If you want go from gut feel to insight inspired, this is the Data Diaries with your hosts from Dexibit, Pierre Perez and Angie Judge. The best podcast for visitor attraction leaders passionate about data and AI. This episode is brought to you by Dexibit. We provide data analytics and AI software specifically for visitor attractions so you can reduce total time to insight and total cost of ownership while democratizing data and improving your team’s agility. Here comes the show!

Angie: Ravi, tell us about this. You’re probably the best person in the world for me to ask this question. How hard is it to build a data product?

Ravi: Maybe the best way to answer this is first to zoom out a little bit. Why do we want a data product for the visitor attractions in the industry for our business? I think it’s really this recognition that data and insights, it’s critical to running a modern business and in order to sort of clear that bog and improve visibility so that as operators you can understand where the problems are, see the opportunities to improve performance.

And with that visibility at all levels of your organization, you are equipped to take better decisions. And through those better decisions, you can improve the impact that every individual can make. So I think it’s, we’ve all realized that data and insights are critical and to me it’s, they’re our leverage that we have as leaders.

There’s a great quote by Archimedes, if you give me a lever long enough and somewhere to stand, you can move the world.

And we will get very excited about that. And I think that’s why we’ve seen so much growth and interest in data, in recent times. However, there is a little of nuance to this and I think we’ve also seen sometimes organizations take this a little bit too far in overreach and they end up in this sort of quagmire.

They think they’re doing the data and insights thing, but actually what they’ve ended up doing is getting bogged down, worrying about, building rather than driving impact through insight and answers. And because this is what we do at Dexibit day in, day out, we have realized through hard for real world experience that it is actually really, really hard to build a great data product and deliver a fantastic data experience where users and leaders at in all parts of an organization can see how they can use it within their workflows, within their day-to-day to make an impact.

Angie: Yeah. And it’s no surprise is it that the research shows, I think Gartner says what 85% of big data projects fail and you can kind of see why, like, for us, it Dexibit but it’s our life’s work to produce a great data product. But it is, it’s tough. It’s a hard job!

Ravi: That’s right. And I think the challenge, that you face is that. Really what people want and what delivers value is that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But to get that and to deliver that to chase the rainbow requires so much work. And it’s that tip of the iceberg problem where a lot of it is invisible and it’s unknown to the end user or the consumer. And that’s why I think it’s easy to get carried away. and not realize what goes into building a great data product and to make this really real and concrete.

A big part of what we do is spend a lot of effort in plumbing, basically connecting all the pipes to ensure that data is flowing from source to destination. Just like the pipes in your house that you never really stopped to question unless there’s something wrong. It probably took a lot of planning and effort to put them into place, and it’s a big part of, building a data product that often gets underestimated. Then on top of that, there is the performance. Is everything running fine? Is it fast to load a dashboard? Does everything arrive in your inbox at the time you expect it to? When you log in to look at the data, how long do you have to wait?

Is it go make a cup of coffee or is it instant so you can start digging into it? The performance is a big part of what we invest in, and we are constantly trying to improve that side of our product, because we think it, it plays a big role in democratizing. Data for everyday users in a big part of the user experience.
Because what that means is if you’ve built an in-house data solution and it takes 10 minutes to generate a report, it really affects how you choose to interact with data at an organizational level. One of the things I’ve noticed is that organizations are very malleable and they will adapt to what they have to work with, and they then become that they internalize what data means for that organization based on what they experience, and they just become used to it.

It’s hard to know if you’ve gone the build route, whether you are actually at the forefront of what’s possible. Or you are actually behind the curve and others are doing it much better, much more efficiently than you are, and you are missing out on all of that value and impact that could have been, available.

Angie: If it’s gonna take you two years to build something, by the time it’s all said and done, where you’ll be at, then by the time everybody else has leapfrog over top of your position of where you’re  planning for now. And it’s, funny you talk about, the performance thing. We get two types of customers who come and talk to us.

One is customers who have never had a data solution and they’re making that first time decision. The second is people who have tried or even have built their own data solution only to find that performance problem comes to bite them, or the innovation problem comes to bite them, or the cost problem comes to bite them and then they come back and say, Hey, it takes our, you know, our system, five minutes to generate a query and can you do it faster? Well, the reality is that our performance is more like one or two seconds to deliver the same result. So, it’s, yeah, I think they’re really real problems for people who are sitting out on this journey.

Ravi: And I think the problems don’t stop there. Once you’ve delivered that report, the next thing that you’ll almost certainly encounter if you want to get traction with data in your organization is the needs from a diverse set of stakeholders, all with their own questions, their own business questions to answer.

And one of the mantras we have at Dexibit is providing insight for any question. What that means when you’re building Euro, building it yourself is you often have a queue of requests that start to accumulate and how you respond to that in order to convert that into answers to feed the rest of your organization is actually quite a critical element that often gets overlooked.

Because you’re taking on so much more operational burden by building yourself. You’ve gotta keep all of that plumbing working, stop the leaks, think about performance and optimizations. But then on top of that, how do you find time to, to model and understand the domain that you are working with? And in order to answer, all of these different questions.

So for some real examples, you could have questions from. On the retail side of the business about, product sell through rates or come could come from marketing or around social media engagement. These are all wildly different business spaces, but they’re all part of a complex contemporary visitor attraction.

And if you have to model that every piece of data in order to build a report. It becomes a huge amount of work and these teams, they stop asking, and I think that’s the worst thing that can happen because you saturate your capacity that it turns people away from data insights. So it’s almost like the antithesis of the original goal that organizations start to trying to solve.

Angie: Yeah. If you’ve got one person in a corner office or in the basement. Doing the data for everybody else in a queue out their door of people with requests for, can you build me this, that, and the next thing? You’re, doing it wrong at that point, right? Like, we’re all about democratizing data and from our product that also means about self-service and, data literacy and supporting all of these sorts of things.

And we firmly believe that you’ve gotta have that to have the agility to make not only decisions on a real time basis, but to make the culture of it all work.

Ravi: That’s right. Have spent some time thinking about this problem. And what we’ve really come up with is, first of all, we’ve spent a lot of time in the industry speaking to customers, understanding their needs, and we have a very good understanding of the different domains within the business.

What we’ve tried to do is to bottle that secret source and embed it within our product, under the banner of what we call, our semantic layer. And that gives, most businesses a huge head start and leg up around what it means to be operating a business within the space and what their needs are in terms of data.

So on top of that. They can leverage what we built to then sprinkle in their secret source that’s unique to their business and customize our product so it meets their needs.

Angie: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I think, in the visitor attraction sector, this problem is especially intense because they are really complex business models.

Your average visitor attraction. Sales tickets to the gate, maybe extras for exhibitions or events or, other experiences. And maybe they do tours and maybe they host weddings and maybe there’s corporate hire. And then on top of that, they’re running food and beverage and, retail and maybe a hotel even, some parking and everything else.

So they’re really complex when you start to bring all of these together. And then you layer membership maybe, or season passes and advancement and. What they’re doing online. And then maybe collection management got huge risk management to take on board and big operational and security teams. Like, it’s never ending.
And it’s different to running a shoe shop where you’re got a pair of shoes with a price and a data point that arises when you transact. And that’s about it. And so I think it’s a problem that’s especially felt by this industry.

Ravi: Absolutely. And I think it’s almost ironic because it’s that complexity that sometimes drives leaders to think that they are special and they do need a custom bespoke solution.

But actually in fact they really don’t, and they probably don’t have the resources and expertise in order to take that complexity. And realize that, so there is a spectrum, right? Between build versus buy because you could buy everything. You could buy something that’s customizable, you could be working from a bag of bits, some that you bought and some that you’ve built and be assembling things…

Angie: and essentially building…

Ravi: at that point, and essentially building at that point. Or you could even use off the shelf bits and be building everything from scratch. And I think with that nuance, there’s actually a range of solutions. So we’ve learned early on that businesses are complex and they need to be able to custom, we need to be able to customize our product.

And so we’ve baked that into our product experience. We are designed for you to plug in and bring your business rules, bring your special needs, and bring the obscure. Or the special data sets that’s unique to you and take it into our product rather than, have to do that from scratch at one end of the spectrum or say, no, we can’t support that at the other end of the spectrum.

Angie: Yeah, because thinking about all of those different domains that we were just talking about that, that you’d have to have that knowledge or be able to orchestrate that magic across that technical business barrier, which is one of the hardest parts of building technology. There’s also, then, when you get into the data space, there’s lots of different skill sets that you need, right?

Like there’s the Insights leader who can translate things into executive speak. There is the product manager who can kind of, keep a team on track and help execute vision down into operations. There’s the data engineers, the plumbers of the world if you like. The scientists who are experimenting and researching with different models, your analysts.

And so you’re talk, starting to talk about quite a big. Team overall of these different skill sets to build it up. And it’s quite easy to see how we’re not just talking about a six figure investment to, to build, we are talking about something in the realm of seven figures Plus when we start to get into all of these different areas.
Ravi: I think you’re right and you’re touching on the realities of what it means to do this. We know that, the Tran recently posted that there. A typical customer spends at least $300,000 per year just on their data warehouse technology, and that doesn’t include any of the labor costs to, to maintain that.

Angie: Is misleading with some of these, big players, they might sort of use the micro pricing when you’re looking at sort of $2 here for compute costs or something on a credit. But it adds up when you’re talking about the volume of queries and the data that you’re processing through some of these platforms.

Ravi: That’s exactly right. And to understand the nuance of how these. These pieces of infrastructure, data infrastructure come together. How they build, how to make the use of how to make the most of their performance and use them effectively and efficiently. It requires a lot of deep expertise and knowledge and comes forward with many unknown unknowns.
And it’s only really when you are knee deep in it that you start to, to see these challenges and gaps emerge data and insights. It seems to be an interesting space where it feels very easy to get started and if you’ve got people within your organization who are quite good with a spreadsheet or a little bit technical, you can see how it escalates from belief and with a bit of confidence.
You can see how it escalates into, like, we think we can do a bit more. We can take this on, but it’s. But organizations often sort of have this stunning Kruger effect, if you’ve heard of that, where you might think that things that you don’t know very much about appear to be easy, but you overestimate the effort in areas that you do know a lot about. And I think this is one of the classic pitfalls of the, to build versus buy decision.

Angie: And just to add to some of those costs that you were talking about before. When we’re talking about building out that whole team, I mean head of insights, we are talking what in the US north of 150,000 a year.
Product manager, maybe one forty data scientists, one forty data engineers, probably about that. Analyst, maybe 85 to a hundred. Like we’re starting to add up some very serious resources to be embarking on a project that we’ve got no guarantees at the end of, and a team that presumably have never come together before to do exactly this. So it’s all breaking new ground into white space, which is the hardest thing to do in technology.

Ravi: It absolutely is. And don’t get me wrong, I think it’s amazing to grow your team and take on more talented, people within the space. And I firmly believe that they could add a lot of value to your organization or any organization.

But I think what’s important is to ensure they’re steered in the right direction, working on problems that are valuable. And a part of that is using the best tools out there, not necessarily building your own bespoke tools, because that’s not going to unlock and drive value. And I think it’ll become hard to continue to argue for those budgets if you go down that path, spend two years to, to build. And don’t have those results to show for it.

Angie: And it’s, it also improves out in the numbers as well of the realities of the insides of some of these teams. Like I think embarking on a data project sounds. And feels very sexy from the outside. But get into the inside of it. And like you’re talking about data engineering being sort of the plumbing.

I had a trades person run at my house this morning, you know, unless there’s sort of a painter who’s. Leaving you with a beautiful house at the end of it where you can stand back and say, wow, that looks incredible. If it’s a plumber who comes in and fixes a pipe, I mean, it’s a very thankless job.

And data engineering, and keeping all of the things connected and all of the lights on and making sure nothing fails and cleaning up when it does. Is a very thankless job and like the average tenure of a data engineer on an in-house data project is under two years. It’s closer to one than it is two.

