Heritage Interpretation Planning Consultancy

Heritage Interpretation Planning

Do you need expert help planning your interpretive exhibit, tourist trail or heritage destination?

Heritage Destination Consulting is the market leader in field of heritage interpretive training, fabrication, planning and design. Led by the renowned expert Dr John Veverka, HDC has undertaken hundreds training and development projects around the world.

Heritage interpretation planning strategies can be used as a fundamental business planning tool at interpretation centres, museums, historic sites, parks, nature centres, zoos, aquaria, botanical gardens and so on, or it can be scaled up and used as a strategy at a national or regional level. The basic principles remain the same regardless of the subject area.

Contact Us if you have interpretive planning needs or would like to learn more about the HDC approach to interpretive planning.

The HDC Approach to Objective Based Planning

In the past most interpretive planning involved a simple process. Planners looked at the resources or landscape, and the main interpretive message, and "planned" what interpretive services or media would go where to best illustrate the story. So interpretive planning was focused on two main elements:

1) The story or main interpretive theme/message; and then ultimately

2) Which media or service to employ at particular locations within site

The outcome unfortunately, was that final plan was more focused on the "place" rather than on the visitor!

As our experience with interpretive planning evolved we began to look at the outcomes from our interpretive planning efforts. What were we "really" accomplishing? So we began to employ "objectives" for all of our interpretive services and media: learning, behavioural, and emotional objectives. We began using these three levels of objective based interpretive planning not because it was just a good idea, but because our clients wanted some proof that the interpretive plans (the media and services) were actually working!

For example, if you were going to pay thousands of dollars for interpretive panels, wouldn’t you be interested in knowing if the visitors actually "got the message" from the panel? It is hard to evaluate any interpretive program, service or media if you don’t know "what it was supposed to accomplish" in the first place – that’s where objectives come in. If an interpretive panel was designed to have "the majority of the visitors be able to describe the three ways trees benefit people", we could pre-test visitors to see if they knew the answers – and then post test visitors after they saw/read the interpretive panel to see if there was a real increase in knowledge.

This level of interpretive planning then led us to a more advanced level of using objective based interpretive planning – cost per contact and cost effectiveness of the interpretive programs and services we recommend, design, and build.

That means that our clients were not just interested in "did the visitors remember the information, they wanted to know if they (the organization, agency or facility) were getting a return on their interpretive media or service investment.

ROI - A new way thinking about interpretation.

Now it was not just an information transfer that was the focus, but "what did we get in return for our investment of $10,000.00 in interpretive panels"? Why should we spend money on interpretation if "nothing happens"? So we were now doing interpretive planning to predict just how cost effective each proposed interpretive program, service, or media might be. The key questions of the clients "if we spend $1.00 on interpretation services or media, will we get at least $1.00 in benefits from that media or service? In particular, we are now looking at interpretation results (from our learning, behavioral and emotional objectives) that can be demonstrated to:

Benefit based planning

This new evolution had led us into new interpretive planning strategies where the most important of our objectives were now the behavioural and emotional objectives or "real outcomes". When interpretive planning begins for a project, we ask ourselves for every objective we develop for an interpretive program, exhibit, media or service.