webb: And, you know, fortunately, for better or for worse, I know these are tough times, but people try and find the fun in things. They try and at the end of the day, everyone's looking for a good time, whether we're children or an adult. You want something to just have a laugh and take you away for a moment. And if films and culture but also experiences can do that, then that's all for the good. 

Paul Marden: Well, look, this is going to be a challenge, but listeners, if you would like a copy of Andrew's film recommendation, then when we release the show message on X, if you can retweet that and say, “Give me Andrew's movie”, then the first person that does that, somehow I will get the movie to you. It might be on VHS, it might be on DVD, but somehow we will get you a movie. 

Andrew Webb: I found a CD the other day from a bar I used to go to in Clapham in the noughties and late ‘90s. I said to my mate, look, I'm great, put it on. And I went, “I can't.” I haven't got a CD player anymore. I had to go dig through a box somewhere in the study to find a portable CD player that plugged into my computer that could. By the end of it, we're just laugh. Forget it. 

Paul Marden: Andrew, this has been wonderful. Thank you ever so much. 

Andrew Webb: You're welcome. Cheers. 

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.

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

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.

Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.

Competition ends on 19th June 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

Skipton Town Hall https://skiptontownhall.co.uk/accessibility/

Noor & Katu https://noorandkatu.com/

Survey mentioned by Paul:  https://www.euansguide.com/media/0uyju30y/final-23-euansguide-results-pdf.pdf

Kids in Museums Open Letter:  https://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/2024/05/dear-change-makers-an-open-letter-from-the-kids-in-museums-youth-panel/

Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - https://rubbercheese.com/survey/

https://carbonsix.digital/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/

Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn’t know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.

https://rubbercheese.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thatmarketingbloke/ 

Oz Austwick is the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, he has a somewhat varied job history having worked as a Blacksmith, a Nurse, a Videographer, and Henry VIII’s personal man at arms. Outside of work he’s a YouTuber, a martial artist, and a musician, and is usually found wandering round a ruined castle with his kids.

Transcription: 

Oz Austwick: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Oz Austwick. It's been a busy few weeks in the visitor attraction industry and the world at large. So in today's episode we're going to take some time to talk about what's happening, including the recent M+H Show, the upcoming election, the Family Friendly Museum Awards, and of course, the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey. 

Oz Austwick: So, Paul, where have you been recently? 

Paul Marden: So as we are recording, it is currently half term week, a little bit of a damp half term week, which is a bit of a shame when you're in mid May, but went to Longleat at the weekend and went specifically to go and see their Steve Backshall live event, which is happening at the moment. So for those of you that don't have kids watching CBBC at the moment, Steve Backshall does the deadly 60 telly programme, which is kind of animals and nature on CBBC. And Steve brought out some of the best animals on his event at Longleat. So it was really cool. We got to see some. We saw an armadillo, we saw massive, great python and a wolf. He brought a wolf out on stage, which was pretty awesome. 

Oz Austwick: Oh, wow. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, that was cool. So there was lots of oohing and ahring and everybody enjoyed it. Lots of fun, even though it was absolutely gushing down with rain whilst we were there on Monday. So we didn't. Typical english style. We did not let the weather get in the way of a good day. What about you? Where have you been recently, Oz? 

Oz Austwick: We had our bank holiday day out on Sunday, not on Monday. So we had amazing weather. We threw all the kids in the car and drove down to Dorset to Swanage, where I used to spend my childhood holidays. And the place that went was Swanage Pier. I love it there. I spent my childhood, you know, fishing off the pier and swimming in the sea. Sadly, the hotel I used to go to doesn't exist anymore. They knocked it down and turned it into a sewage treatment plant. 

Paul Marden: Attractive. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. But it was absolutely amazing. The sea was very cold indeed. I did get in, had a bit of a swim, as did my eleven year old. The others all chickened out and just sat and watched. But it was lovely, you know, two p machines in the arcades. 

Paul Marden: Oh, I love it. Was it the pushers on the shelves? Coin drop ones? I love that. Yeah, gotta be the two p ones. Can't afford the ten p ones. That's too rich for me. 

Oz Austwick: Who can? I mean, that's vast amounts of money to win anything in those. 

Paul Marden: So Swanage for me just brings back memories of geography, field trips. I remember going there for about a week whilst I was at secondary school donkeys years ago, so. 

Oz Austwick: Right, well, we used to drive down from Yorkshire, where I grew up, and it would take all day to drive down to go to Swanage. I mean, it was, yeah, when we were there. Absolutely amazing. And the hotel was lovely before they knocked it down, obviously. So I have very fond memories and, yeah, nothing has happened to spoil those memories, thankfully. A very popular place for us to go. 

Paul Marden: Lovely day trip. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, it really was. It really was. So the M+H show, let's talk about that, because that happened and it was quite a thing, wasn't it? 

Paul Marden: It really was. I had such a lovely time, so it was my first time at M+H show. It was. It was lovely event. They pitched it as the big meetup and it really was. I mean, it was absolutely jam packed with people. There were lots and lots of people there when I was there on Wednesday and so many people that I know that I was bumping into that were either running stands, presenting, or just being there and enjoying all the great content and meeting people. It was just such an awesome event. How was it for you as your first big attractions event? 

Oz Austwick: Absolutely, yeah. It wasn't just my first M+H. It was my 1st event. And, yeah, I was gobsmacked, to be honest. It was big. More than anything. I'm just genuinely surprised at how many companies sell museum display cases. 

Paul Marden: There was a lot of glass cabinets on show. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, there really were. And they were beautiful. But, yeah, I mean, how do you differentiate yourself in that market, I wonder? 

Paul Marden: I would differentiate myself by going around and putting my greasy fingers over all the competition's glass and show how beautiful my cabinets could be. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, just take my children. They'd make a mess of the glass within seconds of arriving. So did you get to any of the talks, any of the presentations? 

Paul Marden: I did, actually, yeah, I saw a few presentations. I thought they were really good this year. It was quite clever being given your headset that you could wear so that you could hear the presenters. Few people that have been in previous years telling me how great that was this time, because that was a new introduction this year. 

Oz Austwick: Can I just throw a slightly different perspective on that? I turned up late to one presentation and I didn't have the little box and the person who was handing them out was on the other side and couldn't get. So I missed it completely. Yeah, I mean, it's a great way to make sure you can hear what's going on. 

Paul Marden: It's tough. Isn't it? I felt it was a little bit. So when I had a similar experience where at one point I didn't have one, and it feels a little bit. It's hard, but it answers the problem they've had in previous years, where it was the same layout, where it's a big, noisy hall. And this did make it quite possible for people to be able to hear what was going on. But I would imagine as a speaker on stage, that's quite tough talking to people when you know they can't hear your voice. I don't know. I don't know how I'd feel about that. But there was one presentation that really stuck in my mind, and that was Spencer Clark from ATS and Steve Dering from Direct Access Consultancy. And they were talking about breaking down barriers and basically just giving a collection of essential accessibility tips for attractions. 

Paul Marden: And it was just such a great presentation. I always think that if I'm presenting at an event, if one person walks away, having heard one thing from me, I feel like I've kind of done my job. And to be fair to Spencer and Steve, they absolutely nailed that. I walked out of the room at the end of that, fizzing with ideas and walked away. And straight away that evening, I was writing a pitch for a client and things that I'd learned from what they were talking about made it into my pitch presentation. It's directly changing the way I think about accessibility. So I thought that it was a great achievement.

Oz Austwick: And especially for that specific talk. It's not just a talk that says, “Oh, you can make some more money, do if you do this, or you can improve your response rate if you do this.” Actually saying, “This is a way you can help people.”

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Oz Austwick: And that's now changed the way that Rubber Cheese works and that. What an amazing result for them. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. There's a few things, few numbers that stuck in my mind and I kind of. I went and read about them afterwards and we'll put some links in the show notes to the survey that these stats are based on. But there was. There's two things that they said which really stuck in my mind. 59% of disabled people say, if a venue has not shared its disabled access information, I avoid going because I assume it's inaccessible. And 77% of disabled people say I'm more likely to visit somewhere new if I can find relevant access information about the venue. So these numbers, they caught me straight away and they got me thinking and made me realise that making a venue accessible is more than just meeting the website accessibility guidelines, which is kind of a key focus for us in the industry.

Paul Marden: Lots of organisations will want to make sure that they follow the WCAG guidelines, the accessibility guidelines. Anyone that has a large amount of public sector funding will have a statutory obligation to meet those targets. So that's a big focus of people's attention. But just making it so that a screen reader can read your website, or making it so that you've addressed colour accessibility for people that are colour blind isn't enough to make the attraction itself accessible. So if you don't share the content about how your venue is accessible, people will assume you are not accessible. It was an eye opener for me. They gave a really great example. They talked about Skipton Town Hall up in Yorkshire, and they've got a webpage on their site all about the accessibility features of the building. And it was rich with photography. 

Paul Marden: So, you know, it's got pictures of all of the access points into the building, what the door looks like and which part of the building it gives level access into. They had pictures of all of the toilets that they've got and how they're accessible. They're fortunate. They've got a changing places toilet. So this is one of these accessible toilets with a large bed and usually with the equipment to be able to move somebody out of a chair and onto a bed to be able to change them. They've got photos of all of that on the website. So the accessibility information is right there. It's really clear and it gives loads of really good evidence that demonstrates this is somewhere that takes accessibility seriously. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. 

Paul Marden: Interestingly, this didn't come out in the talk itself, but I found it interesting that the Craven Museum is based in Skipton Town Hall and they won the most accessible museum and the overall winner of the Family Friendly Museums award last year. And we interviewed them back a couple of weeks ago, back in March. So it kind of shows you that making places more accessible for disabled people makes them more accessible for all sorts of people as well. So, you know, it can make it more accessible for families with young children, it can make it more accessible for the elderly, it can make it more accessible for people with temporary access needs. 

Paul Marden: If you've breaking your leg or something like that, you know, you're not permanently disabled, but you need access into a building and making places more accessible to you for disabled people widens the access into the entire venue itself. I've since had a quick look at some of our clients and they're all writing about this. People are putting lots of information onto their website about this sort of thing. I saw Eureka had a special microsite all about it and Mary Rose have got information on their website about it. So this is really important content. And for me, sitting and listening to them talking, going back and thinking about it is really. It's really caught my attention and made me think and do things differently, which, you know, I feel like that's what these sorts of events are all about. Really? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what a fantastic result for the event. If it opens up the industry to people who were struggling to access it, then, yeah, job done, right? 

Paul Marden: Yeah, completely. What about you? 

Oz Austwick: There were a few highlights for me, but I think one of the things that stood out the most was getting to meet some of the kind of movers and shakers within the community meeting Gordon from ACE, what a lovely guy. Had a fantastic chat to him and it really struck me how there are so many people and organisations who exist within the sector purely to try and improve the whole sector for everybody. I like it anyway because I've got a real interest in the historical side of things, museums and stately homes and castles that really talks to me and I take the kids out to places, so it's nice to know, but to actually be part of an industry where everyone's trying to help each other, I think is really lovely. 

Paul Marden: It really isn't it? Yeah. There were so many people like Gordon that you met at the event and they just make you feel good, they make you buzzy. There's a huge kind of collective recharge of batteries and fizzing of ideas that comes from these sorts of events, it was just brilliant. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. That's what networking should be, right? 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I was going to do a shout out for one person that had a stand. I've got a card that I picked up. This is a lady called Sonya Varoujian and she runs an organisation called Noor and Katu. They import these handmade crocheted little animals, finger puppets and toys and things. I went straight over to those because my daughter is crocheting like mad. She got taught by grandma a couple of months ago. It blows my mind. I have absolutely no idea what's going on as she's doing this and all of a sudden, out the other side comes a squid. But this little organisation Sonya was living and working in Armenia got the idea when she returned back to the UK and now imports these toys and they're for sale in a bunch of different attractions. 

Paul Marden: I just thought it was really lovely that these were fair trade, they were nice, creative things that I know my daughter would absolutely lap up at an organisation and it's completely sustainable and makes a big difference in communities that are not well served. 

Oz Austwick: Absolutely. And I know that you, like me, almost certainly get dragged into gift shops at visitor attraction sites on a regular basis and there comes a point where you've seen the staff and to have a company out there that's not only doing good things, but providing something a little bit different, a little bit unique that you can buy in a gift shop and actually feel like you've done something worthwhile and bought something that isn't just going to fall apart in a couple of weeks. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. 

Oz Austwick: I think that. Yeah, yeah, it would be really nice to see more things like that. So, yeah, go and check them out if you're listening or watching. 

Paul Marden: Did you see any talks yourself that  caught your attention? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, yeah, there were a couple that sprung to them. But firstly, I wanted to just briefly mention the talk that I didn't get to watch. I'm a YouTuber, not a massively successful one, but I'm part of a YouTube community. So when I saw that the Tank Museum was doing a talk about how they've used the YouTube creator community to boost their own social media and their own income, I thought, “Fantastic, I'll go along and see that.” Because my brother in law, who's a far more successful YouTuber than I am, was actually part of that. He got invited down to make a video about his favourite tank. So I turned up and obviously I thought I was on time. I was too late. It was hugely crowded, there was no seats, there was no space. So I was stood in the kind of the corridor. 

Oz Austwick: It's not really. Is it a corridor? The path, the walkway, I don't know what you call it. And, yeah, got moved on by the venue staff because.

Paul Marden: Loitering in the corridors. 

Oz Austwick: We were effectively blocking the way through. And rightly so, you know, they need to make sure access is maintained. But, yeah, I didn't get to see that talk, which I was a little bit sad about, but a couple of talks that I did get to see, which stood out, was the Bloomberg panel discussion hosted by Kripa Gurung. They're doing some amazing work. And the fact that it's a completely philanthropic organisation, I think is quite amazing if you haven't come across what Bloomberg are doing with Bloomberg Connects the app. But, yeah, that was really interesting. Talking about what they're doing, how they're getting organisations online, having the museum at the home and English Heritage there, talking about what they're doing with Bloomberg Connects was great. 

Oz Austwick: But I think, if I'm being honest, my favourite talk was the Castle Howard Christmas events talk, partly because it was really interesting, talking about the marketing and how they've created this amazing Christmas event that has a real following and people come back year after year and they've done that on purpose and it's been hugely successful. But Abby from Castle Howard, she's just hilarious. She's been a guest a couple of times, talking about how she hospitalised an old man on his very last ever day at work and then how she sacked Santa. Just, yeah, if you get a chance to go and see their talks go along, because it's not only entertaining but informative, too. So, yeah, that's probably the highlight for me. 

Paul Marden: Cool. I saw a lovely presentation. Longtime listeners will know that I'm a Kids in Museums trustee. So I went over and watched the Kids in Museums Youth Panel and it was really interesting because they had a summit focused around young people and their needs in museums back last year. They had a webinar where they talked about it a couple of months ago and I was blown away by these people who are part of the Kids in Museums Youth Panel. You know, young people at early stages of their careers, some of them are at uni still. Some of them are in the early stages of their first jobs and just talking so articulately about their experience of museums, what they think museums should change, what's going well, what could be done better? 

Paul Marden: And so I wasn't disappointed when I saw them speaking in real life. They did a cracking job talking about the museum summit and what they think are the issues in the museum. So there was a couple of stats I pulled out of it. Over 90% of young people don't feel considered as an audience and represented in museums, which that blows my mind, because we talk a lot about audience with the people that we work with, and the needs of young people are central to many of the conversations that we have about audience. So there. That made me think, “Oh, is there a problem where the conversations that do get had are not being discussed in the right way? Is it a problem of perception? 

Paul Marden: Is it that young people don't perceive that they're being considered when in actual fact they are, or is it a lack of involvement and so they feel like it's being done to them rather than being done with them?” Yeah. Food for thought. If most young people feel that museums don't consider them as part of their audience, that's problematic. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. Isn't it? I mean, I'd be amazed if the people that were running the museums had the same opinion. I suspect they clearly think they are doing things for young people and children, but maybe they're just not asking those young people what they want. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a few things that the youth panel suggested could be done. So loads of kids go on school trips to museums. But have a guess what you think the minimum age is to go unaccompanied into a museum in some museums? 

Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, I'd expect that it would probably be 16. That feels like a reasonable age. 

Paul Marden: There are museums where you have to be 18 to go unaccompanied into the museum. 

Oz Austwick: Why? 

Paul Marden: You can go and get a job, you can go and pay your taxes, but you can't go into the museums on your own because you're not a responsible adult. That's interesting. And I use that word with a great deal of misuse. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. I just struggle to work out how you could justify that. 

Paul Marden: I know. 

Oz Austwick: Well, obviously there are one or two museums out there where you probably need to be 18 to go in and have a look. Yeah. I mean, in general, why 18? 

Paul Marden: Yeah, I think standards of behaviour, you can expect people to behave in a certain way, but that doesn't. That's not dependent on age, that's dependent on your behaviour. 

Oz Austwick: And the sort of teenager that genuinely wants to go into a museum is probably going to behave pretty well when they're in that museum. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, you'd think. So the next thing I might play into this, but one of the things the youth panel want is to see more youth groups being represented in the decision making process in museums, so that they better represent communities and highlight career pathways for young people. Including more working class histories in museums would help people feel more represented. I thought that was quite interesting. We've been to a few recently where we did not necessarily see stories of our background being well presented at the museum. 

Oz Austwick: Yes. 

Paul Marden: Enough for both of us to have noticed it and commented it as we were wandering around. 

Oz Austwick: It's interesting because some do it really well. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Oz Austwick: And coming from a historical background with a focus on arms and armour, there's a real issue that the sort of arms and armour that have survived from the mediaeval period are the unusual ones and they're the ones in the museum. So that's what people see. And you kind of assume that this fancy, ornate, decorated, enamelled armour is pretty standard, but the bog standard stuff didn't survive and maybe that's the issue when you're looking at furniture in a room, in a house, the fancy furniture is the one that survived because people cared about it. It wasn't being used on a day to day basis. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. I don't know, but you're absolutely right, it does give you a slightly skewed view of what’s actually out there. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. Look, if you're interested listeners, in finding out more about what the Kids in Museums Youth Panel are looking to achieve, they've just published an open letter to changemakers within the sector where they talk passionately about what they think the sector needs to do to change. There's a lovely video that goes alongside the open letter where these young people are using their voice to be able to advocate for change. It's great, it's really interesting and I highly recommend everybody goes and watches the video and reads the letter and then does something about it. 

Oz Austwick: So, anything else from M+H  that we need to talk about? 

Paul Marden: The lovely meal and drinks afterwards. The very lovely Bala McAlin and Stephen Spencer, both once of these parts, were hosting an event Wednesday evening, I think it was, which was absolutely lovely. Well attended. Drinks flowed, food came out. It was delightful. Very much appreciated. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. And I have very mixed feelings about the fact that I decided to leave a little bit early. 

Paul Marden: But you got home at a reasonable time and I didn't manage to drag my backside in the front door until about half midnight. And it wasn't because I had a wonderful night, it was because I spent most of it in Waterloo station trying to get home. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. A bit of an issue with the train. 

Paul Marden: Yes. I would much preferred if I'd actually stayed at the drinks event and then dragged myself into Waterloo later once they'd actually sorted themselves out. 

Oz Austwick: So I think at this point we probably need to talk about how the government have ruined our plans for the next few months of podcast content. 

Paul Marden: Yes.

Oz Austwick: Because we've been thinking for a little while that it would be a really nice thing to do to talk to the main political parties about their idea for the visitor attraction industry in the future. And obviously our hands been forced a little bit. 

Paul Marden: It hasn't it? We're not the only ones. I think quite a few people were caught on the hop a little bit when Rishi announced the general election on the 4th of  July. So, yeah, events, dear boy, have somewhat overtaken us, haven't they? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, just a little. So, yeah, we're probably not going to do that if for no other reason that the Labour Party shadow minister isn't standing again, for all the right reasons. But it does mean that there's a bit of an imbalance there and if we can't talk to all the parties equally and get their ideas, we probably shouldn't talk to any of them. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. 

Oz Austwick: That being said, we can still talk about it, right? 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. The lovely people at ALVA Bernard, who presented at M+H and talked about this very subject, amongst other things, they've done a lot of policy work and have prepared some thoughts around what they think is important to the sector, around strengthening the visitor economy, protecting arts and culture and heritage and supporting the natural environment, whilst at the same time looking after all of those people that either work or give up their time to support the sector. So, yeah, there's a few things in there that I thought it was worth us just touching on, because I think it's really important that we think about what the future of the sector could look like in just a very few weeks time as the country changes. They've got some interesting thoughts. 

Paul Marden: Unsurprisingly, the sector would probably benefit from some reduced taxation and there's quite a number of different areas within which ALVA think that the taxation burden on the sector could be lessened. And similarly, they've also got ideas around how funding for the various arts councils and support organisations around the different home nations would make a substantial difference, especially around capital funding would make a big difference to the sector. But there was a few very specific arts which jumped out as me, as being kind of. They really meant something to me. So there's one. ALVA says, “They ask all the political parties to ensure culture, life, performance, arts, heritage and nature are experienced by every child and young person and are within the national curriculum.” Yeah, I think this is so important. Yeah, I think I've talked on the podcast before. 

Paul Marden: This was one of the big COVID victims. So many schools during COVID had to stop taking kids out and experiencing the outside world and going to day trips and the like. And I just. I think it is so important. It's really hard for many schools. They've got such a burden around meeting the curriculum, budget cuts, all of the calls on the staff time is so hard for them to prioritise day trips. But I've seen him in my own daughter's school. Just the powerful impact it has on the kids. They're a school where the kids barely spend a whole week in class. They're usually out doing something outside of school, which I just think is brilliant. And I got to tag along with them. A few months ago. We went to London. 

Paul Marden: We did the trip to the Science Museum, took the kids up on the train and on the tube, which was, let me tell you, quite scary. 

Oz Austwick: Did you manage to bring them all back? 

Paul Marden: Counted them in and counted them out and it was all good. It was all good. But then went into parliament and that was just brilliant. Taking a bunch of ten and eleven year olds into parliament and bless them, it was the tail end of the day. So they were all shattered. But they were so completely engaged by it. They saw Priti Patel walking through the central lobby. They saw all of these different ministers, their advisors, and they got to sit in the chamber of the House of Commons and seeing debate going on. It was all about Horizon scandal. It was just. It was such a brilliant day trip for the kids and how much does it enrich them.

Paul Marden: Yeah, okay, me and Millie go to these places all the time, but, you know, there might be one or two kids in that school for whom this is the only time that they get to experience a day trip into London and see one of the big national museums and go in and enjoy parliament. I never got to go into parliament when I was Millie's age. 

Oz Austwick: No. And I think it's really important to say that. I mean, both you and I live in the southeast of the country in a relatively rural and affluent area and that even here with the schools that we've got, they're struggling to do this. And then when you look at what the inner city schools are having to deal with and some of the northern cities and northern towns where they're really struggling with population poverty up there, how are those kids getting similar opportunities? 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Oz Austwick: And the fact is they're not. 

Paul Marden: No, no. 

Oz Austwick: And that's something that I can't agree with ALVA more on this, that this needs to be prioritised because this is the future. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. Another area where we've had direct experience, from conversations we've been having recently is around supporting local authorities in their care of civic collections and culture. I mean, you've spoken to so many places recently, haven't you, where cultural budgets are just being eviscerated. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've always had a kind of a love of finding those little obscure rural town museums because you find some amazing things in them. My local museum, it's a tiny little market town and they've got like a special area of Egyptian relics. They've got a mummy in a sarcophagus in this little museum that's what, four rooms? But they've got no funding. And there's so many times we're talking to museums like this. They know what they need and they know what they want, but they just don't have the money to be able to do it. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. 

