The challenge
The National Trust takes care of hundreds of houses, objects and places which receive millions of visits every year. Through visitor surveys they had a good understanding of how visitors enjoy their visits, but wanted to discover how to inspire and engage visitors better, as well as their volunteer base, to continually improve the on-site visitor experience. As a cause-driven conservation charity (involved in both heritage and nature) the team at National Trust also wanted to know how best to communicate strategy messages to different audiences.
Our approach
Working with the Visitor Experience team, we launched ‘Our Place’ an Insight Community with an initial focus on visitor experience. Using the Map tool within our platform, members are able to share details of planned days out, and complete tasks telling us about their expectations when planning, during and after their visit. We brought this feedback to life through ‘live’ photo and video content captured during the visit.
We then expanded upon this work by creating another space ‘Volunteer Voice’, which was housed in the same platform for easy management. The focus of this section is of course on engaging volunteers and their feedback.
We have been able to collect rich feedback with ease, using the wide range of tools at our disposal.”
The results
Since its inception, the community has gone from strength to strength, with its remit expanding beyond the Visitor Experience team to provide insight and ROI for teams working across Membership and Retail. Insight from the community has guided a lot of campaigns and initiatives including the ‘Noticing Nature project’ and the award winning ‘pathway to nature connected-ness.’ This project helped to provide a scientific basis that mental health can be improved through interactions with nature. We collected thousands of visitors’ photos of their interaction with nature, and using our AI driven video & photo analysis, were able to easily drill down into themes.
- The community has allowed the National Trust to be agile in its response to emerging issues, as well as future-proofing the Trust’s strategic position and membership proposition.
- Informed National Trust’s Strategic vision for 2025 and beyond. Including stance on Brexit.
- Embedded ‘Customer View’ drove a growth in member numbers to an all time high of 5 million.
- Record income growth of £47.7 million for the year the community was launched.
