Let's Talk Tourism

Dr. Richard Benfield joined Engage by Cell with insights into tourism trends and the travel economy.. Find the transcript and time stamps below.

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[00:00:00] Dr. Richard Benfield: I started 25 years ago. Collecting data on visitors to botanic gardens. And as I tell everyone when I do my garden presentations, I'm the world's expert now on visitors to botanic gardens or gardens in general, though, my daughter will tell you all that I'm the only one. So I'm also the worst.

So I've been doing a solo. promotion of tourism to gardens for the last 25 years, which is now only, becoming, realized, And as an old geographer, I've been to 123 countries of the world. I'm looking mostly at gardens, though, in 2013, I decided to. I was asked to, actually is in my own big mouth.

I told someone, I told everyone so much to write a book about garden tourism and the author, the publisher said, why don't you? And so there you see on the far left garden tourism and, wrote that book in 2013, which, which is actually done very well in terms of, in terms of sales as academic books go.

In 2019, they asked for an update on that Garden Tourism and in 2019, I wrote New Directions in Garden Tourism and literally wrote a chapter 11 in that book because we were immediately, as it went to press. stopped by COVID 19 and COVID became the governing factor.

So new directions in tourism certainly had some element of what were new directions with COVID. But, of course we've since emerged from that. And subsequently I've, done a little bit of an update. It's just about ready to go to press as you can see on the bottom of that slide published the 3rd book, critical issues in garden tourism.

So with that, let's go on to the next one. And because we're off to the races here and, let Dave go back to telling you a little bit about engage, when he gets the podium in a couple of minutes. so, pretty basic. What is garden tourism and what's its evolution next Anna, please.

And that is, this is an academic definition, a person that leaves his or her household, of normal place of normal domicile for recreation and leisure purposes, may be connected with a trip for business or visiting friends and relatives. But really, there's been a lot of discussion with academia over the years on what constitutes a tourist, a tourist, that's for academics.

They can get really excited about stuff like that. I don't. I just kind of like to think that, for our purposes in gardens, we can break them down. I break them down. local 25 miles. And here, I think. I think very much memberships and people coming to the garden on a fairly regular basis. By the way, just a quick aside, average membership in the United, in the United States, constituent gardens is about 36 percent of their visitors are members.

So there's a, a thing for you. Are you above or below that? That will, of course, vary, but, I think it's a nice barometer to know regional within 250 miles. I consider that essentially a day trip, though, of course, for some geographic areas, probably particularly the East Coast. 250 miles is a long way for a day trip with that traffic, but it suits our purposes national over 250 miles.

But the key point there is that usually. pretends that it's an overnight visitor. So that has repercussions, of course, when locally as a garden, you're explaining your economic impact. If you know how much national or visitors from outside the 250 mile area is, you can do all sorts of economic calculate calculations of, of, hotel, state, meals that they purchase, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:03:36] Dr. Richard Benfield: we have a very poor, international and national market. that's 1 of my missions here to get more of that. But for that, we also need the data to convince people that we, as gardens are very important in the tourism mix. we have that 4th category national or 3rd category national over 250 miles and international, people who come from overseas in the United States today.

[00:03:58] Dr. Richard Benfield: Constitutes about 4 million visitors come from overseas into the United States, of which many of them come to gardens. We can talk about that, but I'd make the point that there's 294 countries in the world and each have different needs. I think the Canadians that come, that cross over the border are very different to the British that come or the Germans that come, et cetera.

[00:04:19] Dr. Richard Benfield: So we know that from all sorts of other international studies When we closed the books in 2019, we had about 120 million visitors to gardens in the United States. By the time we were in the midst of COVID, that dropped probably about 40 percent.

[00:04:36] Dr. Richard Benfield: And by 2022, we were back to about 120 million. So once the gardens reopened after COVID, we were very quick in getting back to our 2019 numbers. As of today, 23, million. And 132 million is projected for this year of 2024. Once we close out this year, 94 percent of our gardens closed during covert 7 did not close for whatever reason.
[00:05:06] Dr. Richard Benfield: And 1 of them, which I think is very instructive, went from 75, 000 or so visitors a year in 2018, 17, 18, 19 to 350, 000 since covert. And so, COVID in many ways was quite a, a shock to the system, but for all of those seven, particularly, they did very well. Anna, next please.

[00:05:27] Dr. Richard Benfield: And so, let's just look at where we are in terms of gardens and how we see ourselves within the larger, tourism framework. Because prior to, 2013, Gardens, of course, were a very different beast. Originally set up as educational institutions, then as places for new plants like Leiden with tulips in 1610, gardens as art, empire, place, and then subsequent to World War II, gardens become Centered as areas of plant research of museums, things changed about the turn of the century.

[00:06:03] Dr. Richard Benfield: As you recall, just about when I was getting into the business where we started to become relevant for this, discussion of conservation, sustainability, the name David Ray, who was the. Vice president of horticulture at Edinburgh Botanic Garden in Scotland, was the one that told me that.

[00:06:21] Dr. Richard Benfield: concurrent with that in 1999, there was a book published by Pine and Gilmore. They called it The Experienced Economy. They suggested it was, quote, the new paradigm. And I think in many ways, we're still living within that paradigm. parallel with that in 2013, tourism really started to boom. The statistic I use, and we can.
[00:06:42] Dr. Richard Benfield: you can move your dates out, however you wish. but the, statistic I use is that in 2013, Visit Britain did a survey of all of their overseas visitors and 33%. the third of the top three, 33% of all visitors to the UK wanted to go and see a garden.

