Eight Steps to Effective Interpretation

Let’s start planning the thematic interpretation way. This approach - pioneered by a former interpreter and now a researcher, trainer and author in the field of interpretation, Prof. Sam Ham - essentially involves strategic communication.

The planning process requires you to make decisions about:

• who are your interpretive audiences?
• what themes or central messages do you want them to receive
• how the messages will be delivered to them.

Following are eight steps to Thematic Interpretative Planning, some with worksheets to help you make the necessary decisions.

The eight steps are:

• Prepare an interpretive inventory
• Establish interpretive goals
• Identify audiences
• Determine outcomes for goals
• Develop themes
• Delivering Interpreted Content
• Prepare an implementation plan
• Identify evaluation processes

The planning process is described in detail in the Tasmanian Thematic Interpretation Planning Manual

Step 1: Prepare

Take stock of who your market is and what might have merit for interpretation in relation to that market.

It includes clarifying what is important about the place, its stories and what happens there, and what are the strongest observable features.

Focus particularly on those aspects that would interest your visitors.

This is not the time for documenting lots of detail but about getting a good understanding of what is special about the place, business or experience and what might provide a unique selling point.

As part of this step, draw on market research to develop a visitor profile that tells you as much as possible about who your business or organisation is targeting, what interests them, their travel patterns and any other information that helps you build an understanding of who is likely to be your audience.

Worksheet: Interpretive Inventory [PDF 32KB]

Step 2: Establish your goals

Your goals should clearly state what your interpretive program aims to achieve in a broad sense. They should relate to your business or organisation’s vision, mission and strategic goals.

Examples of goals that may be relevant to your product or program include to:

• Enhance the visitor experience
• Foster support for the business or organisation’s role and services
• Stimulate visitor spend beyond the main ticket price
• Protect the site and its resources.

You’ll return to your goals at Step 4, after you’ve determined what audiences they apply to.

Step 3: Identify your audience

At Step 1 you considered market research and the market segments that apply to your business or organisation. These segments are the way in which certain groupings of visitors are defined for the purpose of knowing how and where to communicate with them and influence their holiday purchase decisions. Whatever you’ve learned about your market is an essential context for this next step as it gives you more insight into the range of needs within each audience.

So let’s identify interpretive audiences. They may fit into market segments before they arrive but once they’re on-site, for the purposes of interpretation planning, we need to look at the groupings differently.

Now we’re we’ll identify groupings based on the way customers move about on-site and on any significant differences in the way they self-select into activities.

Your definition of your audiences is only useful for interpretation planning if the way you define them enables you to target messages and deliver media to them. You need to communicate with them ‘in time and space’. For this reason, interpretive audiences tend to be more general than market segments.

Examples of audiences and the rationale for each of them are:

• Day visitors have 1-2 hrs for the experience and only have time to access areas close to the arrival point or to participate in a short guided tour
• Overnight visitors have more time, explore more widely, and seek an evening tour or activity
• Locals have a high propensity to focus on ‘social’ areas of site such as picnic and BBQ areas.

Step 4: Determine outcomes

Your goals are in place but how will you know when you’ve succeeded? Thisis where outcomes are important.

Outcomes are either non-observable such as mental or emotional - as in visitors indicating that they were inspired by the experience - or observable such as behaviours that are immediate or less immediate, such as sales of merchandise at the end of a tour or increased repeat visitation.

Outcomes tell you what you’ll need to focus on for monitoring and evaluation.

Worksheet: Goals and Outcome-Setting [PDF 24KB]

Step 5: Develop your themes

At Step 1 you identified what is special about what you offer your visitors. As you start to develop themes, it’s useful to review the values of your business, organisation or tourism product. These may be outlined in your brand definition, if one has been developed.

Your brand and these values provide signposts for the direction you should take.

A theme is designed to create meaning and connection. For many people, it involves a different way of thinking about communication. Extensive research shows that our brains process information in whole ideas. Themes make it easy for people to form meanings from interpretation by designing communication around whole ideas.

At its simplest, a whole idea is usually expressed in one sentence.

All themes convey a moral to the story or a conclusion. They encapsulate the ‘big ideas’. When the moral to the story really matters to your visitors then it’s more likely to have a lasting impact.

