Come, Stay, Learn, Play: A Guide to Making the Museum Experience is a practical guide for those on the front-line of museums, as well as leadership, on creating memorable moments through extraordinary interactions. Through interviews with experience staff and research on successful for-profit models, Andrea Gallagher Nalls presents a workable manual on how to find, train, and keep effective curators of experience that will shape earned income success at your museum and form a culture of service to both the visitors, and one another. Cultural organizations are entering what might be their most challenging era yet. In this post-pandemic, new-normal time, museums are forced to rethink archetypal visitor services and guest experience roles and this book offers ways to emerge stronger than ever before. This offering from the American Alliance of Museums is a comprehensive resource for your museum’s frontline. Topics include: Hiring and Training Enhancing Visitor to Museum Staff Communication Improving Institution-wide Interdepartmental Communication Growing a Culture of Service Frontline DEAI Initiative Activation Customer Service Best Practices Guest Point-of-View Museum Visitor to Member Conversion Digital Experience Delivery Content Connection and Visitor Engagement The Post-COVID Experience Features include: Ways a museum visit can be enhanced through the research and application of various for-profit models of guest experience Highlights, experiences and case studies from current museum practitioners New and updated experience resources for museum staff The Making the Museum Experience Questionnaire Museum experience professionals have the incredible opportunity to serve visitors and present a place where they feel welcome, safe and inspired. Our institutions are more than just a place of learning, and greater than a repository of things. They are also community gathering places, and a place to belong.This book offers real-life stories and tested step-by-step strategies to spark ideas on how to secure visitor affection at one’s own museum.

Originally published: New York: Doubleday, 1979.