Storytelling is something more than just having a compelling story: it requires telling it in such a way that people keep listening. But what makes your story addictive, is the right context. A relevant, real-world background that livens up and enriches your narrative. Meet the master in this field. Eldheimar Museum, powered by proximity, got 95% of its visitors to stick to its story from beginning to end.
Uncovering the story
You start to discover the Eldheimar Museum’s story just after you land and realize that one-fifth of the island you’re standing on was completely destroyed during a massive volcanic eruption in 1973. The tragedy remains hidden behind a spectacular landscape, but you’ll experience it once you enter the museum. Its main attraction is a house that used to be completely covered with ash.
There are no signs or labels, nothing that could spoil this eerie atmosphere. You can’t read the story. You have to listen to it.
What you see is what you get
Eldheimar’s creators wanted visitors to stay focused on artifacts, not the tools, so their audio guide must have been hands-free. The only technology that could provide that was proximity. Locatify, a company that specializes in location-based apps, recommended beacons as the most cost-effective and accurate proximity provider.
After three months, the museum had 54 Kontakt.io’s beacons deployed and the beacon-enabled app was ready.
We looked at eight different vendors and tried hardware from three of them and ended up using beacons from Kontakt.io. The quality of the beacons varied between vendors in terms of signal strength, signal consistency, battery life, and administrative functions. Kontakt.io came on top in terms of packing, signal quality, and battery life.
Steinunn Anna Gunnlaugsdóttir, CEO, Locatify
Beacons made the guide fully automatic. There’s no need to stare at a smartphone or press anything—you listen to a story of an exhibit that is just in front of you. You don’t even have to have a smartphone since the museum lends its own devices with the app installed.
Astonishing results, unexpected benefits
It’s been a year since the museum opened. For that time, it’s been visited by 26 thousands of visitors. All of them got museum’s devices and had a chance to listen to the proximity-driven 45-minute guide in any of five available languages.
95% of them found the story so interesting, and the app so hassle-free that they kept listening for the entire visit. When Locatify told us that elder visitors admired the beaconized tour, we were excited, but not surprised. It’s a use case proving that technology can remove barriers rather than create ones. Beacons aren’t only for geeks!
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Eldheimar Museum combined its moving story with the natural storytelling power of audio guides, but it’s thanks to proximity you can’t stop listening. Kontakt.io’s beacons, delivering the story in the right place at the right time, make the storytelling truly engaging and addictive.
What about you? Do you use proximity to tell your stories?