I think, overall in the states, some of the research shows that the average tenure for any data engineer is about 18 months. And it just goes to show like this is the reality of executing on some of these data projects, and that’s a real challenge. I think when we’re thinking about total cost of ownership, like there’s the time that it takes for you to get from zero to one and what you do beyond that, there’s the cost of all of these resources added up and all the different component parts, but then there’s also the risk.

There’s like the risk of will we make it, and then the risk of whether these people will be. Ones that stay with us through the course of, of the lifetime of the project. Even, you know, if it takes a couple of years to get there, that might be several generations of data engineers under those timeframes.

Ravi: That’s a real, very real risk. And with that, that turnover goes, the organizational intuition knowledge about a lot of these systems and about a lot of the plumbing. When you talk about plumbing it’s critical to keeping everything running. So it’s an underestimated and an undervalued risk, in my personal opinion.
One argument to mitigate that risk, which you see often is that there is a lot of, services and off the shelf connectors that can be used to avoid some of that plumbing. However, what we’ve experienced is that. They’re very general. And for our particular industry, a lot of the sources and systems are very bespoke and obscure and you just simply cannot find off the shelf connectors.

And often this is one of the ways where a build project starts to build steam because they can start with the easy stuff with some off the shelf connectors for Shopify. Or for Facebook for instance, very common. But then once it’s, once you get into the really hard problems of ticketing systems and football cameras and food and beverage systems and point of sale things [00:21:00] start to get a lot more tricky and complex, and that risk is not front loaded at all.

But it’s pushed at the back end of these projects, which is why they can somehow feel like they’re stalling. And I think that’s a failure mode that we’ve seen play out, a number of times, unfortunately.

Angie: Can we talk about one of the elephants in the room, which is, you know, that tech teams love to build?
I mean, you and I have had our careers in technology, so we. People who love to build things. And there is sort of two pathways when you get into a technology career where you can work in a product company. And build a product. You can work in a service company and essentially do consulting, or you can go in-house and you are constantly faced with this pull between buying things and watching other people build them or building them yourself, which is a very big temptation.
I mean. How do you wrangle with that yourself and for your own team? Because even within the software that we do build, there’s lots of decisions that we make to buy things or build things with the various components that make up that product.

Ravi: I’m an engineer and in my heart of hearts, I love to build things as well. So I’ve been bitten by this. Bug, so to speak. But I’ve spent a bit of time in, in academia as well, and one of the quotes that’s really stood out to me is, academics often to talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. And I really like that mindset to think about what we are doing in the engineering and IT space now.

And data and insights. Just because you’re not starting from scratch, it doesn’t mean that you’re not able to contribute in a meaningful way. I think it’s really just understanding and being cognizant of what you’re building and whether it is the right thing to be building and to be very honest, we’ve made mistakes at Dexibit as well.

I think there are a few decisions that we’ve taken that we now regret where we’ve. We’ve been thinking about the build versus buy spectrum and we’ve, taken a decision that we now regret, for example, to make this really concrete, we chose to build our authentication and authorization service within our product, and that’s largely under the covers for most of our users, but it’s responsible for being able to log in, being able to access your data and not having it accessed by other people who shouldn’t be able to. And when we were evaluating our needs, it felt like they were special and we could do better to build this in-house. What we’ve realized now is actually, this is really hard.

We have to deal with the after effects years down the track because now we can’t even remove it from our tech stack. It is so ingrained. The job and the effort required to remove it is actually very high. So we’re stuck with it, so to speak, but every day, every week, every budget. We have to account a certain amount for its maintenance and for the frustration that the engineers have to deal with in order to deliver additional value for our users and for our customers.

So I think if we had a time machine, we would definitely go back and change that decision. However, to be fair, you know, when we think about how this decision got made in the first place, it wasn’t due to any malice. But just genuinely not taking into account the total cost of ownership of the decision, the ramification that the decision would have across the rest of the product, and probably just underestimating our own knowledge of the space.

So we encountered many challenges, which I. Which for us at the time were unknown unknowns. That basically means we didn’t know that problems existed. We hadn’t encountered them, and we didn’t have the experience to draw from, to realize that there were actually things we didn’t know. We didn’t know.

We didn’t know those So that was one example. I can probably give you another one where, we’ve probably made I think, a better decision. So previously in our product, we used to do a lot of natural language processing. We ingest, customer reviews, feedback forms and surveys.

And, a couple of years ago we had our own data pipelines using machine learning and natural language processing techniques to break down, customer’s feedback into words and sentences and analyze sentiment and so on and so forth. At that time, it really was a state of the art and a great solution, but then came along, GPT and large language models and that really changed the entire, shape of what it meant to do this kind of work.

And so we pivoted towards buying. We realized that actually this was very hard for us to compete with. Actually we couldn’t add any additional value on top of what, was on the market. So it’s where we’re sort of learning from our mistakes, so to speak, and thinking about the builder versus buy decision through different lens and the entire lifetime of that product or that initiative, as opposed to just the build cost.

Angie: Yeah, it’s funny you talk about one of my biggest regrets and then one of our biggest wins at the same time, with those two stories. And I think it goes, it speaks to that sunk cost fallacy as well of like, it would be easy to look at that and say, well, you know, we’ve spent years developing this particular part of the product that dealt with freeform visitor feedback and that used all of this technology that we’d built out.
And it’s quite the swallow to, take that on the chin and walk away from it and start afresh with something that then overtakes it quite quickly. So it feels bad and good at the same time. I think, one of the things that was coming to me as you were talking about the identity management example, was a guy I used to work for at Hewlett Packard.

He would say “You should only build when it’s core to your mission, when it’s part of your unique sales proposition as an organization.” And for me in a visitor attraction that is things that are inherently part of the visitor experience. So if I’m Disney, for example, and I’ve got my magic band. That for me is an example of a visitor attraction, example where building the technology kind of makes sense because it’s something very unique to Disney, very core to its customer or visitor experience.

But for us at Dexibit being able to log in is not something that’s unique. It might be a necessity to support our customer’s experience, but it’s not the core of it. So getting really specific about how you sort of navigate that strategic decision. I think really comes to, to help, make that decision of where you buy versus build.

But it is a really difficult one, I feel to, to push back on. What advice would you have for people like me who are. Not engineers themselves don’t have the knowledge to understand, or the foresight to be able to know just how extensive a build was gonna be, how long running its ramifications would be down the road.

How do you push back or navigate that kind of decision space while still trusting your technical team?

Ravi: I think if you consider yourself to be a visitor centric organization, which I think a lot of you listening probably do, I imagine you would ask yourself, what value is this going to bring to the visitor?

And really think about, where your build initiative fits in and. Where instead you might be able to build something that sits on top of the shoulders of giants, for instance. Something like the dexibit and how you can extract even more value that’s unique and a unique proposition to, to your visitors and your business. One of the great quotes I’ve learned over the time is from a blogger called John Cook.

And a lot of leaders tend to think of building a software system as like, playing with Lego. And all you need to do is just. Click in different blocks of Lego together and you’re done. But in reality, and this is this fantastic quote, integrating two software systems is usually more like performing a heart transplant than hugging in lego.
If there’s a close enough match and the people doing it have enough skill. It’s possible, but the pieces don’t fit together. Trivially. And what’s worse? Failure is often never immediate, but it’s takes some signs before you see the rejection. And I think it’s an extremely apt quote and something that’s realized by a lot of organizations that go down the build path for the wrong reasons or with a lack of that knowledge around the total cost of ownership. And what this means in the longer term.

Angie: Yeah. I think one of the other things that I found tricky in that decision was, which I hear a lot from visitor attractions when they’re making a data build versus buy solution is, it’s really easy to fall into that trap of, but we have this one special thing. And to feel very unique in that space.

Oh. But we’re a museum that has special exhibitions and general admission, and we charge ’em as separate tickets or something. Or we’re a location based experience, but we do tours and they depart every 15 minutes and feeling like those are unique things and often that they’re not. And often there are great ways to work with problems like those.

For us in that identity management experience, it was, oh, but we have multi-tenant customers. And that was like the requirement that we hung our hat on and decided to build versus buy. What would be some of the things that you would challenge? A tech team with if they’re sort of coming to you with that one special.
But what about this thing? Often these things are, the little use case that’s quite rare to, to encounter too. So they’re not necessarily, the thing that the team comes across every day.

Ravi: I think it’s really just pushing the team to really think through the solution space.

And ask themselves whether there are other avenues to solving the problem, that can sort of mitigate that requirement. And I think that’s what we didn’t do. In that example, we landed on a very specific solution that didn’t exist in what was off the shelf. And we’d concluded that therefore we needed to build that piece of technology.

However, if we perhaps reframed the problem, we could have arrived at the same outcome using a plethora of choices of the shelf.

Angie: Yeah, it’s funny, I often find that you don’t know what you need to know until you get to that point that you need to know it. And it’s like if you sort of resolve the other 99% of the solution, then that 1% that you’re hanging your hat on saying, oh, but this is special because this, then becomes clear to you at that point because you have those shoulders that you’re standing on, that, that view that’s different from the top versus when you’re starting with a blank page and saying, oh, but this special thing, it becomes this mountain that you’ve gotta climb in this big edge case everybody focuses on. And that can then become quite sidetracked.

Ravi: I, I think so. To be honest with you. Another part of this was I feel like there was a disconnect between. How our engineering team, our tech team, understood the needs versus what the needs actually were from the business and customer side. And, we could probably have done a better job of seeing each other’s different perspectives to realize that they were actually probably quite different needs, but the way they were interpreted seem to result in this very special case.

Angie: …and that’s such a common problem, isn’t it? Especially in this example that we’re talking about where we’ve got a, maybe a tech and digital team who are perhaps quite departed from the realities of being on the ground and visitor services, or being embedded in finance or out with marketing, running campaigns like because of the diversity of the stakeholders and all of their use cases and the business domain knowledge that’s gotta go into all of these problems. Like that becomes a really compounding issue to maintain that bridge between technology and business.

Ravi: Exactly. And. We’ve seen this, I’ve seen this a lot where, sometimes the tech team and the engineers, they’re focused on moving numbers around. And so as long as a number appears on your screen or in the report, it feels like everything’s working to them.
But the business users who are actually looking at their report to them, although there are numbers there, they actually don’t make any sense because they’re so far away from what they expected. The business metrics that matter and when you’re not connected and on the same wavelength, it leads to these perverse decisions and misunderstandings.

Angie: I’ve got a couple of questions here from, some of our listeners. I’ve got one here from Kevin, the head of visitor services at a mid-sized history museum in Ohio. Hi Kevin. He says, “We’ve been leaning on spreadsheets forever. Now, there’s a push from leadership to in quote, get serious about data. The tech team in IT want to build us a custom dashboard in-house. I’m worried it’ll be months before we see anything usable. How do I push back without sounding anti progress?”

Ravi: Hi Kevin. That is quite a predicament that you’re in. I think you’re probably right to be worried and concerned. My suggestion would be to talk to your business stakeholders and get a better understanding of what value they get from your spreadsheet and what’s missing, and ensure that they look beyond just the build your own, do it DIY solution space, and see what’s out there on the market. What can be used. What you can really use as a lever to drive more impact. Because I think for example, with Dexibit in your hands, you will have so much more agility that you can do everything that your in-house tech team wants to do, but in a matter of days, and not just for this one data set that you’re talking about, but you have the ability to work with, plug and play integrations, but also upload your own bespoke data sets and spreadsheets and create all of those dashboards and reports.

Angie: Yeah, I would echo what Ravi said. You are right Kevin. It will take months before you see anything usable. Maybe a little bit longer. My advice in this situation would be, if you’re the head of visitor services.
You don’t need to be passive in the technology making experience decision experience, like, best case that should at least be a partnership between you and technology or the IT team. But. You know, if it’s not that equal partnership where you’re making that decision jointly, and it’s not about, in your words, what the IT team wants, I mean, at the end of the day, you are the person, you are the team who will be making the decisions based off this data and this data solution. So I would suggest to you that’s your decision to make. So don’t be afraid to step into that leadership, into that space and lead the decision of are we building, are we buying, and if we are buying what and why?
And. Provide a framework for your team and the IT team to work together to make those decisions and be able to challenge and push and pull within that framework to lead the team to make the right call. Rather than saying hands up in the air, this is the it team’s decision. And we’re just gonna go with whatever they want.

