When Misereor and Stripe partnered to create “The Social Swipe,” they sought to raise the most money they could through micro-donations. Swiping a credit card through the screen acted as a knife slicing a piece of bread for a Peruvian family. Our photobooth at Brite Winter in 2017 and 2018 had tons of attendees jump in and make silly faces. “You! The Experience” at the Museum of Science and Industry boasts a life-sized hamster wheel and dozens of other interactives. All of these built experiences necessitated different key performance indicators (KPIs) and varied ways of attaining them. But they have the same, basic idea: Make the experience engaging.

Successful built environments leverage data…

Data drives purchasing decisions, so if your multi-sensory exhibit isn’t bringing in visitors, lean on your KPIs to tweak your approach. Your KPIs will depend on your overall goals for your built environment.

For a multi-sensory exhibit, your goal could be to make visitors happy by introducing playfulness into their visit. Your key performance indicators may include:

Number of people who respond positively to a post-visit questionnaire
Average amount of time visitors spend engaging with a multi-sensory exhibit component
How much donations increased year-to-year after the implementation of the multi-sensory experience

To further complicate data, hybrid environments can add in an additional set of KPIs. You would likely want to measure page views and email campaign click-through rates. More granularly, you could choose to prioritize the amount of time someone spends on a page rather than the number of visitors.

The more you listen to the analytics, the more successful your built (or hybrid) experiences will be.

…but don’t ignore how an experience makes someone feel.

Depending on where your built environment is located, you might not have as many visitors as the Museum of Science and Industry’s “You! The Experience" or as many donations as "The Social Swipe." That doesn’t mean your experience is any less successful, it’s just a different measurement of success. Maybe the responses you’re getting from your surveys are overwhelmingly positive or your visitors stay longer at your new designed environment than previous builds.

Immerse them in your built environment.

People want to be able to design their own experience in a way. Take “Sleep No More” for instance. The immersive play allowed people to follow whichever Hamlet character they wanted, creating the illusion of intrusion on the live set. Folks could peek behind curtains or step into any room they chose.

The ability for attendees to create their own experience within the play made it more personalized as well. While you can’t develop an experience that attends to everyone’s preferences at all times, there can be aspects of an experience that feel custom-built. For example, we recently designed an interactive planet builder for NASA. Visitors could select attributes for their own planet and watch it take shape before their eyes.

Pay attention to pre-visit and post-visit experiences.

To convince someone to visit your built environment, you can offer snapshots of the experience without giving away all the fun. Teaser videos or media days can help you get in front of your ideal customers. Consider trying out a 24/7 engagement strategy using chatbots. Conversational marketing is more of an expectation nowadays for site visitors looking to get more information. So when they’re buying a ticket to your experience or researching where they should go, make their user experience on your website as streamlined as possible.

Post-visit, look for feedback. If you have a unique hashtag, search it across social media platforms and join in the conversation. Check both quantitative and qualitative data from surveys. How do people rate your built experience on a Likert scale? But also, how many people wrote additional comments with a positive spin?

You can always shift KPIs.

Deciding on which KPIs will be the most worthwhile for your business is a constant A/B test, even for institutions that have been around for decades. What works for one built environment won’t necessarily work for another. So continue to monitor your return on investment (ROI) and adjust KPIs based on your findings.

And if you’re not getting the immediate ROI you expected, circle back to these questions:

Can we use this built environment for multiple years with minimal adjustments?
Can this be a traveling exhibition that we can showcase at other locations?
Is the number of visitors we have increasing each year?

A built environment that does extremely well but only lasts for a year might pale in comparison to one that has a steady stream of visitors and lasts for more than five years.

Remember the basics of experience engagement.

With any built experience, you have to find a new angle on an idea that has likely already been done before. Here are some additional reminders for your next built environment:

Make sure every component leads back to the primary story.
Give them something to think about—when they’re there and afterwards.
Incorporate a game of some kind.

If you’d like some more ideas, please check out our other blogs or feel free to reach out to brainstorm ideas with our team.