Oz Austwick: They come to us looking for a website and they're just struggling for budget to do anything. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, which is where things like that Bloomberg Connect app comes in, because when you look on the Bloomberg Connect site, you've got big national museums like National Portrait Gallery in there using the Connect app. But there were some little ones in there as well that I saw, you know, small local town museums just like the ones that you're describing in there using that app. 

Oz Austwick: I was looking through the app last night and my eye was caught by, I think it was Beverly Town Hall. I was born in Beverley, up in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and I sort of thought, “Oh, I'll have a look at that.” And I just got drawn in and it was just this amazing experience. I didn't even know Beverley had a town hall that was open to the public, nevermind that had a collection that you could view through the Bloomberg Connect app. So, yeah, I guess maybe a little bit more in the way of awareness, but it shouldn't be down to a philanthropic organisation like Bloomberg to keep these museums and collections going. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So look, the ALVA kios of the political parties is up there on their main website. Really worth going and looking at. As the manifestos are published, you'll be able to see what the political parties are doing. There's already some information on the various different party websites around what they want to do within the culture and tourism sectors. But I think we've got a few weeks yet to wait until we see the actual cast iron commitments come out in manifestos. So that'll be interesting to see the direction that takes. 

Oz Austwick: And I suspect we're going to talk about this a little bit more over the next few episodes, perhaps. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, maybe. The other thing I will mention, this is a shameless plug because I work as a trustee at Kids in Museums. We're working on this flagship awards ceremony and it is absolutely delightful event lots of people enjoying themselves doing amazing work and there is a sponsorship opportunity. So if you're like us, one of those kind of sector supporting organisations that serve the attraction sector, and you'd like to support the good work of Kids in Museums and be associated with that amazing event, give me a shout, because I can point you in the direction of the right people to talk to get that sponsorship in place and I know it will make a massive difference to them. Have you been busy recently? What have you been up to? 

Oz Austwick: Do you know what? Weirdly, it's been a little bit busy. Yeah. I mean it feels like it's always a little bit busy, but it's been specifically a little bit busy because as of yesterday we've launched the third annual Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey. 

Paul Marden: Excellent. 

Oz Austwick: That's quite a mouthful, isn't it? It'd be really nice to find a catchier name for it than that. 

Paul Marden: I always talk about naming is the hardest problem in computing, but naming is the hardest problem in marketing, I think. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, let's be honest, what it's actually known is pretty much new survey brackets two. So it's the third one. The first one was a bit of an eye opener, the fact that there wasn't anything already out there and we did this and it was amazing. The second one, we tried to refine it and we got some really nice, interesting data. This is probably the first time we've been able to sit and look at it and go, “Right, okay, now we've got a couple of years worth of results. We can look at what we actually need to be asking and what's just out there because we want to ask, because it's interesting and what information we're not actually getting.”

Oz Austwick: So we've really cut back on the number of questions and I think it's probably safe to say that isn't going to have a massive impact on the quality of the information that we get, but it's also allowed us to add in a few extra little bits as well. So yeah, we're talking about sustainability and the use of AI and yeah, I'm really excited. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Oz Austwick: I haven't actually looked to see if people have started filling it. 

Paul Marden: I can't look, I can't look. I just kind of want to look through my fingers. 

Oz Austwick: I'm not sure I want to know, but yeah. So if you are listening to this, if you've got this far into the podcast and you work at a visitor attraction, please go and fill this in. There's a link in the show notes. There's links on LinkedIn, on X. Everywhere we go. There will be a link for this. And if you can't find it, go to rubbercheese.com. And it's right there at the top of the homepage. There's a link. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. rubbercheese.com/survey, slip that right in there. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. I think one of the things we've done differently is the advisory board. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode. We did what an amazing thing to have these guys on board. I think they've saved us months of work by just being clever. 

Paul Marden: They've improved the quality of what we've done. Asking us, what on earth are you asking that question for? Those answers are exactly the same answer. Can't you make it easier for me to know what I need to gather before I type my data in? 

Oz Austwick: Exactly, saying, “Oh, well, I wouldn't fill it in because you don't tell me what I need to do.” Okay, well, we'll do that. It's not a problem. Yeah. How amazing. So thank you to them and to Expian for sponsoring the advisory board. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. And we're working through now focusing on the kind of engagement plan to increase more people. And then, you know, whilst we have a lull as people are going to be filling in their survey, we'll start planning, looking at the data, seeing where the stories lie. We'll talk about that in some future episodes, but starting to gather together what the final report looks like and the stories that will be told. And, you know, we're really grateful to Convious for sponsoring us on the digital survey and the digital report that will follow and then a bunch of webinars that will run afterwards. So, you know, the call to action for us is get in there, find your data, read the guidance notes, go and fill in the survey. 

Paul Marden: But then once you've done that, come and talk to us because, you know, we'd love to know what you would like us to dig in to. It is amazing how this rich resource of data that we've got and people ask us questions that we've never even thought of, and we look at the data differently and we find a different story in there. So without your input, without you telling us what's interesting you, with what's bothering you, what's challenging you, we don't look at the data properly and we don't find those stories for you. So come and talk to us. 

Oz Austwick: Is this how it feels to kind of run a museum, to be the custodian of this amazing thing and just want people to come and engage with it. Yes, because that's kind of it. You know, we've got this amazing data and it's got all of these wonderful stories within it that are relevant to anyone in the industry and we just want to talk about it. So, yeah, please fill in the survey, talk to us about it and, yeah, with any luck, this one will be bigger and better than the last two. 

Paul Marden: There we go. Couldn't ask for more than that, could we? 

Oz Austwick: No. Before we go, because we're going to wrap up relatively soon, there's one thing that I noticed that we failed to do last time and we talk a lot about giving away a book and I think we even said we were giving away a book in the last episode and then never mentioned a book. So, Paul, do you have a book that you'd like to recommend? 

Paul Marden: Do you know what, Oz? It's funny you should say that. I absolutely do. I have this book Delivering the Visitor Experience by also previously of these parts, Rachel Mackay, who is, I believe, at Hampton Court Palace, and she's written an amazing book about what it is to create, manage and develop unforgettable vista experiences at museums. I don't want a museum, but it was really interesting for me to be able to read this book all about the process that people that do run museums go through to develop, craft and tell that story and give that amazing experience. It's a brilliant book. Heartily recommend it. And if you retweet the show note saying, “I want Paul's book”, then you too could get an amazing copy of Delivering the Visitor Experience by our friend Rachel Mackay. 

Oz Austwick: Amazing. Thanks very much. 

Paul Marden: Slightly out of breath because it will be edited out, I'm sure, but I had to run up the corridor and go find the book and take it off the shelf and bring it down because although I was completely organised with all my stuff from M+H show, did not have my book recommendation. Well, there you go. I think that just about wraps us up, doesn't it? It's been a busy few weeks for us with M+H show and all that's going on and that doesn't look to abate over the next few months as we get the survey into shape and find out what's happening in the sector. 

Oz Austwick: So I think it's only going to get busier. 

Paul Marden: It is. How is this your first time actually hosting? 

Oz Austwick: I think I prefer this one. Maybe that's because it's not my first one. Or maybe it's just because I. 

Paul Marden: Because you're power hungry and you took the captain's chair. 

Oz Austwick: Make it so. Yeah, definitely Picard rather than Kirk. But that's because he's a West Yorkshire man. 

Paul Marden: Is he really? You've got too much hair to be Picard. I'm sorry.

Oz Austwick:  I'm not wearing my Star Trek uniform.

Paul Marden: On that bombshell. Thank you very much, mate. 

Oz Austwick: Thank you. 

Oz Austwick: 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 X for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.

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

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Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Show references:

https://rubbercheese.com/survey/

https://carbonsix.digital/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/

Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn’t know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.

https://rubbercheese.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thatmarketingbloke/ 

Oz Austwick is the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, he has a somewhat varied job history having worked as a Blacksmith, a Nurse, a Videographer, and Henry VIII’s personal man at arms. Outside of work he’s a YouTuber, a martial artist, and a musician, and is usually found wandering round a ruined castle with his kids.

Transcription: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Paul Martin. In today's episode, I'm joined by my new co host, Oz Austwick, the Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese. Following the success of the Rubber Cheese Visitor attraction website survey in 2022 and ‘23, we're going to look back at how the previous data has stories still to be told and look forward to what the 2024 survey has to offer. 

Paul Marden: Welcome, Oz. Welcome to Skip the Queue. This is one of our regular Skip the Queue episodes where the Rubber Cheese team take a little bit of time to talk about some of the work that we do.

Paul Marden: And I think this episode we want to talk about the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction survey of websites that we've done for the last couple of years and what we're planning to do in 2024. So that's going to be a nice conversation for us to have. But we always start these episodes with a little conversation about places that we've been recently. So we spare each other the indignity of the icebreaker questions and talk about an attraction that we've been to recently. So why don't you tell me, Oz, where have you been recently?

Oz Austwick: The most recent one was that my wife and I took the kids to Farleigh Hungerford Castle in Somerset. It's English Heritage castle. Absolutely lovely. Nice and rural. I mean, it's just beautiful, lovely ruined castle. There's a fantastic chapel with mediaeval wall paintings. But, you know, I mean, if you like historic sites, if you like castles, it's just a great one.

Paul Marden: Wow, that sounds good.

Oz Austwick: How about you, Paul? Where have you been recently?

Paul Marden: I have been to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard with my daughter. We've been a few times to Mary Rose and really enjoyed that. But this time went. We had an explorer pass, which meant we could go all over the dockyard. So went and saw lots of things. We saw the victory being refurbished and went on board. They've got a lovely old submarine on the other side of the harbour, which is a great place to see. But the bit that really captivated my attention whilst were there that made me think, “Oh, I've got to remember this one to talk about on the podcast” was they had some students there doing exhibition from the university and they were marine biologists and it was just such a lovely opportunity.

Paul Marden: They had microscopes, they were talking all about plankton and different types of microorganisms that you find in the water. But my daughter's ten years old and she loves going to museums because I drag them to them all the time. She loves learning about this sort of thing. What I liked about it was you had some 18, 19, 20 year olds who were exposing themselves to kind of a work experience type model, but talking to the kids and showing them. And the kids were learning as they were going. They got lots of opportunities to look through microscopes. They were doing some lovely drawing and art of the microscopic organisms that exist in the water.

Paul Marden: And I just thought, I can talk about amazing jobs and what you can go and do in science and what you could do in different of roles in real life, but there's something about somebody that's only maybe ten years older than you telling you what they're learning at the moment and what learning in a university context looks like and the cool stuff that you get to do. And as amazing as I am, I'm not quite as impressive as a 20 year old.

Oz Austwick: And modest too. 

Paul Marden: Amazing, dad. I say it all the time, but it's not as compelling when I do it. So going to the museum and meeting these young people that are only a little bit older than Millie is and seeing what they do was just. It was such a lovely opportunity. And I know that work experience at museums is quite a controversial subject because I know a lot of people, it can be exclusionary for some people. The only way that you can get into a role is to work unpaid as a volunteer in a museum to get into a role later on. But I just loved the idea that we had these students that were local telling the story of what the University of Portsmouth does in marine biology and how these two major institutions came together.

Paul Marden: And you could just see Millie's eyes light up as she learned about this amazing stuff. It was brilliant. I loved it.

Oz Austwick: Awesome. Do you know what? I've not been down since. God, it can't have been that long after the Mary Rose landed there. It's a long time ago. Yeah. I was a much younger Oz at that point.

Paul Marden: I think you might notice that the Mary Rose looks substantially different maybe than the last time you went.

Oz Austwick: Do you know what? It was effectively an aircraft hanger full of water when I was there. So, yeah, definitely go down. And while we're here, I just want to say. And I might check out their lovely new website, too.

Paul Marden: Why? Do you know somebody that might have worked on that?

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Funnily enough, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic agency, but let's leave it there.

Paul Marden: Yes. So you've just turned up on the podcast and I'm talking to you and.

Oz Austwick: Yeah, nobody knows who I am, do they?

Paul Marden: Yeah, exactly. So why don't you, Oz, just take a few minutes to tell the audience who you are, what you do and why you're here.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Okay, so obviously I'm Oz. I am Head of Commercial at Rubber Cheese, also at Carbon Six, the sister agency. I originally came on board as kind of Head of Marketing and then when Kelly decided to move on, I've taken on some of her role. Obviously you've taken on some of her role as well. So my background is in social media, video first as a content writer in SEO. I've worked in technology, I've worked in healthcare. I've done all sorts of things over the years and I've always kind of found myself back in the world of digital wherever I try and go. So for me, as somebody with a real passion for history and historical sites, there's a story there, maybe for another episode.

Oz Austwick: But I love the idea that I can work in an agency doing what I do well for venues and organisations that I really love. And I think that's quite a special thing, to be honest.

Paul Marden: It's a bit of a privilege, isn't it, to be telling the stories of some of the places that we're working with.

Oz Austwick: To be able to go for a meeting and sit and have coffee with somebody in the middle of one of the most glorious, historically significant buildings in the country. It's just. Yeah.

Paul Marden: For a history buff like you, that. That's pretty good.

Oz Austwick: It is, yeah. I'm all about the history.

Paul Marden: So we are today going to talk a little bit about the Rubber Cheese visitor attraction websites survey and we run that now for a couple of years and we just want to talk a little bit about some of the plans that we've got for the year ahead. But maybe let's recap, what have we done in the last two years and a little bit about the survey in the last year?

Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, I guess there'll be people listening who may not have come across the survey before. So I think from a broad context point of view, a few years ago, Kelly, who was the original founder of Rubber Cheese, was looking for industry standard data and it turned out that there wasn't any. And at that point she was faced with two options to either just go, “Never mind, and walk away” or go, “Oh, well, I better do something about it”. And she thankfully took the latter route. So for the last two years, this is year three, Rubber Cheese has put together a survey and sent it out to as many visitor attractions as possible and asked them for their views and their objective figures as well, related to their digital presence.

Oz Austwick: So whether that's the marketing side of the website, whether it's e commerce, whether it's ticketing, we want to know it all and then we combine it all together, do our best to analyse the data and publish a report. Obviously, the world of digital changes very rapidly, and obviously when you do something like this for the first time, you're not going to get it quite right. So it's evolved year on year and. Yeah, here we are. And it's evolving again. Right?

Paul Marden: Yeah, exactly. So we had, you know, more than double the number of respondents last year compared to the first year. We had some amazing people that came together in London for a launch event in the first year, and then we had a great webinar last year launch.

Oz Austwick: I just want to interrupt briefly at this point. If you were at that launch event, then we have already met. I'll leave it there.

Paul Marden: Yes, part of the Rubber Cheese family before you were even part of the family. Yeah. So we've had success in the first two years and we've used that report ourselves and we know lots of other people have used it as well. So we've had some lovely conversations with attractions who have used it as part of their pitch process to try to identify what good looks like and how to select other people to work with across their different digital presence. So be at the marketing site, the ticketing engine or whatever. But I think one of the things that you and I both said is that it's a challenge, isn't it? Because we can go looking for stories and then we can tell stories that exist in the data that we find.

Paul Marden: But it's not quite the same as when people ask us questions, because they tend to ask us questions we haven't really thought of. And then we go looking at the data in a different light, don't we, and find just amazing things that exist in the data.

Oz Austwick: It's a constant surprise to me, both how different every attraction is and yet how they all have certain similarities. You can group them together and you can see these similarities in the data, but most sites, this is something we came across recently. We were going to a meeting with a fairly well known venue that's got two or three different strands to what they do. So we spent a bit of time looking at which of those different strands they actually fit into, because it can be really hard to know how to improve your digital presence, how to make your marketing more effective, if you don't even really know where you're starting from and what the data in the survey allows anyone that wants to access it to do is to see where they fit.

Oz Austwick: And you may think that the country park is what you are and the house is second, or you may feel that, I don't know, maybe the adventure playground or the science centre, whatever it is, whichever of those. You may think that you're one, but the data says you're the other and at that point it's not a problem. But at least you need to understand, if you don't have the information, you can't make any decisions that are going to be helpful in the long term. And I think. Sorry, I know I'm talking a lot here, feel free to shut me up.

Paul Marden: That's what we're here for.

Oz Austwick: I think it's a huge surprise to me that more people aren't coming to us and asking us about this.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely.

Oz Austwick: This survey isn't really a cynical way for us to make money. The survey pretty much loses us money year on year, but it's really valuable and I think every time we've done it, the conversation has been, “Do we need to do this again?” And the answer is, well, “Yeah, we do.” Because not only is it a valuable thing to do year on year, but to show how things have progressed and to show those evolving patterns. I think it's really important and it's a phrase I use all the time, but the rising tide floats all the boats together and if we can put this information out there and it helps everyone improve, then great.

Oz Austwick: You know, as an industry, those that are part of the industry, those like us that sell into the industry, we all get better at the same time and I think that's a really important point.

Paul Marden: Absolutely. And there's loads of things that we're doing this year as we launch the survey to try to improve it so that, you know, you've just been talking about those attractions that are many different things and definitely in previous years we've made it really hard for those attractions that are many different things to be able to identify what they actually are. And that ended up being lots of people saying, I'm an other attraction and our biggest category was other, wasn't it? So we want to try and make it much easier for people to identify themselves.

Oz Austwick: I hate Other as a category. I realise it's entirely our fault, you know, if we don't give the right categories and we give you the option to say Other, that's what you're going to tick, but it's the least helpful thing we could possibly do because what does Other actually mean? So we've tried really hard to be more accurate in the choices that we offer in the survey this year.

Paul Marden: Yeah. So should we talk a little bit about what we're going to do this year?

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, let's do that.

Paul Marden: First of all, we're really fortunate this year that we've got two amazing sponsors that are supporting the survey and the work that we do. So we've been really lucky that our friends at Convious have come back again for the third year running to sponsor and support what we do. And they're sponsoring the digital report and the launch webinar that we'll have towards the end of the season and show everybody what the results are that we found. So we're really appreciative of the work that the team at Convious have done. It's not just a financial sponsorship, it is a real collaboration that they bring to the party and they really do help us a lot.

Paul Marden: And then this year that we've also been joined by the team at Expian who are a ticketing platform and they are sponsoring our new Advisory Board, which we'll talk a little bit more about later on. But we asked for people in the sector to come and join us, to advise us and in order to be able to make that a reality, Expian have sponsored that advisory board throughout the entire year. So that's. It's brilliant. It's great that other people are seeing a real value in the thing that we've been doing for the last couple of years and want to sponsor us going ahead and making it better year on year. So thank you to both Convious and Expian for supporting us this year.

Oz Austwick: I think just at this point, again, I'd like to interject and maybe a little shamelessly say that there are still a couple of aspects of what we're doing with the survey and the report that it would be really nice if we could maybe get some help from another sponsor. So if you'd like to maybe get involved, we're thinking about an in person launch event like we did in year one. That's a big deal to organise, to run, to fund. So if maybe that's something you'd like to help with, get in touch, that'd be great.

Paul Marden: We are always happy for new people to join the party with us and help to support the good work that we will trying to do here. So, yeah, there's more information about that on the website at rubbercheese.com/survey.

Oz Austwick: Survey yeah, I think it's maybe worth mentioning the advisory board in a little bit more detail. I know that it's something that you've been really keen on for quite a while now that we try and make it clear that this isn't a digital agency that builds websites for the visitor attraction agency telling you how to have your website and that you should come to us. It's actually an objective report of the digital landscape and that if we can make that more objective and more transparent by getting together a group of experts then we absolutely should.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. We've got an amazing group of people that have agreed to join us. We have more people asking to join than we have the capacity to be able to include in the board, which is humbling in and of itself. And those people who offered, who aren't part of the board this year. That doesn't mean to say we don't appreciate you and we'll be really keen to find other ways in which those people can help us going forwards.

Paul Marden: But yeah, we're looking for the board to kind of provide advice and guidance help us. You know, going back to what you were saying a minute ago about people helping us to identify what's important to the sector so that we then go and follow the data, we ask the right questions, we look deeply into the data, we understand where the interesting stories are and then reflect that back to the sector as a whole in the final report. That's so much easier when we've got a board of people that are advising us what matters to the heads of digital of the attractions around the country. So yeah, we've also got some really helpful advisors from different sector support organisations. So suppliers like ourselves who know what the larger sector are talking about in different areas.

Paul Marden: And those people as well will be helping us to understand what are the right questions to ask. How should we ask them? They'll also be helping us with testing the survey before it goes out into the wild and supporting us with understanding what the answers are at the end of it and what they think are interesting. So I'm really excited about the Advisory Board and totally appreciative of everybody volunteering their time to join that board and giving us that advice. So that's a really exciting thing for us to be doing this year and totally appreciate the work of Expian to sponsor that.

Oz Austwick: Absolutely, yeah. Couldn't agree more.

Paul Marden: So there's some other things that we're going to do, aren't there, in terms of trying to improve things?

Oz Austwick: We've got some goals. Are they ambitious? I don't think they're that ambitious, to be honest. But, yeah, I mean, obviously the most important thing when doing something like this and repeating it on annual basis is that we want to make it more useful. We want to make the data more valuable to the people that need it. So we've spent a lot of time going through the previous survey and looking at what we asked and what we got in response to those questions, whether we got the information we thought we would and whether that information is even of any help to any. I think we've cut it down fairly significantly this year, I think.

Paul Marden: Yeah, we've taken a red pen and scored through quite a lot of the questions, haven't we?

Oz Austwick: Yeah. I wonder if perhaps maybe people were getting a little bit tired of the survey by the time they got towards the end, because it was really long and it's still quite long, but I think there's very little in it that isn't really, or at least to me, feels really valuable to be able to say, “This is where I am. And if I can compare where I am to the wider industry around me, that would be a helpful thing to be able to do.” And I think pretty much every question does that. We're hopefully going to grow the sample size because year one to year two was a really significant step up. If we get the same size step up or even the same percentage step up, I mean, that would be absolutely incredible. I'm not sure we will, but I think.

Oz Austwick: I think we need to keep growing it. We need to get it to more people and make the data in itself more relevant. Because obviously, if you've got a tiny sample size, it's really difficult to draw any conclusions from that data. But if you've got a huge sample size, then you can say that the averages across this are probably relevant. And that's information that I should know.

Paul Marden: I talk about that a lot, don't I, when I'm slicing and dicing the data that, you know, sometimes it can be hard to draw conclusions because there's insufficient data there and it could easily be chance that gives the answers that you get.

Oz Austwick: Well, absolutely. And it's so hard to look at it and think, is that cause or effect? You know, we can say that there's a pattern or is it just fluke? 

Paul Marden: Exactly. I think some of the questions, some of the data is illustrative of what the wider sector looks like. So when people answer questions about the content management system that they use by far the most popular one was WordPress. I'm willing to bet good money that is fairly illustrative of the outside world.

Oz Austwick: Yes.

Paul Marden: Yeah. You know, WordPress is the hands down most popular content management system on the web, so it's not. It's hardly surprising that it is then the most commonly used one in attractions. But some of our numbers around ticketing systems, e commerce systems and some of the conversion rate information as well, I would not be surprised if that is being skewed because the sample size isn't necessarily big enough. So the more people that join, every person that is submitting their data is making a substantial difference to the quality of the answers that we give afterwards. And I also think that kind of the intersectionality of stuff. So when you're talking about historic houses that have got animal based attraction at the same place. Yeah.

