December 2016 Visitor Experience Introduction Measurement & Evaluation An overview for GMs/CMs and HoDs Introduction From March 2017, we’re making some changes to the way we measure our visitor experience. That’s because our strategy is asking us to think differently about visits. We need to carry on giving people great days out – that’s as important as ever – but, increasingly, we also need to think about how our experiences can help us to grow support for the work we do. This means we need to keep delivering the basics of a great visit, but we also need to put more focus on how well we’re providing deeper engagement. Visitor enjoyment is a combination of both of these things – plus a lot of other factors. We want to make sure that our focus on these two areas is as clear as possible, so we’re breaking down visitor enjoyment into the most important two elements – service and emotional impact. For those places that are experimenting with new programming and interpretation, we’ll also be testing new ways of really getting under the skin of our audience’s response. That includes a new national online audience community and lots of new resources and guidance to help properties evaluate new initiatives. Measurement – our new KPIs Evaluation – what you need to know The new service KPI We already have established questions in the visitor survey for measuring our service delivery: Our “overall service” question will become the service KPI Nationally and regionally we expect to see at least a 1% improvement in our overall service KPI in 2017/18 We’ll also be looking for bigger improvements at properties with low service scores Emotional impact We don’t yet fully understand all the things that make emotional impact go up or down, so 2017 will primarily be a year of testing and learning: We want all properties to at least hold their current emotional impact score We’re also looking for improvements at places that have been identified as priority sites for experiences in Regional Business Plans. If you’re trying new things, maybe some new interpretation or a piece of programming, it can be hard to track the results through the visitor survey, as it just gives us an overall view of the whole visit . If we want to understand how well our new ideas are working, we’ll need some new tools that can help us evaluate them in much more detail. Look out for some new Everything Speaks resources coming soon which will help you to plan your evaluation - your VE consultant will be on hand to support you. What you need to do Keep focusing on delivering great service! Agree KPI targets with your ADO. If you are testing new interpretation or programming, talk to your VE consultant about building an evaluation plan. Key contacts VE consultants Contact: tony.berry@nationaltrust.org.uk