The four invisible barriers to digital storytelling and how to break them

Your stories are what define the visitor experience, and your organisation is their keeper. Yet for many cultural institutions, the most impactful narratives and insights are trapped behind invisible barriers: cumbersome apps, 'one-size-fits-all' tours, or unreliable hardware.

Since launching Pladia Empower, we’ve worked closely with visitor-experience leaders to understand the barriers stopping your stories from reaching every visitor. Pladia Empower’s Tours feature is the culmination of that work - a visitor-centred solution designed to ensure the storytelling of your venue and collections is effortless, inclusive, and future-proof.

We believe the key to successful digital engagement is addressing four crucial challenges faced by the cultural sector.

Removing the App Download Barrier

The first and most critical challenge is friction: native apps require downloads and logins. Our analysis across multiple institutions shows that native app uptake rarely exceeds 5% of visitors - consistent with wider industry studies placing the figure closer to 2–3%. This makes bespoke native apps an unsustainable investment for audience reach and cumbersome to maintain operationally for venues.

Meanwhile, visitors who search on their browser while at a venue - seeking information about what they see, often represent around half of your visitors - reinforcing the importance of meeting audiences where they are.

Our approach at Pladia is clear: bring the seamless look and feel of a native app to a mobile, browser-based experience. As a Progressive Web App (PWA), Pladia Empower requires no logins or downloads, ensuring your venue has the best chance of remaining the source of truth for your visitors.

Multi-Audience Tours: One Stop, Multiple Stories and Languages

Your venue is visited by diverse audiences, from school groups and cultural communities to international tourists, and you want to craft stories that resonate with all of them.

With Tours, you can create multiple tour narratives for the same set of tour stops - a general adult tour, a narrative crafted for children, and a specialized tour for a specific cultural community - all available in multiple languages. This flexibility allows you to cater for the widest possible range of visitors.

Create multiple tour narratives for the same set of tour stops - one catering to adults and one for kids, for example.

Making Audio Truly Inclusive - Headphones Optional

Audio guides are popular, yet a significant barrier persists: headphones. Our internal data from thousands of visitors shows that over 60% don't bring their own headphones. This leads to either audio being skipped or the awkward moment of audio played aloud, which can compromise the visitor experience for others.

We solved this with Audio Access+  - turning a visitor’s own phone into a private audio guide. By simply lifting the device to their ear, they can listen privately like a phone call. Our customers have already seen a 40% increase in unique listeners through phone-to-ear playback.

Phone to ear playback has been a big hit for the 60% of visitors who forget their headphones.

Rethinking Wayfinding Beyond the “Blue Dot”

Bluetooth beacons and similar location-tracking hardware are costly to maintain and often unreliable for visitors. Hardware shouldn’t hold back your stories.

This challenge led to the development of Pathways, our indoor/outdoor wayfinding solution that provides visitors with step-by-step directions using clear reference points with no extra hardware, logins or downloads required. We treat indoor wayfinding as a visitor-centred design challenge, not a technical one, moving beyond the 'blue dot' to embrace how visitors naturally explore.

A New Era of Inclusive Storytelling

Every challenge we’ve explored has informed the way we built Tours - bringing each solution together into one seamless, visitor-centered experience. By embedding inclusivity, flexibility, navigation, and a deep understanding of visitor behaviour into its design, Pladia Empower enables institutions to deliver stories that resonate with the widest possible range of audiences.

And we’re only just getting started. Soon, you’ll be able to offer paid tours, turning your growing digital audience into a new source of revenue for your institution.
If you’d like to learn more or request a free trial we’d love to hear from you.

Watch a short demo of the feature here

https://www.pladia.io/talk-to-sales

Check out the Empower demo app here

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