So that, that would be my suggestion. I know it’s tricky when it comes down to whose budget is it coming out of. But hopefully there is also that sense within the wider leadership team of who are the core stakeholders who are leading in this space.

And we have another one here from Leila, a marketing manager at a science center in Canada looking at buying a COTS data solution. So I presume that means commercial off the shelf data solution. “I’m struggling to compare the cost to what we already do with our ticketing systems reporting. Is there a framework to help non-techies understand the real cost of building versus buying? That’s a tricky one. I would jump in there. With the fact that one of the things we talked about today was lots of different data coming from lots of different places. And your ticketing analytics or ticketing reporting that’s in that system is just one piece of that puzzle. And there are lots of different data points and metrics or key performance indicators that you need to run your visitor attraction.
And let’s take one, like revenue for example. To get a revenue out. It’s not just gonna be ticketing. We’re talking about food and beverage. We’re talking about retail. We maybe wanna look at something like average revenue per visit and maybe we recognize visitation of footfall. Maybe we’ve got a food and beverage joint venture revenue share partnership with a local cafe operator. And so we need to take into consideration that that split as well. So we are talking about lots of different data sources already just for this one, KPI and lots of different automation requirements and lots of different things. Ravi mentioned all the stuff that’s happening under the hood in terms of transformations and business rules and so forth. As well as all of that coming together, plus we’re talking about all of those things of, and how do you visualize this and, you know, do we wanna look at per cap by day of the week or per cap when it’s rainy versus windy, and all of these sorts of things. So this is a much bigger problem than saying, how many tickets did I sell today? Out of your ticketing solution. And I would say the same is true for pretty much every system that you work with. Like Google Analytics, for example. Great place to go to get data about your website. Facebook. You can go and pull some data out of there as well. But what you end up with is that problem of like copying and pasting data into spreadsheets and circulating them in reports and lots of effort involved in data admin. And time and that’s all energy that’s not being spent on making great decisions. What would you add to that, Ravi?
Ravi: I can’t add anything more to that. I think you’ve answered that question extremely well. 

Angie: maybe you could help me out with this one. Raj from a theme pack operator in Dubai. He says, “We’ve in invested in an internal data lake and we’ve got a strong engineering team in house, but I’m under pressure to demonstrate faster return. How do you balance what you’ve already built with the appeal of buying something that could plug in faster?”

Ravi: I think it’s a really great question to ask because it shows you’re really thinking pragmatically about how to deliver value and not just about working on a project because it’s fun and cool. There’s actually quite [00:42:00] a lot of different ways to integrate and in-house with an off the shelf solution. So for us at Dexibit we do this quite often because again, we can leverage the work that’s already been done to good effect and allow your team to focus on adding value and building on top of the combined software. So we can integrate with a lot of standard data warehouses.
Such as Databricks and BigQuery and Snowflake or SQL Server, and we can leverage all of that work. We can over time slowly migrate away from that. So then you are no longer burdened with the maintenance and the operational expenditure that comes along with keeping the lights on and keeping that performing well.
Or we can choose to leave it in place and continue to build new in our product. So there’s quite a lot of different pathways that you can take, and the best is the best way forward is really just to have a conversation with your chosen vendor.

Angie: Nice. Well, if you like the show, come and find us at Dexibit.com or send us your questions at info@dexibit.com.

Thanks for listening to the Data Diaries so until next time, this is Dexibit. Thanks, Ravi.

Ravi: Thank you.

If your goal is to get more visitors through the door, engaging and spending more, leaving happy and loyally returning – check out Dexibit’s data analytics and AI software at dexibit.com. We work with visitor attractions, cultural and commercial, integrating with over a hundred industry source systems across visitor experience and venue operations, providing dashboards, reports, insights, forecasts, data management and a unique data concierge.

Until next time, this is Dexibit!

If you want go from gut feel to insight inspired, this is the Data Diaries with your hosts from Dexibit, Pierre Perez and Angie Judge. The best podcast for visitor attraction leaders passionate about data and AI. This episode is brought to you by Dexibit. We provide data analytics and AI software specifically for visitor attractions so you can reduce total time to insight and total cost of ownership while democratizing data and improving your team’s agility. Here comes the show!

Angie: Pierre. What is happening to the world? Tariffs, tourism, takeovers. It’s been a real mixed bag the past year for visitor attractions when it comes to visitation and growth. It’s a jungle out there.

Pierre: Absolutely. Global data has been all over the show, especially since 2024, right? We’ve seen a huge change in behavior in 2024 and. Seems to be the same for 2025 so far. We’ll dive a little bit into that later on because we have some really cool benchmark data to look at. It has been a very different year so far.

Angie: To put this into context, if we wind the clock back to 2024, globally, visitation only grew the whole year, year on year, from 2023 to ’24, only by 5%. That was down from 30% the year prior. It was actually lower in the Northern hemisphere down to 3%, which was dropping from 16% the year prior. So 2024 already was kind of flat. I mean, we don’t expect the industry to grow at 30% year in year. Right? Like that was a, that was still a bit of pandemic recovery. We are talking about ’22 to ’23 at that point. So ’23 to ’24 was never gonna be pulling double digit numbers, but 5% felt [00:02:00] a bit flat and a lot of that growth was banked up into Q1. We saw some good results. Everything was off to an amazing start. January, February, March, by April, we had a real dip and then had a soft summer in the northern hemisphere and the second half of the year just really struggled to get off the ground.

Pierre: Yeah, absolutely. There was this saying everywhere on social media survive until 2025 – 2024 was looking a little bit green. But, you know, bear in mind, 2023 in a lot of regions, people were recording their best year ever. Right. We, I was, I remember being in, in Europe in 2023, we had an amazing summer and visit attractions were performing extremely well. It didn’t sort of carry through 2024. 2024 in my opinion, was the first normal year after the pandemic, right? This is where like everything is back to normal. Now, let’s have a look at how we perform in 2024.
This is what people that we work with are doing what worked, what didn’t work? Can we use levers to amplify what work in 2024 in 2025? And this is what most of the conversations are right now with people that we work with.

Angie: And there was a couple of reasons for some of the stuff in 24. I remember April, we had some changes around holidays, number of weekends. Tell me more about that.

Pierre: Yeah, it’s always a good one to, to look at. We usually, we sometimes are guilty also to look at data very zoomed in, which is usually done a month, granularity, right? And we looking at, we look at our numbers for the month and we say, Hey, look, we overperform against last year, we underperform against last year, et cetera, on a monthly basis.

What we do need to do on top of that is zoom out a little bit and understand how the specific month of each year is shaped against the same month last year. You’ve mentioned an extra weekend, or, one day of weekend last this year against last year can have a huge impact in your numbers, right?

So zooming out to understand that. If we talk us, we have, you know, holidays such as spring break that I’m never usually, on the same month or same time of the month each year. So that can also play a huge fact into the deltas that we are seeing when we are analyzing year on year performance and a monthly granularity.

Angie: Yeah, and I remember, Easter has shifted around. It was at the tail end of March last year, which gave us this really great booster March in 2024 where everybody thought the year was going exceptionally well. But then of course April down on the year prior, because that’s where Easter had fallen previously this year.

We’ve got Easter back in April again, and spring break. Let’s have a look at the numbers for 2025, we’ve got January down 2%, February down 10%, March down 11%, or actually for North America, just down 9%. So we’ve seen the flip of the coin here. If we flip back to 2024, we had, north America behind at 3% versus 5% for year on year growth across the year. So this year so far, we’ve got North America. Although negative figures like everyone else, they are actually ahead of the pack, down just 9% versus 11% for everyone else in March. But this year we’ve had a few weird things to contend with, right? It’s been a year of global events.

Pierre: It has been a year of global events and external factors like that do play a role in visitation figures. Right. Are we talking about domestic tourism, international tourism, et cetera. So there’s been a lot of different events that have been impacting visitation, this year so far.

Angie: Yeah, we’ve had, in the first few months of the year, we had one of the biggest cold snaps in recent history in the east coast of the US. Multiple snow day closures for a lot of locations and in LA of course, sadly, the LA fires, which closed many venues and continues on to have some impacts. Even now we’re recording this in what, May 25 we’re seeing still some impacts to tourism in la. We had, of course inauguration in dc and state funeral, which, impacted closures for those days and also has impacted, visitation somewhat, positively and negatively in some [00:07:00] spaces. Sadly plane crashes in DC and Philly. Having an impact on visitation, so quite unusual things coming out this year that have maybe had a say on those results.

Pierre: It is all linked together. Absolutely. And it’s hard to, identify exactly what may be causing, visitation fluctuation, but as you mentioned, it is absolutely a combination of events that has impacted visitation so far.

Angie: So this data is coming from Dexibit’s customers. We love working with this data. This is a very unique industry benchmark. First of all, it’s daily and granularity. Secondly, it’s real time in monitoring how the industry is going. That’s what makes it so unique. The only other data that we can refer back to is publicly available, published data from publicly traded commercial companies, from publicly published nonprofits who are putting their annual visitation so forth out there. So it’s really unique to be able to have this aggregate look at how the industry is performing. But if we, so we otherwise have to wait for what? 15, 18 months to get some results out for rest of industry, so the last data we have is actually all the way back to 2023 from the rest of the sector, where their public reports have been put out. And the year on year growth that the rest of the industry reported in 2023 was only 6%.

Keeping in mind that Dexibit’s customers in 2023 recorded growth rates on average of 30% in that year. So if they’re sitting at 6% versus 30 in ’23. We saw 5% from our customers on average last year, and this year we’re seeing negative. We can actually expect that the rest of the industry is somewhat behind those figures. Again, any guesses on why our customers outperform rest of industry when it comes to visitation growth?

Pierre: Yes. Are there educated guesses? Maybe less so. There’s a few theories out there. One is, customers are working with us for a reason, that they pay close attention to their data and they want to democratize the data across different departments, right? That means all the way down to the curator or your exhibitions to understand what is attracting visitors to your museum, to your zoos, to their aquarium, et cetera, et cetera. They’re also really conscious about pricing. If they do charge for, admission, which is another topic that we benchmark on for another episode, but they pay very close attention to how they’re performing and also how other people are performing. This helps them to make better decisions.

Angie: What do you think people are happy with as a growth rate?

Pierre: It’s a tough question. It’s how long is a piece of string really? Right? It depends on the department, I’m talking, you know, membership, retail, visitor experience and all of that. So when we talk about growth, and here for this specific context, we are only talking about visitation growth, right?

There’s also a caveat here in term of the type of attraction we’re talking about established versus fairly new, so the expectations will be different. Based on, how long this attraction has been running, right now in established attraction, I’d say, a yearly growth rates are of between five to 10% is sort of expected.

And I’m curious to see if you, if you concur or if you, have different conversation with people that you talk to. When you talk to, a new venue, these numbers are always in the double digits, right? Year on year.

