This guide offers 20 practical and powerful prompt ideas to help you get more from Ask. Some are deep dive prompts designed to stretch strategic capabilities (a few as illustrations that you’ll want to adapt for your location and use case specifics), others are quick fire checks you can ask anytime.

🧠 Deep dive prompts

1. Write a leadership report
   “Write a summary for our executive leadership team meeting that covers our performance over the past week compared to the same period last year. Include summary metrics, key visitor experience insights, any notable trends or events, and highlight anything happening in the wider environment that might be impacting us. Bring it all together into a brief report that gives a full picture for the leadership team.” 

2. Identify experience opportunities
   “Act as a visitor experience consultant. Look at our recent visitor feedback and identify the top three improvements that would have the biggest impact on our guest experience. Then highlight one quick win we can implement easily and give me an estimate of the potential cost and impact.”

3. Plan an awareness campaign
   “Use the internet to find a list of upcoming awareness days and giving days relevant to our museum. Add these dates to our almanac, and then create a membership and donations campaign calendar around them. Suggest content ideas and messaging we can use to engage our supporters on those special days.”

4. Measure media driven visitation
   “Look at our almanac entries for notable animal events at the Zoo, like births, new arrivals, surgeries, or animal passings. Analyze how each of these events impacted our visitation patterns. Then cross reference with earned media mentions using our Google Alerts integration to see what kind of press coverage each event received. Finally, write a report on how these animal events and the related media coverage interacted to influence our visitor numbers.”

5. Build visitor segments
   “Create detailed, quantifiable visitor segments for our cultural institution using all available data: voice of the visitor feedback, transactional info like ticket and shop purchases, membership engagement, visitor origin, demographics, and any digital insights like Google Analytics. Use industry best practices for visitor evaluation and segmentation at cultural attractions to formulate these segments and then provide example advertising strategies tailored to each segment.”

6. Analyse school holiday or term break performance
   “Compare our visitation during school term break periods in Ohio this year versus last year (check the almanac for actual dates). Factor in any weather impacts, like the number of rainy days. Then analyze the per capita spend across different business lines (tickets, retail, and F+B) during those holidays. Show whether the increase in visitors also led to better financial performance. Finally, create a graph to illustrate these insights.”

7. Simulate policy changes
   “We’re considering removing the free parking benefit for ski season pass holders and requiring them to pay. Use our visitor experience data to understand how many members currently use the parking benefit and how important it is to them. Then simulate different scenarios to see how this change might impact member churn, new member sign ups, and the additional revenue we’d gain from parking fees in the future.”

⚡ Quick fire prompts

8. Are we on track to hit our visitation target this quarter? Are we forecast to? 

9. How does our ticket revenue so far this month compare to the same month last year?

10. Summarize this week’s top positive and negative visitor feedback themes.

11. How does our membership to admission pricing compare to the industry benchmark?

12. Show me the top three factors influencing our per visitor spend over the past month.

13. Identify any unusual visitation trends or outliers this week that I should know about.

14. What external events in the almanac should we prepare for in our next campaign?

15. Using our voice of the visitor, write a FAQs page for our website that cover common questions or issues that would prevent negative experiences

16. Write a report providing a full summary of our last special exhibition, across all aspects of performance and visitor experience. 

17. What’s the biggest driver of member churn in the past quarter?

18. Come up with a new name for our exhibition about the local history of architecture in Chicago. Use visitor comments from our formative visitor survey as inspiration. Be creative! 

19. What does the weather forecast suggest for the coming weekend and how might that impact attendance?

20. What are three opportunities to increase retail conversion based on current patterns and feedback?

Ask is more than a reporting tool. It’s your analyst, planner and creative partner, built around the realities of running a visitor attraction. Try these prompts, tweak them to suit your context, and keep exploring. And if you’re not using Ask yet, let’s talk!