Kickstarting Visitor Experience Training

In an earlier blog article, Making Your Visitor Your #1 Priority, I make the argument that “visitor experience is the foundational measure of success for a new children’s museum,” that visitor-museum touchpoints create their experience perceptions, and that I’ve recently started planning “visitor experience” training with a newly opened children’s museum. Today that new museum’s executive director and I are preparing to launch a three-month all-staff training module to start the journey of making the visitor experience the center of the museum’s operations. 

As a small children’s museum with a staff of up to eight, all staff members take shifts on the floor as Playworkers, including the Executive Director. Since all staff members engage directly with the visitor, we knew visitor experience training could be the cultural transformation for the entire organization. 

Most children’s museums have some staff positions that don’t directly work in public spaces regularly engaging face-to-face with visitors; however, it would still be important for all staff members to participate in visitor experience training. Since visitors’ touchpoints with the museum include everything from reading a social media post, to finding fully stocked supplies in the bathrooms, to hearing “thanks for coming to play today” on their way out the door, developing a visitor experience mindset is important for all staff, regardless of position description. 

The idea for visitor experience training came from an on-going dialogue with the Executive Director during our biweekly check-ins. Many new children’s museums hire their first director who has great leadership skills but might not have direct experience leading a children’s museum. Our one-on-one check-ins speed up the deep-dive into children’s museum pedagogy and operations, provide ongoing mentorship, and create a safe space to work on solving problems. 

Through this dialogue, we realized that staff members were presenting the aptitude to grow as playworkers. While there were some staff issues to solve, they were showing real potential to develop professionally. By digging a little deeper, we started to see an opportunity to improve the visitor experience by focusing on a culture of staff engagement and empowerment through training and professional development. We started to frame-up what visitor experience training could look like and that it could be comprehensive enough to cover most staff development needs, including the remediation of unhelpful behaviors. It was clear that visitor experience training would be focused enough -- yet broad enough -- to cover needs of the staff and the organization.  

In order to really make visitor experience the primary lens for operational decision-making, our training approach starts with all staff members working together to lay out the visitor experience foundation. We know we can’t let the training become too theoretical or too time-consuming, so the training goals and deliverables empower staff with the agency to become the museum’s visitor experience experts over time. 

Our training framework centers on all staff members developing a “play-work mindset” in an iterative process over the next three months, through the following practice:

Observation > Documentation > Reflection > Dialogue > Action

The desired results include all staff members: 

• Obtaining a clearer view of play-work

• Team-building by working together to solve day-to-day issues

• Personally investing in their ongoing learning and development

• Understanding their roles in managing visitor experience and contributing to museum success

Our first visitor experience training session is scheduled for 90 minutes. The training agenda is being posted in advance and will cover:

• An introduction to play-work, including a video of Penny Wilson

• A discussion of visitor behaviors witnessed so far, both positive and negative

• An overview of learning in the early years

• A discussion of the learning framework (vision, mission, values, learning goals and impacts, audience)

• All staff sharing a “day in the life of a Playworker”

• Drafting shared definitions of:

  • Play (including the difference of open-ended versus instruction play)

  • Play-work

  • Visitor experience

  • Customer service

• Visitor Experience SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) analysis

• Setting up a process to start the practice of Observation > Documentation > Reflection > Dialogue > Action

All staff will be given their own playworker journal, which they can decoratively personalize at the training. Playworkers will be tasked with keeping the journal with them during every shift, to document what they see, hear, and do. The journal is an important tool of empowerment in helping all staff to see their roles in impacting every visitor’s experience. 

In addition to receiving journals, Playworkers will be charged with prototyping their process for observation, documentation, reflection, dialogue, and action. A critical step in staff empowerment is to ensure that their observations are being heard and have an impact on the organization's management. This will take time and practice, so labeling it as a prototyping process helps set realistic expectations. 

From there, the Executive Director and I will observe, guide, and then regroup to discuss our impressions, review training feedback, and synthesize a plan for the next all-staff training. 

Be sure to check back as I share what we learn from taking these first steps -- implementing a first-of-its-kind plan to make visitor experience the center of a children’s museum’s operations.