Angie: Yeah, I think if you’ve done a, a really significant redevelopment or a blockbuster exhibition, you’d be expecting a minimum of 10, 30% plus on your growth rate. But if we are talking about, a new build, it’s different again, given that they don’t have a baseline to come from. Actually, typically we see the reverse in a new build, typically their first year is their best year. Second year is slightly behind. Third year, they tend to see a drop. As, you know, everybody who’s going to visit would’ve visited once. And then it’s about attracting, repeat and tourist, and new audiences. If we’re talking about an established attraction, I would agree with you. With a caveat that I think five to 10% is great. I think in terms of sustainable annual growth for an established attraction, people should be happy with around that two to 6% mark, would be my pick. So actually when we look at last year as result, although it was really bumpy through the year, which makes it a hard year. Actually the overall figure of 5% is not too bad if we’re sort of putting that in the context of that, that two to 6%, if [00:12:00] we were to look at it this through a business lens, your average sort of, small, mid-sized business is usually happy with something north of 10%, established companies like to sit five to 15% Nonprofits in that five to 15% mark as well. So yeah, I totally agree with you. Depends on the museum or the visitor attractions’ age, depends on what department and metric we’re talking about. Yeah, I would shoot for, if you’re going outside the two to 6% range, have a good reason why.
Pierre: I’m gonna have a question for you as well. Our mission is to democratize data in visitor attractions, right? We want to break down silos. Do you think the democratization of a visit to attraction in term of. You know, we’ve, we’ve had firsthand experience of people with no experience in visitor attraction before are building visitor attractions right now, right? Such as, family, entertainment places, one of the aspects that I’m curious to see, have we seen a growth in the number of venues that are out there? Because that will explain why also the visitation growth is not as big as what it was in the previous year, if you have more places to choose from to spend your time, the likelihood of guests returning to the same places is lower

Angie: Possibly. There’s definitely a lot of competitive activity, vying for a visitor’s attention, particularly in certain cities, like New York and, and so forth. LA. London, Singapore. But, I think that some of that competitive tension also comes from outside the industry, and in particular with our cell phones, you know, with the Tiktoks and the Netflixes of the world as well.

You know, when the family decides what to do on a Saturday morning, like peeling the kids away from a screen is half the battle. And then we get into the, and what do we do, once we leave the house. So I think that definitely,, yeah, that com competition is something to think about on all fronts. For sure. What do you reckon is easier to grow, visitation, attendance, revenue, or membership?

Pierre: That’s a very good question. I feel like revenue would be one of the easiest to grow, because you can simply put your prices up to a degree, without upsetting anyone dramatically. There’s a few levels that you can pull that are low hanging fruits, in my opinion, that will increase revenue.

On the visitation side, logistically and strategically, it’s a lot more complicated to lift, right? You’re talking organizing exhibition, which is not, you know, it’s not a two weeks project, right? It’s, it takes an enormous amount of time , and resources to organize. And that’s what you’re gonna need to increase visitation.
It’s gonna take special events, it’s gonna take festivals, it’s gonna take something new. Really drive people, were talking about social media earlier. Social media has new content very frequently, and this is I guess why people engage with it so much. It’s the same thing here, that if you want to drive visitation substantially, you need to have that fresh content in front of people to prompt them to come to you.

Angie: Yeah, absolutely. I would agree with that. I think it’s harder to get another person in the door than it is to get somebody who’s already there to spend more, do more. Even it’s harder to get a new member than it is to get an existing member to come back that one more time, or do a bit more the next time that they come.

When we look at the cost of servicing a visit, the visitor acquisition costs, the marketing dollars we have to spend to get that person to come to the attraction in the first place is one of the higher parts of the cost versus, servicing that visit once they are there. So yeah, I would definitely agree with you. I think if you wanna improve performance in these slim years going for improving your per cap with onsite spend, with ticket price, with auxiliary spend, that’s where the easier wins are. We’ve seen that in the publicly listed companies too.

Right? Visitation was flat or down , but revenue was up. They were getting more out of their visits, which is cool to see. Still a squeeze on the profit margins with rising cost, but great to see the growth.

Pierre: That was my next point, is that an increase in revenue doesn’t mean an increase in your margins or your profit. As we’ve seen, again, we talked about external events that are impacting visitation. The same goes on here with external event impacting potential cost of goods at retail stores, but also on the F and B sector.

Like things have been more expensive to buy for cafes and restaurants on sites, which means they need to offset that cost to the customers, which means yes, your revenue is growing, but it’s growing as a result of your cost increasing, not necessarily people spending extra. And I think that’s a different, topic for another episode. But this is also what I like to see is that if your revenue increases, what is it caused by? Is it because the average transaction has gone up? Is it because the basket size has gone up? And then you look at your margin and so on.

So, yes, revenue is easier to, grow than visitation, but you can also do certain activities to increase visitation, for you. Yeah.

Angie: Yeah. That’s gonna be the big question on everybody’s lips this year is the impact of tariffs, especially in the retail store. Like you say in food and beverage, even in those new locations who are trying to get their construction projects finished and have got equipment and facilities and things sitting at the border.

And looking at those publicly listed visitor attractions too, they haven’t, a lot of them haven’t yet published their full results for the year, last year. But what they are sort of all setting shareholder expectation around the theme of demand moderation in 2025. If we look back at their quarterlies that they were releasing, pretty much Six Flags was the only anomaly, reporting what looked to be about 3% growth with their merger, that they had. But everybody else, again, quite quite soft.
I wanna turn now and talk a little bit about tourism. We had US international tourism sitting at about 31% growth from in 2023 it was sitting at 66 million. Moved up to 72 million in ’24, not quite at pre pandemic levels of 79, although is projected to, to hit a record break in next year with America’s two 50 anniversary. But I know Oxford Tourism Economics came out and projected an adjustment down to as low as minus 9%, which everybody was scoffing at, but they’re indicating that the March actuals have come in just a touch under 12%, which, if they’re right, 12% negative growth, if they’re right, is a huge impact. If we look at some of the big visitor origin for US, international tourism, Canada, Mexico, China, Canadian entries were down 32% in March, according to Canada. Air Canada has actually got to the point of producing its flight volume and at one point Trudeau was telling his citizens to travel at home. This is really gonna be one of the big stories to follow for visitation in 2025 is international tourism.
Pierre: Absolutely. You know, despite that, despite the Canada entries being down, what we’ve seen is that domestic tourism in the US was actually really healthy. Especially in Washington DC where we saw a few museums really benefited from that local or hyper-local crowd coming and supporting them, and going to these venues, so that, that domestic tourism was looking pretty good.

Angie: Yeah, it’s interesting, Bank of America put out some figures of domestic tourism. So not looking at like local, hyper-local travel, but more, further afield, domestic tourism numbers in the US were sitting at 5% growth, 2023; 8% growth. 2024. Bank of America are saying credit card spending, electronic spending, down 2.5% in March, for lodging accommodation, and down 6% for air. So I think, whilst we’re seeing that sort of boom, especially in areas like DC on the locals and the hyper locals, perhaps those coming from further afield, like maybe people are less, less likely to fly, more likely to drive great for drive cities like, the DC Metro area, New York, la et cetera.

Maybe going to hurt a little bit. More for cities that people have to fly in, to visit.

Pierre: And that’s interesting to, to see, right? I guess you will expect locals not needing. Lodging or air travel as you mentioned. So let’s keep an eye on these numbers. We are, usually, at a zip code level when we, look at origin of the guest, and what we’ve seen is that the zip codes immediately surrounding venues, have been performing pretty well, in DC.

Angie: Yeah. And if we zoom out a little bit more in the world, I’m really curious to see how this tourism situation’s gonna play out for other countries. I mean, maybe one country’s loss. It will be another one’s gain. I don’t know how that’s gonna play out for our Canadian venues. For their domestic tourists or some of our other, you know, whether Europe might benefit a little bit from those that might be diverting travel from elsewhere. I know regionally like countries like Saudi, Qatar in the Middle East, leading on tourism growth because they’re coming from you know, a pretty low starting point. And same with some of Central America, and some of the cheaper just destinations in Europe performing really well. So I’d be curious to see how all of that plays out in our big cities around the world.
Pierre: Absolutely. I’ve been hearing some amazing numbers from Japan as well recently with a huge amount of international tourists, flocking to Japan right now to take advantage of the currency and the yen being so low. So there will be, I think, some really interesting numbers coming from Japan for ’24, ’25.
Angie: What’s your pick for what America two fifty is gonna do next year?

Pierre: I think, it’d be a great thing, right? Isn’t it? The FIFA World Cup as well. Then we had the LA Olympics in 2028 on the back of that as well, two years after that. So, I think it’s gonna be a, an impressive year. I mean, I know there’s a lot of these infrastructures and a lot of planning around that.

So I think it’s gonna be a huge year ahead.

Angie: Yeah, definitely for, East Coast. I think, DC is an obvious pick. Philly probably, I know Philly are also hosting some fifa, New York, new York’s planning some really cool events, I think, some of the sailboat, regattas and things like that for two 50. But yeah, I’m curious about what it will do in other spots.

Like in LA or San Francisco where there we’ll see quite the same impact on visitation for visitor attractions. It might be quite dependent on what their public programming is and how it sort of ties in with what city officials are doing and things like that. It’s really interesting to see how that plays out.

Pierre: I think so, and also interesting. We should be seeing some of these numbers very early on. Something that we’ve noticed in 2024 and 2025, but the shift. Of how far in advance people were booking to come to the venue or even the channel that they were using before they were coming to an attraction.

We used to see right after COVID a lot of people booking online and, planning their trip a little bit. Further ahead on what we are right now. We’re seeing a lot of onsite tickets being sold right now and all people being a lot more impromptu with their visits. So I’d be interesting to know what these big events due to that book in lead time that we usually look at. And I assume these numbers will be, started to be impacted, towards the second half of this year.

Angie: Hopefully we see booking lead time picking up a bit ’cause it’s been falling the last few years since the height of COVID. Definitely helps our attractions when they have a little bit more predictability and who they know is going to come.

So if you’re in Dexibit, pull out your benchmark search benchmarks in your library. You’ve got some great data sets in there for visitation growth, and much, much more. I always find, I don’t know about you Pierre, but I love walking through benchmarks with visitor attractions because you get that reaction of. It’s not just us. That sort of validation, of is it me or is it something else? Is it the world? I think that can be really good in both scenarios. Like when things aren’t going quite so well, it can be really comforting to have that sort of check. To be like, oh, this is actually a common experience. But also when things are going really well, it is also that nice check to know, to pat yourself on the back and give the team a high five, and recognize when things are above performance. Benchmarks are a great point to put into context how things are going for you and your team.

Pierre: And talking about benchmarks. I love that we talk about visitation. In another episode we can maybe talk about pricing, but also how are people feeling when they come to these attractions, right? Has the sentiment and the emotions that people are feeling when they come to attractions have changed over the year?
The expectations change, and the value, what do they feel about the value when they go to these places? So I’m really excited to dive into that.

Angie: My favorite topic, we can see what the complaint levels for restrooms are across different visitor attractions globally. Just in case you needed to know.
If you like the show, come and find us at dexibit.com or send us your questions at info@dexibit.com.

If your goal is to get more visitors through the door, engaging and spending more, leaving happy and loyally returning – check out Dexibit’s data analytics and AI software at dexibit.com. We work with visitor attractions, cultural and commercial, integrating with over a hundred industry source systems across visitor experience and venue operations, providing dashboards, reports, insights, forecasts, data management and a unique data concierge.

Until next time, this is Dexibit!

Angie Judge: Hello and welcome, my name is Angie Judge from Dexibit and welcome to the Data Diaries. I’m here today with David Hingley. David, good morning.

David Hingley: Morning. Good to be with you.

Angie Judge: Great to be with you! David has spent the last 12 years leading visitor services and operational excellence in the UK’s leading cultural institutions, and he’s sharing his passion with others up and coming in the industry. From a career in FMCG retailing, David has worked at the Historic Royal Palaces and then the Landmark Trust before going on to head Visitor Experience at Tate across both Tate Britain and Tate Modern since 2019. And he’s also a trustee for Painshill Park and is currently running a series of 10K runs to raise funds for mental health too, I understand. Looking for a bit of sponsorship there, David?

David Hingley: Yeah, always looking for sponsorship. I’ve done 10 runs so far this year and I’ve got two more to go.

Angie Judge: I would gladly be on the paying side rather than the running side. It’s definitely not my cup of tea.

David Hingley: I’m definitely banking on that with a lot of my supporters.