Paul Marden: When you start to zero in on those smaller sample size or smaller groups, they get so small that it's very hard to draw any conclusions. If we can make the sample size bigger, then those intersectional groups will still be fairly small. If there's a Venn diagram, there's not a lot of overlap in some of these groups and they will be pretty small groups, but you'll still get some interesting answers rather than a sample size of one, which some of the smaller groups do drill down to that at the moment. So the more people, the better. And the more diverse types of attractions that fill in, the better.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. I think it's probably worth recognising that some of the groups that people fall into are going to be really small.

Paul Marden: Yes.

Oz Austwick: I mean, how many safari parks are there in the UK, for example? It's not a lot. And if only one safari park fills in the survey. So if there's a call to action from this bit, it's like, please fill it in.

Paul Marden: What else are we going to do? So we talked about simplifying the survey. We want to increase the sample size. We wanted to introduce some new themes as well this year.

Oz Austwick: Yes. The survey is designed to represent the digital landscape of the visitor attraction industry in the UK, but obviously there are things happening in the digital world that we've not spoken about in the survey. For example, AI, there's a big. A big amount of development. There's a lot of AI stories hitting the news. People are using it for all sorts of things. We've never asked any questions about it at all. Does anybody use it? Is it relevant? What's going on out there? We don't know. So we're going to be asking a little bit about that. And the other main theme that we've not really looked into before that we're going to be asking a little bit more about is sustainability. It's become really clear over the last sort of six months or so, looking at the conversations we've had with venues.

Oz Austwick: Everybody's doing stuff, not everybody's doing the same stuff, not everybody's doing the right stuff, but everybody's doing something. And it would be really nice to know what's standard. And obviously there's stuff on site that you can do at the attraction itself, but there's things you can do around the website and the hosting and the way that your digital presence works. So we're going to be asking a little bit about that as well.

Paul Marden: I think in every conversation I've ever had about digital sustainability, I learn a little bit more about the subject. And I can remember there was an amazing speaker at the Umbraco conference a couple of years ago that spoke, who's now a friend of mine, and he just told some amazing stories about the impact of digital on CO2 emissions. And it was, you know, I used to work in an airline. It was fairly clear to see that airlines are fairly polluting. You can see it coming out the back of the plane. But I don't think I'd ever really seriously thought about digital technology being a major contributor to climate change in the way that I now understand it to be. So, finding out what other people are doing, we're willing to bet that quite a lot of attractions will have a sustainability plan.

Paul Marden: Fewer will have done any sort of benchmarking of their digital platform, and fewer, again, still will have done anything to actually reduce their CO2 emissions. But that's just instinct. I'm really interested to understand what the actual numbers are at the end of this, because once we start measuring it, we can start improving things as an industry.

Oz Austwick: I think it's fascinating, and that goes back to exactly what Polly was talking about when you interviewed her two episodes ago I think.

Paul Marden: Something like that.

Oz Austwick: About the fact that, you know, we all start from somewhere and you can look at this and think, oh, I'm actually not doing a great job, but you've got to be honest about it because you've got to know where you are. You know, everything that comes to us is completely anonymised. We don't give out anybody's data. We give out, you know, the raw data in a way that means that nobody can track anybody else. So you nothing that you say is going to put, you know, anything that you're maybe a little bit unhappy out there. But if doing this survey forces you to think about what you're doing and look at it and think, actually, maybe I do need to do this, then brilliant. You know what an amazing achievement that will be.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So we want to enable people to give better answers. So we're going to reduce the number of category type questions that we've got and drill down to real numbers. We'll get better understanding of conversion rates. And there was some other standardisation that we wanted to do, wasn't there?

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we noticed that. And again, it's going back to this, trying to reduce the fact that you can just tick other when we're trying to look at what sort of attraction are you when you're filling in the survey. In fairness, we've got a pretty good idea of the different attractions there are out there and we created a fairly good list, but we still got quite a lot of Others. So were kind of looking at how we can improve that list and we thought, well, why not standardise it with a list that's already out there? And it turns out that VisitBritain has a perfectly good list, which is really quite comprehensive.

Oz Austwick: So we're using their list for attraction type rather than ours because it allows us to standardise the data a little bit more and hopefully people will already know where they fit. But I think we've also allowed people to tick more than one option this time, which previously we didn't. If you were a historic home that also had a safari park or an adventure playground or something, you'd have to pick which of those am I? And obviously, you know, for the big attractions around the country and for an awful lot of the smaller ones, we would look at them and go, “Oh, they've ticked that. That's odd. I wonder why they've done that.” Whereas now you're able to say, “Actually, I'm three different things.” And that's great, because again, it allows us to be a little bit more granular.

Oz Austwick: And if it turns out that maybe there are other attractions that have the same breakdown of what they do as you, that will become clear, hopefully.

Paul Marden: So one of the big areas that we want to, we're excited to grow into is that we'll be having a US focused survey for the first time, supported by our friends at Convious.

Oz Austwick: Lots of Zs instead of Ss in that one.

Paul Marden: Yes, we've had to do some localisation and that will be published alongside the UK version of the survey. And we'll have a US report and a UK report that we'll be launching at the end, thanks to our friends at Convious. But we'll also have versions of the survey localised for attractions in the EU, because there was actually, last year, we got quite a number of european attractions submitting and we think that can improve when the survey tool itself is focused on the EU and is, you know, the numbers that we've got in the survey are denominated in euros rather than in pounds. So, yeah, that's increasing. The number of international responses, especially in North America, is super important for us this year.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. And I think it's worth saying that it's quite a potentially valuable thing to do as well, because if we can look at the surveys and say that, weirdly, the UK sites tend to rate here, but us sites rate here for something, why is that? What do they do differently in the US that allows them to be more successful in this instance than we in the UK are here? You know, with any luck, either, we'll be able to say no. Globally, this is all pretty much on a par. So you can see where you set in the world, rather than just in, say, Shropshire. But you could also say, right, well, these guys are doing better. Let's look at what they're doing and try and emulate that and improve what we're doing to bring it in line with what we know is possible.

Paul Marden: So lots to change, lots of improvements that we're making. Pretty big ambitions to grow the survey in a number of different ways, but not in the number of questions that are there. So hopefully, it will take less effort for people to submit their responses this time and the survey will be launched around the time that this episode comes out. So you'll be able to go onto rubbercheese.com/survey and follow the links and submit your data, which is pretty exciting for us. We'll be sat there watching the responses rolling in. I got very excited last year, watching people respond.

Oz Austwick: I can't wait, genuinely. I know that sounded sarcastic, didn't it? It wasn't supposed to. I genuinely. I'm quite excited about this. Yeah.

Paul Marden: You might need to work on your sincerity. There's an area of improvement there are.

Oz Austwick: Recording this at the end of the afternoon on a Friday, so, you know, this is as good as you're gonna get, I'm afraid.

Paul Marden: So. We're really keen for people to go onto the website and fill in the survey, but there's other things that you want as well, isn't there, Oz?

Oz Austwick: Well, for me, I want people to talk to us. I want people to talk about the survey. I want them to talk about last year's survey and the rapport. I want people to come along and say, “Look, it'd be really interesting to know where I sit it in this. This is our attraction. This is what we think. Is it true?” Get in touch, give us a shout, let's have a chat. You know, let's have an excuse to get together with a coffee and a laptop and look at some spreadsheets. But, you know, if there's something that you want to see from the survey moving forwards, because I think it's probably safe to say this isn't going to be the last one we do.

Oz Austwick: Then again, let us know if there's things that we aren't talking about and you've got a better viewpoint and you can see that there's a gap in what we're asking. Please let us know because we can't do this by ourselves and we're not really doing it for ourselves. So the more people talk to us, the better, really.

Paul Marden: So if you want to talk to us, all the usual social channels that we normally talk about, but also send us email at [email protected]. Both Oz and I will get that. And really keen to spark the conversations and see where it goes from there.

Oz Austwick: Yeah. And if we bump into each other at an event or you see me, give me a shout, I'll buy you a coffee. I mean on him, obviously.

Paul Marden: Of course. So your episode number one on skip the queue, how was it for you?

Oz Austwick: That was all right, actually, wasn't it? Yeah. Okay. I mean, hello. Let's, let's see. Well, I enjoyed it.

Paul Marden: I've enjoyed it. Not quite the same as talking to Kelly, but not the same. Not better or worse, just different.

Oz Austwick: I'll take that as a compliment.

Paul Marden: You take it however you like, mate.

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm.

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

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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 Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends on 22nd May 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://www.rigb.org/

www.linkedin.com/in/shjfranklin

Steven Franklin is a self-confessed social media addict, with 4 years’ experience of work in social media, drawn from a mixture of heritage, cultural, government, and the charity sectors.

To date, he has worked at Egham Museum, Bradford Museums and Art Galleries, The National Archives, and now The Royal Institution.

When he’s not making TikToks or trying to write witty posts on X, you’ll find him thinking about how the latest evolutions in social media could translate and be used within the cultural and charity sectors. His passion for innovation has seen him deliver huge social media at every organisation that he has worked, bringing his distinctive mixture of creativity and storytelling to every account, which has resulted in an attention-grabbing tone of voice that has greatly increased brand exposure and recognition.

Transcription: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. 

In this episode, I'm joined by Steven Franklin, the Social Media Manager at the Royal Institution. Steven has seen some phenomenal increases in subscribers and engagement whilst managing the organisation's social media, which, as we'll find out, is pivotal to the role the RI has in science communication. 

Paul Marden: Welcome, Steven, to the Skip the Queue podcast. It's lovely to have you.

Steven Franklin: Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me on, Paul. Really looking forward to this chat.

Paul Marden: Yeah, me too. Me too. So, before we get started, where are you sat at the moment? Because it's looking like a pretty impressive location.

Steven Franklin: Yeah, no, I thought I'd make an effort for the listeners and viewers. So I'm currently in the very salubrious surroundings of Mayfair. To be more specific, the Royal Institution on Albemarle street, in the historic writing room, which dates all the way back to the sort of mid 1800s. Interestingly, a little anecdote. This is the room where our discourse speakers are locked in and have been locked in for quite a while, for a couple of, well, approaching a couple of centuries, following one specific instance where one of our speakers got so overwhelmed by anxiety and nerves that he basically left before his talk. So, in order to prevent that from happening, we now locked speakers up half an hour before their discourse is supposed to start, so they don't have the chance to run away and leave the audience wanting more to speak.

Paul Marden: And for the Skip the Queue audience, I would like emphasise that is not my plan going forward with the podcast. I am not going to lock people up half an hour before that.

Steven Franklin: No.

Paul Marden: So, Steven, we always start with some icebreaker questions. So I've got a couple for you. First one, what's your earliest memory of travelling outside of your hometown?

Steven Franklin: Oh, I think it would have to be travelling up to see one of my aunties who lives in Northamptonshire, and I always remember sort of going up the M1, which is an interesting thing to remember, seeing sort of the lights. But I think, more importantly than the sort of mundaneity and boredom of travelling up a motorway, it was just sort of the excitement and good times of getting treated by different relatives who also had a golden retriever called Barney, who I was very fond of. And, yeah, that was probably my earliest memory.

Paul Marden: Yeah, family trips like that are lovely, aren't they? I remember lots of trips up into South Wales. So mine would be that my memory would probably be the M4, travelling from Somerset up to the South Wales Valleys to visit Auger Farrell. Okay, so the next one. How would you describe your job to a two year old?

Steven Franklin: I'm in the business of entertaining people. And the way I entertain people is by either doing it through the form of video, or by doing it through the form of written word, or by doing it in nice visuals, whether they are still photos or animated graphics. And as a byproduct of my entertainment, I hope to also educate. There you go.

Paul Marden: Lovely. So another thing that we always ask our visitors onto the show is, what's your unpopular opinion?

Steven Franklin: So I've been. Obviously, you gave me the heads up for this, and I've been thinking long and hard about what's the most unpopular opinion that I came up with that I truly believe in, and mine is that audiobooks are a more pleasurable and enjoyable experience than reading a proper book.

Paul Marden: Oh, wow. Okay, so what's wrong with reading a proper book? There are librarians among us that might actually care about a physical book.

Steven Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. See this where it becomes a poor reflection on my own self, basically, because the reason that I don't really enjoy reading proper books is that I find it quite difficult to sort of sit still for long periods of time. I also find it quite difficult to shut my brain off for long enough to only be really focused on the one, the book that's in front of me. So, yeah, whilst I do appreciate the romanticism of sort of reading a book in the sun or reading a book over a cup of tea or, you know, reading a classic novel on holiday and the sort of the tactile nature of the book experience, it's never really sat with me.

Steven Franklin: So I think in some ways, that sort of unpopular opinion isn't really surprising, given what I work in and sort of age I am and sort of the media that I create, so I don't know whether it's a sense of the tail wagging the dog or the dog wagging the tail, but either way it's, you know, there's a nice sort of closed loop there.

Paul Marden: I've got my subscription and I've got a few credits that I need to spend at the bank, but I like an audiobook, but they send me to sleep, so if I can't do factual books on audiobook that sends me straight to sleep. But even listening to fiction on audible, within five minutes, I'll be out. Whereas I can sit and read a book and that can hold my attention for a couple of chapters before nodding off. Audiobook, I just need. I was listening to a Stephen Fry narrated one the other day, the lulling tones of Stephen Fry, but off I went to sleep.

Steven Franklin: I think Stephen Fry is, you know, he's sort of a silent assassin of the audiobook world insofar as he has such a, you know, his dulcet tones just naturally send you off and give me the Harry Potter audiobooks read by Stephen Fry, and I'm golden, so to speak. But, yeah, now, I also got into a bit of a nerdy sort of. And this is a very typical conversation at the RI, but a nerdy chat about whether you retain more information having actually read the book than listening to the book. Because I was of the opinion that you probably didn't take as much in if you were listening to it than if you were reading it.

Steven Franklin: I can't exactly remember what the figures were, but I think the long and short of it was that actually, the science suggests that sort of retention is slightly less, but not as drastic as you might have thought. So that gave me some sort of, you know, made me feel a little bit better about myself and my inability to sit quiet for long periods of time and read.

Paul Marden: So, anecdotally, I'm reading to my daughter as we read every night before she goes to bed. She's ten years old. She can be doing something else. She could even be reading a different book that I'll be reading to her. And I'm like, “You're not listening to me. What did I just say?” And she could just recite exactly what I just said. So she is listening, somehow, doing two things at once. I do not understand how she does it.

Steven Franklin: I don't know whether this is actually correct, but somewhere somebody might have said something or have read it, but there's something about doing two things at once that, you know, sort of gets your brain in a state of flow and maybe ups your performance again, I actually don't know whether this is true, but if it's not, this is a lie that I tell myself.

Paul Marden: So it's a pinchot that we're not actually scientists of the RI, so why don't we. You've told us what the two year old view of your job might look like, but why don't you tell us a little bit about the RI? Lots of listeners will be aware of the RI from the Christmas lectures, but it's got really long history. So tell us a little bit about that, about each role today and what you do.

Steven Franklin: Yeah, so the RI founded in 1799, basically from its very inception, a science engagement institution. I think that's something that has always and will continue to always set the RI apart from other sort of science organisations, insofar as we haven't been an organisation that's got a traditional focus on research and research outputs. Our sort of modus operandi, for want of a better phrase, has always been the core principle of connecting the public with science. Back in 1799 and through the early 1800s, you know, that would have been done traditionally by. Well, it still is to this day, but obviously that's back. Back in the day of ye oldy, victorian times, it would have been done by sort of, you know, lectures and demonstrations.

Steven Franklin: So the likes of, you know, Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday, you know, these are some of the big figures that are associated with our long 225 year history. And in fact, pretty much every, you know, sort of famous scientist of the Victorian age is likely to have been a member here at some stage. Yeah. So, you know, we're very difficult. We're very different from the likes of the Royal Society in the sense that we've always welcomed women. We've always sort of had an ethos of connecting children. The Christmas lecture has been the most obvious example, but we're connecting children to science. And I think also, you know, we've also been quite historically wedded to the idea of being slightly different, less snobbish for, you know, I think, and more. More sort of open, more playful. We don't take ourselves too seriously.

Steven Franklin: And in fact, during sort of the Victorian period, we were sort of lambasted by famous caricatures of the day for that very fact. For the fact that sort of. We were obsessed with teaching the public. We allowed women in. We sort of broke the traditional rules of the day. So that got us into a bit of not trouble, but people laughed at us and pointed at us and sort of said that weren't doing it the right way because we weren’t an academic members only organisation. So that was. That was sort of our founding. And I think, you know, pretty much from that point onwards today, we've not really changed in that regard. The thing that's changed is sort of society around us. So we still have a lecture theatre.

Steven Franklin: I've mentioned earlier that we have our discourses. They used to happen every Friday, and they now happen once, the last Friday of every month. Christmas lectures continue to this day, and next year it will be the 200th anniversary of them.

Paul Marden: Wow.

Steven Franklin: And the Christmas lectures have pretty much been a constant. They were stopped or paused during World War II but, you know, by and large, a tradition that's sort of a line that links us from the present all the way back to the past. And, in fact, even the desk that sits, that's in the lecture theatre today, whilst it's not Faraday's original, part of it, is, so every time they rebuild it, they keep a part of the old desk and use that. So it's a bit like that, you know, that famous Titanic sort of riddle like, if you were to change all the parts of the Titanic, would it still be the Titanic? And, you know, or bicycle, whatever. But, yeah, so there's that. And I think, to the present day, our scope's much larger now.

Steven Franklin: So we have a sort of traditional stem learning framework in place where school kids, pretty much of all curricular curriculum ages, can come to on site and be taught. So we've got a very buzzing, very healthy science programme. We also do a lot off site science engagement for the schools that aren't based in London. We also have a very thriving public programme that, you know, sees some of the foremost, greatest scientific thinkers of today come and provide lectures in the Faraday lecture theatre. We're also home to a wonderful collection of scientific history. So there's been ten elements of the periodic table that were isolated here at the RI. So, yeah, we've got a history of that, and we have, well, basically, we've far too much for even us to talk about. And then I guess.

Steven Franklin: I guess for me, working in sort of digital social media, I guess part of my remit, well, my remit is to engage people with science to get them interested in science. We believe, and we're quite unashamed in our belief that, you know, science is for everyone and science is important. It is quite fundamental and crucial to everyday life, regardless of how old you are. So a knowledge of science is important. And, you know, another key sort of part of my work is to sort of show off what the RI has in our heritage collection, our public programme, to get people onto site, to encourage people to become members and support our mission, and just to, I guess, entertain people through science. There you go.

Paul Marden: That's interesting, isn't it? The entertainment element of it. I guess there's an element of trying to get people on board and engage in their RI's mission, but at the same time entertaining them. And everyone likes a good explosion video, don't they?

Steven Franklin: So, yeah, I mean, yeah, I've sort of. Not a day goes past where I don't feel incredibly fortunate, really, because, you know, in some ways, I get a lot of the credit for success that we see on social media when videos go viral. But I'm not the one exploding hydrogen balloons or making, you know, really impressive looking sort of demos, chemical reactions, so to speak. So, you know, it's very much an all sort of team sort of mission. But, yeah, I do have it very good, actually, because I've got so much. I'm like Aladdin in the cave, got so much to play with.

Paul Marden:  Lots of material. So that's interesting. So let's talk a little bit about social media at the RI. It's really important to the organisation, because when I was doing my bone round research to all of this, and I open up the annual report, then on the trustees report, on, like, page one or page two of the annual report, they are talking about the impact of social media on the organisation. So it's obviously crucial to what you do. How do you think that it's become that important for the organisation?

Steven Franklin: I think, genuinely, it does link back to that core fundamental purpose. All social media is the 21st century way of connecting people with an idea. In the Victorian times, you would have had to sit in a lecture theatre and listen to the lecture given. If you were lucky, you might have been able to read it, if you were in the right sort of circles. But, in many ways, the way in which technology has evolved and where we sit here today, it's never been easier to sort of publish ideas and communicate thinking. That isn't to downplay the craft that goes into it, because I think that's two separate conversations. It is very easy to publish.

Steven Franklin: It's a little bit more of a science to publish in the right way with the right sort of thinking that goes into it. So, yeah, I think, it's fundamental about connecting people with science, and that is what the charity and the institution is built on. I think we're quite fortunate, the RI, in the sense that we have a leadership team that truly believes in the importance of connection and doesn't devalue digital connection against physical connection. So, whether you're supporting our social media channels, whether you're a subscriber on YouTube, or whether you're sitting in the lecture theatre, that is a valuable engagement that is fulfilling a function and part of our purpose. So, yeah, I think that's why. And actually, it's really nice to be working at an organisation that does play such onus and importance.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So what is it like having responsibility for over a million followers across social? That must be a little bit bolting.

Steven Franklin: Yes, it is. And I've thought about this a lot, and indeed, I've had quite a short career in social media, but I think even I've begun to mature in the way I think about this, too. I think, first and foremost, if you're working in social media, you probably aren't somebody that's overawed by that fact that you can hit huge numbers of people pretty much instantaneously. And I think if you are somebody that would get anxious about that, you probably wouldn't be working in social or indeed comms. So I think there's that. But I think it's a great honour, to be honest, to be trusted pretty much within reason, to sort of spearhead a strategy and have a bit of fun.

Steven Franklin: And translate sort of, scientific ideas into a medium that makes sense for the 21st century, or indeed the trend, or indeed the platform. I think that's in a very entrusted position. Yeah, so there's that. And then, I think, for me personally, there's been a bit of maturity in sort of realising that, actually, whilst you still get that rush, when you see a viral post really take off and you get that lovely dopamine hit and you're on cloud nine, actually realising that this is not your account, you're doing the work of the organisation. This isn't Steven Franklin out there and sort of going viral.

Paul Marden: This is some of the jokes. There's a little bit of you in there, I think.

Steven Franklin: Yeah, no, there is, there is. But I think the thing that I've realised is that when things. When things go well, then you've got nothing to worry about. But in the odd moments where you get into a bit of a sticky patch, something didn't go quite anticipated. That's when having too close a personal connection with it does become health sage. Correct. Yeah. And actually, I think, by and large, for the most part, that sort of talking to a million people is 99% not a problem. It's that small 1% of moments where something goes awry that you didn't quite anticipate, we didn't expect. I try my best to think 360 degrees about what possibly people could think in response to it.

Steven Franklin: A post that I think is harmless, but in reality we're posting to the Internet and everybody on the Internet is able to hold of you. And so I was having this conversation with my line manager a couple of weeks ago, 20 years ago, you would have published something in the press and somebody would have had the same thought. The only difference was they were having it in their living room and they were just uttering it to their other half. Today they can literally give you instantaneous feedback. So that's how the dynamic shifted. So yeah, I think hopefully that's answered your question. Paul.

Paul Marden: Yeah, you touched on this a minute ago, you touched on kind of the broader strategy. So what are the goals for social, for the organisation going forwards?

Steven Franklin: I mean more, more, more. How do you like it? How do you like it? I mean there is an element of that. So obviously we want to continue growing all of our channels as much as possible. We want to be talking to as many new people, raising the awareness of the institution, raising the awareness of our work, but then also sort of subsidiary to that, just sort of communicating good science and providing that sort of educational offer. So I think, there is that sort of vanity metric in terms of raw number of followers, but we're also really interested in engagement and you know, there's no point to us in having 5 million followers if only 5000 people engage with your content each month. That to us feels a little incongruous.

Steven Franklin: So, putting out quality content on channels that our communities on those channels respond to and enjoy and engage with is sort of a big motivation factor for us. And then secondly, or maybe thirdly, we've been quite agile in adapting to technology in the 21st century. So some of our channels we have monetised and sort of use digital content to help drive revenue and bring in revenue. So that's a sort of secondary or tertiary sort of thing on social.

