Your Content Deserves a Second Life

Content creation in the cultural sector is a labour of love. Whether it’s a beautifully researched exhibition narrative, a painstakingly crafted description, or a visitor experience designed to unfold room by room, none of it comes easy. It’s the product of months (or sometimes even years) of curatorial thinking, historical investigation, community consultation, and creative interpretation.

But technology has a habit of moving on. And when this happens, many organisations find themselves asking the same question: what happens to all the content we’ve already created?

In the cultural sector, content isn’t “just content.” It’s intellectual labour, emotional labour, and financial investment all woven together. Having to rebuild everything from scratch when a platform changes is too high a cost to bear.

A platform that adapts to your content — not the other way around

Too often, technology dictates how stories must be told. Content gets flattened to fit rigid templates, narratives are broken into generic blocks, and years of careful thought need re-working just to satisfy technical constraints.

Our platform encapsulates a different view of this: your stories shouldn’t be forced into an awkward format. It is on us to make sure our platform can flex… and support the full variety of structures and interpretive approaches that cultural venues use now and in the future.

Empower supports this philosophy through a set of content models shaped around the realities of cultural storytelling:

Stop-based tours are designed for experiences where a narrative thread unfolds through physical space. Each stop is anchored to a location, helping visitors to move through a site in a deliberate sequence. This structure supports orientation, pacing, and narrative flow - whether visitors are following a curated route or dipping in and out along the way.

Thematic collections bring together content around an idea rather than a location. They allow stories, objects, and places to be grouped and regrouped to support different interpretive lenses — whether that’s social history, a creative movement, or a contemporary issue. This makes it possible to reuse existing material to create new narratives without starting from scratch.

Audio narratives recognise that listening is a distinct mode of engagement. These stories are shaped around voice, tone, and timing, often carrying emotional weight or personal perspective. By treating audio as a first-class content type these narratives can be experienced in the way they were intended, without compromise. Click here if you’re interested in learning more about how we support audio stories in Empower.

Object stories focus on individual works or artefacts and the layers of meaning they hold. They offer rich contextual information, more detail, and multiple interpretive angles — from provenance and materiality to personal or community perspectives. Our flexible “content blocks” model makes it easier to deepen engagement without being bound by the physical constraints of a wall label.

Giving existing content new possibilities

When content is stored in flexible, well-considered structures, it becomes far more resilient. Stories  can be reused and recombined in meaningful ways. Individual stories can surface in different contexts. Existing material can support new experiences without duplicating effort. Updates become simpler, and experimentation becomes safer.

What once lived in one specific format can suddenly support many different visitor journeys, extending the value of work that has already been done.

Technology should amplify cultural work

Empower steps out of the limelight to make room for your stories. Our ambition is to give cultural content longevity, flexibility, and room to grow.

If your organisation has invested years in building rich content that currently lives inside a fragile or ageing system, it doesn’t mean you have to start again. With the right platform, your content can have a second life — and a long one.