Give a museum experience to someone you love
With Gift, you use your smartphone or tablet to create a digital gift. It’s like a playlist or a mixtape, except with objects from a museum.
The Visitor Experience
What is the experience like?
Some people create playful treasure hunts with a game-like mission to find the objects, while others spend a great deal of time and care choosing a single object.
How to implement it?
Gift can be implemented quickly and is aimed at museums with tight budgets and limited staff time. Learn more in this information pack. Use Gift Viz to analyse data generated by users.
Case Studies
Insight
Have Blast Theory created the future of museums?
asks Kevin Bacon, Digital Manager at Brighton Museum. In this blogpost, he explains the museum’s rationale for experimenting with the app:
Technologies can be effective ways of providing more content to visitors, but they often rub against the grain of the social experience, resulting in a low uptake. On the surface, Gift does much the same: the visitor uses their mobile phone to create and share content in a solitary way. But because it is so rooted in the practice of creating and sending gifts, it can enhance the social experience of the museum. A gift could be sent to a friend in another gallery, who is then encouraged to seek out the shared exhibit. It can even be shared with someone outside of the museum, so that they can enjoy their gift at home, and possibly visit the museum themselves in the future.
The beauty of Gift is that it gives you a new pathway through the museum, one that takes you off the beaten track onto a pathway of your own.Digital Manager, Brighton Museum
I thought that’s exactly what my mum would like, and so reading information about it made it feel more close to me or to my mum. So I connected my mum with this item and I think that helps remembering information better.Visitor, Brighton Museum
It definitely made me look at different things I’ve never seen in here before, and I’ve been in here loads of times.Visitor, Brighton Museum
No download. No app store. No login.
Gift is designed to be as seamless as possible: once visitors navigate to the website name of your choice (like demo.thegift.app), they can start exploring and creating gifts straight away.
Can the tool be customised?
The app in its most basic version can be built upon and customised by accessing the code repository. Alternatively, Blast Theory can provide two levels of service to customise the app for your institution. They provide a full explanation in this information pack.
How will the tool be supported?
We are committed to maintaining this tool and providing it for free until the end of 2021. You may also install the service on your own servers. Blast Theory will also provide support until at least the end of 2021 for anyone who chooses one of their paid options. Learn more about the experience and how to deploy it in your museum in this information pack from Blast Theory.
How do you get visitors to access the app?
As it is a web app they simply need to load a web address. Here are some further suggestions.