Paul Marden: Yeah, it's a nice bit of feedback, isn't it, in batching to the organisation. So who are the audiences, those communities that you touched on a moment ago, who is it that you're trying to speak to?

Steven Franklin: So I think by and large, like any organisation, we have an audience sort of strategy that sort of segments all of our audiences into various catchment terms that represent people and we have about six to eight of those. And we made a conscious effort to focus on to two groups that we internally refer to as the science connected and the science curious. So science connected being people that might work in science, might have done a degree in science, might have a connection through science, they might be studying it. So, that traditional science call, they work in a career that is adjacent to science and then the science curious, probably, are those people that don't fit into that group, but are probably more arts and culturally orientated.

Steven Franklin: They are interested in learning new things, they are open to ideas and exchanging ideas and. Yeah. So those are the sort of two audiences that we predominantly focus on. That isn't to say that we are deliberately excluding the rest.

Paul Marden: If you're not focusing on some bit, you're focused on no deal.

Steven Franklin: Exactly. Yeah.

Paul Marden: So I guess the reason how the way that we got connected, the way that our conversation started together, was more interested in data and pulling data out of the sector and understanding how the sector works. And in a conversation I had with Rachel at the Association of Science and Discovery Centre, she said you'd be a really good person to talk to because you're really motivated by the data behind social and you use that a lot to be able to influence what you do. So tell us a little bit about that. How are you using data to make decisions about what you do next?

Steven Franklin: Well, that's a big question. I think one of the great things about working in digital social being a part of digital, is that there's no shortage of data that is at your disposal. I think one of the things that makes me sort of sad working within the charity cultural sector is that actually, by and large, the level of resource isn't there to truly sort of get to the bottom of what that data tells you. 

Paul Marden: Yes. 

Steven Franklin: So I'll get off my soapbox now. Yeah. So, as you say, I'm very interested in using that data to inform my content choices. And I think by far and away, the clearest example I have to show you today is the way that we've sort of looked at data in terms of our Instagram growth.

Steven Franklin: To put that into context, in the last six months we've grown organically by 110,000 followers in about 130 posts. So absolutely staggering numbers. And then within the last four or five months, we've done approaching 10 million impressions on just Instagram alone. So, huge numbers. And the thing that I noticed was that whenever I posted a static image or graphic to the grid, so just a post, the only people that saw it were your followers, and there was a tiny fraction of people that weren't your followers. So I posted a reel and then I realised that percentage and was completely skied the other way. So, depending on how successful the reel was, you could have anything up to 75% non followers versus 25% followers on a truly viral reel, that was over a million views.

Steven Franklin: So what that told me was that if I wanted to grow, the easiest way to grow is to obviously get your content to new people. And the way the platform and the algorithm was telling me the easiest way to do that was to just publish Instagram reels. So. And, there have been other stories. I think the Washington Post sort of in 21, 22, grew their Instagram channel to over a couple of million by publishing three Instagram reels a day. And they had exponential growth of which hadn't been seen before. So I didn't do three times a day. I just did three a week one on Monday, one on Wednesday, one on Friday. All videos about 60 seconds, some 40 seconds and some, up to a minute and a half. But yeah, just got into that pattern.

Steven Franklin: Posted, posted posters, and then I would supplement those reels with, a couple of grid posts. And the way that I sort of was seeing or the way that the strategy has sort of evolved is that the reels are the things that grow the channel and the grid posts are the things that cultivate the community. So, our Instagram reels are our calling card.

Paul Marden: Yep.

Steven Franklin: For a traditional analogy, they're the billboard that you put on the motorway that lots of people see. And the content you post to your  followers or to those followers are the sort of entertaining, sort of, membership pack that they can read and that equivalent, the analogy sort of fell down. But hopefully you get my gist.

Paul Marden: Yeah, I get what you mean. So when you flip it on its head and you go with the reels, you get this massive increase in people that aren't following you, seeing what you're talking about. And what sort of conversion rate are you seeing how many people are actually following you as a result of that? Is that the great point there?

Steven Franklin: Yeah, so we've like, within a month, we've been growing on average, 20,000 followers a month. In some days, we've been doing one and a half thousand followers a day. You can link that. So, you know, Instagram, if you go into our most popular reel that has over 5 million views, it will tell you how many new followers that specific video has generated. That video, I think, for us, has in itself generated like 30,000 new followers.

Paul Marden: Many thoughts. Now there's just play by mind. That's amazing. What is it about the content? Have you changed the content over that time? So you'd say that you're presenting different things.

Steven Franklin: Yeah. So it's been really interesting. And the reason it's been interesting is because by and large, it sort of has gone against the industry received wisdom. So, for context, I am the sole person in charge of social media. I work in a digital and marketing team. We have two full time video producers who help me create visual content and assets and video. But by and large, you know, I am sort of a one man band. So I sort of decided that I couldn't create brand new content all the time. But what I could do is use the 40 minutes to an hour lecture that we have take place in our lectures sometimes three times a week that are by and large filmed.

Steven Franklin: I know that we've got some of the greatest scientists in the world coming to speak about really cool things. Okay, cool. Why don't I take that 1 hour talk and skim through it at two times speed and isolate 1 minute moments that peak interest. Okay. So that's all very well and good. What are the things that we internally think peak people's interest? Well, there's the obvious one. It's the demonstrations or the impressive science experiments, the bangs, the smoke and all of that. So there's that. Then there's the talking about something that's, you know, vaguely topical trending. So I think that, the probably most obvious example of that is the, is Chris Van Dulligan and his ultra processed foods or ultra processed people book.

Steven Franklin: So, yep, we released quite a lot of content around that. And that did very well. And then thirdly, I guess it's the content that is likely to somewhat divide opinion. I won't say it's controversial content, but I would say that it's content that is most likely to get people talking. Because another thing that I noticed was that if your video gets more comments, it seems that helps with performance than likes. So you could get loads of likes. But if nobody comments, then algorithm isn't interested. But if people start talking and commenting, then the algorithm says, “Oh, people really like this. And, you know, it doesn't matter what they're saying.”

Paul Marden: And that's what you're seeing with the reels. Is it that you push a reel out there? And if it's, if it is thought provoking, not controversial. Yeah. Then you're seeing people commenting on that and that drawings up more impressions, which itself drives more engagement and all the outcomes.

Steven Franklin: Yeah. So like to take that 5 million reel example, you know, it's got like 45,000 likes, so it's still a lot of likes. But if you did the maths, that compared to 5 million views, it's quite a small rate. The amount of comments, it's got huge. It's like the comment section alone is bordering on 5000. Conversely, we have another video that's done sort of approaching 4 million, the likes are at 100,000, but the comment section is far smaller and it hasn't received as or hasn't been pumped out. Now, am I reading too much into this? Probably, because at the end of the day we're all slightly at the mercy of the algorithm and there is a bit of luck. There is a bit of luck.

Steven Franklin: But I guess for me, having sort of worked on it and sort of adopted this strategy for six months, it does seem to be the case that the more people start talking and commenting and sharing, the more the algorithm sort of takes that as a sign or marker of good content.

Paul Marden: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So around the kind of content planning and production piece, there's a team of people around you. You're in a fortunate position because you've got all of these amazing scientists from around the world that want to talk about what they do in your lecture theatre where you can go and record their content and back, all of a sudden you've got a content plan in front of you of the year, haven't you? So that's a really fortunate position to be in. But how do you go from that plan of all of the activity over the year into figuring out what you're going to do on a daily basis on your Monday, Wednesday, Friday posts that you do.

Steven Franklin: So there's two ways. There's the official answer and then there's the unofficial answer. The official answer is in some ways the reels that we post are somewhat predetermined by the schedule of our public programme. Now that isn't to say, and this somewhat circles back to your previous question, but I think it still makes sense. Not all of our content that we published on Instagram or TikTok is, a clip of a talk. You know, we do supplement the content calendar with our own sort of original content, whether that be green screen or our own internal science demonstrations, you know, and interestingly, actually there's another anecdote. The green screen on Instagram just dives. People aren't interested in it.

Steven Franklin: The green screen on TikTok, people love it, whereas on TikTok you post a clip of a talk, people less don't like it. They probably don't feel it's very authentic to the platform. The green screen, you know, goes bonkers, you know, work that out, whatever. Yeah, but, yeah, so going back there is. There is obviously there's somewhat predetermined by the talks, but then also it's coming down to, okay, we have had, you know, how many physics, how many biology, how many chemistry, how many hard science, soft science. We are an organisation that is inclusive reflex all. So we don't want to just publish white men.

Steven Franklin: We need a gender balance there, we need an ethnicity balance as well to reflect the vibrancy of everyone that comes to talk here, but also the vibrancy of the scientific community and large because at the end of the day, our content has the ability to inspire and allows people to feel seen, I guess so. So that also sort of informs our planning process.

Paul Marden: I think you said something about when we were talking before, actually, if you were being really mercenary about this and just going for the engagement, then you would focus on certain demographics of who it is that's presenting all the subject matter as well. Those can skew as well. But you have this obligation to be more diverse than it used.

Steven Franklin: Yeah. And that is an internal challenge. And I think it is a challenge that you could let yourself get carried away by following, chasing big numbers and fall into a trap of sort of undermining your own institution nor mission. Just at the sake of  to get to a million followers or whatever. But yeah, no, there are some challenges, you know, there are. And this is me not trying to overstate things, but we do publish content that we know sadly won't perform as well as say something else that we know probably would. But I think that is also one of the great joys and great beauties of working here is we're not yet. We will never be at a stage where we just do things for the pure KPI's.

Steven Franklin: We are also all about engagement and inspiring and being inclusive.

Paul Marden: There's a big mission that plays. It's quite interesting, isn't it? Because it makes you wonder whether just if you focus on one demographic or you focus one segment at the expense of the others. Is that because the algorithm favours that or is that because the audience. You would think that even if it was the algorithm favouring it's because that's because the audience that the algorithm serves is optimised around the algorithm is optimised around the audience. So you would expect it to be the audience listening. But yeah, it's a. Which came first is a chicken and egg problem, isn't it?

Steven Franklin: It is. It is a chicken and egg problem. And I think, you know, sort of this comes back to you. What's it like to manage a channel of a million sort of people? You just got to accept that not everything you post is going to be to everyone's taste. There'll be things that fly and there'll be things that don't. But the things that don't, it doesn't mean that it was bad content, doesn't mean that it's not fulfilled an important or valuable function or done something that has meaning, even if it only gets, you know, 50 engagements. Those 50 engagements are very valuable and in some cases could be potentially more valuable if it's chimed with the right sort of people and got in front of the audience we wanted.

Paul Marden: Yeah, my daughter absolutely adores Mark Rober videos and the crunchlight boxes that he has. And he talks about, you hide the vegetables. Yeah. You give people the big exploding test tubes or whatever, but hidden behind that is the chemistry. Or you give them a toy that enables them to do amazing things with ping pong balls, but actually along the way they're learning some physics. You can hide the veg in amongst all of your exploding videos.

Steven Franklin: Yeah, correct. And funny you should mention Mark Rober. I was literally just watching a YouTube video about him earlier today on the way in. Yeah, I wouldn't say an idol of mine, but a really interesting sort of case study in somebody that sort of, you know, the way in which the creator economy is sort of pivoted to a way where you can become your own sort of advertiser as well as product. And you have the perfect closed loop. You create a product, you make a video for 30 million people that advertises your product, that then generates income so you can create more product, so you can just go round around.

Steven Franklin: Yeah, I mean, I guess for me, I'm a YouTube nut and I'm a sort of social media addicts and I think there's really big potential in sort of unlocking some of the secrets of how creators work and how they think and how they approach content and product and collaboration, taking some of those principles and concepts into the world of brands and organisations and institutions, because, let's be honest, that's kind of the future. And those people, regardless of whether they've got a marketing background or qualifications in marketing, they are cutting edge marketers who.

Paul Marden: Absolutely, yeah.

Steven Franklin: Who know exactly what they're doing, who are obsessed by the detail, who study and analyse retention graphs until it sort of makes them blue in the face. And that's the type of thing that I would love to do, to be able to do A and B tests on Facebook, to be able to do something as simple as publish the same video, publish one without a sort of timeline that shows how long you are through the video, publish the same video with that. See how that affects retention. Because if you believe that, as we're told, that retention is one of the keys sort of metrics of success or good content, then if you can find ways in which you can create longer retention metric, then that would be a key.

Steven Franklin: And even something as simple as that could possibly lead to some really big impacts. Another thing, you could post your video on reels and you could look at the or TikTok, look at a retention graph. Okay, we'll publish the same video, but we'll take that spike and we'll move that there and we'll cut the video short. 

Paul Marden: That's amazing, isn’t it? 

Steven Franklin: Yeah, but that is the sort of thinking that's happening with some of the biggest creators, and sort of I guess they're in a very privileged position because they have now huge teams behind them. But I guess for me the core point is that they didn't always have these people there.

Paul Marden: And did the data just add to that, isn't it?

Steven Franklin: Yeah, yeah. You know, and my suspicion is I've never spoken to the likes of Mr. Beast or Mark Rober or anybody with huge social following. But my suspicion is basically if you just take one piece of data and you optimise your workflow around that, then once you've got that sorted, you then turn your attention to another piece and then another piece, and then if you've optimised five pieces of data, then maybe you are in a place where you can get another person and then, so to speak.

Paul Marden: It's a positive reinforcing cycle, isn't it? So let's take that. How do you demonstrate back to the organisation the return on their investment for all the work that you're doing?

Steven Franklin: Well, as sort of referenced earlier, there is the sort of monetisation aspect to that. So I have a KPI of sort of quarterly and monthly budgets that I am against, that I'm accountable to. So there's that. So that's a very obvious straight line trajectory between a very opaque money and then digital content. But then I guess outside of that, there's other KPI's, obviously, growth on channels, engagement rates, numbers of engagements, link clicks through to our posts that promoting our membership offers, whether that be family membership or adult membership or our public programme events. So those are all the ways in which I can demonstrate value, I guess. And that's just numeric data.

Steven Franklin: But then there's also the actual stuff that I much more enjoy, which is the anecdotal, the sort of the written word where somebody says, give the social media manager a raise. I cheaply screenshot and send it over to my line manager to say, you know, just leaving this here.

Paul Marden: Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. This has been brilliant to talk to you, find out a little bit more about what you do and what the RI is doing with social media. It's been awesome. We always ask our guests to tell us about their favourite books that we could share with the audience. So have you selected a book for us?

Steven Franklin: I have selected a book that I listened to on audible. Yeah. So Steven Bartlett's the Diary of a CEO, 33 laws, business and life, something that I've just finished listening to. Yeah, I'm a big sort of fan of, or, you know, have great admiration for, you know, Steven Bartlett and sort of the way that he's sort of, you know, that a rags to riches kind of story. But yeah, I think there's lots of. It's a very consumable, accessible book with some really nice little ideas in there that you can take away, probably implement to yourself. One of the greatest is the idea of absurdity, and the role that can be and how that can be exploited not just in social but just within marketing.

Steven Franklin: And those sort of tidbits, stick with me, I guess. It's in that ever sort of growing pursuit of mind of trying to just make myself, you know, 1% better each day. And if I can learn from some of the world's best and sort of get any part of wisdom or insight from them and sort of implement that, then that's not going to do me, I hope, any bad. So yeah, that would be my recommendation.

Paul Marden: There you go, lovely listeners. So if you would like a copy of Diary of a CEO, then jump onto X, retweet the show announcement and say, I want Steven's book. The first person that does that will get a copy of the book. Steven, it's been utterly delightful. Thank you ever so much. I really enjoyed we said to each other when we finished the prep call, I hope the main call goes as well as the prep call did. It really did. I've enjoyed this one just as much as the prep call. So thank you.

Steven Franklin: No, thank you very much. And yeah, it's been really enjoyable. I just wish it could have been longer, to be honest.

Paul Marden: Well, maybe we'll bring you back for part two again sometime soon. Thank you, Steven.

Steven Franklin: Thank you.

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/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.

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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 Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends on 8th May 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://thetypefacegroup.co.uk/

www.linkedin.com/in/polly-buckland-69146a12

Download the latest Impact Report

Polly sat on the client side in a marketing manager role at BMW (UK) Ltd before co-founding The Typeface Group in 2010. She’s an ideas person, blending creativity and commercial awareness to get the best outcomes for our clients.

The Typeface Group is a B Corp Communications Agency + Design Studio based in North Hampshire. Their mission is to counteract digital chatter by championing authentic and strategic communication. Team TFG work with brilliant minds in business to extract, optimise and amplify their expertise, cutting through content clutter and stimulating sales
while reducing digital waste at all costs.  

The Typeface Group have been B Corp certified since October 2021 and is currently going through recertification. 

Nancy Hyne: True Horizon: https://truehorizon.co.uk/

Seismic Change: https://www.seismic-change.com/

Transcription: 

Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with Vista attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. 

On today’s episode I’m joined by Polly Buckland the Owner Founder of The Typeface Group a B Corp Communications Agency and Design studio based in Hampshire.

The climate emergency is a subject that is gaining traction.  The changes to our climate are palpable, and finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint and impact on the planet is front and centre for many people that visit attractions.  

People are making mindful decisions about where to spend their time and money, to have as little impact as possible – but at the same time people still want to enjoy experiences.  

There are many attractions that understand this and are working to reduce their impact, and communicate this clearly to potential guests.  So today I’m going to be talking to Polly about how you can measure, and communicate the sustainability of your attraction.

Paul Marden: Polly, welcome to the show.

Polly Buckland: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul Marden: Absolute pleasure. My first in the driver's seat all by myself. So it was important to me that this was going to be an interview with a friend so that I could ease myself into the hot seat of being the main host of Skip the Queue.

Polly Buckland: Happy to help.

Paul Marden: Thank you. Thank you for joining me. So regular listeners will know that we always start the podcast with a icebreaker question or two, which is always a surprise. So I picked out some lovely ones for you. Okay. These were ones that came from one of the podcast alumni last week, Ross Ballinger from Drayton Manor. So these were ones that he prepared. So he said, “If you could master one new skill instantly, what would it be and why?”

Polly Buckland: Being able to focus one thing at a time, because I don't know what that feels like.

Paul Marden: Does any agency owner know that? I mean, I think that is kind of a skill for agency owners to be able to focus on 16 things concurrently.

Polly Buckland: No, I’m not sure. Yeah. I feel like it would be a superpower to just really focus in on just that one thing.

Paul Marden: It's interesting, isn't it, because different people behave in different ways. So some people just hyper focus, don't they? Right down into the cornflakes. I can't do that at all. I'm like, just give me the headlines and I'll focus on the six things concurrently, rather than write down deep.

Polly Buckland: Indeed. Lots of tabs open.

Paul Marden: Oh, yeah, completely. All right, so my next one then. If you could live in any period of history, what would it be?

Polly Buckland: Well, my mum told me recently that we descend from Vikings in our family. So maybe I'd go Viking. Maybe I'll go that era.

Paul Marden: That's taking it right back, isn't it? That's good.

Polly Buckland: Or all the 60’s, 70’s, because my mum also went to the Isle of Wight festival when Hendrix was there, and that sounds like it was fun.

Paul Marden: I think if I had to choose between those two, I'd probably go for 60’s or 70’s.

Polly Buckland: Life might have been harder as a Viking.

Paul Marden: I think it could have been quite a lot harder as a Viking. We went to Wealden Downland Museum a couple of weeks ago, and you could see the history of all of the different buildings and places that people lived. Yeah, no, I'll take central heating, please. Central heating and somewhere to cook your dinner. Don't really want to go back to just everybody sitting around a fire trying to. Trying to cook off a fire and live in the same space. That doesn't sound too fun for me.

Polly Buckland: No. Maybe I was hasty. Yeah. Let's go to the Isle of Wight festival and watch the doors.

Paul Marden: Sounds pretty cool to me. All right then, Polly. So the other thing that we always ask people is, what is their unpopular opinion? So tell me, what's yours?

Polly Buckland: I don't like ABBA. 

Paul Marden: Really?

Polly Buckland: Quiet, full stop. Well, just so overplayed. It makes me sulk a little bit if I'm dancing and someone puts an ABBA track on.

Paul Marden: Which is quite often, isn't it, really?

Polly Buckland: It's too often.

Paul Marden: So you're not too interested in watching some musicals with some ABBA soundtrack in it? That's. That's not going to light your fire?

Polly Buckland: My kids like watching the Mamma Mia films. They're okay. I like Meryl Streep, but.

Paul Marden: Not so much the music.

Polly Buckland: No. And I love musicals, but, yeah, not ABBA.

Paul Marden: So next wedding you go to, better make sure that they don't have ABBA on the soundtrack and ruin the end of the evening for you.

Polly Buckland: Yeah.

Paul Marden: Okay. So, Polly, thank you. We are going to talk about sustainability reporting because this is something that you do in your business. Yeah. But it's also something that you do helping other organisations with their sustainability reporting, isn't it? So really, I just wanted to start right back at the beginning. For people that have never done this before that heard the term bandied around, what does it actually mean to be doing sustainability reporting within an organisation?

Polly Buckland: Well, it depends what framework you choose to report by and what's most suitable for your business. And there are many excellent sustainability consultancies out there that can help you kind of decide which road to go down. But for me, regardless of what framework you choose to work by, sustainability reporting is important because you can't improve what you don't measure. 

Polly Buckland: And in order to move forward as a more sustainable business, you also need to bring your team on board, your customers on board, and you're kind of missing the most important communication tool if you haven't galvanised your mission and your targets into a report. So, yeah, it's really important, regardless of where you are in your journey, regardless of whether it's a legal requirement for your business or not, to actually get your goals down in black and white and start communicating them.

Paul Marden: So there's something you touched on there about it being a legal requirement for some people. So is it's mandatory for some sorts of organisations, is it? And then is it an optional for others?

Polly Buckland: Yeah. So quoted companies, LLPs, large businesses, there's kind of thresholds of energy usage and turnover that will define whether you are legally required to report or not. All B Corps have an obligation to produce annual impact report. And that's kind of how we started putting our annual reports together since our accreditation three and a bit years ago.

Paul Marden: Wow. Okay. So if you don't have to do it, if it's not a legal requirement for you to do it, why would you do it? It sounds like, not having done this before myself, it feels like it could be quite a lot of work. So is there a business benefit to producing this?

Polly Buckland: It is quite a lot of work. It's definitely not a tick box exercise. There's buckets of research out there as to the relationship between consumer behaviour and sustainability. So McKinsey did a study. 60% of customers actively prioritise purchasing from sustainable businesses. Capgemini, 77% of customers buy from and remain loyal to brands that show their social responsibility. 

Polly Buckland: That I could literally keep quoting stats as to why businesses should take their sustainability goals very seriously and the communication of their sustainability initiatives very seriously, because it's becoming clearer. There was another stat about primarily women making the decisions based on sustainability of a business, and millennials and Gen Z being sort of high up the list of people that are taking sustainability creds into consideration when they're making a purchase.

Polly Buckland: So, I mean, it's a barrel load of stats that suggest if you don't have your eye on sustainability reporting and communicating your sustainability goals, you perhaps should have.

Paul Marden: Yeah. So thinking about our listeners and sorts of people that listen to the podcast, we've got attractions. And, you know, when we as an agency going and talking to people, we're talking about the audience. Who is it that's actually going to be buying from an attraction? Those are key demographics that you're talking about and making buying decisions off the basis of sustainability reporting and sustainability an overlap of what they want and what the organisation is offering. That's a key buying decision for people that are making decisions about where do they go at the weekend with their family. Could be off the back of those sustainability goals themselves, couldn't they?

