The Power of Personalization: Making a Museum Visit More Memorable with a Personalized Story

Abstract: Research has shown that wrapping a visit to a museum around a story makes that visit more memorable. Blessing and Skowronek (2013) embedded activities for children at the Glazer Children’s Museum in a story that motivated each activity. We hypothesize that personalizing the story more, by including the child’s first name and other particular information provided by the child, will make the visit even more memorable. We performed a study at the museum where half the families toured the museum with a personalized story for the child and half received an identical, but un-personalized, story. The story, activities, and short quizzes were contained in an iPad application, which kept track of time, success at the quizzes, and also recorded conversations. Children also provided answers to a questionnaire about their experiences two weeks after their visit. We compare performance between the conditions to assess the power of personalization.