The Royal Ontario Museum gets a lot of visitor photos – and most arts and heritage attractions do too (check out your location and relevant hashtags on instagram, twitter, and facebook).

This case study shows how they looked at these photos as a rich resource and encouraged their visitors to interact with the museum digitally. Instead of creating a new digital experience and encouraging visitors to use it (like downloading an app) they inserted the museum into digital activities their visitors were already doing such as taking photos in the venue or looking up their website before a visit. By changing their photography policy and adding signage to encourage photography they let their audiences take the lead in creating content.

“In our digital engagement work at the ROM we’ve stopped forcing people to act the way we want them too, and started being more reactive to what they are doing in our space.”

They were then able to turn these visitor-generated photos into a data source too – figuring out where the photo hot-spots were in the museum, and understanding their audience interests more.

Read: ‘Unpacking 263,000 visitor photos at the Royal Ontario Museum’