Polly Buckland: 100%. And actually, if you think of the little people that are going to these attractions, I know my daughter is in junior school at the moment, and they've done, it's part of the curriculum now. So she's coming home and talking to me about plastics in the ocean and looking at signage and looking at labels on fair trade, that there are little people out there that are looking for these messages now. Yeah, it's important to them. I even noticed the other day a new Sainsbury's opened near where we are, and there is an abundance of sustainability messaging throughout the shop.

Paul Marden: Oh, really?

Polly Buckland: Yeah. So I think people are switching on to the fact that consumers want to see this stuff.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So the other group of people that listening to us are people that working with attractions. And I guess if you're doing sustainability reporting, does that also look at the supply chain? So the people that you buy from, you need to be buying from people that are also thinking about sustainability. So for agencies like us or other people that are servicing the attraction sector, for those attractions that are interested in sustainability reporting, they're going to look to that, to their suppliers to also care about those sorts of things.

Polly Buckland: Yeah, 100%. So doing your due diligence with your supply chain is a big part of what you claim to be as a business. We've just supported one of our clients with the design of their GRI reporting. And as part of that, as one of their suppliers, we had to write a statement to go into that GRI report. So, yeah, supplier due diligence is massive, and I think it would only help you as an agency or as a supplier into these big attractions to not only do the sustainability reporting get the accreditation with whatever framework that works for you, but communicate it to your prospects and customers as well.

Paul Marden: Yeah. So you're talking a little bit about frameworks, and you've talked about different types of sustainability report. Is there some kind of standardisation to this? You know, accountants have standards by which they do their financial reporting. Is that the same sort of thing happening in sustainability space?

Polly Buckland: There are just a number of frameworks you can report by. So if you are one of those larger businesses that we spoke about previously, there are SECR regulations that you need to be compliant for. There are reporting frameworks, as I mentioned, like GRI. There's the ISO accreditation, there's B Corp and our sustainability consultant that we use, Nancy Hine from True Horizon, based down in the New Forest. She very often says it's a case of choosing the framework that's right for you and what you're hoping to achieve as a business. So went down the B Corp route because that's suitable for us. One of our clients, as I said, has just gone down the GRI route. So there isn't one size fits all.

Polly Buckland: And there are a lot of consultancies out there, like Seismic Change, for example, that can support using whichever framework is most kind of commercially viable for you and where you're looking to go as a business, but keeping that credibility through the reporting.

Paul Marden: So getting some advice and guidance from some of the experts to help you pick makes a lot of sense then, I guess.

Polly Buckland: 100%. 

Paul Marden: We've talked a little bit about the frameworks. Now you might need somebody to help you with those frameworks, but let's just take it right back to basics. We need to talk a little bit about the sustainability report itself. How do you go about actually gathering all the data and being able to report on the numbers themselves?

Polly Buckland: Yeah, so like us, when we started, weren't really affiliated with any framework. And actually we started by just getting an environmental audit of our business because were interested in how we fared. And that's really how were then introduced into the world of B Corp. But at a basic level, I would split impact reporting into the story and what makes you different as a business and where you've been, where you are, where you want to go, what your commitments are and the data which would be your scope one, two and three emissions. 

Polly Buckland: So your scope one emissions, they include all direct emissions from the activities of your business. So that might include any company owned facilities or vehicles. Scope two emissions cover indirect emissions from electricity, heat, cooling that are used by the organisation. And then scope three is pretty much where everything else sits. So for us, a fully remote business, the majority of our emissions sit in scope three, and we are granular to the point where we know the majority of our emissions come from our coffee habit. 

Polly Buckland: And that is. That is fact. So once you get a basic understanding of what your scope one, two and three emissions are, there's so much training you can do as a business, whether it's through carbon literacy or you can find consultants to come in and do one one training. What I found was really important is getting the whole team involved in that training.

Polly Buckland: So everyone has a basic understanding of what we're measuring when we're saying scope one, scope two, or scope three, what we mean and what's included within those scopes so people can start to be mindful about waste. So understanding the emissions is important, but tracking your emissions as a business is really important. And we use a business called Compare Your Footprint. And it's basically an engine that you put your data into and it tells you what your carbon footprint is.

Paul Marden: And it's doing that across all of those three different scopes of emissions that you're able to put your data in. Because obviously that's going to really vary by types of organisation, isn't it? Because if you're running a big attraction, then you're going to be, you know, that's a big physical space, isn't it? So you're going to be consuming lots of electricity to be able to power that thing, and probably gas as well to be able to heat it. But, you know, there's ways of mitigating that. But your focus might be different than you are if you're a virtual organisation like us where you know you, a lot of it is very indirect, that kind of scope three type stuff.

Polly Buckland: Exactly. And I guess it's important to differentiate at this point the difference between carbon neutrality and net zero. So there are lots of businesses that will claim carbon neutrality and what that means is they've calculated their scope one and two emissions and have offset those emissions. You don't have to have any reduction plan in place for those emissions and you can offset them and claim carbon neutrality. So on one hand, at least, scope one and two emissions are being measured. However, we could, I could easily do that as a business and pay 30 quid in offsets and claim carbon neutrality knowing that I have tons of emissions sat in my scope 3, whereas net zero, you have to get your baseline of emissions, then you have to reduce them by 90%, I believe it is, and then offset the rest.

Polly Buckland: So there's a world of difference between claiming carbon neutrality and net zero and there's most people, if not everyone really is in between and doing the work. I digress going back to that very first impact report, getting a handle on your emissions. In our first impact reports, we said we've done scope one and two, we haven't done scope three yet, so being really transparent because you've got to start somewhere. And actually, we included in our Impact Report because weren't governed, it didn't have to be compliant in the way that a GRI report might be. 

Polly Buckland: So we're slightly more free with what we include. We really told a story through ours on what we set out to do, what we did towards that, what worked, what didn't work. Then our data and data visualisation around our scope one, two and three emissions. And then actually the biggest part of our first ever impact report was the to do list for the coming year.

Paul Marden: Oh, really?

Polly Buckland: What we wanted to focus on. Yeah. And actually the beauty of an impact report like that for us is, A, we get really good feedback because people love the storytelling aspect of it. But B, I'm just doing my third impact report now for us, and I go back to last year and say what we said were going to do, and I have a double page spread with what we said were going to do, what we actually did. So it's a really great accountability tool, as well as a way to tell the story of your sustainability progress.

Paul Marden: Yeah. It holds you accountable for setting a plan and then measuring how well you completed against that plan. And I'm guessing that varies. Some things you will have done really well on some things you didn't progress on, and there'll be some things that you do that you hadn't necessarily thought about as well.

Polly Buckland:  Yeah, yeah. And there are some targets in there, like revenue from purpose driven businesses. I think year one were at 30% and we said we wanted to get to 40%, and then we said we wanted to get to 50%. And I think we're at about 54% at the moment. So putting those targets in place really helps give you that focus throughout the year in some of the decisions you make as a business.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely.

Polly Buckland: It helps you grow internally as well as provides a vehicle for communicating something that's actually very important to a lot of people that are choosing your product or service.

Paul Marden: You touched on the storytelling element of this. When I think about sustainability reporting myself, I guess I started from a point of view of, and this might because I'm a data geek, but I started from thinking there's a huge amount of data involved in this, you're going to have to gather lots, but equally important to you is the storytelling around it. So are you thinking about that in advance, about the narrative of where you want to take the business over the year ahead. And how are you thinking about that? Is that something that you get the whole team involved in?

Polly Buckland: So throughout the year, we have a slide deck open and it's called our Sustainability scrapbook. And any decisions we make or anything that we do mindfully around the sustainability of the business, anyone can chuck into that deck. It doesn't look pretty, but it's just a repository. Show us putting our money where our mouth is and making decisions that might not directly impact our scope, but could have a real social impact, for example. So we use that Sustainability scrapbook to help build up the story in our impact report for the following year. I think businesses are going through a lot of change at the moment, and there might quite naturally be a theme that pops up when you're starting your impact report journey for the year. So last year, for us, it was educating ourselves and other people.

Polly Buckland: So we'd done a lot of training internally, but we'd also created our digital cleanup challenge to help people understand their digital footprint. So that became the thread that worked its way through our impact report last year. This year, we have defined down our services. So our impact report is about kind of slaying in your own lane and being really clear on what it is that you do to reduce waste. Yet naturally, if the people that are writing and communicating your impact report are close to the decision making, you'll probably quite naturally know where your report is going to go in that any one year. If you outsource it, so we support businesses to help them tell their story through their impact report. We interview the key decision makers in the business and we will really draw from them that narrative.

Polly Buckland: And I think it's really easy to get bogged down in the data. It's incredibly important, but it can be quite stressful gathering that all together. So actually having someone interview you about, but what were the things that you loved? What were the things that you saw people coming into your attraction really engage with? What was the thing that surprised you about signage that you put up to do with sustainability? Or, I don't know, when you get the little activity sheets for the kids, what did the younger visitors engage with the most? Asking them that sort of question will really draw out the story to help bring the impact report to life.

Paul Marden: Yeah, and I love the scrapbook idea. I love the scrapbook idea just more broadly as just a place for the whole team to dump their thoughts about doing different things. So having one all about sustainability. It must capture so much that the more senior people, the people that lead the organisation, they may not see some of the smaller stuff going on, and they're. They could be really powerful stories. So it kind of makes it much more democratic across the team, doesn't it? To have a place where everyone can put their thoughts about sustainability and record the little things that they're doing. And then you can draw those stories out later on.

Polly Buckland: 100%. But you can use those stories to engage your customers as well. I've been on a couple of panels, the B Corp type events, and I've sat alongside a lady called Faye, who owns Beevive, which are the little vials that revive bees. I think they're in the Natural History Museum shop, and they're not B Corp yet, but they are a manufacturer. So their raw materials, their packaging, the mileage, their distribution, everything has to be considered. And what Faye and her team are excellent at is documenting all of that. And it's like we said one of the panels, just because you don't wear your Fitbit doesn't mean you haven't done the steps. And I think it is the same with sustainability accreditations. You might not be ready to be B Corp. You might not be ready to go through an ISO accreditation or GRI reporting.

Polly Buckland: You might not be ready to be B Corp. You might not be ready to go through an ISO accreditation or GRI reporting. You might not be legally required to do any of that. But let's start documenting it because people care. And you could run one initiative at your attraction, and that's you off the mark. You've started your sustainability story, and I think that should be documented and that should be shared with your audiences.

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So that story that you can tell, I guess, is kind of reusable, isn't it? Because it's not just about, you know, you start off thinking about sustainability reporting. I'm going to have annual report and I'm going to publish it. But this is a story that can thread through everything, I guess.

Polly Buckland: Yeah, 100%. I think this is the same with all content produced across most businesses, to be honest. Lots and lots of hours go into creating something, and then it gets shared once on LinkedIn or there's a paid Facebook campaign, and then it dies a death. I saw someone on LinkedIn the other day, say, for every hour you take to produce a piece of content, you should spend the same amount of time distributing it. And I think that sustainability reports, impact reports, can take weeks, if not months. So as part of your reporting, I would have a distribution strategy as well. So where are all the places that you can get people to engage with that report? Is there a QR code in the cafe at your attraction where it's like, do you want to have a look at what we're doing for sustainability?

Polly Buckland: Is it an email that goes through to all your members? I would imagine that investors want to see this type of information. I would imagine that it would be really important to go onto the bottom of job descriptions when you're recruiting because there is a huge influx of people out there in the market that want to work for purposeful businesses. So this impact or sustainability report should go everywhere, really, in the footer of your emails. You just want to get eyeballs on it. And of course you can break it down. Kew Gardens have got a really great video on YouTube about their sustainability mission. What I would say is, don't hide it. And I think previously, sustainability reporting sits with other financial reports and policies in the footer of a website.

Polly Buckland: I looked earlier at an attraction that me and my family love going to, and they have some really nice bits of sustainability messaging when you're there. I couldn't find their sustainability report on their website. It was kind of the group website and then it was hidden away in a sub sustainability page. And I think transparency is really important. And bringing your sustainability report to the conversation, not hiding it away once you spent all those hours creating it.

Paul Marden: Yeah, there was a. There's an attraction that we visited just recently that were talking to, and they've got biomass boiler on their site, and they coppice wood from the site and they use that coppiced wood then to power the biomass boiler, which then powers the hot water that people are sitting in hot tubs and enjoying. You know, there's a really powerful story to tell there about the sustainability of going to that place. And that's something that they recognise is not something that they're not telling that story very effectively. And I think for a lot of people in the UK, now they're making decisions about what they do for their long weekends or their holidays, even on the basis of trying to have a minimal impact.

Paul Marden: And if you've lost that story, even, you know, even the people that are doing lots of amazing work may not be spotting the opportunities to tell the story of what they're doing to be heard by those people that make the decisions.

Polly Buckland: Yeah. And I think that they're photo opportunities as well. Right. So if you're in a hot tub and there's a little sign saying this is powered by wood from the estate, that's a little Instagram opportunity for those people to be righteous about the choices they've made, about what attraction they've chosen to go to. So I think more and more there's an opportunity for user generated content with sustainability messaging on site. So, yeah, everything's really an opportunity to share that message and it shouldn't be just contained to the impact report.

Paul Marden: I was at the Natural History Museum last week with my daughter's class. I took the class, I was one of the responsible adults going along with them. And I had 15 10 year olds in the gift shop at the end. And of course I'm just stood there like a numpty in the middle, just watching them all, trying to make sure they would make a decision as quickly as they possibly could. And I did find myself looking at the signage that was in the shop and they were talking about their sustainability journey and how they reduced single use plastics from what they were doing and they tried to improve the sustainability of the gifts that were available in the shop. So those messages are there, but are they consistent? Are they shared everywhere?

Paul Marden: So that wherever people are touching that brand, is it available for them to understand that it's a sustainable brand? It's important, isn't it?

Polly Buckland: Yeah.

Paul Marden: So I think you've touched on this, but let's just. Is this something you would do on your own or is this something where you would get in help from experts to get you started?

Polly Buckland: I would get help because you've got to factor in the hours in your day as having a value. So the length of time it would take you to figure out how to do an audit on your business and to work out your starting point and to get your initial scope one, two and three emissions measured is probably going to take you three or four times as long as it would a consultant. So if you can, I would do that. If you can't, there are some great tools out there I mentioned Compare Your Footprint and their customer service is really excellent. So if you want to start simple, you can. But if you have the budget, I would go with a consultant because you'll get to where you want to go, which is ultimately to find your baseline quicker.

Paul Marden: Yeah. Is this something where you start small and get a consultant in maybe to help you with a small part of the organisation? Or is this something where you really want to be throwing your all into this to try to do everything that is kind of best practice all at once?

Polly Buckland: Oh, no. No one's perfect. So don't hold yourself to that standard because it's just going to stop you doing anything out of fear. I think you just need to get started. That said, hitting publish on my first ever impact report was one of the most stressful things I've ever done because I just felt like I was going to be judged.

Paul Marden: I think that worries me as well, is that thought that unless I do a perfect job, there's a risk that when I put this out there, that I'm going to be accused of greenwashing, and that my intent may not be well understood if I don't do it perfectly first time.

Polly Buckland: Yeah. Which is why, again, that storytelling part of the impact reporting is really important for me, because I will say we are not perfect. These are the things that we know we need to work on, but these are the things we've done better. And that's what I really like. The B Corp BIA assessment and their framework is because it takes you across five categories of measurement, and no one's perfect in any of them, but what it does do is it provides a framework for you to better and measure yourself against. Yeah, I think the messaging behind your sustainability is really important. If you're professing to be perfect and you're not, you will get stung, because I think people can see through that.

Polly Buckland: But if you are showing that you're trying to better, I don't think many people could argue with that. So it's not just environmental reporting from a B Corp standpoint, it takes you across governance, workers, community, the environment, and your customers. There is a real breadth to that framework. So, actually, on our first go at certification, I guess our strongest category was governance.

Paul Marden: Oh, really? Okay.

Polly Buckland: Yeah. And then you have three years to make changes, make improvements. It's a continuous improvement journey, for want of a better word. And we're just about to re accredit. We're going through re accreditation now after three years, and you can see significant improvement across those categories.

Paul Marden: So that B Corp framework, that's going to be relevant to quite a lot of attractions that are profit making organisations. But of course, people like our charity based museums and some of the cultural organisations that could be non profit making. The B Corp route might not work for them, but it's something that quite a lot of consumers recognise now, isn't it?

Polly Buckland: It is. And the B impact assessment tool is still a useful framework, regardless if you want to become accredited or not, because it takes you through the five categories to focus on. And actually, I think if you're starting your impact reporting and you're not sure where to begin, it's a really nice framework to use.

Paul Marden: Lovely. Polly, really interesting talking to you about sustainability reporting and then going off and talking a little bit about B Corp and places like that as well. It's been lovely. We always ask our guests to leave us with a book recommendation, something they love, or it can be anything, a personal book recommendation, a business book. So what have you brought with you today?

Polly Buckland: I absolutely love Manifest by Roxy Nafousi, 7 steps to living your best life. It's not a book about visualise it and it will happen. It's a book that takes you through the steps to improve your chances of achieving what you want to in life. It takes you through your vision, removing fear and doubt, how you can align your behaviour to get what you want, how you can overcome tests from the universe, how you can embrace gratitude, turn envy into inspiration and trust the universe. So it sounds a bit woo, but everyone that I know that's read it absolutely loves it.

Paul Marden: What a lovely recommendation, Polly. Thank you. So that will go onto our list of the books recommended by our guests, which are blog posts that we've got. And as ever, if you want to win the book, if you head over to X and you retweet the episode announcement with the words I want Polly's book, the first person that does that will get the book sent to them. Once again, thank you ever so much for coming on the podcast and talking to me about sustainability reporting. It's been lovely. Thank you.

Polly Buckland: You're welcome. Thank you.

Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/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

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends on 17th April 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://carbonsix.digital/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pmarden/

Paul Marden is the Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Six Digital and the CEO of Rubber Cheese. He is an Umbraco Certified Master who likes to think outside the box, often coming up with creative technical solutions that clients didn’t know were possible. Paul oversees business development and technical delivery, specialising in Microsoft technologies including Umbraco CMS, ASP.NET, C#, WebApi, and SQL Server. He's worked in the industry since 1999 and has vast experience of managing and delivering the technical architecture for both agencies and client side projects of all shapes and sizes. Paul is an advocate for solid project delivery and has a BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile.

https://www.rubbercheese.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellymolson/

Kelly Molson is the Founder of Rubber Cheese, a user focused web design and development agency for the attraction sector. Digital partners to Eureka! The National Children’s Museum, Pensthorpe, National Parks UK, Holkham, Visit Cambridge and The National Marine Aquarium.Kelly regularly delivers workshops and presentations on sector focused topics at national conferences and attraction sector organisations including ASVA, ALVA, The Ticketing Professionals Conference and the Museum + Heritage Show.

As host of the popular Skip the Queue Podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions, she speaks with inspiring industry experts who share their knowledge of what really makes an attraction successful.Recent trustee of The Museum of the Broads.

Our guests:

Paul Wright from Made by Wag

Andy Povey from Convious

• Looking forward to 2023: Key digital trends attractions shouldn’t miss out on

Bernard Donoghue from ALVA

• Season finale, with Bernard Donoghue!

David Hingley from BOP Consulting

• Visitor Experience restructure at Tate, with David Hingley

Paul Griffiths from Painshill Park

• The transformation of Painshill Park, with Paul Griffiths, Director of Painshill

Ross Ballinger from Drayton Manor

• The importance of building a great social community and process behind rebranding a 70 year old attraction

Danielle Nicholls from Alton Towers

• The importance of building a great social community and process behind rebranding a 70 year old attraction

Rachel Mackay from Hampton Court Palace

• The importance of Sector Cooperation with Carlton Gajadhar and Rachel Mackay

Sophie from Eureka! The National Children's Museum

• How to write a website brief that agencies will thank you for, with Sophie Ballinger

Elizabeth McKay, CEO of the London Transport Museum

• Developing a culture of innovation, with Elizabeth McKay

Simon Addison from The Roman Baths

• How introducing variable pricing increased revenue by 2.3 million, with Simon Addison

Dominic Jones from The Mary Rose and Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

• Attraction partnerships and rivalries, with Dominic Jones

Transcription: 

Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions.

Paul Marden: On today's episode, I'm joined by my co host, Kelly Molson, founder of Rubber Cheese, as well as a group of returning guests to the podcast. This is Kelly's last episode as the host of Skip the Queue as she's leaving rubber cheese after 21 fantastic years of the agency. Today we'll be turning the tables on Kelly as the guests ask her the icebreaker questions. We'll also be looking back at the impact the podcast has had as some of our guests share their experiences of appearing on the podcast with Kelly.

Kelly Molson: If you like what you hear, subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.

Paul Marden: So, how you doing?

Kelly Molson: I feel slightly. I feel slightly apprehensive. You just said, like, are you ready? Have you got your tissues ready? Like I have. I'm prepared.

Paul Marden: Good. So, listeners, today is a big episode, as well as being on 99th episode is also Kelly's last episode as the Skip the Queue host. Yeah. So many of you will know that after 21 years heading up Rubber Cheese, Kelly has decided to spread her wings and move on to pastures new. 

Paul Marden: And while this is news from many of the listeners, I've had a few months to prepare for this. So I've been thinking long and hard about this episode of what can I do? And I thought it'd be nice to look back at some of your best bits, but I didn't feel like I should do that on my own. I actually thought the best way of looking back at your best bits are to bring your best bits back to us. So I'm just gonna admit a load of people that want to join the edge.

Kelly Molson: Oh, no.

Paul Marden: So we have got a host of po face and audience members that are going to join us today.

Kelly Molson: I'm going to cry already.

Paul Marden: Excellent. I've done my job to start with straight away, so everyone's joined us for a virtual leaving party. So I hope you've got your whatsits in a bowl and your cheese and pineapple ready for you as we look back over some of your best bits and enjoy a Skip the Queue episode at its best. And so, for those of you that are listening and not watching, first of all, where have you been? These aren't facestrail radio. You should be subscribing on YouTube and watch these lovely people. But if you're listening, let me introduce you to the host of people that are joining us. We've got Andy Povey from Convious. We've got Bernard Donoghue from ALVA. We've got David Hingley from BOP Consulting. We've got Rachel Mackay from Hampton Court Palace. Sophie Ballinger from Eureka!

Kelly Molson: You're supposed to be on holiday.

Paul Marden: Sophie from Eureka! The National Children's Museum. We've got Ross Ballinger from Drayton Manor. We've got Dominic Jones from the Mary Rose. And we've also been joined by some of your lovely Rubber Cheese colleagues that wanted to say hi and goodbye.

Kelly Molson: Look at everyone's beautiful faces. Oh, God.

Paul Marden: And the tissues are going already.

Kelly Molson: Do you know what? Just before I came on, I was like, I'm not going to cry. I am completely in control of today. If it was yesterday, I would have cried, but I'm completely in control today. I am not in control at all.

Paul Marden: So, long time listeners will know that we always start off with an icebreaker question. And Kelly never tells the guests what the icebreaker question is in advance. So I'm afraid, Kelly, it's your turn. Bernard, you're going to kick off for us today. Would you like to ask Kelly your icebreaker question? 

Bernard Donoghue: Thank you. Claudia Winkleman. I'm delighted to join this episode of The Traitors. 