Angie Judge: David is going to share with us today, one of his great passions and how he’s sharing his work in the industry, helping visitor services and frontline teams of the UK’s cultural institutions to – what he calls, “Cross the Floor” – to swap and share in their experiences and gain new ones. So, David, I’m looking forward to hearing all about this. Perhaps you could start us off with a quick overview on what “Crossing the Floors” is all about.

David Hingley: Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely a bit of a soapbox of mine. So people that know me and have worked with me know that I’ve been sort of banging on about this in different forms, for quite a while, but essentially it’s a really simple idea. It’s the idea that a lot of the teams that work really broadly in front of house, so visitor experience, my teams, but also areas like ticketing, security, et cetera, they don’t get the same opportunities that other areas of the organization do to just dip out maybe and grab a coffee with a colleague in another institution, or spend time in another museum or a cultural site as part of their work. Because their work is very much normally around being rooted in certain places at certain times so that the site can operate. So talking to the team, one of the things that they wanted to do was have wider experiences and we were thinking about how we could do that, and just one simple way that we came up with was to be able to go and spend some time with a similar or even slightly different institution that was kind of relatively close by, because we’re always thinking about the cost for the team member, for example, to do a different commute, but, you know, go and spend a day shadowing a shift, buddying up with a colleague and just see what it’s like. So, for example, Tate Modern sits facing St. Paul’s Cathedral, and they’re both big tourist sites, but they’re very different obviously, in terms of what they offer. So what “Crossing the Floors” does is it gives people an opportunity to think, especially those people who are just starting off their career and maybe working for Tate is their first job. They may well love it, but they may also be trying to work out what they want to do longer term as a career. This gives them a chance just to go and spend a day and just get a taste of what that might be like. Whether that’s for them, whether it’s not, but also a chance also to see how things are done differently in different places. Because I think you can become very kind of focused on your own institution. So it’s nice to kind of take a step back and see something different.

Angie Judge: And how do you get around this kind of constraint that you mentioned there of as a frontline person, these people would need to be onsite for it to operate. Is this something that they’re doing on work time? Is it out of work time? How do they manage, you know, that need to be present at their own institution?

David Hingley: Yeah, so we’ve worked really closely with partner organizations to sort of see how we can make this work and everybody’s gonna do it in the same way, because we thought that was really important. And it will be done on work time. Again, I think the culture sector can depend a lot on people getting experience through volunteering, and we thought it was important to be able to give people the chance to do something at their regular rate of pay. So they will work with a buddy. So it does mean that each site’s got to free just one person up for a day. We can run this scheme, we can have people who are interested put their names forward. We’ve been very clear that we kind of have to plan ahead to make sure our rotors work, et cetera. But then we can drop people in over a number of months into their kind of chosen site on days when we are better staffed and we know we can afford to do that. And the place where they’re going, whoever’s hosting them, knows that, you know, “Alright, they’re getting somebody who we’re not gonna leave them on their own, but we do know that these people have transferrable skills. They’re going to be great at talking to visitors at customer service. So they’ll bring that along with them.” So in a sense, you probably get kind of the equivalent of an extra half-person, they’re on your site for the day without leaving them, you know, unsupported. Because it’s really important that they’re with somebody and they’re looked after and that’s part of it. We’ve got six different organizations at the moment who are working on this and we’ve already got people that want to join us and expand. It’s easier to spread the load between us, whereas if we’re trying to do training kind of for our own teams, it’s really difficult to get more than a few people off the floor sometimes.

Angie Judge: Yeah. There is sort of a critical mass that you need to reach in order to do training across frontline teams, isn’t there?

David Hingley: Yeah, absolutely. So really one of the things we are looking at as well, is sharing the kind of training courses that we run because we recognize there’ll be a lot of similarities and I may only be able to get a couple of people off the floor, which would mean running a course for my team wouldn’t be cost effective, but if there are other teams that want to run a similar course and they can all get a couple of people off their floor together between us, then we can run the course.

Angie Judge: And I have to ask, in today’s tight labor market where it is quite difficult to attract staff, and I know so many cultural institutions are feeling that pinch at the moment and are short staffed. Does that become a little bit of a risk in terms of letting staff walk out the door and across the way to someone who I imagine isn’t quite a competitor, but equally another workplace that might entice others away?

David Hingley: Do you know what? I think it’s always a risk, but I think it’s that classic, there’s absolutely a risk that if you don’t do something to look after and develop your team, you’re going to end up with individuals who are frustrated, who want to get on, but aren’t seeing the opportunities and who are probably gonna look elsewhere anyway. So I think there are two bits to it. It is a tight labor market. We’re all pulling on, effectively very similar pools, but we’re talking about how we want to change that pool of people in the future and attract more diverse individuals, for example, in the culture sector. And I think each institution is not gonna be able to do that on its own. So by pulling together, you know, maybe I’m a firm believer sometimes in getting the right person in the right place. So there could be somebody who’s a little bit demotivated, maybe isn’t sure that my place of work is a place for them, but they go and experience somewhere else. They really find that that is where they want to be. And then I think you’ve gotta take a broader view that that is good for the sector. And you know, I’m a believer that our organizations are, although we would quite often say they’re large, they’re not large in the scheme of the world. I’ve worked for kind of major blue chip companies where we had tens of thousands of employees, lots more opportunities to develop. So I think what we can do by giving people the opportunity to see what else is out there is they have an opportunity to develop. There’s not necessarily always somewhere for them to go where they’re currently employed, but it may be they go away and come back and they’ve got some experience in a different role. So I think, yeah, I’m a firm believer in giving people that opportunity.

Angie Judge: Very well put. And I know I love hearing your passion that speaks to the way in which a visitor services or visitor experience career is a profession in its own right. I’m curious, at what moment in your own career sort of sparked this inspiration behind starting off this effort around “Crossing the Floors”?

David Hingley: Yeah, I think I’ve always been interested in that kind of, I think if you work with lots of people, you know, you always get interested in what makes people tick, be that the visitors and customers or be that your own team and how that interaction between individuals is the point where, let’s be honest, whatever your product, whatever area you work in, that’s kind of the moment when it happens. And that’s very, I think that’s very personal. So I think it’s really important. Whatever else goes into an experience or a project is that kind of interaction moment where it actually happens. That for me is the most important part. And so I came to the conclusion that whatever else people did in the background, when I worked in department stores, or now I work in more creative and cultural industries, that personal interaction can totally ruin everything else on the downside or it can totally make up for something that’s not quite working in the way that you’d hoped. So I think that is a real, it’s often overlooked and partly that’s because it does just happen because, you know, we are just human at the end of the day, and we try and get on with each other most of the time and we try and make things sort of work as well as they possibly can. On the one hand, that’s quite a simple thing because we do it all the time in everyday life. So we all think we can do it. But delivering that day in, day out for very different audiences that may be coming into the same place, that is a real skill. And I think you learn that over time. So I think for me, probably there was a point at which actually when I was working in department stores, when I decided that I actually really liked that part of the whole journey. And I have done roles where I’ve been further away from that kind of interaction, and I’ve just found I don’t get the same buzz out of it and I don’t enjoy it as much. And I also think the teams in that expert field of operations, visitor experience, more broadly, I think they’re people who what gives them a buzz, is usually seeing somebody go away who’s had their experience turned around if they were maybe not having a great time or who’ve had their experience really moved on to the next level. People write in, I always kind of joke a bit, but people write in, and this is the same wherever I’ve worked. And they don’t say the art was amazing at Tate Modern. I mean, they do, but they kind of expect that because it’s Tate. Or when they go to a royal palace, they expect the royal palaces to look amazing, to be stunning, to be full of history. That’s kind of a given, which is slightly unfair, but that’s the deal. But what they write in about is the member of staff they met that told them the little secret or the thing that they couldn’t read in the guidebook or the writing about the sandwiches in the toilets. But I think it’s really important that you leave a real impression on people and I think that can get so overlooked because it’s really hard to quantify actually. You can do mystery visit scores and you can, you know, there’s all kinds of things you can do. It’s quite hard to tap into just what it is people do because if you’re doing it right as well, it seems effortless and I think that’s really hard. It’s almost, the better a team is at it, the less it gets noticed.

Angie Judge: That’s so true.

David Hingley: Because we always react and again, team people that work in these teams, I think are naturally predisposed to kind of look at what went wrong and try and fix it for next time.

Angie Judge: And David, I wondered if there’s a moment that you’ve learned through “Crossing the Floors” or seen somebody else learn that sort of light bulb moment of those secret ingredients that go into that secret source that delivers that really special visitor experience.

David Hingley: It’s really interesting. I’ve seen it where we’ve taken, even just taken people in on work experience at different levels and they’ve quite often been really nervous about, you know, the first time you go and work, usually you end up wearing a uniform. If you are in a big visitor experience team, as soon as you put that uniform on or that name badge or whatever you do, the pressures on. Everybody assumes you know everything. And I think what I’ve seen quite a few times is where you say, “Well, we’ve partnered you up with this person today.” And it’s usually somebody who knows the institution clearly, someone who’s really enthusiastic about it. What we found is if you say to them, “While you are with that person, just kind of ask them about what their personal favorites are. You know, what little stories they’ve got.” I have seen quite a few people really blossom on the fact that what they’ve realized is, you don’t need to be an expert on everything. You can’t. But if there’s a few bits that you really know and you really love, and you really learn to kind of tell that story or share that in the way that you want, that can really make a difference. And I can think of people who are quite quiet, although, you know, great at meeting and greeting, but you know, quite quiet as an individual. You would say they were outgoing, but they, they pick up these bits from people that they’re buddying up with and you can see they think “I could do this because there’s something in this space where I’m working that I’m massively passionate about, and I know I’m not gonna have a problem talking to somebody about it for five, ten minutes if that’s what I need to do.” So I think that’s what you see people kind of take away from the experience.

Angie Judge: It’s a great leadership mission, isn’t it? To connect with your “why” and find your personal passion in there that helps you love your work.

David Hingley: Yeah, I think that’s it. And I think one thing that I’ve reflected on is, and that probably has made me even more passionate about the idea that this is a real career for people, is that you come across people who are so passionate about what they do. Whether you meet people, for example, who work at Tate, who are practicing artists as well. And this is just where everything connects for them. And that’s fantastic, but it’s, you know, it’s also great because it’s something that they want to share with people.

Angie Judge: And so, outside of that passion, what are some of the big skill gaps that we as an industry need to address?

David Hingley: One of the things I used to kind of give regular talks to museum studies groups, which I always loved doing. I think a lot of people in the audience, and this is not to say that you shouldn’t want to become a curator, but they’ve kind of, the job they’ve heard of is being a curator in a museum. So that’s what they want to do. I think this happens in lots of organizations, actually. There are certain jobs that you just think, “Right, that’s the job I want. Cause that’s the one I’ve heard of.” So actually one of the gaps is in people being able to understand what the structures are that are behind working in, for example, a museum or heritage site. Such as the ones I work in at the moment. You can work in marketing, you can work in maintenance. There’s a whole structure there and I think one of the gaps is that we just don’t make people aware that we do need those skills. So it’s kind of a catch-22. I think what people naturally want to do is to specialize in an area and so actually one of the skills gaps is in, I would say if you work in Visitor Experience because you’re the end result of everything else in the organization. You are the kind of point of delivery. You do get to see everything. So you get to work with every single team. And that in itself is a skill to be able to balance that and to be able to put across your experience in dealing with customers to say, “I know this looks great on paper, but in the nicest possible way. I don’t think it’s gonna work when it comes into contact with people.” And I think another gap is having people who don’t necessarily have a massive understanding about everything, but a great understanding of specific things. Sometimes you’ve just got teams on the front line who know the visitors who operate in those spaces every day, and it can be something as simple as everybody always turns left when they come through that door. There’s not necessarily any deep logic as to why that is, but that’s just what the humans have been doing here for ages. So don’t build an exhibition where you need everyone to turn right because they’re gonna get confused. Sometimes there’s less understanding of the importance of really having, not just having the data, because I think we’re quite good at having data, but analyzing it and seeing how you can get the best possible use out of it. So I’m thinking about things like, how many people go through an exhibition in a day, and really breaking that down. I think people don’t tend to work on the detail of like, how many people did you get through that hour? How many people did you get through the next? How does it vary? How can you maximize and make sure the experience is as good as possible while still having the ticket sales that you want? And I think that’s an area that when I moved from retail into heritage and culture, I felt that the sector has been behind on at times. It almost feels like it’s not somewhere where people wanna get too scientific about it because it might ruin the magic, but I think it’s quite the reverse.

