43 Graces Road
London
SE5 8PF
London
SE5 8PF
Staff Training and Development
YOUR INDEPENDENT GUIDE TO THE SECTOR
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About
TheWholeStory’s enjoyable training facilitates how visitor facing staff and volunteers share the stories, history, heritage or culture through tours, object handling, talks, activities and conversations and develop how staff and volunteers think about, respond to and actively interact with visitors, to meet their expectations and to positively influence their experience.
We are proud to have used storytelling since 2006 as a communication, investigation and training tool within national and regional museums, in natural landscapes, in city contemporary art galleries and heritage and cultural organisations.
We create and deliver training to help volunteers and staff, offer visitors a fulfilling, engaging and memorable visit, from “Hello” to “See you again soon”.
Our workshops investigate and identify with staff and volunteers how, when and where they can best enhance the visitors’ experience by being the face-to-face catalyst between the museum, its interpretation and visitors.
We facilitate the finding of stories that volunteers and staff can share, convey, illustrate and evoke (through interaction), to connect and inspire visitors with the characters, ideas and actions, time and places present or represented.
Based on our combined experience of more than 30 years, we respond to the desired outcomes of our clients and the needs of staff and volunteers to design and offer useful and practical workshops and training that will give them the skills, confidence and creativity to interact and communicate with visitors.
Our Visitor Engagement and Experience workshops cover the following:
Finding your stories, impromptu and programmed conversations and discussions, object handling, storytelling, tours, talks, room stewarding, interacting, greeting, welcoming, customer and visitor engagement, memberships, donations.
Do call or email Lily or Josh – we would like to hear about what you are doing and to see what we can do with you.
Visit our website to see our approach, read case studies and find out about our ready to go training.
Testimonials
“Josh and Lily are superstars! They deliver really good training courses for whole organisations without that I’M – A – SCARY – CORPORATE – ROBOT stuff you get so often.”
Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator
Historic Royal Palaces
“It has been a delight to work with theWholeStory. They fill a room with enthusiasm, and have been very collaborative, considerate and flexible with our team in the creation of a tailored Visitor Engagement Training programme (despite numerous covid-related delays and subsequent necessary alterations!). This is a really exciting project for us and I have confidence in the value that it will bring for our visitors and colleagues alike.”
Learning and Development
Tate
“Thanks for running the training, you did a great job of facilitating the tour creation and managing the team. I’m very happy with the results and the team will definitely run with it far more than if I had written a tour myself and trained it out to them. They feel more ownership of it as a result of collaborating on the process. I’m looking forward to the group rolling it out. Thanks again, I definitely recommend you to others!”
Public Participation Officer
D-Day Story Museum
“Bletchley Park engaged TheWholeStory to help review and refresh our Highlights Tour, to ensure it was warm and welcoming to a wide range of audiences. Working with our volunteer tour guides, Lily and Josh set about building relationships and trust and managing expectations about how to work together. Lily and Josh took so much time to immerse themselves fully in Bletchley Park’s history and our desire to better engage visitors with our often too-complex stories. They worked with the guides to create a framework for the new tour, which still allowed flexibility and the guides to show their personalities and their passions. It was a great experience and we are delighted with how Lily and Josh tackled this difficult transformation of a core part of our visitor offer.”
Director of Public Engagement
Bletchley Park Trust