Paul Marden: Have you got the fringe to be Claudia? I'm sorry.

Kelly Molson: No, we have not.

Bernard Donoghue: Kelly, it's World Book day tomorrow. You've received short notice. What book do you go as to work, please?

Kelly Molson: Oh, I would. I'd have to take one of my daughter's books. So she has got this book called Oh, no, George. And it's about an incredibly naughty dog with. He's a ginger dog with a very long nose. I would have to dress up as George because he doesn't do himself any favours. He hopes that he's going to be good, but he's just. He can't cope with being good and he eats all the cake and he knocks over all the tulips in the house and he's incredibly lovable, but incredibly naughty. So definitely George. That's me. Right.

Bernard Donoghue: It's a lovely insight into your personality. 

Paul Marden: Perfect. 

Kelly Molson:  Great question. 

Paul Marden: It is a great question. I hope you're ready for a few more because we've got some of these lined up for you. So the next. The next person that's going to join us, unfortunately couldn't be here today, so they sent me a little message that we'll play now.

Paul Wright: Hi, Kelly. Remember me? It's Wag here.

Kelly Molson: This is my old co founder.

Paul Wright: My question to you. If every time someone clicked on a website and it made a sound. What noise would you want it to make?

Kelly Molson: Oh, it has to be a big old fart noise, right? A real big wet one, like a whoopee cushion. Fart noise, please. Thank you.

Paul Marden: So, Mrs. Marden, over breakfast this morning, as were talking through what I was going to talk about, said, oh, she's just going to say wet fart, surely.

Kelly Molson: Absolutely.

Paul Marden:  She knows you so well.

Kelly Molson: She’s my level 

Paul Marden:  Completely. Next up, we've got Mr. Andy Povey. 

Andy Povey: Hi, Kelly. It's been a while. So I'm very pleased to be here, but not for the reason that we are all there for. We spend a lot of time on the road, travelling around for our jobs. So my question is, what's your favourite motorway service station and why?

Kelly Molson: I tell you what, Peterborough motorway service station. Because I know that I'm probably an hour from home then, so I'm nearly home. I've had a good few coffees in Peterborough service station.

Andy Povey: I've not tried that one, I must admit.

Kelly Molson: I mean, I don't know if it's up there with, like, the best, but, you know, I just. I know that I'm going to be home soon.

Paul Marden: Bit depressing that the favourite motorway service is the one that's closest to home for you. Thank you, Andy. Next up, so here's a surprise. Danielle Nicholls from Alton Towers, you've managed to join us.

Danielle Nicholls: So my question to you, Kelly, is you've worked with a lot of attractions and theme parks over the years, but which is your favourite theme park attraction or ride that you've ever been on?

Kelly Molson: This is not a good question to ask, is it? Because I'm going to upset people. 

Danielle Nicholls: You can be diplomatic about it. 

Kelly Molson: My favourite ride, definitely not those ones that swing and literally make you one of them. My favourite ride. It's really hard. Yeah, it's really hard. Well, I was just trying to think of, like, where do I go with this? But I'm going to go with the one. It was mine and my dad's favourite when I was a kid and it doesn't exist anymore, which is really sad, but it's the Back to the Future ride at Universal.

Kelly Molson: Which was absolutely epic and I can remember years ago queuing up like four times on the trot to go on it with my dad and he just. It was just brilliant. Absolutely absolute. I mean, I love that. I love eighties music movies. Yeah. My genre, anyway, but, yeah, that ride was absolutely incredible. Oh, that's amazing. 

Danielle Nicholls: I never got to do that one so very jealous. 

Kelly Molson: Good memories.

Paul Marden: Paul Griffiths, can you take the floor and give Kelly a grilling? 

Paul Griffiths: Of course. Hi, Kelly. Good to see you. And good to see everyone else. We know that you love picking up souvenirs and knickknacks on your travels, particularly attractions. So what is your favourite souvenir you've taken away from one of your best tourist attractions?

Kelly Molson: I've got them all here. Look at them. I've got my bounty on my desk.

Paul Griffiths:  The show and tell answer then, isn't it?

Kelly Molson: Look, I've got. Yeah. Okay. What's my favourite one, though?

Paul Marden: For listeners, hey can't see you picking up a dodgy eighties ice cream box.

Kelly Molson: This is my ‘80s. It's a Bijam economy vanilla ice cream tub, which my parents were obviously really keen on feeding us well as a child. But in it are, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of rubbers that I've collected from different places and attractions over the years. And they smell. I wish this was smellyvision because they absolutely smell divine. There's so many in here. But I think, again, this is. And this is for memories. I'm going to go with this one and it's really old. This is my Thorpe Park rubber.

Paul Griffiths:  Very classic.

Kelly Molson: Isn't it great? So it's got the Thorpe park rabbit on it. Rangers. 

Danielle Nicholls: Is it the Thorpe Park Rangers? 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Yeah. Thorpe Park Ranger. Yeah. Thorpe Park. So that was, again, that was probably the closest attraction to the closest theme park to me as a kid, and we used to go there a lot and, like, my uncle used to take me there in the summer holidays. The whole family used to go. So that one has got really good memories. That's a great question, Paul. There's so many in here, though, that I could have chosen.

Paul Griffiths:  I didn't age to have them all to hand, though. 

Kelly Molson: That sat on my desk.

Paul Marden: So I promised you that we would try and faithfully stick to the format once you hand the Batman to me. So I'm going to give you a breather from being grilled by everybody. What was your unpopular opinion that you wanted to share with everybody?

Kelly Molson: Peas. Peas. Peas are the food of the devil. Peas taint everything that they touch. Sometimes. Nobody tells you that there's peas in stuff on the menu as well. Like, I love a fish pie. Fish pie is delicious. When you open up a fish pie and someone's gone. No, we'll just throw a few handful of peas in there just for a laugh. That's not fun. You can pick them out of stuff, but you can taste them in absolutely everything that they are in.

Paul Marden: That's not an unpopular opinion, that's just. That's just a fact. I don't know how everybody else feels about peas, but I'm a pea hater as well.

Sophie Ballinger:  Oh, what about cheesy peas?

Kelly Molson: No, cheesy peas. Even cheese would not make peas taste appealing to me.

Dominic Jones: Wasabi peas?

Kelly Molson: No. 

Danielle Nicholls:  Minty peas? 

Kelly Molson: No peas. I like beans. Beans are okay. And like edamame beans, which I like peas. But not peas. It's just a very distinct difference.

Bernard Donoghue: Nurse. Nurse. She's out of bed again.

Sophie Ballinger:  Where do you stand on mushy peas? 

Kelly Molson: Oh, so far from mushy peas. I did have to cook them once for Lee's old granddad. Oh, God. No.

Paul Marden: Guacamole as. Who was it? It was one of the politicians and labour politics. 

Andy Povey: Peter Mandelson. 

Paul Marden: There we go. Peter Mandelson went into a fish and chip shop and asked to have guacamole with his fish and chips and it turned out was mushy peas.

Kelly Molson: I'd eat guacamole with my chips. That's fine.

Paul Marden: So should we go back to grilling you on some.

Kelly Molson: This whole episode is just awkward questions for me. Is it great?

Paul Marden: You've done this to everybody for 99 episodes. It's your turn to take one. Rachel Mackay from Hampton Court Palace, welcome.

Rachel Mackay: Oh, hello. I've decided to go against the grade. I'm not going to ask your revision question because I know you'll just stare blankly at me anyway, so I'm going to go more general. What is your preference, running shoes or dancing shoes? 

Kelly Molson: Oh, dancing shoes. Dancing shoes all the way. I really miss dancing. You don't get to dance enough when you get older. Dancing is the one thing that I used to really love doing with my friends. 

Rachel Mackay: I thought you would say dancing shoes because also it gives you a bit of a heel.

Kelly Molson: Which I need. No, you're absolutely right.

Paul Marden: So the dancing. You'll be able to get them back out again soon because, what, Eddie's two now? Two and a bit. It will soon be birthday party season, where you'll be doing the hokey cokey and you'll be doing the conga.

Kelly Molson: And she's already got all my moves. She's already got all my moves. Yeah, she's in the dancing zone.

Paul Marden: Excellent. Next up, we've got somebody else that couldn't join us today, so they've sent us another little video to share with you. So this is Simon Addison from the Roman Baths and number two in the hour, top ten paid attractions outside London. And I say, sorry, Dominic.

Dominic Jones: He deserves it. He's a great guy. And so is the Roman Baths.

Paul Marden: Exactly. You haven't heard what he says yet.

Simon Addison: Hey, Kelly, it's Simon Addison here from the Roman Baths. I'm really sorry that I couldn't be with you for the recording today. Before I ask you my ice breaker question, I just wanted to tell you about the impact that skip the queue is having, not just on those people who work in visitor attractions, but those who visit them too. Last month, I was walking around the National Portrait Gallery with Dominic Jones and a visitor genuinely pulled him over and asked him if he was the Dominic Jones from Skip the Queue. Kelly, you have created an absolute monster there.

Kelly Molson: I love this.

Dominic Jones: That is actually true. It actually happened. We were a bit bemused by it and were worried that someone had set this visitor up, but they genuinely wanted a Korean visitor attractions and had listened to it and I'd obviously said my name a bit too loud to Simon and they came up and asked for a picture. It was completely random, but brilliant.

Paul Marden: I'm a little bit heartbroken because I actually genuinely thought they spotted the face and knew you from the YouTube.

Dominic Jones: I think it was the voice, but, yeah, no, it was brilliant. It's all because of Skip the Queue, which is Simon's rise had a massive impact on everyone in our industry and actually people who want to join our industry. So you should be really proud. And hopefully that's the last random stranger that stopped me. But it was fantastic.

Kelly Molson: Do you know what? I do feel really proud of that.

Paul Marden: So, Simon's question.

Simon Addison: Kelly, my icebreaker question for you is what is the weirdest piece of advice that you've ever received? And did you follow it? Thanks very much, Kelly, and thanks for everything. Thanks for all the episodes over the years and I wish you the very best of luck with everything.

Kelly Molson: I'm trying to think what has been. Do you know, I have been given some advice about public speaking before, which I thought was quite strange. I used to really. I used to get really anxious about public speaking. It wasn't something that was massively comfortable for me. And I had loads of coaching from a really good friend of mine, Andy Loparta. And I don't know if it was Andy. I don't think this was Andy that gave me this advice. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been. But someone told me that if you go on stage and you clench your butt cheeks, you can't actually clench anything else. At the same time. And I'm like. I am, though. I'm clenching my butt cheeks now and I'm clenching my teeth so you can. But that's always stuck in my head.

Kelly Molson: So I definitely tried it, but I don't know that it helped with my speaking whatsoever. I'm doing it now. Is everyone. Is everyone doing it now? Is everyone trying it? Everyone's doing it.

Paul Marden: Standing desk practicing it right now.

Sophie Ballinger: Yeah. Start bobbing up and down in my seat. You'll know why. 

Kelly Molson: There you go.

Paul Marden: Lovely segue. Sophie Ballinger from Eureka. Why don't you ask Kelly your icebreaker?

Kelly Molson: Hello, duck. 

Sophie Ballinger: Hello, duck. Hey, I've got a bit of a random one. I think I might have. It might have been asked you this in the agency interview many years ago, but I'm not sure because it's one of my favourites. Who would win in a fight between a badger and a baboon? 

Kelly Molson: I don't remember you asking me this. 

Sophie Ballinger: Should have done.

Kelly Molson: Badger. I think Badger. Badgers are quite vicious, aren't they? You think the boots. Everyone's shaking their head. Oh, I think badger. I've never seen a live badger either, but I know that they're quite vicious.

Paul Marden: We went into South Africa a few years ago and we stopped because we saw a troop of baboons on the side of the road and there were other people watching. So everybody got out their cars and they all stood around. All of a sudden, this alpha male baboon just crosses the road to the car behind us, opens the back door, gets into the woman's handbag when he's rifling through trying to find chocolate and she's sat in the front seat going absolutely crazy. So I promise you it'll be the baboon. So next up, we've got another video. Joining us this time it is Elizabeth McKay, CEO of the London Transport Museum.

Elizabeth Mckay: Hi, Kelly. You were the nicest interviewer I ever had. So my question for you is equally nice, I hope. So, when you're getting around London, what's your favourite mode of travel? Is it tube, bus or cycle? 

Kelly Molson: Oh, I actually prefer to walk, so neither of the above. I know. Sorry. I'm sorry. I like. So I have to get the train in. So my train is the Liverpool street line. So I tend to get off. You know, I go. I'll go to Liverpool street and then I quite like to walk places. I do like the tube. Not gonna dis the tube, especially not to Elizabeth. But I quite like the opportunity to go and see stuff. And I think walking around London, everything feels everything so close together.

Kelly Molson: So it's nice to be able to just walk and see things that you wouldn't normally see.

Bernard Donoghue: Can I just point out that I've seen Kelly getting out of a disco rickshaw at least three times in the last week.

Kelly Molson: Fake news. Fake news.

Paul Marden: Now, Kelly, you did say to me that you had a few thank you messages that you wanted to share with people. So do you want to just have a couple of minutes to thank some people?

Kelly Molson: Yes, I would. I would like to thank everybody because people have always been so incredibly generous with their time for me, and I'm always so grateful of that. You're generous to come on and talk to me. You're generous to come on and answer my ridiculous questions, but generous to share all your insight and knowledge. And I think especially through the pandemic, that meant an incredible amount to me and hopefully to our listeners as well. It really felt like people were coming on and sharing kind of a real time. This is where we're at. This is what's happening, and this is what we're doing about it. Experience. And it was amazing.

Kelly Molson: The pandemic was incredibly difficult for everybody, but for me, the highlight was knowing that I was getting to speak to so many different people and being able to share that with other people as well. And it made it a really special time for me. So thank you for everybody that has ever come on the podcast and answered my stupid questions and shared all of their stuff with me. Thank you. Thank you to all of the listeners. I genuinely could not have imagined. I could not have imagined how well this podcast would go. I honestly can remember the day that I came in, I was like, “We should definitely do this podcast. I've been looking. I don't think there's anything like it. We should do it.” And my team going, “Yeah, how do we do it? I don't know. Let's just do it, though.”

Kelly Molson: And this is what happens. I come up with these crazy ideas, and I'm the driver of them, but it's all the people around me that actually make the magic happen. And that is. That's for the podcast, that's for the survey, the report, the agency itself. All I've done is just kind of drag it along and share it with people. It's all the other people behind the scenes that do it. Steve works his magic every single episode. He really does. He cuts out a lot of swearing. The very professional introductions that I record separately to the interviews. Jesus. The amount of swearing that he has to cut out on those is ridiculous. So well done, Steve, mate, you deserve that award winning podcast editor title just for this. And Wenalyn. So Wenalyn down here waving. She.

Kelly Molson: I mean, she really is the powerhouse behind the podcast because I'll get you to come on. We'll have a lovely chat. It goes over to Steve for the editor, and it comes back to, well, and she does everything. She does everything. She creates all the graphics. She uploads everything to the, you know, the website, she does the transcriptions, she creates, does all the podcasts, all the scheduling, all of the. All of it. So, you know, she really does do all the hard grunt work behind it. So thank you, Wenalyn. It's been such a lovely. It's been lovely to work with you over the years. Thank you.

Paul Marden: Wenalyn wins the award for the longest distance journey into the meeting today because Wenalyn is over in the Philippines. Wenalyn wins this award in every single meeting that we have. So she does.

Kelly Molson: She does. There is one more. Thank you. I wanna make, which is to the unsung hero of Skip the Queue. So it's for an old team member of mine, Ashley Mays, because if it wasn't for her, actually, there probably wouldn't be a Skip the Queue. She made this happen, really. Not only did she come up with the name, but she actually got one of our first guests to agree to come onto the podcast. Because I can't tell you how difficult that first season was. If you've ever gone back, it actually launched in July 2019. This podcast, myself and my co founder, Wag, who asked the ridiculous question I answered with a fart earlier. We both used to interview guests, but if you've ever tried to get someone to come onto a podcast and they go, great. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: How many listeners and downloads have you got? You're like, none. Absolutely none. No listeners. You are our first guest. Please help us make something magic. That was quite a hard sell. Ashley had a family member who agreed to come onto the podcast, and it was actually Lynne Whitnall, who is the director of Paradise Wildlife Park, which is now Hertfordshire Zoo. She was the biggest name that we could have possibly hoped for in that first series. So really, that was the kind of catalyst for all of the other amazing guests that have come on since. 2019 was a really tough year for Rubber Cheese, and I had to let Ashley go at the end of 2019, and I'll tell you now, that was the single worst thing that I've ever had to do in my whole career as an agency owner, because she was brilliant.

Kelly Molson: And I felt like I'd failed her at that time. So I really wanted to make sure that she got a big thank you. She's gone on and done brilliant things. Don't get me wrong, brilliant people always do. But that was genuinely the toughest thing that I've ever had to do. And it's probably my biggest regret of running the agency all of these years as well. So, yeah, big shout out to Ashley. She made a big difference.

Paul Marden:  Every agency owner enjoys the fun bits, the launches, the winning new business. Nobody enjoys that bit. But it is this life, isn't it? So, yeah, it was a tough time for everybody, wasn't it? And you said that Ashley came up with the name as well, didn't she?

Kelly Molson: She did, yeah. Skip the Queue was all Ashley. I take no credit for that whatsoever.

Paul Marden: Amazing.

Danielle Nicholls: What a moment that was. That was really touching. 

Kelly Molson: Thank you.

Paul Marden: Keep it together, mate. You've still got a few minutes to go.

Kelly Molson: Okay?

Paul Marden: So let's segue for some light relief to Ross Ballinger from Drayton Manor.

Kelly Molson: Now, I'm not gonna lie, I'm really apprehensive about this. Ross. 

Ross Ballinger: Hello, lovely. 

Kelly Molson: Hi, Ross.

Ross Ballinger: It's so nice to see and hear you. I feel like.

Kelly Molson: Likewise, mate.

Ross Ballinger: I've only known you, like, a short space of time but you were such a champion for me and Danielle when you spotted us at theme park award a few years ago.

Danielle Nicholls: Really.

Ross Ballinger: And we're just so grateful for that. You spotted our passion and our energy for the industry and obviously we just gravitated toward each other. Anything you've done for all the other professionals in the industry as well. So true testament to everything that you've done it just. It's all paid off and everyone loves you and thank you so much for everything on Skip the Queue.

Kelly Molson: Oh, mate.

Ross Ballinger: No, honestly, I think that was probably one of the best years I ever had in the industry, really, because it, like, it did stem up a couple of things did, like, fall out at the back of it because it got. It got me a little bit of 15 minutes of fame that I really enjoyed. And then I managed to do some presentations with different things and owe credit to you, really, for just, like, putting us in the limelight for a little bit. 

Kelly Molson: I'm so pleased. I'm so pleased. I just want to tell the story because I met the two of you at the UK theme park awards. It was at Drayton Manor, wasn't it? And these guys are on the table behind me and I've never had such enthusiasm. You two were the light, I mean, that. It was a bit of a. It was a bit of a. It was a. It was a tough crowd, wasn't it? Everyone was quite subdued in there, but used to, like, “Yes,” shouting and just.

Danielle Nicholls: Basically every time anyone won, even if it was like, Pleasure Beach or being anyone. We were like, “Yeah, go guys.”

Ross Ballinger: We were wooing everybody.

Kelly Molson: What awards do should be like. Like, you two were like the Persona of an awards day. It was. It was so good to meet you that day. I had the best day meeting you two, and I just knew that I had to get you both on the podcast, and you were such a little dream team at Drayton Manor. And now, you know, you've set off on your different paths, but it's lovely to see. For me, it's really. I think it's brilliant to see where you're all going and what your good things are.

Ross Ballinger: Yeah. Thank you.

Danielle Nicholls: That's really kind. Thank you.

Ross Ballinger:  Yeah, it was just one of those cases of, like, sat in the right place at the right time and the rest is history. Like, yeah, loved it. Loved the meeting on that day. Instant connection, you know? And you just get an instant connection with someone who shares the same energy and passion and insight, and they understand what you're doing and what you stand for. So, yeah, it was a really good day. Loved it. My icebreaker question, I did have four. Actually, so I don't even know if Paul knows what. I'm going to be honest.

Paul Marden: Well, I'm taking the other two that you did send me because they were awesome.

Ross Ballinger: I'm going to go with, if you could switch live with any fictional character, who would it be?

Kelly Molson: It's a really good question. You need to. You have. You've wrote all these down, right? This is a good one.

Ross Ballinger: Yeah. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: With any fictional character. I'm trying to think of all the books that I've just thinking about. Well, okay. I've got this thing about reading. Like, if you go on holiday, I like to take, like, a really familiar book with me on holiday that you've read, like, a million times. And I don't know why. I've read The Beach, like, a billion times, which is far better than the film. Like, far better than the film. And I can't actually remember a guy's name in it now. It's gone off my head. But the Leonardo DiCaprio character in the book, I will swap lives with him because I feel like that whole travelling culture, I never got to do that. I wasn't brave enough to do that when I was younger, and I'd really like to go and do it now, but it's really difficult for toddler.

Paul Marden: Not brave enough to do that. But you were brave enough to jack it all in and set up an agency 20 years ago.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Should I have done the travelling? Who knows? But, yeah, I think, yeah, I would swap places with him, although he goes a little bit crazy towards the end. I'd take that.

Ross Ballinger: Thanks for your long lasting impact on a door. Thank you very much. Love you.

Paul Marden: Well said, Ross. Crack and jog. So I'm going to take that and segue off quite nicely now to a video from your greatest fan, my daughter, Miss Amelia Marden. She wanted to be part of this, but she's busy at school today, so she sent you in a question and she said,

Amelia Marden: Hello, Kelly. I've seen the video of the roller coaster you and dad went on at Drayton Manor. My question is, what is your favourite sort of roller coaster? Vertical drop or a loop de loop? Love you from Amelia.

Paul Marden: For listeners. I kept it together on that roller coaster. There was no noise. I was completely composed. Everything was fine until it started moving at the beginning.

Kelly Molson: So was this. No, hang on a minute. Was this the, this was the in the Viking. This is the Viking one, wasn't it? Because we've been on two roller coasters together. And the second one, it was in the rain and there was a lot of screaming in my ear as well. The first one was. Yeah, the first one was relatively screamy as well. What is my favourite? I like the shock of a drop. I do like a loop a loop. I'm cool with those. But there's something about like that. There's a, there's a motion sickness thing with me that is a bit. So the drop one I quite like. And again, this has got another good memory of my dad is that is Terra Towers. He loves the Terror Towers drop so much.

Kelly Molson: My dad's got this thing in his head about taking Edie to Disney. Like my dad. My dad best in, he'll be when she's five, he'll be like 76. So, you know, he's getting on and he's like, that's my cutoff point. We're going to go to Disney when she's five, whether we all like it or not, because I can't do it any older than that. And he's like, we're going to go on Terror Towers, aren't we, Dad? I don't know if you should, dad. It's almost, I feel like maybe it was trigger of a heart attack. I don't know. A bit worried. But he's adamant that he's, you know.

Paul Marden: He's going to Edie's five and we're taking them on to Terror Towers.

Kelly Molson: Maybe it's going to work, Dad.

Paul Marden: I think we don't need to set dad's expectations, teacups. And it's a small world and that's about it.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, I'll have that chat with him.

Paul Marden: And we have got a message in from Mister David Hingley.

