Why a Museum App Isn’t Just for Exhibits: 6 Ways to Extend Visitor Engagement Outdoors This Fall

It’s a familiar challenge for any exhibit coordinator or curator: the buzz of a major exhibition fades, and you’re left wondering how to sustain that momentum. You've poured so much effort into the indoor experience, but as the seasons shift and people look for reasons to get outside, how do you keep your institution relevant? (It’s a real problem, I know.)

You want to be a vibrant part of your community, and that means being present beyond your galleries.

The good news is, you don’t need to build something from scratch. The solution is already in your hands: your museum tour app.

This powerful tool can be a gateway to the community's culture and history, creating new opportunities for a deeper, more immersive travel experience beyond your four walls.

A Digital Tourism Platform for Cultural Tourism

What if your app could become a portal to your community’s history and culture, guiding visitors through local parks, historical sites, or even around the block?

A museum tour app isn't just a digital docent for your exhibits; it's a powerful tool for creating outdoor, self-guided experiences that keep your audience connected long after they've left your building. This fall, you can get creative and leverage the beautiful weather to tell stories that are literally all around you.

The Downtown Carleton Place BIA provided a great example of this. They created a self-guided scavenger hunt themed around the Hardy Boys author, Charles Leslie McFarlane, to engage families and students in local history.

It was a massive success, with over 1,300 completions in just 30 days. That’s the power of a simple story-based tour to make local history interactive and accessible.

6 Ways to Use a Museum App to Get Visitors Outside This Fall

1. Seasonal Scavenger Hunts: Tap into the autumn vibe with a themed scavenger hunt. Create a tour with a series of digital clues that lead families to historical landmarks, public art, or even specific autumn leaves. This is a perfect way to gamify local history and get people exploring.

2. Historical Walking Tours: Use your museum tour app to create a self-guided walking tour that highlights the history of your neighbourhood. Pin points of interest (POIs) on a map with stories, archival photos, and audio clips about the buildings and people who shaped your area.

3. Indigenous Heritage Trails: Collaborate with local Indigenous communities to create a tour that shares stories, language, and the deep history of the land. This is a meaningful way to offer an educational and respectful experience that goes beyond your traditional displays and supports Indigenous storytelling.

4. Architectural Highlights: For urban museums, create a tour focused on the unique architecture of your city. Pin POIs on a map that highlight different building styles, the history of key structures, and the people who designed them. It’s a great way to make people look up and see their city in a new light.

5. Public Art & Sculpture Parks: If your city has public art, curate a tour that brings those pieces to life. Add artist interviews and contextual information for each sculpture. This can turn a simple walk into an engaging art lesson.

6. "Spooky" Haunted History Tours: As Halloween approaches, why not get a little spooky? Create a self-guided tour of your community's local ghost stories, urban legends, or historically "haunted" buildings. Thunder Bay Tourism did something similar by transforming their Halloween house-decorating contest into a guided digital tour, which resulted in a massive 1000% increase in engagement and over 25,000 views.

Key Takeaway: Extending your museum’s reach beyond its walls isn't about creating more work. It’s about leveraging the digital tools you already have to tell the stories that are waiting to be told right outside your front door.

Frequently Asked Questions About Museum Apps

Q: How can a museum app help with visitor engagement?

A: A museum app can transform a passive visit into an active, personalized experience. It offers a way to provide rich context through audio, video, and text that visitors can access at their own pace. By creating interactive elements like quizzes, scavenger hunts, or guided outdoor tours, you can encourage deeper learning and longer engagement with your content, both inside and outside your institution’s walls. Tools like these allow you to connect with a wider audience, including people who might not typically visit a museum.

Q: Is a museum tour app difficult to manage and create content for?

A: Not at all. Many modern platforms are designed with simplicity in mind, with user-friendly content management systems. You don’t need to be a developer to create a great tour. You can easily upload images, audio, and text, and then pin them to locations on a map. For outdoor tours, you're often just taking existing community stories or historical facts and giving them a new, mobile home. This process is far less intensive than designing a physical exhibit.

Q: What if our museum doesn't have a large budget for an app?

A: Many digital platforms offer scalable solutions for different budgets, including options that are much more affordable than developing a custom app from scratch. Some even offer a free-to-start model so you can build and test your ideas before you commit. You can also explore grants for digital initiatives, as many tourism boards and cultural funding bodies recognize the value of these platforms. You can check out sources like Destination Canada for potential opportunities and funding resources.

Q: How do you measure the success of a museum app?

A: Modern digital platforms provide easy-to-read analytics that show you exactly how visitors are interacting with your content. You can track things like tour completions, the number of people who view a specific point of interest, or how long they spend on a particular tour. These metrics give you valuable insights into what your audience enjoys and what’s working, helping you make smarter decisions about your future programming. This data-driven approach proves the value of your efforts (and helps secure future funding!).

Start Building Your Outdoor Visitor Experience

Ready to turn your museum into a community-wide experience?

With a museum tour app, you can move beyond your exhibits and create engaging, story-rich tours that connect visitors with the history and culture all around them. The next great exhibition isn't just inside; it's waiting to be discovered, one stop at a time.

Ready to start building a tour?

Book a demo now and see what’s possible!