Angie Judge: That’s so true. I’m so glad you brought up data and insight as part of that skill gap, because I think what we see in our work is that the visitor experience and visitor services teams in a venue or a museum where data is incredibly successful, they are the number one consumers of data. They look at forecasts to do their rostering. They look at visitor sentiment to see how happy their visitors are. They look at exhibition performance against goals. Again, they look at revenue, average revenue per visit, and how they can improve it and get visitor services into that state of play. There is quite a big leap to make from how we’ve operated in the past. Right?

David Hingley: Yeah, definitely. I think I’ve often been surprised by the fact that data doesn’t actually get to the teams on the ground sometimes. It’s almost like it’s analyzed, understandably, it’s analyzed financially and all that, but it’s not necessarily looked at by the visitor facing teams. And I think there are always gonna be some members of the team, and that’s fine, who aren’t into all of that detail. You don’t need every single person to know the minutiae of it. But certainly, at a management level, I think it makes such a huge difference to be able to stand back. I mean, we’ve all had it happen when we work operationally, where you think at the end of the day, “Gosh, that was a busy day. You know, we must, we must have had a really large number of people come through.” And then you look back at the counters and, you know, oh, it wasn’t as busy as I thought. It just happened to be one of those days where we dealt with a number of issues. So that’s really helpful, I think. But the reverse is also true, sometimes you think, “Gosh, that didn’t feel like it was a busy day,” but actually what it means is you’ve had huge numbers of people through, you’ve hit your targets, but you’ve managed to do it in a really good way. And to be able to go back and look at that and say, “Right, how do we repeat that experience so that having X thousand people through the doors over a weekend so it doesn’t feel painful? I think that’s really important.

Angie Judge: Yeah, and you hit on such an important point there that often we haven’t democratized that data to those frontline staff. That it is sitting in the finance department, or the marketing team are the ones with all the tools, and yet our visitor services teams are the ones who have the most context to add to that data. Of all of those things that went on, on that really big weekend that made it feel heavy, and they’re also the people that can provide the most actionable moments to that data as well when we see those opportunities for improvements of, “How can we repeat that beautifully scalable, seamless weekend and do more of them in the future?”

David Hingley: I do think that one of the things that came out of the pandemic, and I think it’s still really important, is when we had to be really careful in terms of how many people were in a building, how we operated the space. We had to keep so much space, I mean there were legal reasons as well. While we needed to do that, it really focused the mind on what we were able to do. And what we were able to do was get really live information from surveys that say “How safe did visitors feel?” Cause that was the number one thing above everything else. How safe did people feel so that they would continue to visit and come back? And because we were getting that almost as a live feed sort of at least kind of once a week download, we could make changes and we could see how those changes were affecting the experience in an exhibition, for example. And we could do that kind of week on week. I don’t know if you could do it any more than that. I mean, you could possibly do it more than that, but sort of week on week was really manageable actually. And I think one of the things that I have taken away is, another one of these areas where I think it’s really important to work as consistently across organizations is because visitors were going to your competitors, if you want to call them competitors, or going to, you know, I think people will always go to the National Gallery and Tate because we’ve got different art, different exhibitions, but, you know, people having both those experiences. Safety and fun. So to be able to make sure that, to a degree it’s aligned in terms of people won’t go to the National Gallery and think, “Gosh, it’s brilliant they did that there, and yet Tate does none of it.” I mean, if stuff’s working for visitors, you kind of wanna grow the whole experience rather than just focus on an individual area, an individual site. Because it just doesn’t work because they always come back to you and say what they saw elsewhere that they loved.

Angie Judge: And speaking of these pandemic trends, we are sort of in this very weird time of hyperinflation and these tight labor markets that we were talking about before. Are we in a spot right now where the industry is understaffed on the frontline?

David Hingley: I think it’s a challenge. I’ve heard different things. We’re fortunate that we’ve recently been recruiting and we’ve had a really good response. I’d like to think some of that’s because people can see what it is we’re offering and that we are absolutely saying there are opportunities to work as an apprentice, for example, and kind of move through the visitor experience. So kind of a career ladder if you like, but also we’re being quite open and saying “If you’re looking for an experience, come to Tate, work with us in visitor experience and we’ll hopefully help you to think beyond Tate if that’s where you need to go.” So I hope that’s insulating us if you’d like a little bit from that. But it’s definitely tight and there are other opportunities. So I think it’s gonna be increasingly, and I know this has been a trend over quite a period, but I think it’s kind of accelerated why it’s important that this is a career. We live in a gig economy world, and you can choose to work on contracts where you might come and support different organizations for different events, et cetera. And that really suits some people. But I think it’s being able to say that there’s another option, and the other option is kind of building a career in the sector. You can’t always necessarily compete on the salary because some of these gig economy roles, you know, somebody’s desperate and they’ve got an event to run so they can offer a good hourly rate, and it’s up to people whether they want to take that, understandably, they may need to, but I think to be able to say, “Look, there’s different ways of doing this” and just kind of be really honest about what it is you can offer, I think that is hopefully helping us to insulate a little bit against that, but it, it’s definitely a tough market at the moment.

Angie Judge: What are you looking for in the staff that you’re hiring that are new to this role?

David Hingley: I’m looking for people who are passionate about people. Actually, first and foremost, I think it’s great if they’re passionate about, in Tate’s case art, but equally sometimes some of the people who maybe come from a retail background, et cetera, who are great with people. I mean, our whole selection processes have moved to looking at personal interactions, group exercises, those kind of things to see how people are at talking to and engaging with other people. Because quite often people who don’t have that arts background actually suddenly come across an artist that they’ve genuinely never heard of who might be at some upcoming exhibition, and they become so interested and excited because it’s completely new to them that they can carry that passion through as well. So people. Love interacting with people. It’s people who I think understand the variety of what you’re gonna deal with in a front-of-house role that, you know, if you’re open to it all, you genuinely will get every type of person in. You need to be able to think about what that will be like and will feel like, and we support people obviously, but you know, sometimes you can have difficult conversations. It’s not always easy doing the kind of roles that we’re talking about. And then I’m absolutely happy for people to come in and work with us and get early career understandings of what the culture sector is and then they may move on to work in a different area. think it’s always good that people have had front-of-house experience. But I’m also looking for people who do want to build a career in front-of-house, who do want to be the managers of the future and can see the opportunity to kind of shape what the experience is by moving up in that.

Angie Judge: And where can these careers take people in front-of-house for visitor experience and cultural institutions?

David Hingley: Yeah, I’ve seen people that we’ve placed in different roles within the same institution. I think what tends to happen is people who are really passionate about it use this as a springboard. We’ve had people go and join our learning team, so move from visitor experience to kind of more formal learning and engagement. So that’s great. Looking after family program development, that kind of thing. We’ve had people who’ve moved into curatorial roles, particularly in areas like if you think about kind of program production and delivery. So looking kind of more broadly beyond the day-to-day delivery. So they’ve already got those skills. They take them, they take that on. We’ve had people join other teams simply because they’re just really good at customer interaction. We have visitor communications teams who look after a lot of the emails, calls, et cetera. So members of my teams have moved into that. And then I’ve had people who’ve kind of taken first management roles, if you like. When I went to historic royal palaces at Hampton Court, whenever anybody left, we used to try and encourage people to think of it as us gaining another museum. So we had people who’d kind of start with us, build up their experience and then go and run. I think we had somebody who went to Oxford Castle for example, someone who went to the Ashmolean, which is another museum, and they were able to take what they’d learnt and then kind of take the next step up and then bring us back to “Crossing the Floors”. Then that’s increased the network and we’ve got somebody else that we can contact and say, “Can we work together in the future?”

Angie Judge: And what would your advice be if somebody wanted to attempt, replicating your initiative in another country or in another city? What would you suggest to them in terms of how do you go about getting something like this off the ground?

David Hingley: I think I absolutely mercilessly pitched to people who I thought would be interested in my personal network. There was a bit of that. I think it was very much around, I think people were keen to do it, but I think we’re all, we’ve talked about it. It’s tough at the moment in the labor market and we’ve got a lot going on, so you can become quite focused on your own problems and your own institution. So actually I think the group we’ve set up, we’re also a bit of a self-help group at times where it’s like, we have worked out together how this is gonna work, and I think that’s been important. Without a huge amount of investment, et cetera. But you know, what I’ve been able to say is that I’m one of the bigger teams involved, so we can take on kind of quite a lot of the admin and such to support other smaller organizations. And one of our organization values is to be kind, though I think in a sense it’s like what are your organizational values? Do they align with the other organizations you’re gonna work with? Because then, you know, you’ve got probably a very similar start point. And the other element is just sorting out the admin because you can imagine the admin people thinking, “Are they gonna go and work at a different site? What’s the insurance? How are you gonna cover that? Different organizations can have different kinds of security clearance levels.” So getting all that sorted in the background has been important.

Angie Judge: I can’t even begin to imagine what that looks like.

David Hingley: There’s quite a lot of spreadsheets, you know. That’s good. Once we’ve got it off the ground, I’m sure as well it’ll get easier.

Angie Judge: Well, thank you very much for taking a few minutes out of your day and all of that paperwork to share your “Crossing the Floors” initiative with us. It’s incredibly exciting to hear in this post covid world that the way in which cultural institutions came together to collaborate and to work together as an industry as continuing on in lots of different ways, I’m really excited about that.

David Hingley: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to seeing how it develops and I’m kind of excited. We’ve got other organizations who are interested, so hopefully we can just build on that and as you say, keep working together post Covid.

Angie Judge: Hello and welcome to the Data Diaries, I’m your host Angie Judge of Dexibit. Today I am here with Arthur G Affleck III, Executive Director of the Association of Children’s Museums. Welcome Arthur.

Arthur Affleck: Thank you for having me.

Angie Judge: Now the children’s museum field is one of the fastest growing cultural in industries in the world. And ACM is its international nonprofit for representation and advocacy. It has over 480 organizations and members across 16 countries and 50 states. And Arthur is very well known in the industry for his achievements in education administration, institutional advancement and nonprofit governance, centering diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. Before ACM, he served as EVP at the American Alliance of Museums. And he currently serves on several nonprofit boards, including for the International Council of Museums who just had their annual meeting in Prague. Plus Bottom Line, New York, Crystal Bridges, and Playful Learning Landscapes. And he’s also an accomplished author too. That’s quite the resume Arthur!

Arthur Affleck: Well, thank you.

Angie Judge: Thank you for taking the time out of that very busy lineup to join us here. Today is a very special topic that I’m really looking forward to. Because as of a few months back, I joined the parents’ club and it’s really got me thinking about my own parenting style and how we want to approach education. We’re going to talk about the ‘power of play’ in children’s learning and experiences and cultural institutions and beyond, and how the work of the Association of Children’s Museums is not just representing the interests of their museums, but changing the way children learn, which is a really big departure from the ‘desks set in rows’ that we all grew up with and an incredibly powerful mission. And when we were exchanging ideas ahead of today, Arthur shared with me a great quote by the late great Fred Rogers. That “Play is the real work of childhood”. And he also went on to specifically say, this is Rogers speaking, “That children’s museums offer play experiences that other settings are not able to give them.” That’s quite the ultimate endorsement for your work I imagine!

Arthur Affleck: Yes. Yes. And I just should say that some years ago in 1996, actually ACM gave Fred Rogers, our ‘Friend of Kids’ award, and he gave the talk and the keynote address and shared some of those thoughts, but we give that award out every year. So we were thrilled that Mr. Rogers would come and, and obviously knew he shares our love of children and love of play.

