Watts Gallery Artists’ Village

Watts Gallery Artists Village

Watts Gallery Artists Village has Grade I-listed arts and crafts buildings and a permanent display of over 100 paintings by the great Victorian artist G. F. Watts.

The Goal

Watt’s Gallery generally attracts an older audience and relies on a committed group of volunteers to deliver the day-to-day visitor experience. The Gallery wanted to provide an engaging audio tour and varied interpretations by local experts while ensuring any new technology would be easy to use for volunteers and visitors. Although senior staff were keen to use Smartify as a new technology that met their needs for sharing information, they had to make sure their core audiences and volunteers felt confident and were willing to embrace it.

Smaritfy’s Solution

In parallel to working with the curatorial team on content creation and the set-up of Smartify, we developed a program of volunteer workshops and training days to listen to feedback or concerns from those on the front line of delivering the visitor experience. We allowed volunteers to try the app for themselves and appointed Digital Ambassadors to advocate across the organisation. We also created FAQ guides together.

The Results

By engaging volunteers from the outset of the project, we developed a sense of ownership and responsibility for the technology, which was then reflected in the willingness to encourage visitors and a greater uptake. One of the surprises was how quickly staff felt comfortable using and talking about the app. Many echoed the positive responses of visitors, highlighting key areas such as ease of use, giving visitors a choice in their visit, increasing dwell time by providing additional layers of information that are already on offer, and extending the experience through post-visit reflection on favourites.