People Don't Fall in Love with History. They Fall in Love with Stories.

Historic re-enactors tell the story of their service at Fort Necessity. Photo by Heidi Schlag.

At a recent webinar, someone in the audience asked me a question I've heard many variations of over the years: "How should I go about attracting people to my history museum when most people think history is boring?"

I pushed back on the premise. The evidence doesn't actually support the idea that people think history is boring. Heritage and cultural travelers make up 78% of U.S. leisure travelers. History-themed travel, historic site visits, and cultural experiences consistently rank among the most popular leisure activities in the country.

My answer: stop leading with history and start leading with story. People connect to heritage experiences when something feels personal — a character they relate to, a detail that surprises them, a place that makes the past feel present rather than preserved. The organizations that attract visitors who never thought of themselves as history lovers aren't doing it by explaining why history matters. They're doing it by finding the story that makes a visitor feel something.

The subject matter is not the hook.

This is the shift that changes everything. When an organization leads with what it is, it self-selects its audience. "A museum of 19th-century industrial history" reaches the people who already care about 19th-century industrial history. That's a small room. But when that same organization leads with what it does to a person, everything opens up.

What is it like to stand in the room where a decision was made that changed a community? What does it feel like to discover a new species? What would it be like to prepare your meals over a fire or spin your own cloth? Those are not history questions or nature questions or art questions. Those are human questions. And humans of all kinds respond to them.

Find the story hiding inside what you have.

Every heritage organization has a multitude of stories waiting to be told. They are the anecdotes your staff shares with visitors in a quiet moment, the detail that stops people mid-tour, the piece of your story that sounds almost impossible.

That detail is your entry point. The moment of recognition where someone thinks: I didn't know that. Tell me more.

Interpretation and marketing should be telling the same story.

Many heritage organizations treat interpretation and marketing as separate functions with separate goals: the curatorial or education team builds the experience, and the marketing team promotes it. The result is often a visitor who arrives expecting one thing and finds another, or an organization that's sitting on extraordinary stories internally and leading with generic messaging externally.

Your interpretive plan is one of your most powerful marketing assets. The detail that stops a visitor cold mid-tour is exactly the hook that should be on your website. The question your guides use to open a program is the question your social media post should be asking.

When interpretation and marketing draw from the same source, the experience becomes coherent: the story that gets someone through the door is the one that deepens once they're inside, and that deepening is what makes them want to come back.

The organizations that get this right don't just use marketing to drive traffic. They use it to set up the visit. The visitor arrives already oriented to the story, already curious. That's a very different experience than showing up cold and hoping the signage does the work.

Design the threshold, not just the experience.

Most heritage organizations put enormous care into the visitor experience once someone is through the door. Far fewer put the same care into the threshold: the moment before someone decides to show up at all. Your website, your social media, your event listings, and your signage: those are your hooks. And if they speak only to people who already love what you do, you're not growing your audience; you're serving the audience you already have.

A well-told story at the threshold should create interest. The immersive evening program works because it meets people in curiosity and atmosphere before it asks them to care about the past. The hands-on workshop works because it creates a physical connection before an intellectual one. The programming built around local food, craft, or music works because it starts somewhere familiar and takes people somewhere they didn't expect to go. The hook comes first. The depth follows.

The story has to be specific to work.

"Discover our rich history" is not a hook. "The night the river changed everything" is a hook. The more specific and rooted in your actual place your story is, the harder it is to ignore, and the harder it is to find anywhere else. Your specificity is both your differentiator and your invitation.

This matters more now than it ever has. Generic content is everywhere, and the tools to produce it are cheaper by the day. What you have that no one else has is the actual, documented, irreplaceable story of your place.

This is the work.

Helping heritage organizations find and tell the story that reaches the people who didn't know they were looking for it is the core of what I do. It's marketing and communications work, but it's grounded in a deep understanding of how heritage tourism functions: how visitors decide, how they move through a region, how a single experience builds into loyalty and advocacy.

If your organization is sitting on a story you haven't figured out how to tell, or if you're reaching the same audience over and over and wondering how to widen that circle, I'd love to talk. Contact me here.