The web form is our most flexible interactive module. It’s an excellent tool for collecting real-time responses from your audience whether you’re seeking email addresses, audience feedback, or you want to encourage active participation. 

Why museums love the web form:

  • Collect individual replies – by recording every single visitor’s reply, your team can track averages without losing access to first-hand visitor feedback
  • Ask questions in diverse formats – mix and match open fields, drop-down menus, and multiple choice so visitors can communicate in their preferred format
  • Share resources – distribute materials like worksheets, bibliographies, further reading, and more
  • Accommodate any dwell time – the web form can be as simple or as complex as needed and a bonus, your team can choose to make fields mandatory or optional

Web Forms in Action: Four Case Studies

Case Study 1: Missouri Historical Society

Gamify Learning

Growing interest in Distance Learning experiences has propelled the development of gamified learning. Distance learning applications often have to balance curriculum requirements, sharing deep levels of content in an engaging format, and keeping students active and participating. The Missouri Historical Society team were able to accommodate distance learning with their Making Missouri application . 

Making Missouri uses several interactive modules (the emoji module, voting, personality quizzes, and more!) but their web form offers students the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and feelings directly to their Collaborator Stories project.

Missouri asks students to respond to three key questions:

  • What are three things that you think people should know about Missouri’s history?
  • What are two things that you hope people in the future will remember about how Missouri is now?
  • What is one connection you have to Missouri?

Integrating the web form into their distance learning application creates multiple ways for students to engage in active learning and diversifies how students can share their responses, opinions, and feedback.

Depending on the depth of data needed, museum educators can include prompts to track teacher name, school, individual student’s name and their responses to all prompts in the web form. These experiences can be presented to the student prior to their field trip or virtual learning experience and again after the educational experience concludes. Time-stamped replies make it easy to track changes across each student.

Case Study 2: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami

Give Audiences a Voice

Create a space for your audience to voice their authentic ideas, reactions, and opinions in whatever form or length suits them best. When the Lowe Art Museum launched Hidden Voices, community feedback was essential to the project goals. 

With web forms, when selecting an artwork, the museum’s audience can dive deep into the artwork’s meaning, the artist’s life and style, historical context, as well as respond to inspiring prompts from the museum team. In the Voices section of the experience, shown above, audiences can offer up their reactions, questions, interpretation, and even a haiku about each painting. The fields are optional so participants only have to respond to prompts of interest.

The Lowe Art Museum team then exports these replies and republishes them back into the public facing online exhibition. This ongoing participation helps create a public conversation around the collection, build the online exhibition’s content in the long-term, and encourage more audience participation.

Check out the full case study here.

Case Study 3: Indiana Historical Society

Share Resources, Activities, Worksheets, and More

Give audiences access to further reading, bibliographies, worksheets, and more wherever they go, online or offline. When the Indiana Historical Society launched their You Are There and Be Heard online exhibition series, they wanted to offer their audience virtual access to the permanent collection and exhibition experiences but also encourage deeper levels of engagement. 

Above we see two key resource pages: Gennett Studio Resources and Madam C.J. Walker Resources. Using web forms, these pages convey valuable collection research, further reading and research opportunities, as well as access to online collections for those audiences seeking to explore related stories across the permanent collection.

Case Study 4: Maymont Nature Center

Survey & Connect with Audiences

Deploy visitor surveys, collect email addresses, organize program sign-ups and find ways to expand, iterate and deepen the impact of your exhibits, experiences, and programming! When the Maymont Nature Center launched their in-gallery kiosk experience, Run of the River, there were a few high priority outcomes:

  • Help younger visitors learn about their local ecosystem
  • Introduce lifecycles, food chains, and animal adaptations via animals living in the James River
  • Share opportunities for exploring the James River including fishing, swimming, and hiking
  • Behaviors for protecting and caring for the James River and the local ecosystem
  • Create a connection with visitors that can continue once they’ve left the Maymont Nature Center

The web form became an essential tool for creating connections with visitors offsite. In two key locations in the Run of the River kiosk, visitors are prompted to share their email addresses. One prompt allows visitors to sign up for ongoing communications and upcoming program announcements whereas the second prompt focuses specifically on Citizen Scientist programs.

Since Run of the River launched, dozens of museums have deployed the web form to collect information from their visitors. Depending on the depth of data needed, forms can include a single field for an email address or a full survey experience.

What elements can I build into my web form?

  • Text boxes: Write headers, convey instructions, add commentary
  • Images: Create visual interest, break up text blocks, appeal to visual communicators
  • Dividers: Segment the experience, guide the user, differentiate between required and optional fields
  • Document Download: Give users the option to take the experience offline and delve deeper! 
  • Open-field responses: Allow your audiences to share their full feedback with an open field. No character limits.
  • Single-field responses: Activate to collect email addresses, phone numbers, or zip codes.
  • Dropdown Selects: Streamline data collection, ask users to prioritize one option
  • Checkboxes: Create low friction form fields, gather simple data, allow users to select multiple options 
  • Multiple Choice: Simplify survey feedback by pre-loading multiple choice prompts.

What other interactive modules are available to my team?

Depending on your project goals and desired outcomes, the CultureConnect platform offers multiple interactive modules. If you’re still interested in collecting visitor feedback, gamifying your applications, and encouraging contributions, the scoring module or a scavenger hunt could be a good fit.

Check out the scoring module deep dive here or explore our scavenger hunt tools.

Need interactivity to guide audiences through layers of content? Or perhaps you want to find opportunities to serve your skimmers, swimmers, and divers simultaneously?

Check out how team make lots of content digestible with the image mosaic module and our hotspot tool.

Want to learn more?

Connect with the CultureConnect team to learn more about the platform here or by emailing hello@cultureconnectme.com

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