The Concept

Early on in the master planning process, The National WWII Museum began to envision how it might engage younger visitors, grow awareness, and engender national support. The findings showed conclusively that the way to accomplish both of these goals was by integrating immersive media experiences within the fabric of the Museum to bring history to life; both in the museum and online, and sometimes in both places.

An Immersive Museum and Post-Visit Experience

The Dog Tag Experience is an experience that is activated by an RFID enabled dog tag which is registered and activated at the Museum’s immersive Train Car exhibit. At that touchpoint the visitor selects the story of an actual participant in the war and register their email to get the full story when they get home. The visitor is then enabled to walk through the Museum to activate chapters of their story and virtually collect artifacts. At the end of each day all visitors who opt in with their email addresses receive a welcome email pointing to the Dog Tag Experience post-visit website.  

The key objectives are to create a rich and engaging interactive experience during the Museum visit while also creating a significant post-visit experience whereby users would be able to dip back into the artifacts and stories they had experienced at the Museum.

The kiosk technology is pulled from across the spectrum of current technology— touchscreens, hand-tracking, and projection— to bring this story to life. Each kiosk experience is tailored to support content developed in collaboration with the museum curators. The registration database records constituent data at eregistration and touchpoints through the campus and connects to the Museum’s online CRM Blackbaud Luminate Online.

Results

Since the launch in December 2014 Dog Tag Experience has been a tremendous success with high marks qualitatively on our Visitor Intercept Surveys and a dramatic increase in new constituent registrations, with and average take rate of 60% and an overall increase of nearly 1000% in the email house file. In essence it has become the backbone of the Museum’s email marketing strategy.