Angie Judge: You must get this a lot, but perhaps you can set us off with what a children’s museum actually is. And, how does it differ from other museums?

Arthur Affleck: So first we like to talk about the four dimensions of children’s museums. First as local destinations. Second as educational laboratories. Third as community resources and fourth as advocates for children. Now a more traditional definition I could give is a place where people come together, children and families, to understand the world and their place in it. Some museums do that through art, others, through natural science specimens. And children’s museums do it through immersive play based hands on experiences. So that is how we differ from a museum that focuses more on collections.

Angie Judge: And what led you to your role as ED at ACM?

Arthur Affleck: So very interesting. I have always, for most of my career, worked in education in higher education. As a matter of fact, I originally wanted to be a school teacher, a science teacher. I went to college for biology pre-med, but wound up going to graduate school for a degree in higher education leadership, and then to law school. And after a few years, working at a law firm decided to get back into education where I felt more fulfilled. And every university where I worked the last 10, 15 years had a museum. And I loved those museums. And so the opportunity came about six years ago to work at the American Alliance of Museums. And I jumped at the opportunity and it was a great experience there for six years. My last role, as you mentioned, was Executive Vice President. And then for the last six months, I had been the Executive Director of the wonderful Association of Children’s Museums.

Angie Judge: And what are some of the sort of current opportunities or challenges, the work that you’re facing right now?

Arthur Affleck: We are emerging from the pandemic. So as an organization working to, I’m look at my team and building my team. You may recall the book ‘Good to Great’, which said, those who build great organizations, make sure they have the right people on the bus and in the right seats. So I’m looking at my team and I have a very strong team, but we’re looking at roles and responsibilities. And so we’ll be making some changes there and then we’re going to grow the team. We’re hiring additional people because the demand for our services is greater than ever. But some of the challenges that, that we also have – technology, we’re upgrading our technology. We’ll be bringing on a new database for us, but when it comes to the children’s museums, some of the challenges they’re having. We spent a lot of time doing virtual work and now that we are focused on in person work and some of them are not fully back in terms of staffing, 100%, they’re struggling to say, how do we fully give the in person experience yet not lose all of the great work we did in the virtual space? So that’s one challenge. Staffing is a challenge – hiring and retaining staff – because we are not able to pay right as high as some other entities. So that’s a challenge. We’re facing funding as a challenge. We have to work harder for revenue and support because when you have a pandemic and people have medical challenges and people are unhoused and people have food insecurity, a lot of charity kind of shifted a little bit for those resources, but we make the case that man or woman does not live by bread alone, that we must feed our souls and our children and adults need access to culture and the arts to behold. And in fact, if you think about the mental health crisis, we know that we are even more important as children’s museums that is to the children and families than ever before, because while we don’t solve those problems, we ameliorate those symptoms because when children play they’re joyful and in the process they’re learning and families are engaging and we can see that they are having a very positive emotional, mental and physical experience in our museums. So we are vital and we must fight for those resources, just like every other organization. We’re thrilled to be here. The challenges are not as many as the opportunities. We have many great opportunities that I’m very excited about.

Angie Judge: And what is the science and the data behind this say what, what supports the value proposition of play and play based learning?

Arthur Affleck: There is a lot of data and information around play and play based learning. I will start with an article since your podcast is all about data, right? So I’m going to refer to an article called ‘A New Path to Education Reform, Playful Learning Promotes 21st Century Skills in Schools.’ And this 2020 paper has 150 references, to back it up and support it. And this paper was written by one of my colleagues and friends, Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and her colleague, but essentially they start out by talking about the American education system, just not preparing all children to thrive. So that’s a big challenge right there. The data shows that in the science of learning, narrow content focused education, the didactic method, is insufficient, works for some, but is insufficient. And so we’re calling for scalable evidence based education that puts student engagement, educate expertise, and equity at the center. And so we believe that play and play-based learning and the data shows it helps students and teachers make learning more active, engaging, meaningful, socially interactive, iterative, and even joyful. And when it’s joyful for the students and for the teachers, not only do the students learn, but the teachers are better retained. So that’s one, and I’ll give you another reference for play-based learning and, and another endorsement. And that is the American Academy of Pediatrics. They put out an article, many articles, but there’s one that, that I referenced and it’s called ‘The Power of Play, a Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development of Young Children.’ And so that article talks about the fact that children need to develop a variety of skill sets to optimize their development and to manage toxic stress. Basically research demonstrates that development developmentally appropriate play with parents and peers is a singular opportunity to promote social, emotional, cognitive language self-regulation skills, et cetera. So lots of references from the medical field, from academics, from teachers that play in play based learning is the way and from none other than Fred Rogers.

Angie Judge: It’s incredible. Especially following a couple of years where our kids have been learning in front of screens, really. And it’s so different to being able to sit and play with each other. And you mentioned equity in there. How does this whole approach address some of those inequities that we face in early childhood education?

Arthur Affleck: We believe that learning through play is accessible to every child, to all students, to all families. It’s not based on your income level, it’s not based on your zip code. It is based on the ability of the institution of the school, of the museum to implement this methodology. And, and we find that play based learning can be made to be culturally sensitive and culturally specific, because play is viewed differently in different parts of the country, different parts of the world. They view play a little differently, but play-based learning can be moulded and modified to be culturally specific and therefore help students to be engaged. I’ll give you an example of that. If you are from, maybe your cultural background is from Latin America. Well, there are things in that culture that animates children and families. So one way to get to play and feel comfortable is to play some games that they would be familiar with from that culture to reference, you know, some of the characters from that culture that would be of interest. And you can do that with every culture, whether it’s African American or whether it’s, you know, Asian or what have you. And so when we work with schools and we are talking about our academic partners and museum educators, we always look at how we can make sure that we are creating culturally appropriate kinds of opportunities for children to engage and to play. And then the other part of play, you know, play comes on a spectrum, you know, there’s free play and there’s an argument for free play because we believe play is learning full stop. When students are playing, they’re learning, there’s free play, but free play doesn’t have a learning. Children are just doing their thing and having a great time. But we believe guided play is what we use in museums. More often where the child does indeed have agency and is actively engaged and involved, but you have an educator or a museum staff member kind of guiding the child toward a learning objective. So it’s still fun. It’s still engaging, but there’s learning going on. And at the other end of spectrum of play and learning is direct. Instruction, you know, where students are sitting down, they’re being told what to do and how to play. And that we think is not the best way to go about it because we need children to have agency. We need them to have the feeling that they’re making decisions about how they want to play and just, and, and they can be guided then in ways that make play even more important and even more meaningful. So that. That’s uh, what I would say about why we, we know that more equity can be achieved if playful learning is utilized. And we can see that in, you know, some of the data as well.

Angie Judge: That’s so interesting. When you talk about sort of the cultural elements of play, and one of the things where I come from in Aotearoa or New Zealand, there is a, a respect for food, which means that it can be  somewhat offensive to have children playing with food, which is quite common in the Western world. You know, you think about things like play-doh, or making macaroni sculptures or playing with rice. But here that’s very different. So it’s really good to hear that be incorporated as part of this view on play-based learning. And Arthur, I understand your team are working on a new strategic plan? Can you share any of that in terms of your preliminary findings or some of the priorities that are coming out of that work?

Arthur Affleck: Yes. So we are, we should have this plan done by the end of the year. It’s been fascinating to move around the country and to receive input from our members, from education leaders, from our board members and others. Right now we’re emerging, we have four major priorities that are on the draft plan. And the first of those priorities is that we will continue to support the children’s museum community as, as a membership organization. That’s critical through convening and resources and connecting and research, et cetera, but a new plank that was not in the last plan is that we will have a separate priority focused on children and families providing indirect and services through our members, but also direct advocacy and work from the association. And I should say, Angie, this second plank came out of the awful experience that we all learned about and with the Uvalde shooting, when all of those children were lost in that school, meant some of our board members came together to say, it’s not enough that we champion our mission statement. Our current mission statement says we champion children’s museums worldwide. It’s not enough that we champion children’s museums. We have to champion children and families, and we have to fight for them to be safe wherever they are. So for example, our current mission statement, you know, says we champion children, children’s museums worldwide, the emerging mission statement, the draft mission statement says, “ACM champions children’s museums and empowers children to play, learn and thrive safely in these vital shared spaces worldwide”. So that’s a shift that we are going to do more to advocate, not just for children to play and learn, but also to thrive safely in these vital spaces in museums or schools. Which means that we will, I’ve had conversations with the boys and girls clubs of America. I have conversations with other organizations that we won’t go with alone, but we will join with other organizations advocating on behalf of children to be safe funding for schools. We’re gonna fight with others for universal pre-K, all of those things that we know make a big difference. And I know at some point you’ll let me share some data. You know, school readiness and, and why it’s so important that we, we have this early childhood education, but let me finish responding to your question. The two other planks in our strategic plan. So one was the children, museum, community, two children and families. Advocacy policy and research and advocacy is so critical. We work with federal government educating, sharing information, making sure they continue to financially support the museum community. We have museums advocacy day, every year, working with AAM and other associations. And we have been successful in maintaining funding for our museums. And the last one is strengthening the organization, that we will work to strengthen ACM as an organization. So we can be more impactful to our members, provide more direct services, children and families generate more revenue to offset the work that, that we are doing and to hire and retain more staff. So all of that is in our new plan, but the newest plan is, and I’m excited about this work to think about how we can do more direct work with children and families.

Angie Judge: This is such a radical leap and it’s such an amazing vision to have. And you mentioned the origins of that an absolutely horrific situation, but it does go on to highlight the need for this safety of our kids. But, and not only that, but the children that grow up to experience problems through their early years and the impacts to society that that sort of creates, these shootings that have taken place. The people who are the offenders in that situation are, are young people themselves. Aren’t they, in, in many cases, Arthur, you mentioned some of the, the data that are coming out of some of these elements, the statistics on how kids are ready for a kindergarten and the relationship of how we set up our kids to enter the academic system and then the socioeconomic trajectory that, that sets them on. If they essentially learn to hate learning and then never catch up, what does the impact of that problem look like in data?

Arthur Affleck: A child’s learning, and it’s not every parent just doesn’t know this, but a child’s learning from birth to five is critical. It determines their kindergarten starting point. Students who enter kindergarten behind have a monumental undertaking to catch up with their classmates. And so the data show that one in four kindergarteners are not ready to learn. Some of this comes out of the Pritzker Family Foundation report: low income black and brown children are almost two in four, almost 50%, approaching, kindergarten, not quite ready to learn. For students who enter kindergarten one or two or three years behind, it is very difficult to make sufficient progress, to move up even one level without a massive amount of intervention. So, so, you know, we are hopeful. We believe all children can and will improve. Right. But for those who enter kindergarten, the data shows 75% will never catch up to their classmates. This means that each child’s kindergarten starting point matters. And this is according to the Children’s Reading Foundation data: that we have got to get more children ready for kindergarten. So children’s museums play a vital role in facilitating play and many school readiness programs exist to address this pressing challenge. And so we plan to do more in that regard. I remember being in the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia and seeing that very wonderful school readiness program that just gets these kids ready so that they have socio-emotional skills. They have executive function skills, self-regulation skills. So they show up to school with literacy, numeracy, self control to the extent that they can indeed learn. And the point you made earlier that breaks my heart is that we know that if children are not prepared for school and they get to school, and spend years behind, school becomes painful because every day you are found out to be unprepared. You can’t answer the questions you can’t keep up. And the minute they get old enough to be able to drop out, we see millions of kids dropping out of school every year and they become, unfortunately, those young people that often get into difficulty and get into trouble. And the data show that a high percentage, 75%, if not more, of convicted felons in prison are people who dropped out of school didn’t have a good school experience. So we know that the dire consequences to society for not paying more attention to early learning. And our goal is to advocate for more, to do more within our institutions and to partner with others who also understand this.

