Workshops and training to enhance your visitor experience.

Staff and volunteers are the catalysts for the relationship and experience between your museum and your visitors.

theWholeStory’s practical workshops and training will give your staff and volunteers the skills, confidence and creativity to interact and communicate with your visitors and enhance their experience.

Each of these workshops is ready to go, but we will none the less adapt and evolve it so that it’s right for you and our participants.

Storytelling to Communicate and Interact.

An enjoyable and practical process to create and deliver lively, accurate, personal and experiential interpretive face to face communication with visitors.

Staff and volunteers can enhance their preparation and communication of confident and engaging conversations, talks, participatory activities, pop-ups, welcome introductions and answers to questions.

This workshop can be delivered as a Train the Trainers programme.

This workshop has been delivered to all IWM sites and RAF Museum sites, the Wellcome Collection, National Trust and English Heritage properties…

1 - 2 days

6 - 12 Participants

  • This workshop questions what is useful about storytelling for visitor facing staff or volunteers to share the history, heritage, facts, art, experiences of a place/collection…, and provides the answers through the activities of the workshop that participants take part in.

    Participants will bring a subject they like – from your collection - and through the workshop find the story they can tell about their subject for an audience of their choice. This will reveal themes, content and perspectives, allow participants to hear how and what their colleagues tell too and develop their delivery, expression and (natural) communication style.

    The audience is always centre stage, so as to build the relationship between them and the subject, this is created through the techniques to keep content and delivery interesting, engaging, relevant and stimulating.

    Throughout and particularly at the end, participants will be asked to reflect on how the techniques are helpful and useful to their practice.

Creating and Delivering Tours

What story does your building, collection or landscape tell?

Create and deliver tours that are site specific, experiential, accurate, interesting and memorable.

We can start from scratch and collaborate with you and your volunteers and staff to build a tour or refresh skills and evolve content, for tours that stimulate, engage and delight audiences.

This workshop can be delivered as a Train the Trainers programme.

This training has been delivered to National Trust for Scotland, English Heritage, British Library, Somerset House, Government Art Collection.

4 days

4 - 8 Participants

  • The 3 - 4 days, spread over approximately a month facilitates both the design and building of content for a tour, while developing the delivery style and skills of your tour guides..

    In the process, applying storytelling throughout, participants work together to create a tour using pair and group work to create the tour story, interpretation and expression that can be shared between them as one united tour while allowing for the individualisation each tour guide can bring to their delivery.

    Guides apply narrative structure, descriptive language, presence and spontaneity towards creating lively, accurate, personal tour content and delivery. The experiential nature of a tour is developed by considering and building interaction as something that stimulates experience (and therefore learning and engagement) through thinking/talking, senses/feeling and doing/moving.

    Time is given to creating the content and practicing on site with peer and facilitator feedback, so as to define for your museum what a successful tour and guide is: practically, for interpretation and for visitor experience.

Taking Ownership of Visitor Experience

From room guides to ticketing to retail and beyond, all your visitor facing staff and volunteers play their part in engaging your visitors and influencing their experience.

This workshop will help them consider what experience all your different visitors can ideally have and define what each member of your team can do to ensure each visitor has a better experience for having interacted with them.

This workshop can be delivered as a Train the Trainers programme.

Variations of this workshop, have been delivered at the Thackray Museum of Medicine (ahead of their development), the Mary Rose Museum, at Tate Modern and Britain and National Galleries Scotland.

1 - 2 days

6 - 20 Participants

  • The intention of the workshop is to guide visitor facing staff/volunteers from all levels and departments, to firstly think about and explore what the current and desired experience of visitors is and what can be done to enhance it through their presence (being approachable) and interaction throughout a visit.

    (The workshop can also be adapted to explore the current and desired effect of interpretation and what is physically present, on visitor experience).

    The discussion, practical theory and application, drawing and group decision making initiates the development of thinking and agreement on best practice and the clarification on and ownership of the why and need for visitor experience/customer care at your museum.

    By drawing on the knowledge and experience of the participants, using situations and dialogue that are real, creating detailed portraits of visitors to remove generalisation participants work in a way that is relevant to their role, day to day tasks and your visitors.