Life is a series of experiences—some we want to repeat, and some we’d like to forget. Perhaps things like this have happened to you:
• You walked wearily through an endless hall in a natural-history museum, searching in vain for a bench.
• You were having a great time at an art museum’s restaurant—you got wonderful food and warm service in a fun atmosphere—and then you found a dirty bathroom with a cracked, drippy sink.
• A salesclerk’s sour attitude ruined your experience in a national park store, even though they had fantastic merchandise.
• Or maybe you sat down at a computer in a library to find a grimy keyboard and a sticky mouse.
Creating Great Visitor Experiences will help you sidestep pitfalls like these and instead create high-quality experiences that your visitors want to repeat. Your visitors have many other ways to spend their leisure time, so your experience must be unique and enjoyable. The nonprofit world is not immune to competition; getting and holding an audience is critical to a museum, park, or zoo’s financial health. Because people have so many choices, your site has to stand out from the pack by providing a sophisticated, meaningful, and memorable experience. The way to set yourself apart is to understand that, while you are a nonprofit, you are also in the business of creating and selling cultural experiences.1
This book takes you step by step through the process of cultivating and maintaining the highest level of visitor satisfaction. I coined the term “Experienceology”® to describe my approach, which combines elements of art, science, and common sense. Experienceology can be used to improve the quality of visitors’ experiences at any museum, park, science center, living-history site, garden, zoo, aquarium, or library.

Experience adds up

A good visitor experience helps you in two critical ways. First, since your goal is educating the public and serving your community, a positive experience supports learning. By helping to save and make you money, a good experience brings in additional revenue that can be used for public programs and other services.2
Second, a crafted experience increases your potential for earning and generating revenue, allowing you to remain financially viable for years to come.3 If you’re providing a poor visitor experience, your organization is probably suffering financially in some way. On the other hand, providing good experiences saves you money in advertising and promotion, because it costs five times more to attract a new visitor than it does to keep one you already have.4 In addition, a good Web site is part of the cost benefit of the well-crafted experience; it saves and makes you money by reducing customer-service telephone hours, as visitors can easily use it to renew services, buy products, and get directions on their own.5
It costs five times more to attract a new visitor than to keep one you already have.

Why you need this book

To court your visitors
To improve your site
This book is intended for any informal learning site that serves the public. Experienceology applies to all kinds of museums and similar places. I will call the people who come through your doors “visitors” to keep it simple. At your institution you might call them guests, users, or patrons. I’ll use the term “site” to describe your place of business. You might call it your museum, institution, park, heritage site, garden, library, or facility. Don’t let the language get in the way.
After reading this book, you may decide to choose another term to describe your visitors. To some, the term “visitor” sets up an “us vs. them” mentality from the start, as they are only visiting your site. Some sites now prefer “guest,” a word most commonly used in the hospitality industry. “Patrons” is an old-fashioned library word that no longer reflects today’s service-oriented libraries. And “users” has an unfortunate association with drugs. Whatever term you choose, it’s your attitude toward your visitors that counts, but I’ll show you a few examples of how changing terminology can reflect a more visitor-centered approach.
Throughout this book we’ll look at examples from a variety of museums and other businesses around the world. Some will be very similar to your own, others very different. All of them will give you ideas about how—and how not—to provide great experiences for your visitors.

From an education advocate to an experience advocate

I’ve spent my career at the intersection between art and science. My background in film and design, combined with a degree in health education, gave me a unique perspective on nonprofit sites’ educational roles. Over the years I have acted as a liaison between content experts—doctors, botanists, or scientists—and the public. I view myself as a translator, someone who distills the essence of material down into tasty bites of (correct) information that the public will enjoy. Over the years I’ve been a passionate advocate for education and interpretation at the sites where I’ve worked.
In 2002 I was invited to Brookfield Zoo in Illinois for a conference on conservation psychology. We held spirited debates over how to change visitor behavior at our conservation-minded institutions, with the focus on how we could make a difference on pressing global environmental issues. And then Robert Bixler, a professor in recreation studies, stood up. “Recreation is not the enemy! Recreation sounds frivolous,” he said. “But playing in natural environments is key to caring about them. It’s good for people to have pleasant experiences at zoos and parks.” While we all laughed, his impassioned defense of enjoyment struck a chord with me. Since then, Richard Louv has made a similar argument in his book Last Child in the Woods.6
While still at the conference, I thought back to the project I’d recently completed, a database of the interpretive signs at the San Diego Zoo—more than a thousand messages. I thought about the long fight to install a sign about the African bushmeat crisis next to the beautiful gorilla habitat. For the first time I wondered, were we right to place that stark message in that location? Was that the best way to reach people? What exactly were we trying to accomplish in the long run? How did interpretation fit into the bigger picture?
I was reading two books at the time, The Experience Economy7 and Why We Buy.8 The first book pinpointed what was bothering me about focusing solely on interpretation. If visitors were having a lousy time in the parking lot, or at ticketing, or they couldn’t find a bathroom, then all the time, money, and effort we spent on interpretation was, possibly, wasted. It was a horrible thought. If visitors were spending from two to four hours at the zoo, how many signs was it reasonable to expect them to read? Ten percent of the total? Twenty percent? I never once considered how many messages there were when I added new ones. We had nearly two thousand signs on the grounds, if you counted donor-recognition, wayfinding, cautionary, and merchandising messages. That’s a lot of reading. We had never talked about how much time visitors were spending overall at the site, nor had we designed the experience as a whole and integrated signage into it. I was pretty sure that this was the case at most museums, too.
As I read Why We Buy, I wondered whether anyone had taken Underbill’s twenty-five years of experience tracking retail customers and applied it to museums. People are people, and behavior is behavior. The book was chock full of useful tidbits that museums could put into practice. I wasn’t the only person thinking this way; I found a paper wr...