David Hingley: So I sit in a lot of meetings with Kelly, either in person or online, in her role as a trustee at Museum of the Broads. And it's usually not as dramatic as it might be. We talk about steamboats, coal, and our upcoming Pete exhibition, which is fascinating but can lack a bit of drama. So my question is, if every time you enter a room for the rest of your life a piece of entrance music plays, what piece of music are you choosing and why?

Kelly Molson: Oh, my God. I've never thought about this question. This is a great question. Why has everyone given me really good questions now that I'm leaving? You idiots.

Paul Marden: David is promising to play this at every future trustees meeting. As you arrive, he'll have Spotify on the phone ready to play.

Kelly Molson: What would be my entrance music? I feel like it's got to be something. It's got to be something dancy where I can get my groove on. So I feel like. Like this someone's. Loads of people have probably said this, but I feel like. Like here comes the hot stepper. Would be a good one for me because I can, you know, I can drive in. Here come the odd stepper, you know?

David Hingley:  I'll record the next trustee meeting museums of the broad and circulates to this group.

Kelly Molson: Oh, please do.

Paul Marden: Thank you, David.

Kelly Molson: I'll tell you what. I'll do it at the AGM. I'll dance in at the AGM.

Paul Marden: So last up, we have Mr. Dominic Jones from the Mary Rose, who, along with Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, the third most popular paid attraction outside of London in the hour list released yesterday.

Dominic Jones: Yeah, very happy about that. Very happy.

Paul Marden: I can take you one better because still the undisputed most listened to podcast guest on Skip the Queue as of yesterday. Wow.

Dominic Jones: I honestly can't believe that.

Paul Marden: I know, I know. It's not as if you haven't dined out on that fact several times before.

Andy Povey: He doesn't like to talk about it, Paul.

Kelly Molson: He's so shy, doesn't he? 

Dominic Jones: I am shy. I don't talk about myself. That's incredible. What did you say number one?

Paul Marden: Number one by country mile, I might say.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, by nearly a hundred downloads, actually.

Dominic Jones: Oh, well, that's fantastic. I'm absolutely honored about that. I have to say, I am so sad that Skip the Queue with Kelly is coming to an end because it's kept me company on many a motorway journey, on many a day when I've had a really tough day at work and thought, you know, what's going to cheer me up is Skip the Queue. Because not only do you motivate and inspire the next generation, like the person that sort of bumped into me and Simon, but you also motivate, inspire all of us. And actually, without Skip the Queue, and to be fair, ALVA as well, I don't think I'd have this amazing network of friends and colleagues that really keep me sane in some of the tough times.

Dominic Jones: So I know we often talk and Bernard talks about how visitor attractions are like sort of the fourth emergency service, I would say, when it comes to working in a visitor attraction, you and ALVA. So Skip the Queue and ALVA are the emergency services, because without you, I don't think we'd be sane. Absolutely. You've made such a difference to my personal life and I can't thank you enough. But for an icebreaker question, one of the things that irritates me on Skip the Queue is you can tell who Kellys favourites are. So if she has someone from the zoo and she likes them, whats your favourite animal? Or someone from a theme park, whats your favorite ride? And then she gets people that she just asks really difficult icebreakers. So I was thinking, how can I get the most random, hardest icebreaker?

Dominic Jones:  And I was trying to remember, but when I was a child in the eighties and nineties growing up, a lot of my friends had Sky TV. We couldn't afford Sky TV. We had BBC One and BBC two. Well, on Sky TV there was this thing called WWF. Now, this was before the Internet. So I went to the library and worked out that it was about looking after animals. Turns out it wasn't. It was actually wrestling. And so I used to sort of been in the playground, talk to my friends, but never ever watching it, never really understanding it. So I'd be in my bedroom. I was very young at the time, pretending to be a WWF wrestler. I was the praying mantis, because I did watch BBC 2 a lot. Mantis, one of the very strongest animal in the animal kingdom.

Dominic Jones: But if you were a wrestler in the WWF, what would be your wrestling name?

Kelly Molson: I used to love the wrestling.

Dominic Jones: I bet you did. I bet you did.

Kelly Molson: I did. We went. So they did the one in the UK. They did the royal rumble and I had the finger and everything. Yeah. I used to like the bushwhackers and rowdy Roddy Piper and Jake the Snake. I was well into it. I was really into it. Yeah. I was not cool at school until I was well into the wrestling. So what would be my wrestling name?

Dominic Jones: Yeah. And why?

Kelly Molson: The trouble is, I'm a bit of a lover, not a fighter, so don't think I'd actually make a very good wrestler. I'm not actually that aggressive. Looking at me as if I've said something crazy, then I'm not a fight. I might have a fiery temper, but I'm not a fighter. Oh, God. It's. I don't know what rhymes. Like, Kelly's a really rubbish name to rhyme stuff, but Kick ass Kelly, it's rubbish, isn't it?

Dominic Jones: Good, that'll do.

Kelly Molson: Okay. Kick ass Kelly. Yeah. I don't know what would be my costume. There'd definitely be some neon in there. I feel like I'd be like the eighties girl. Like neon leggings and leg warmers and stuff. Yeah.

Dominic Jones: And maybe some fire in the background as well, just to spice it up. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, maybe.

Paul Marden: I reckon there's got to be some cheese in there as well. You need some. You need some cheese in that wrestler name, ain't it?

Kelly Molson: There's not many cheeses that begin that, like, rhyme with Kelly either.

Dominic Jones: The worst ever icebreaker. I've ruined it.

Kelly Molson: Good question. No, I like it.

Dominic Jones: Oh, I should have done. What's your favourite boat? That's what I should have done.

Paul Marden: Oh, come on then.

Kelly Molson: What's my favourite boat? Well, it would have to be the falcon or the. Can't remember the name of the other one.

David Hingley: Well, the other one.

Kelly Molson: Is it the Marsh Harrier?

David Hingley: That's the one.

Kelly Molson: There you go. At the Museum of the Broads is a wonderful museum. You can also take your family out on a little boat trip. It's also dog friendly as well, you know, bring all your friends.

Dominic Jones: Great. Plug in one of your recent episodes. I was listening and thought about booking a holiday. It was a great plug in the last episode. You did?

Kelly Molson: Well, if you do fancy a little holiday trip to Norfolk, you know, there's a little holiday cottage that you could. You could hit me up for, Dominic. So just, you know, let me know.

Dominic Jones: Absolutely.

Paul Marden: I reckon I should have got 20 quid in my pocket every time you mention that guest house.

Kelly Molson: I really hope that someone books someday and they're like, “We heard it on Skip the Queue.” “Yes! It worked.”

Paul Marden: They'll insist on a discount. Thank you, Don. That was amazing. If any of our listeners would like to support any of the other guests and boost their listener figures to compete with Don, I'm going to put the details of everybody's episodes in the show notes, because frankly, 

Dominic Jones: Why would you do that?

Kelly Molson: That's mean.

Dominic Jones: Why would you do that? Surely this is the end now. Number one, the end.

Paul Marden: We're talking load of nonsense and I need to put something in the show notes. So I thought I'd put the episodes that everybody was in on the show notes. Can you exclude one, Paul? Oh, I'm sure I can, yes.

Dominic Jones: I think yours is okay, Andy. I wouldn't exclude you. Yours was a great one. 

Paul Marden:  So they'll all be in the show notes. And lastly, all of our guests asked to pick a book that they love. So Kelly, what's your book?

Kelly Molson: I read this book right at the very start of my agency journey. A very good friend of mine, he's been a coach of mine for a number of years, said that you should read this book, and it is How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. It's a very old book, but it is a classic. And this book opened my eyes and ears. So it really taught me how to understand and listen to people. And I think for me, building an agency like we have over the years, so much of that comes down to listening to people, understanding what their challenges are. You know, we have to network. You know, a lot of what we do is based on reputation and how likable you can be and all of those kind of things.

Kelly Molson: And this book really gives you an understanding of that, about what it is to be likable. And you shouldn't have to teach this to people. Like, really, it's pretty common sense, but, you know, it can be difficult for people to understand, like, why you should listen to people and why you should just let people talk. And I think a lot of the things that I learned from this book, I have applied to the podcast, so I just want to read out a little synopsis. Well, some of the things that I think are really important about how you listen to people, and it's. It's about becoming genuinely interested in other people.

Kelly Molson: And I hope that has come across in this podcast, because every single person that has come on and shared with me has just given me so much to think about, and I've learned so much from you all. It teaches you to smile, like smiling is just so important. I've always been amazed at how many people that don't smile back when I smile at them when I'm out walking the dog in the morning. Just smiling is the simplest thing that you can do to connect with somebody. Remembering people's names. Remember that a person's name to that person is the most important sound in any language. Make sure that you can just remember people's names. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. And I hope that I've done that. I've always hoped this podcast, you know, it's not about me.

Kelly Molson: It won't be about Paul. It will be about all the guests that come on and still continue to come on and talk to us about their stories and their challenges and their initiatives and all the brilliant things that they do. And I hope that I have gone above and beyond in making other people feel important. And I hope I've been sincere in doing that as well because it is all about you. You all make this podcast amazing and I genuinely am so grateful that you've allowed me into your ears and allowed me to share everybody else's stories in a really fun way. So thank you.

Paul Marden: Kelly, that was really. Yeah, awesome. Listeners. If you'd like to win in Kelly's book, then head over to the show announcement on X and retweet as saying, I want Kelly's book. That just leaves me to say that we are busy planning season six now. Wanlyn and I met yesterday with Oz to start brainstorming ideas for what we can do in season six. If you've got ideas, then send them in. Let us know on Twitter. We'd love to hear those X, I should say. If you would like to appear in an episode, let us know, because I love to interview people. So let us know if you'd like to come onto the podcast, that would be amazing. That's about it from all of us here today. So I want to thank my lovely co hosts, the Skip the Queue alumni.

Paul Marden: I want to thank the rest of the Rubber Cheese team that came along as well. I want to thank you, Kelly, for everything that you've done for us and thank the lovely listeners. I look forward to seeing you all in the next episode of Skip the Queue.

Kelly Molson: Thank you so much. This is amazing. 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

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

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.

Download the Rubber Cheese 2023 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast

Competition ends on 29th March 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.

Show references:

https://skiptontownhall.co.uk/craven-museum/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-hill-54503a189/ 
Jenny Hill is Lead Museums Curator at North Yorkshire Council, including at Craven Museum in Skipton. She has a degree in History from Lancaster University and a Contemporary History MA from the University of Sussex. She has worked in the sector for almost 7 years and is passionate about community engagement and making museum collections accessible for all. Between 2018-21 she worked on a National Lottery Heritage Funded capital redevelopment project at Craven Museum. In 2023 her team won the Kids in Museums Best Family Friendly and Most Accessible Museum awards.

https://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alison-bowyer-0608a417/

Alison Bowyer has worked in the cultural sector for over 20 years with previous roles at LAMDA, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Southbank Centre and the Academy of Ancient Music. The longer her career has continued, the more convinced she is that we still need to work harder to make culture and heritage accessible to all.

She has a longstanding interest in museums and how people engage with heritage, having been a volunteer at Handel House Museum (now Handel and Hendrix) in London and completing degrees in Cultural Memory and History. Alison has been Executive Director of Kids in Museums for seven years. During which time, the organisation has become an Arts Council England IPSO, won a Museum + Heritage Award, developed a new national training programme, established a Youth Panel and delivered a range of new programmes.

Outside of work, Alison is a listening volunteer for Samaritans, a Director of the Family Arts Campaign and likes to crochet.

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. 

On today’s episode I’m joined by my co-host, Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.

We’re speaking with Alison Bowyer, Executive Director of Kids in Museums and Jenny Hill, Lead Museums Curator at Craven Museum.

It’s almost a Kids in Museums takeover as Paul is one of their amazing trustees.

Today we’re finding out what it takes to be a truly family friendly museum, why it’s important for you to engage with the Kids in Museums manifesto, and how you can enter the awards this year.

If you like what you hear, subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.

Kelly Molson: Hello, Alison, Jenny, and Paul, welcome. Welcome to Skip the Queue today. This is a treat. I am joined by Alison and Jenny today and we're going to talk about kids and museums. And I've also got Paul. Hello, Paul, who has joined me as co host today, and he is going to start the icebreakers. This is new.

Paul Marden: It is, isn't it?? It's a brave new world for us, isn't it? So I've got a lovely one for you, Alison. So should we get started? What are you most likely to buy when you exit through the museum gift shop?

Alison Bowyer: Oh, gosh, that's a really tough one. Definitely postcards. I'm also a sucker for a nice sort of pencil case or I do like museum jewellery. I have quite a lot of tattoo divine, especially museum themed jewellery. And I do also have a pushant for like, cute, fluffy things, even though I'm not a child. I'm 44 years old, but still.

Kelly Molson: I'm loving this. Hello. At museums, Alison is your best gift when she comes because she's filling up her bag.

Paul Marden: Think of all of those museum gift shops that you can go through with all the jewellery in because there are some amazing ones, aren't there, that have the jewellery stands in them.

Alison Bowyer: That completely are. And I like to buy all my gifts for other people from museums if I can. So I am a big museum shopper.

Kelly Molson: It's really lovely to do that. So just before Christmas, actually, I think it was. No, yeah, it was November time. I went over to the Ashmolean museum and their gift shop is really lovely, actually, and had a really good nosy around it in between meetings. And oh, my God, I bought so many of my Christmas gifts in there. It was brilliant. My best friends, I bought Edie a book called Bear at the Museum, which she adores. It's the most read book in our house at the moment, which is lovely, but I bought my mother in law jewellery. I bought her earrings from the  Ashmolean, which were absolutely lovely. So I'd never really thought about jewellery from a museum as well. There you go.

Kelly Molson: Good tip for you from Alison today. Thank you. Right, Jenny, have you ever been pulled off by security for touching a museum exhibit?

Jenny Hill: I haven't personally, no. But I did visit Manchester Museums with a friend and she was told off whilst were in the gallery because it was a really pretty furniture display and she just kind of automatically reached out a hand because she was like, “Oh, it's so pretty”, and instantly clocked by the security guard in the room and we very sheepishly left quite quickly.

Kelly Molson: I love that. It's really hard, isn't it, if you're quite a tactile person as well, and you're like, “Oh”, because you would do that if you were in a shop, right?

Jenny Hill: Exactly, yes. And she was just really excited by it was kind of just like an instant response. We were like, “Oh, no, shouldn't have done that.”

Kelly Molson: I love that. One day you will get told off. I know this, and you need to come back on and share that with us. Okay? Right, I've got one for both of you now. So, Alison, I'm going to start with you. If you had to wear a t shirt with one word on it for the rest of your life, what word would you choose and why?

Alison Bowyer: Oh, gosh, one word makes it really difficult because it can't be like a command.

Kelly Molson: Well, it could stop.

Alison Bowyer: Yeah, that's true.

Kelly Molson: It is a command.

Alison Bowyer: Because I have one at the moment that I'm quite fond of that just says “Be kind on it.”

Kelly Molson: That's nice. All right, well, maybe I'll let you have two words.

Alison Bowyer: You can't just say kind because that sounds really weird. And od, if I'm allowed to, it would “Be kind.”

Kelly Molson: Okay, we'll allow to, for the purpose of this podcast, we'll allow to. That's nice. I like that one. Jenny, what about you?

Jenny Hill: “Be curious” as well. I think that's something that always happy for our visitors to do when they're visiting, is to be curious. And I think it's just a good motto for life, isn't it, to always be thinking, always be inquisitive. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: They're very good one, Paul, I'm going to ask you as well. Sorry, dropping you right in it. What about yours?

Paul Marden: Learn. It has got to be if it's got to be one word, because one's a toughie. Learn.

Kelly Molson: I like that. Somebody actually went with the brief. Thank you for obeying me.

Paul Marden: Always. I know my place.

Kelly Molson: Doesn't happen often. All right. Thank you, everyone, for sharing that. I appreciate it. Right, unpopular opinions. What have you prepared for us? Alison? Over to you first, I think.

Alison Bowyer: Oh, gosh, this question made me so stressed.

Kelly Molson: I'm so sorry.

Alison Bowyer: No, no, it's fine. Not in a bad way, because I was like, oh, my goodness, I'm not sure what I have that's unpopular. And then I started googling unpopular opinions and I found all these weird lists of things that I never even considered were opinions, like people saying that C is the most redundant letter in the English language and you could replace all C's with S's and K's. Apparently, this is a commonly held unpopular opinion. So, yeah, then I started thinking, oh, goodness, I'm not really sure I'm up to this. I think what I came up with in the end was, which is going to make me unpopular, probably. I think pizza is the worst takeaway because it always survives cold and hard and the topping off, it falls off in transit, so you end up with a really dowsy meal.

Kelly Molson: I love a pizza takeaway, though. I can't be down with you on this one because I love a pizza. It's because we never get to eat pizza. Oh, no. Actually, we've had pizza quite frequently recently because Edie loves it. But Lee has always been a bit like anti pizza takeaways. Okay.

Paul Marden: I don't understand people that have the delivery of burgers and chips, because surely that is going to be cold by the time it gets to you and they're going to be rubbish chips.

Kelly Molson: Yes. That's weird. Yeah, that is weird. I've never ordered a burger to be delivered to my house. That sounds strange to me. Ok, let's see what Twitter feels about your pizza. Unpopular opinion. Jenny, what about you?

Jenny Hill: Oh, mine's similar on a food topic, which I feel is going to make me really unpopular. But something I always say that really annoys people is I really hate brunch, which I feel is very unpopular. But I'm a person that gets regularly hungry, so for me, waiting to go out for food in the morning is just not possible. So I will always have to have something to eat before I leave the house. So I'll always basically have breakfast and then before you know it, I'm eating again. So at that point, it's essentially lunch. So for me, brunch doesn't really exist.

Kelly Molson: Okay. All right. Let me argue this point back to you, though. So if your girlfriends or whoever had asked you out for brunch, you'd have breakfast first, right? So you'd have like 08:00 breakfast and then you'd go for brunch. But if you're always hungry, doesn't that just mean you just eat lunch a little bit earlier? So brunch is like.

Jenny Hill: I mean, I don't mind eating again, but it's just the concept, I guess, of calling it brunch just doesn't feel accurate for me by that point because I've already had a full breakfast.

Kelly Molson: Okay. So I have a similar challenge with afternoon tea. I can't stand afternoon tea. Sorry if this upsets people. I don't understand why you get to a certain age and all of your every thing has to be, “Oh, should we go for afternoon tea?” No, why don't we just go to the pub like we used to? Go to the pub. Just go to the pub. What is it about afternoon tea? It's really annoying. And it's one of those. It's always at like 03:00 so what is it?

Jenny Hill: It's not a meal. It's the same situation, but in the middle of the afternoon. I agree.

Kelly Molson: Exactly. Okay, I can get on board with your brunch thing then. If you're on board with my afternoon tea thing. Good.

Paul Marden: I'll take you afternoon tea and I'll raise you a kids party at 2:30 in the afternoon. It's neither lunch nor is it dinner. So I have to feed the child before. I have to feed the child afterwards. And then they're going to eat more food in the middle of the day.

Kelly Molson: They are. They are. But I mean, Edie eats constantly so that it doesn't really matter. But kid's parties are amazing because buffet food is the best kind of food. I'm all down for a kid's party. You get what's it, what's not to love? You get party rings. There's always sausage rolls, which is like my number one top snack of all time. I'm here for the kid's parties. I'll just take the food. You can have all the kids. Okay. Should we talk about some serious stuff now?

Paul Marden: Yeah. Shall we do that?

Kelly Molson: I mean, it's still equally fun, but let's get on, shall we? We're talking about Kids in Museums today.

Paul Marden: Which is really good, isn't it?

Kelly Molson: It is a great topic.

Paul Marden: I feel like I'm going to learn loads about Kids in Museums that I probably should already know as I'm a trustee of Kids in Museums. But I get to ask Alison all the questions that perhaps I've been a little bit too scared to ask for the last year because I might look a little bit silly if I don't know the answer.

Kelly Molson: Yeah, and she has to answer you because that is what the podcast rules are.

Paul Marden: Exactly. All right then, Alison, why don't we kick off, tell us a little bit about Kids in Museums and how the organisation was developed.

Alison Bowyer: Kids in Museums has existed in one form or another for about 20 years now, which always astonishes me a little bit. So we started life when our founder, who at the time wrote to the Guardian, her name was Dea Birkett and she took her young child, I think she was about two years old, to the. I'm going to name and shame, I'm afraid, the Aztec’s exhibition at the Royal Academy. And her son screamed at one of the massive Aztec statues, which, if I remember the exhibition correctly, was totally fair enough, because the statues were pretty. I mean, they were designed to be scary. That's one of the reasons why they built some of them. So they were thrown out of the Royal Academy because apparently he was disturbing the other visitors.

Alison Bowyer: And then Dea wrote about this in her Guardian column, and what happened after that was the Guardian got a lot of letters coming from families telling Dee about similar experiences they'd had when they were out and about in museums with their children. And so a campaign was born to make museums better places for families, children and young people to visit. And to an extent, what happened on that day at the Royal Academy, that kind of remains our guiding principle. We are led by what visitors tell us about their experiences and we really strongly feel that museums, galleries, heritage sites, as kind of public space, should be for everyone, and everyone should be free to have that access, to feel comfortable when they're visiting and to have a really great time during your visit. So since then, the charity has evolved in various ways.

Alison Bowyer: Today, we work across the whole of the UK and we will work with any kind of museum, gallery, heritage site, historic house, castle, any kind of outdoor heritage site to support them and lead them and encourage them to take action, to better places for families, children, young people. We're quite a small organisation. There's only five of us in total, but we feel like we achieve a lot. And last year we won the Museum and Heritage Award for being the Best Sector Support Organisation in the UK, which was a really amazing validation of our work. That definitely doesn't mean we're sitting on our laurels, though. We're always trying to spend time talking to families, talking to young people, talking to museums about how we can create new programmes, refine our existing programs to do better.

Alison Bowyer: And we really want to be approachable, supportive, trusted experts. So we are doing the best by both the audiences we represent and the museums we try to support.

Paul Marden: I think the size of the organisation. I know Vanessa, our chair, often says how much you, as a team, punch above your weight, because I don't think anyone would imagine that it was such a small team that was having such a loud voice. Is that a positive thing? That should be a positive thing. How much impact you have with such a small team? It's amazing.

Kelly Molson: It was lovely at the MandH Show. I was at those awards, and I saw that win happen, and it was fantastic because the cheer from the crowd was pretty phenomenal. So congratulations on that.

Alison Bowyer: Thank you. I was so sure weren't going to win. I wasn't there, and I'd gone to bed and gone to sleep.

Kelly Molson: Woke up to some spectacular news.

Alison Bowyer: Yeah, no, it really did. But, yeah, no, it was brilliant to get that recognition. It helps more people find out about us as well, which is always valuable.

Paul Marden: So what is it that you offer museums, and how can they get involved more with what you're doing?

Alison Bowyer: So we like to think that we've got something for pretty much any kind of museum, whatever your level of expertise in working with families, children and young people is whatever resources you have, how many staff you have. So we have a large, free offer, which is kind of the building blocks of what we encourage museums to do, and it's all centring on our manifesto. So our manifesto is something that we compile with children, families and young people. So every two years, which actually is something we're going to be doing this year, we will be out talking to museum visitors, doing a national survey, and finding out about what their good and bad experiences of museums are. And then we will take all that information and distil it down into six easy points that make up our manifesto.