If you want to write powerful themes, remember to make links in your theme between the tangible and intangible elements. The tangible qualities are the physical things that your visitors can see, touch and experience directly, like wildlife or a colonial building. Intangible qualities are more symbolic and represent beliefs and values that are common to our human experience, often regardless of our country of origin, age or worldview.

You can develop themes yourself or you can develop them through a representative workshop by inviting stakeholders, specialists and interpreters who represent the range of potential interpretive topics. You could also run an in-house workshop, drawing on the skills and knowledge already available within your team. Workshops can add greater richness and depth to interpretation by harnessing multiple perspectives and a wider range of ideas.

Worksheet: Writing Themes [PDF 60KB]  

Once you’ve got your draft themes, check the following:

• Can you incorporate one or more themes into a bigger and more powerful theme?
• Are there any sub-messages rather than themes, as they help build or reinforce themes though are not a theme in their own right?
• Are there any gaps in relation to what your audiences expect or seek? If so, develop a theme or themes to fill the gaps.
• Do your themes align with your brand or business values and do they meet the needs and interests of your audiences?

It’s worth putting in the time and effort to review, edit and rework themes because they are so central to the effectiveness of thematic interpretation.

If you get stuck writing themes, you’re not the only one. Sometimes it takes a while to get comfortable with theme-writing.

Worksheet: Troubleshooting [PDF 26KB]

Step 6: Deliver interpreted content

Communicating a message to your audience requires some kind of vehicle or medium to carry the message. It might be a person, a sign, an historic artefact or an interpretive booklet for example.

This step requires decisions on how and where you will deliver your interpretivecontent.

In making these decisions, you should identify the best media for your audiences and the cost-effectiveness of that media. For example, you might decide that a face-to-face approach is best. However, a team of interpreters may not be cost-effective for your business or organisation so you may need to select a media combination that will work for the audiences and be affordable.

You’ll also need to take into account the range of learning styles that will be represented in your audience. One approach that interpreters find useful is psychologist Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences developed in the 1980s.

He found that we all have eight ways we learn:

• linguistic: making sense of the world through words and language
• logical-mathematical: use of analysis and abstract relations
• spatial: visual information such as charts or creating visual effects from imagination and memory
• musical: sounds and sound patterns
• intrapersonal: reflecting on our personal feelings and motivations
• body-kinaesthetic: using parts or all of the body to understand the world
• interpersonal: recognising and understanding the intentions and feelings of others
• naturalist: understanding of, and affinity with, features of the natural world.

While we all have the eight intelligences, we each have a particular preference or set of preferences in the way we learn.

For this step in the planning process, documenting your selection of media on a matrix or table will help ensure you target your interpretation to your audiences.

Worksheet: Media Matrices [PDF 49KB]

Step 7: Implement a plan

This is the action plan that describes how your interpretation will happen.

It will usually document the decisions you or your organisation make about the budget, what resources are required or available, who is responsible for what, and what, if any, training is needed.

It will also include the stages and actions required and the timelines for achieving them.

Where interpretation planning is complex or will be undertaken over several years, then it may be necessary to develop annual delivery plans for implementation.

While an overall interpretation plan provides the blueprint for interpretation, a delivery plan is also developed each year, based on priorities for that year matched to available budget and organisational resources.

Step 8: Evaluate

Evaluation measures the progress or success of your interpretation. It is a diagnostic tool that helps give your interpretive program a regular health check.

It also provides feedback for continual improvement and can help you avoid costly mistakes.

It can be conducted before, during or after implementation, depending on what you need to know and when.

Evaluating an activity or interpretive device before implementation (formative evaluation) is a way to help you decide whether to limit the risk of investing further money or time, make improvements or stop doing something that doesn’t work.

Evaluating a program while it’s operating is called monitoring. Monitoring, such as routine debriefing of frontline staff on their observations of customers and on customer feedback, can be conducted at more regular intervals than formal evaluation, commonly done annually.

Evaluating after implementation (summative evaluations), will most likely use more formal evaluation methods such as surveys and focus groups.

To gain the most benefit from evaluation, it is important to identify evaluation processes and tasks relevant to the nature and scale of your business and integrate them into your business practices.

Evaluating Interpretation [PDF 55KB]

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