Angie Judge: And that’s not just about crime, is it? Because in the last few years we’ve seen mental health for both adults and kids become more front of mind  for our society and indeed more pressing, how does play help with that?

Arthur Affleck: And you are exactly right. The two crises, one is mental health crisis. The other is the early learning crisis, but they’re related, right? They’re definitely related. So, and I think it was the in readings from the American Pediatric Association talking about the fact that play is good for the physical, the mental, the social, and the academic growth and development of children. And there are studies that show how young people who are allowed to play as the American Pediatric Association said, it helps the toxic stress that they experience in their lives, that we can’t avoid some stress. But what the data show is that if children are allowed to be in those environments, where they can release that stress by playing freely and even through guided play with facilitators, but also playing with parents, the other benefit of play that supports mental health for parents and that playing museums and our museums is intergenerational. I was in with the Louisiana Children’s team a few weeks ago. And saw a grandfather with his daughter with his granddaughter in this play space, watching the granddaughter, you know, a toddler playing and he reported, he just volunteered to me, “We come here twice a week. She loves it and she’s learning so much and having so much fun.” So all of that, he felt great, he felt pride. The mother felt good and the child was having a great time. So, you know, we need to do more of this and provide more of this feeling. And again, it doesn’t solve the problem if you will, of mental health. But we also are beginning to work with our members to have trauma informed programming so that while we can’t solve the challenges when we, but we need to be able to identify trauma in families and in children and be able to help parents and families to services that can help them. And then also to train our staffs and we’re working to do that. So that again, you know, we, we have programming to say, first of all, it’s okay to be a little anxious. It’s okay to be concerned when things are happening in society, that nothing is wrong with that, but here’s how we process trauma. And certainly coming out of eval, more museums have been in programs, bringing in experts, bringing in social scientists, bringing in psychologists, bringing in others into the museum to talk about how we process trauma and all of that. And all of that helps with some of the mental health challenges that we’re seeing among children and families. And sadly, that is not going to go away tomorrow. They will be more. Tragedy, sadly in America, and in the world. So we just have to help children and families become more resilient. And that’s the goal of ours.

Angie Judge: And what are some of the other ways that the children’s museums are engaging with parents and other caregivers?

Arthur Affleck: So one of the exciting programs that I love is, a number of our museums have these, programs called ‘The First 1,000 Days’. And these programs, we understand that parents really are the first teachers of children. And if we can help parents understand how they can facilitate play in their home, how they can facilitate brain development in their children, the children will be so much more successful. So in collaboration with researchers and scientists and health professionals, artists, and educators, some of our museums have designed a support system to help parents navigate the first three years of this parenting journey. And so they come into the museum for programming and then they’re given tools and resources to take. So they can do some things at home. So that’s exciting evidence based collaborative with community resources. And that’s one of those programs that we want to expand to throughout the country to make sure that we are doing all we can because if we don’t start early with these children’s first 1,000 days, first three years, and then the first five years, you know, we give children a chance if we do that well.  So that’s a program that I think is, is exceptional, that, that we will do more.

Angie Judge: It all sounds like it makes a lot of clear sense, but I know it’s, it’s always hard to get everyone to recognize the value of change like this, particularly when it is quite dramatic from the traditional ways that generations have learned before that, is this an obvious way that the world is heading or do you have to really work to convince parents, teachers, government officials that we need to do things differently?

Arthur Affleck: I think it’s getting easier. It’s becoming more acceptable  for play to be accepted. And one of the things that helps I think is that we have not only children’s museums, not only academics, not only the American Pediatric Association saying this. But their corporations and foundations, like Lego that truly believe in the power of play and that promote play and that support with their resources and their programming play and play strategies. For example, as you know, I visited the Famous Lego House recently. And one of the Lego foundation’s aim is to redefine play and to reimagine learning. And they’re working toward, as in their words, the future where learning through play empowers children to be creative, engaged life, long learners. So we have allies, an increasing numbers of allies, and we will partner with Lego. We will partner with academics, we’ll partner with all these other organizations that want to do this. And superintendents, I’ve met with superintendents because helping them to convince parents and other teachers that this is, this is important. And if time permits, I’d love to chat about the New Hampshire program that I think is going to, to make a, make a difference. But I think it’s getting better. People are recognizing the importance of play and especially coming out of the pandemic where children were pent up in their homes, parents and others are realizing, kids have got to get out, they’ve got to play. They can’t be, you know, kept cooped up on these screens or in, in homes all day.

Angie Judge: Tell us about New Hampshire what’s happening up there?

Arthur Affleck: So one of the great things that happened in New Hampshire, a parent who believed in play and the value of it wound up running for office and became a legislator. And then she introduced legislation to say, we ought to have play and play based learning for pre-K and kindergartens in New Hampshire and lo and behold, it was passed. So it is now a law in the state of New Hampshire. But to implement play based learning in the pre-K in kindergarten classes, they decided to bring in the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire. They also brought in professors from the university of New Hampshire and one of my colleagues, Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Dr. Kimberly Nesbitt from the University of New Hampshire, Kathy’s from Temple University and they put together a program to train coaches who would then go into the classroom and train teachers and work with teachers in the classroom on how to implement a play based approach to their curriculum. They’re not trying to change their curriculum, just implementing play based techniques. And I went up to New Hampshire. I met with the educators, I met with the children’s museum and that I went to some of these schools, sat on the floor with these kids and saw the joy in them And it works. It works. And so we are going keep looking at the data from New Hampshire. I may have mentioned, I went to California, met with the superintendent of Los Angeles unified school district the great  Alberto Carlo, and he’s doing great work there. He said, he’s interested in doing more round play and play based learning. And there are many others. And so we believe that this New Hampshire model will be carried forward. I was in Washington. And met with legislators there and they said they willing to take a look at what more can be done there. We actually have an event coming up, another event in Washington State and Seattle. So we think it’s gaining momentum and we’ll see other models like New Hampshire and each state might do it a little differently. And that’s okay because it has to be state specific, culturally specific, but the idea is to bring more play and for learning techniques into schools and into communities.

Angie Judge: And in doing that work, what is the role of the museum in changing how children learn and, and has this sort of shifted as a result of the pandemic, has, has the last couple of years changed that role?

Arthur Affleck: So, I don’t know that the last couple years has changed the role except that what it has done is that it has made the role that much more important and that much more relevant and clear. Let me give you one story during the pandemic. One of the things that many of our museums did was when children were cooped up in their homes, couldn’t go to schools. Couldn’t come into the museums, is that they created kits. That would help children learn. And with the support of their families. One story was the Children’s Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. They created over 4,000 thinker player, creator boxes for an entire school district’s kindergarters because those families and children were really struggling on with online work. As a result, the district saw that when the kids got their boxes, the dropout rate among families slowed dramatically. Also one of the parents told the district that the materials in the box were the first time the child ever had their own book, scissors and crayons, the first time. So that’s just one example. Hundreds of museums did stuff like that during the pandemic. And so coming out of the pandemic, we know that and then some became vaccination centers. As you may recall, some became places where you can just get wifi, whatever, that the community needed. Some were food distribution centers. Our museums stepped up, but learning and education was a central way that our museums help families and children. And we’ll continue to do that on going.

Angie Judge: And speaking of that wider museum community, I know for our listeners, they might be from cultural institutions that they’re hosting school groups through their venues, or even from commercial attractions who are appealing to kids, they’ll be wanting to implement some of these ideas around play based learning too. How are you going about sharing the work of your team for others?

Arthur Affleck: So we share in a variety of ways. Number one, we certainly have an annual conference, a really big show and tell, and it’s not just open to children’s museum professionals. We have lots of other folk who come to the conference. In addition, our website provides a lot of information in the form of articles and blog posts and this to other materials. We have a newsletter called hand to hand that newsletter has lots of information. As a matter of fact, the story I told about the museum, in Arizona came out of that hand to hand one of our hand, hand publications. And then for members, we have something called group site where members post question, share challenges, uh, and successes, cetera. And if people want specific information, most of our children’s museums get requests and work with, for example, other community organizations and certainly schools to bring them into the children’s museum to say, this is how we do what we do, and we’re happy to share. So if anyone is in a community with a children’s museum, that children’s museum will welcome that organization in to dialogue about what they can do together and to share inspiration.

Angie Judge: Very cool. And I know some of your work is actually outside of what we traditionally think of as a venue, if you like, or a cultural institution, because you work with cities and public spaces too, through landscapes in some of your work. What does that look like in those other spaces, in terms of learning with play?

Arthur Affleck: So playful learning exists, not only in the classroom, but outside the classroom in what we call these informal learning spaces, museums, a one informal space, but I serve on the board of an organization called Playful Learning Landscapes. And this is an initiative that uniquely blends the science of learning place, making and community cohesion, right? Transforming public and shared spaces into fun and enriched learning hubs for the further development of children, families, and, and communities. And the beautiful thing about the way that works is that these spaces are co-created. So if we agree in a community that a bus stop or basketball court, or a park or playground could be transformed, we work together. We have some ideas. We ask the community, what do you think? What do you want? Parents, children, others, so that they own that space. And it’s different in every city and there’s some international locations. And so this is a young organization, but has already had some successes. And ultimately we believe that certainly play is important for children, and young children, but play is important for all of us, play everywhere. Play throughout our lives, play for adults. There’s data to show that those folk who are playful and who play and who do puzzles and do other things live longer and don’t have as many mental challenges as, as others. So play is good everywhere for all of us.

Angie Judge: Oh, that’s good, Arthur, because I bought my son some baby puzzles the other day. I bought them home and immediately did them, myself, so it’s gonna pay off! And so you just returned from a tour of Europe, I know with ICOM in Prague. And you mentioned Lego there in Denmark, too. What were some of the things you could leave us with that have inspired you recently?

Arthur Affleck: Oh, just first of all, the international conference was great. It was inspiring to, you know, be first of all, Prague was a beautiful city, but to just have presentations on topics like climate change, leadership, diversity governance, resilience from colleagues who are from Kenya or Paris or Australia or California, Brussels, DC. So I met so many colleagues from all around the world, so that was tremendous. That was great to see that we have so much in common with these common goals and objectives. And then I went to London and the great joy there was visiting the wonderful museums in London and meeting with colleagues from cultural institutions and talking about ways that we can collaborate and partner. And so we will be doing more work with them. And then the National Children’s Museum Eureka, talk about inspiration. When I visited, it was a Saturday, the museum was full of children and families having the time of their lives. And one comment from that museum, in the museum, there is a wall of pictures and quotes from their ambassadors, remembering their days in the museum. And one woman who her name is Hannah. She’s a five time para Olympic champion, and she said that Eureka is unique. “Children are just free to go out and explore”, and she wrote, “you’re having fun, great fun, but you’re also learning.” And then many quotes like that from adults now who remember their days. And as I said, my final destination was in Denmark at the Lego house in Denmark and my host there was a wonderful gentleman. Brilliant kind, joyful, gentle. And showed me so many things. Lego’s been doing this for 90 years, and I mentioned Legos on this mission to promote, play and play based learning. So we are there. But one quote I share that inspired me as well from the Lego Museum. And you’ll find these words around the Lego House as well. “Only the best is good enough”. It means we will always strive to do better year after year because the children of this world. How’s that for inspiration!

Angie Judge: What a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much, Arthur, for sharing all of those incredible worldviews on how learning is changing in different cultures in different places and what we are doing to, uh, further that in the museum field. It’s very, very inspirational.

Arthur Affleck: Can I share one last quote?

Angie Judge: Oh, go ahead.

Arthur Affleck: So I want to leave us with the words of the great Frederick Douglas. Frederick Douglas said “it is far easier to build strong children than to, than to repair broken men and women”. And so let us together work on early learning on play and play based learning to build strong, healthy, productive children, so we won’t have to try to prepare broken men and women, which doesn’t work so well. So thank you and Angie for your time. And I enjoyed so much talking.

Angie Judge: Likewise, a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much, Arthur.