Alison Bowyer: And then that's a document that we think pretty much every museum should be able to commit to in their work. None of it is particularly complicated, or a lot of it doesn't need to be resource intensive. They're all pretty simple things that everybody should be able to do. So that's a really good starting point. And over a thousand museums have signed up to the manifesto and hopefully are using it in their work. I know we'll hear later from Jenny about how Craven Museum did that. Once you've signed the manifesto, there are lots of other things that you can get involved in.

Alison Bowyer: We've got over 100 free resources on our website, which cover everything from ways to implement the manifesto at low cost, how to create self guided resources for families, right up to things like how you can engage children and young people with the climate emergency in your museum. So they cover a really wide range of things that we think are helpful to the teams in museums who are doing that work on the ground. We have a programme of UK training, so we run about trend training sessions a year for museum staff and we also work with museum development organisations on training and that's available to attend in person for a small ticket price or to buy us recordings.

Alison Bowyer: Then every year we run a program called Takeover Day, which is a really brilliant, fun, exciting initiative where children and young people age between 0 and 25 go into museums and they do adults jobs for the day. When I say 0 to 25, I really mean that. We have toddlers doing museum Takeover Days, being given tasks like polishing glass museum cases with soft dusters, doing some cleaning and doing some object packing with, like, wooden blocks. They don't let them use loose on the actual collection.

Paul Marden: With white gloves on. 

Kelly Molson: I'm laughing because Edie would be like up there licking the glass, not trying to clean it, thinking about my daughter. And Paul is smiling because he did one of these Takeover Days. 

Alison Bowyer: He did. Yeah.

Kelly Molson: He's got a massive grin on his face.

Paul Marden: We loved it. We got to be curators for the day. The kids got to run around the museum and then they went back into the learning suite of the Mary Rose Trust and they got told to design an immersive exhibition and they took ideas from all around the museum and designed out what they would do and such brilliant ideas that they had. It was such a great experience for them to get that kind of behind the scenes experience of what the museum is actually like.

Alison Bowyer: So we see from Takeover Day that impact Paul has described. More than 70% of the young people who take part say that they would like to go back to a museum again as a result of being part of Takeover Day. And more than two thirds of the museums say that they now know more about what young people want from their museums and will make a change. So it's a really brilliant initiative. Then we obviously have the Family Friendly Museum Award, which is what we're going to be talking about with Jenny and I'll talk more about it later. And we've got some new programs coming online this year. So for the first time, we're working with a group of museums to help them appoint their first young trustees. So they're going to have people on their boards by the end of the programme age between 18 and 25. 

Alison Bowyer: And we also are running some programs with our own youth panel that they've designed. So we are working with them on a project which will hopefully show that museums can help address social isolation that young people experience when they move for education or new jobs.

Kelly Molson: I think it's just take a pause there and just reiterate that there are five of you in the Kids in Museum’s team. That is a pretty phenomenal menu of things that you offer to museums with just five people.

Paul Marden: It's amazing, isn't it?

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Let's just keep that up there as we're talking today. Thanks, Alison. Jenny, I want to come over and chat to you about Kids in Museums. How did you first kind of find out about them and get involved with what they're doing?

Jenny Hill: So, I've been aware of Kids in Museums probably since I first started working in the sector around six, seven years ago now. I've been on their website, sort of seen their name come up and use some of their guidance when I was doing some of my initial sort of museum work. But I think they sort of really stood out to me. From about 2021, I got involved with some training with part of Museum Development Yorkshire, whose sector support as well, funded by Arts Council England, and they were running front of house cohort that I got involved with at the time. And we had a really great training session as part of that cohort with Laura Bedford from Kids inMuseums. She gave a really inspiring talk and session on creating family friendly interactions in museums, and that was really inspiring.

Jenny Hill: I learned a lot during that session and really made me think, oh, we definitely need to be involved with this more. And then later on in the same year, I actually did an in person event. It was at the auction museum, and actually got to have a chat with Laura there about Kids in Museum's work. So that was really helpful. So, yeah, we kind of taken it from there. We signed up to the kids and museum manifesto following on from that, started to use those sort of principles in a lot of our front of house work and then behind the scenes as well. So, yes, Kim, have been on my radar for quite a while.

Jenny Hill: But, yeah, it's sort of the past three years, really, that we've really sort of been taking on board a lot of their, using a lot of their resources and their ideas.

Kelly Molson: It's lovely to see that it was indirectly as well. So obviously, Kids in Museums and what they do, it's good that they work in partnership with other organizations as well. So there was like a crossover there. Why did you enter the Family Friendly Museum award last year?

Jenny Hill: So Craven Museum went through a National Lottery Funded redevelopment project between 2018 and 2021. So we completely redesigned our museum space. It used to be really inaccessible. It used to be at the top of Skipton town hall. There was no lifts up there. It was a really steep, horrible flight of stairs to get up there, and a lot of the interpretation was really outdated. A lot of it was not very accessible. So after our redevelopment project, which really put access at the centre of all of our work, and particularly looking at family audiences, this is a group that we really wanted to feel welcome to our museum. It's a group that we'd been working with a lot pre redevelopment and we really wanted to expand our work with this audience after we reopened.

Jenny Hill: So after all this work was completed, we spent 2022 in sort of that post Covid year, finding our feet when maybe our visitors weren't quite as confident coming onto site and people were still getting to know that were reopened as well. So we had got a lot of people coming in going, “Oh, I didn't realise the work had finished.”

Jenny Hill: That was sort of our sort of pilot year. Whereas last year in 2023, we really felt that we hit our stride and we've been piloting lots of new ideas in 2022 and embedding our family friendly ethos in our work. So it kind of was the year that work really felt like it came to fruition after having spent quite a few years developing it. So we thought, as a team, that we'd really like to sort of get this work hopefully recognised. And a family friendly museum award really felt like a way to do that and we really wanted it to sort of give a boost to our team as well, who'd been working hard on that. So, yeah, we just thought it would be a great year to get involved and we entered it with very low expectations.

Jenny Hill: We thought, we're a small museum in the north of England. We weren't sure if we'd be, I don't know, sort of recognised for what we've been doing. So it was absolutely amazing to get recognition through the award in that way. It's fantastic.

Kelly Molson: It feels like the recognition was for the team and for the people that were kind of working in it. Is that what was important to you about entering?

Jenny Hill: I think so, yes. It was to prove to the team that the work that they'd been doing was really valid and really important. And I think in the museum sector, sometimes there's quite a lot of pressure on quite small teams. Like Alison was saying, there's only five people in Kids in Museums, and we're a small team, too. So I think having that recognition for the team just really helps them to know that, yes, they're doing a good job alongside the fact that it's obviously important to us to sort of share with the families that do come and use the museum, that it's going well.

Kelly Molson: How difficult was it to write the entry? Because I think that there's often a barrier. I mean, certainly for us, there's been things that I've thought this would be great to enter, but I look at it and think, “Oh, my goodness, this is going to take me, like, four or five days to actually pull all of these things together and write it. And write it in a way that's appealing.” Did you find it was an easy process to go through?

Jenny Hill: Actually, yes, we did find it, because I've done some applications that, yes, like you say, it can be quite as difficult, quite time consuming. I actually found the process for Kim really easy. So when the applications opened, members of the public were asked to nominate their favourite museum through a form on the Kim website. And we're really excited that we got some lovely nominations from families. And then kids and museum got in touch to let us know that we could make full application because we'd been nominated. So after that point, there was an online form that we could fill out that asked questions like, how have you made visiting your museum accessible to families, children and young people with additional needs? So that was one of the sort of longer questions on the form because we applied for the best accessible museum.

Jenny Hill: And that was. Yeah, I think because of all the work that we've been doing and because that kind of ethos is embedded in our team, weren't talking maybe about a specific project that we'd been working on. As some applications, I feel like they're very sort of project focused, but having such a wide question like that meant that we could just talk about what we do every day at the museum, which is what's really important to us. 

Jenny Hill: So, yeah, there were nice questions to answer because they kind of felt like they gave us the space to talk about all of our work. So that was brilliant. And we also had the opportunity to upload some supporting materials so we could get some photos in there, send through some of our more visual. Yeah, I think we might have sent a video as well. So that was great, too, because it meant we could share lots of different aspects of our work.

Kelly Molson: I love that. And spoiler alert even. You won. You're not only be the overall winner, you were the Best Accessible Museum winner as well.

Jenny Hill: Yes. And I was still absolutely blown away by that.

Kelly Molson: It's phenomenal. Congratulations.

Jenny Hill: Thank you.

Kelly Molson: Huge for that.

Paul Marden: I wonder if the reason why you found it not too painful to do the application is because this is folded into you. This is running through your core. You're just telling people what you do every day, and so you're just telling the story of what you do all the time.

Jenny Hill: I think that's how it feel. Yeah.

Paul Marden: Alison, let's talk about. I remember sitting in the audience listening to you talking about all the different museums and what the judges said and what stood out, and I loved hearing those stories. So what was it, do you think, that stood out about the Craven Museum, about their entry for you?

Alison Bowyer: So there were a few things about the Craven entry that really grabbed us. The first that I remember reading was that they had built our manifesto into their visitor charter, which is amazing because they are taking what we know, families, children, young people need and want, and they're building it into that work that they do every day. Like Jenny was saying, this is them living that way of working, which is incredible. And I think throughout the application, you got a real sense that all of their staff really cared about this. There was a page in the supporting document with the whole team on it saying just, like, one little thing about everyone in the team. And it was really amazing to see that because you felt that where in some museums, this is kind of just what the people in the learning team do.

Alison Bowyer: That wasn't true at Craven. Everyone at Craven really cared about the families he visited, and I think that was really borne out in the family nominations we received. There were so many families who were telling us how much they loved going to the museum that their children saw it as, like, the highlight of their half term holiday. And they talked for weeks in advance about wanting to go, and the make and take craft seemed to be a particular hit. There were lots of families telling us that their children couldn't wait to go back and do that again. And the families who nominated the museum also, they sounded really proud that their town had the museum, which was really lovely. And also, I think, something that came through, which is a kind of sad reflection of the way the world is at the moment.

Alison Bowyer: They really appreciated that all of that was available for free. When they're struggling to find things for their family to do that don't cost much, it felt like it was a really important thing to have that amazing resource in their town. And there were other little things, too. The museum is a safe space. The staff have amazing access training and training in inclusive language, and those things really help with kind of broadening out who can come into the museum and something that we spend quite a lot of time talking about. That isn't always something museums pick up on. And the Craven Museum website is just amazing, incredibly informative. I think it came in like the top five or something in the state.

Alison Bowyer: The museum access website report in the whole of the UK for its access information, which a museum of its size is absolutely incredible. We spent so much time telling people that families like to plan, they like to look at a website in advance and find out about all the facilities, and Craven had actually done that and it really makes a difference. So were really pleased to see that. And then I think the final thing was the community case and how they had a space in the museum where local people, local organisations, could show things that were important to them. So they were really giving the local community the opportunity to see themselves in the museum and feel a sense of kind of belonging and ownership.

Alison Bowyer: So I think all of those things came together and it was really clear that Craven Museum was going to be a really strong contender, which was why they shortlisted them. And then it was over to the families to judge them during the second stage of the award.

Paul Marden: I'd say the fact that you gather together these real families to kind of go and look at the museums that have applied and pass on their feedback to the judges, I think is hugely powerful. Are there any little snippets that the families came back that you liked because there were so many lovely little comments that the families had given to us throughout the awards?

Alison Bowyer: Yeah. So I think this quote is one that I think sort of sums it all up, really. The family judge said, “This is one of the most accessible, family friendly and welcoming museums I have ever visited across Britain. Although small compared to city museums, this has a lot to offer and is well laid out. It is very inclusive and their website is a particular strong point in terms of helping people to feel able and welcome to visit. People can visit the museum or attend an event knowing what to expect and what options are available. We especially love the fact that the spot, the mouse activity involved actual exhibits. Often this type of activity utilizes soft toys or pictures that have been placed around the site and end up being a distraction from the collection, meaning families don't get to actually experience the museum and look at the artifacts on display. But this activity in Craving Museum involved looking for things that were part of the carvings and objects. A great way for visitors to get more close to the collection. We all really enjoyed our visit.”

Kelly Molson: That's so nice.

Paul Marden: That's just brilliant feedback, isn't it?

Alison Bowyer: Yeah.

Kelly Molson: So nice.

Paul Marden: And who would have thought having a website that told you information about the museum that was accessible could actually be of value to people?

Alison Bowyer: I know. It's amazing, isn't it?

Paul Marden: I know. I wonder who could help you with that.

Kelly Molson: Yes, although, full credit, this is not one of our websites, but we definitely could help you with that. This is incredible. What lovely words. We've all got smiles on our faces for people that are listening to the audio of this and can't see us. Jenny, I'd really love to know. We go back to the reason that you entered and, you know, part of that is for the team, it's for the people that have worked really hard to make all of these amazing things happen. What has the impact been for your team since you won this award?

Jenny Hill: I think it's just been the real boost that it's given the whole team. Like Alison was saying, everyone on the team really cared about this, know every single member of our team, not just maybe our learning team or our forward facing team, everyone cared about it. And I think it's just really inspired us to carry on with our work. We're all very conscious of the fact that working with families, working with accessibility, is never a finished process. You've not achieved it. So it's kind of really just. Yeah, it's given us that extra push to think, oh, actually, we're doing well in this and we really want to continue. We don't want to sit on our laurels, we don't want to take this for granted. We want to keep working on this. So I think that was really great.

Jenny Hill: It was also particularly lovely just to know that it was real families who'd nominated us and that, like were just saying with the undercover judges, it was real families who came to visit us during that judging period and had these positive experiences. So that was just fantastic to know that it was visitors who wanted to sort of recognise the work we've been doing. So, yeah, I think that's been the main thing, really. It's just been amazing being recognised by the sector and our colleagues and given us all that kind of. That boost. 

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Like a validation of all of the work that gone into it. 

Jenny Hill: Definitely.

Kelly Molson: And what about the impact from kind of general public? Has it had an impact on the visitors that are coming and what they're saying about it and then also the sector itself, you said it's been a good thing to be recognised within the sector.

Jenny Hill: So it's definitely had a real impact with our visitors. So we've had some visitors coming to site who've said that they've specifically come because they heard about the Kids in  Museum award, which has been amazing. Some people coming from a distance to visit family in the area and saying, “Oh, when I was looking for things to do, I saw that you'd won the award. So I thought while I was visiting I'd pop in.” So that's been incredible, that impact with visitors and our sort of more regular local visitors who've come in, we've got the award up on a shelf behind the front desk. Our front of house team are so proud to have it there behind them while they're working.

Jenny Hill: And we've had local visitors saying, “Oh, it's so amazing that our town's got a museum that's won this award and it's really lovely for local people that we've got this here.” So, yeah, that's been really nice for both bringing in new visitors and also for our local audience and then within the sector, it's just been so good for us, publicity wise, to sort of kind of get our name out there, really. So since the awards I've done, I was just counting up the other day, I've had seven different institutions in touch, asking for site visits to come and look at our work, have a chat with us about best practice. I've delivered another seven presentations either already or got them booked in for the rest of the year. And then obviously doing podcasts like this.

Jenny Hill: And then we did a blog post as well for Send in Museums with Sam Bowen. I think that's the pipeline, hopefully. So, yeah, it's really kind of boosted us and we even noticed on social media, new institutions following us that maybe weren't aware of us before, after the award, people taking interest. So that's been really nice as a small local museum to have that kind of more bigger awareness from the sector.

Kelly Molson: I love this so much. And this goes back to something that comes up time and time again on these podcast interviews is just how collaborative and how supportive the sector is and how much they want to work with each other. It's so lovely that you can now showcase the processes that you've been through and how you approach accessibility and be able to share that with others so that they can go on and do the same and make theirs better and better. 

Kelly Molson: I think it's so important to be able to do that, and it makes me love this sector so much. It really does. What top tips Jenny, would you give to any museums that are out there thinking, “We really want to enter the awards this year.” What would you say were your best top tips for them?

Jenny Hill: This kind of links to something Paul was saying earlier, and it maybe sounds a bit cliched, but just be yourself. I think there's so much amazing work going on in the sector to do with making venues family friendly. And if you're passionate about what you do and you're working hard to make your venue inclusive, then that will shine through. So maybe sometimes not to overcomplicate it. So if you're doing the work and you really care, then that will make itself apparent. But I guess on a more practical level as well. Give yourself time with the application, don't try and rush it. We work very collaboratively at Craven Museum, so we really wanted the opportunity for all of our staff to be able to feed back into the application process and for lots of different people to read the draft, make comments, have their say.

Jenny Hill: So by giving ourselves enough time to do that, it really made the process a lot smoother. And also, have a look at the Kids in Museum manifesto. It's a great place to just, if you haven't signed up already, sign up and if you have, just refresh yourself on it, because it can really help that framework for how to answer questions and things.

Kelly Molson: Great tips. Thanks, Jenny.

Paul Marden: So with that in mind, should we talk about this year's family friendly awards. Nominations Open on 19th March, I think. Is that right, Alison?

Alison Bowyer: Yeah, that's right.

Paul Marden: So what is it that museums can do to enter?

Alison Bowyer: This year we have five categories, so there are three size categories, so best, small, medium and large museums, which will be organised by number of visits in the previous twelve months. That's all explained on our website. I won't go into that now. Then we have a category for the Best Successful Museum, which is the category that Craven won last year. And then our new category for this year is Best Youth Project, and that is a prize for museums who are doing long term, so work longer than six months with young people from the ages of 14 to 25. And what we're really looking for is work, that young people are given a sort of equal share in decision making, that they're really involved in shaping work.

Alison Bowyer: And the guidelines for that category, along with all of the others, are in the guidance notes, which you can download from our website. So that would be the first thing to do. Sounds very obvious, read the guidance notes carefully because that should explain most of what you need to know about how to enter. So then there are two routes to entry, really. So what Jenny described, what happened to Craven, that's what happens to most museums. Families will nominate them. So for a family to nominate, they can just go on our website. It's really simple. They just have to tell us the name with the museum they're nominating and in a few sentences why they're nominating them. That's it. And then we will contact the museum and tell them they've been nominated and ask them to fill in the museum side of the application process.

Alison Bowyer: We've got lots of tools to help museums promote nominations to families. So we've got social media assets for all channels and we've got some paper forms you can print out and put in your museum if you want to. Then the other alternative is if you want to enter but you for some reason don't have the time or the capacity to collect lots of family nominations, you can just enter as a museum on our website. That's totally fine. You just go on our website and you look at the museum application form. It's not essential to have a family nomination for the small museum and large category, but for the Best Successful Museum, we do ask that at least one family has supported your museum's nomination. Just because we feel for that category, it's super important that the museums are sort of supported by families for the provision that they offer in terms of accessibility. 

Alison Bowyer: What happens then is once we've got all the nominations together, we put together a shortlist. So the shortlisting panel is made up of. We normally have primary schools, young people from our youth panel, our staff and trustees, and sometimes representatives from museums who've won in the past. We all come together, we pick a shortlist and then we announce that in June. And then if you've been shortlisted over the summer, we will send out families like mystery shopper judges to your museum. So you won't know they're coming, they will just go on a visit and they will report back to us afterwards. And as Jenny says, it's their scores that choose the winners.

Alison Bowyer: We don't intervene in any way. We go with whatever the families tell us, so they really are in control. And I think that's one of the lovely things about this award. It is genuinely an award that is given by people who visit museums and then we will announce all the results in October at our award ceremony.

Paul Marden: We've talked a little bit about the mystery shoppers, the family judges, the undercover judges going in and actually looking at the museums. And that's how I first found out about Kids in Museums because I saw a sign when I was in the London Transport Museum suggesting that people could go on to nominate and also apply to be an undercover judge, which was how I found out about you first. This is a few years ago now. What can families do, though, if they want to be an undercover judge? Can they get involved?

Kelly Molson: Oh, yeah.

Alison Bowyer: Absolutely. So the best thing to do is to sign up on our website to our family mailing list. And then when we recruit the judges, which will be from June onwards, we will get in touch with you and let you know whereabouts in the UK. We need judges. It changes every year because we need the judges to be the museums on the shortlist. So it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing that we can't really start until we know where those museums are. But, yeah, the best thing to do is to sign up for our family mailing list.

Paul Marden: Yeah. It's such a great opportunity, isn't it, for people to go and have a mission, for the kids to go in and have a mission to go and check these places out and be the ones that decide who gets the award. What a great opportunity for a family to go and find that out.

Kelly Molson: Yeah. Don't tell them until they get home, though, because they'll just be shouting that out in the museum.

Paul Marden: Do you know who I am?

Alison Bowyer: We get lots of families tell us that their kids really enjoy it because they tell them they're, like, having to play detective or something and not be seen. And apparently it makes the day out really fun. So, yeah, it comes recommended.

Paul Marden: So there's a call to action for all the families that might be listening to us to join the mailing list and get in there early to become an undercover judge.

Alison Bowyer: Yeah. And I should say that we will cover travel expenses for the family judges, up to 30 pounds a visit. So we try to make it as accessible as possible to be a judge.

Paul Marden: Completely brilliant opportunity.

Kelly Molson: Thank you both for coming on and sharing this with us today. It's been so lovely to hear about it. We are going to put all of the details on how you can enter and how you can sign up to be a family judge as well on the show notes, but essentially go to Kids in Museum's website because they have everything that you need on there. We always ask our guests to leave us with a book recommendation. Something they love or know can be anything, a personal recommendation, a business book. Whatever you like. Jenny, what have you prepared for us today?

Jenny Hill: Well, it's probably not one that people haven't heard of before, but I'm a massive Jane Austen fan, so I would always recommend Emma. Emma is probably my favourite by. Yeah, it's one of those ones that I always go back to. So, yeah, if you're thinking about you've never read Jane Austen before, you want to read some classics? I would always recommend that. Yeah, it's a lovely book.

Kelly Molson: Oh, it's nice. We get so many people come on and recommend their favourite. Mean something magic about rereading the book over and over again is that you always find out something different every time you read it, regardless of how many times you've read it before. Thank you. Alison, what about you?

Alison Bowyer: Gosh, I found it so hard to pick a favourite book. People who aren't watching won't be able to see the bookcase behind me.

Kelly Molson: Very full.

Paul Marden: Alison looks like a reader for the people that are listening.

Alison Bowyer: It's not probably necessarily my favourite book, but a book that I really love by an author who I think deserves to best known in the UK is Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiney. She is absolutely hilarious and it's just a really beautiful portrait of a family living in New York who are all slightly eccentric and unusual in different ways. And I guess I'm really curious and lazy about people's lives. So I love books that kind of open the window onto different kinds of families. And yeah, she's just a wonderful author. All her books are wonderful, but that's my absolute favourite.

Kelly Molson: Good recommendation. Thank you. And both of those books have never been recommended before as well, so they will go top of the list on our blog post that we have where we save off all of our guests recommendations. As ever, if you want to win these books, if you head over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with the words I want Alison and Jenny's books, then you'll be in with a chance of winning a copy yourselves. Once again, thank you both for coming on. It's been so lovely to hear about the awards and the impact of winning the awards. Congratulations again on all of your hard work. It's just been wonderful to talk to you. So thank you.

Jenny Hill: Thank you very much. It's been lovely speaking to you today.

Alison Bowyer: Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure to share the award and some of the other work we do.

Paul Marden: And it's got us smiling all the way through, hasn't it, Kelly? It's been a lovely story to tell.

Kelly Molson: I hope people can hear that in our voices, that we're smiling. They can hear that we're smiling if they don't watch them, nobody watches our videos. Hey, go and watch our videos.

Paul Marden: There you go. See us grinning all the way through smiling.

Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. 

Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

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