Invite your audience in

Walking past the building site for the new Royal Children’s Hospital.  Love the way they invite us to do what we always want to do when we pass a building site – peep in .  Notice the two peep holes – one at a child’s level?

They are already making their target audience, parents and children feel included in the new project and welcome.  Lessons for us in business and leadership…

No matter what you do we can all find ways to invite our customers or our audience in.  I was intrigued to learn how the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) does that.  When you visit a gallery you possibly spend some time reading the printed text on the gallery wall that tells you more about the art work.  Conventionally this would be put together by the curator or an expert.

The NGV has trialled projects that look at how this can be done differently for a modern audience.  In addition to the curator’s words, the wall texts initially quoted poets and other writers. When this was well received, the NGV extended a project into Victorian schools, asking children to write labels in response to the paintings.  These labels written by children were fixed to the wall alongside the conventional texts.  Imagine the delight of a child reading a wall label  written by another child, just for them.