Simon Harrison of Associate Supplier Whisper outlines how technology can offer an enriched and informative experience for your visitors.
Museums and heritage sites often struggle with balancing the need to provide meaningful and contextual information to visitors whilst minimising the visual impact of signage and information boards.
The Whisper Service solves this problem by presenting each section of your visitor guide automatically on the visitor’s mobile phone, as they move around your museum.
Technology simplified
Whisper is a high-tech solution requiring a low-tech setup. With minimal set up, you can easily manage your own visitor guide, branding and location triggers within the Whisper web portal.
What will visitors see?
Visitor information is usually presented using a simple web-type layout, formatted specifically for mobile phone screens. You don’t need any special web skills to create this, Whisper seamlessly combines your text and images to create great-looking information screens ready for your visitors. It can also present audio and video content and supports multiple languages.
Right page, right time
Whisper uses a combination of GPS locationing and Bluetooth locator beacons to identify exactly where a visitor is, and then automatically offer the corresponding information via their phone screen.
Visitors can go back and look at the guide sections for the places they’ve already been through, and you can also choose to make elements of your guide always available, for example, site maps, parking information, toilets and facilities.
No network needed
Poor mobile phone signal or availability of WiFi isn’t a problem with Whisper. Whisper can automatically preload information to phones as the visitor nears the museum or site, meaning that is available even if the visitor’s phone has no data connection. The user doesn’t need to do anything to achieve this, it just works.
Easy to access
To engage with this offering, visitors should be encouraged to install the Whisper Service on their phone from the Apple Play Store or the Google AppStore. This could be done via your website or as visitors arrive at the welcome desk. However you choose to tell visitors about the app, the download is made easy by providing a QR code to scan with their camera, which automatically installs the service and even uses your own branding whilst going through the process. There is an example QR code at the end of this article which you can try out.
If the user already has the Whisper Service installed on their phone, perhaps having used it at another AIM member’s site, then they don’t need to do anything; it will just jump into life as soon as they arrive.
And importantly, visitors can be assured that Whisper is completely anonymous. No information about the user is captured – there is no user login or account requirement, so visitors can enjoy the enhanced experiences without reservation.
Down the track
We’re working on a few new and exciting things over the forthcoming months, to make Whisper even more valuable to museums and heritage sites.
Heat maps: You’ll be able to see where people linger, and for how long, as they move around your location. Being completely anonymous, this data can be captured without concerns over privacy and tracking. Whisper knows there is a phone there, but nothing about who it belongs to.
Martyn’s Law: You may have heard about the forthcoming legislation known as Martyn’s law, which is designed to ensure that venues which can hold more than 200 people must take steps to ensure that a proportional response to terrorist threats is in place. As well as providing general security awareness information to visitors as they arrive, Whisper can be used to quickly pass emergency messages to everyone who is on site, again even when there is no data network available.
Try Whisper for free
The team at Whisper are keen to work with AIM members, to get the message out about how good this is.
To this end currently, Whisper is FREE. Once you are on Whisper for free, we won’t suddenly start charging you down the road. Refer to our website at www.justwhisper.com/nfpo for details.
Scan the QR on the right with the camera on your phone to install Whisper for a demonstration of a simple visitor guide.
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