[00:07:02] Dr. Richard Benfield: And that was only behind shopping and going to the pub. And so tourism really was a major. Element to gardens and as we move through that last decade of 2013 to 2019, we started to see diminution in money coming into our gardens from outside sources. We started to have to go to things like sponsorships, et cetera.

[00:07:24] Dr. Richard Benfield: And so what happened is, the need for visitors or often called earned income money coming through the gate become more and more paramount. And I think that still lives with us today that we need visitors. Our emphasis now is on the visitor and what I've espoused for the last 5 to 10 years is that, for gardens now, the simple, Fact is that we can deliver as much education as we wish.

[00:07:51] Dr. Richard Benfield: We can deliver as much conservation as we wish. we can deliver as much plant, protection as we wish. But if we don't have people coming through the gate, then we become irrelevant. So that's the kind of thing that makes us have the need To become tourism oriented, or let's just call it visitor oriented to go through the gate.
[00:08:10] Dr. Richard Benfield: So Anna, this was kind of interesting to me because I think it's more than just what you see up there, which is 2021 and 22, which was a survey at the height of the covid epidemic where respondents were asked. This, by the way, comes from Colleen Dil Schneider to give them credit for their data.

[00:08:28] Dr. Richard Benfield: when COVID's over, what is the thing that you most wish to go and do, see, partake of? And isn't it remarkable that going to a botanic garden was number one? Seventy something percent of our respondents said they wanted to go to a garden. I don't think that has changed in 2023 and 2024. Certainly not because of COVID, but because the drive out there, and we'll see it there in other things, is still very much part and parcel of it.

[00:08:56] Dr. Richard Benfield: You will see, as a quick aside, museums are down to about 50%, and they certainly haven't recovered. I think of most gardens that I speak to over the last year or so, all of them are not only back to 2019 level, some of them have far surpassed it.

[00:09:13] Dr. Richard Benfield: Potential demand, I think economists call it, call it, what is it? Unrealized demand or latent demand is still there for garden. So we are still very much part of the mix and we need to act on that.

[00:09:24] Dr. Richard Benfield: You can certainly see it. It actually comes from a group of gardens in the Dallas, Fort Worth, North Texas area, and it talks about the fact that gardens up until 2019 were very much at the whim of weather actually is what that shows. But by the time we got to post COVID in 2022, as you can see, Gardens at 95%.

[00:09:47] Dr. Richard Benfield: We're just about back, where they were, two years previous, but museums and zoos are still languishing. So we're still very much, if not the dominant, certainly the go to activity for post COVID areas. What do we know about gardens? These are just some of the statistics that I've collected over the years.

[00:10:04] Dr. Richard Benfield: You can certainly, I can certainly give you a whole bunch more, which I hope are interesting, but, it tells us a little bit about what we do to our visitor. First of all, I tell everyone it's the most popular outdoor activity in the United States today with 132 million visitors. Disney gets 60 million visitors to all of their properties every year.

[00:10:25] Dr. Richard Benfield: Las Vegas, that claims to be the number one tourist destination in North America, gets 45 million. They used to get 75 by the way. They're now down to 45. We're up to 130 million. The only people that that statistic upsets are the people from Disney. My dear friend Luke Benalli from Disneyland Paris tells me this cannot be true.

[00:10:46] Dr. Richard Benfield: And I said, yeah, you can even go to Wikipedia and see it, Luke, if you wish. The other thing we have, which I think is really nice is it appeals to all demographics. if you're in the theme park business, if you're in the cruise business, they don't appeal to all demographics. We do. And as you'll see in a minute, we're starting to see movement and it's very heartening amongst the millennials.

[00:11:07] Dr. Richard Benfield: The largest demographic group in the United States is now very much becoming part of the garden mix. Why do people come to our gardens? If we want them to come through the gate, we want to know why they're coming. And there's been a very limited surveys as to why people walk through the door.

[00:11:26] Dr. Richard Benfield: A lady called Joe Connell came up with most of these things, and it's been proven time and time again that it's an element of they come to be with and socialize with others, particularly family. The socialization with others in the garden.

[00:11:41] Dr. Richard Benfield: The other big strong factor is done on the factor analysis is to enjoy the outdoors. They wish to be outdoors. And I think that was certainly shown by the calling Dylan Schneider file and increasingly they go for health. They go for fresh air. They go for the outdoors. They go for the environment and that is becoming more and more a strong area there If you are a garden, which I think most of you are the average time spent in a garden is about 92 minutes What does that mean?

[00:12:09] Dr. Richard Benfield: It means they're there for the morning or they're there for the afternoon There's very few destination gardens in the united states where people will come for a whole Day, so in your garden, you're very much part of your local mix if you're going to Cape Fear Botanic, I'm sure you could spend all day there, but if you're going to Cape Fear in the morning, you know, when they open at nine o'clock or ten o'clock, presumably they're out for lunch.

[00:12:34] Dr. Richard Benfield: They'll have lunch and they're going somewhere else. So you're very much part of a partnership of others that are doing gardens, The people who are coming to your garden will see another garden in the following six months. So we're all in this together. They love to go compare gardens and check them out.

[00:12:50] Dr. Richard Benfield: So what are the trends today? What are we going to be looking at over the next, let's just say five years. first of all, providing experiences for all markets, that experience economy I talked about with Pine and Gilmore, it is still out there and they want experiences that they can go and say, Oh, this was great.

[00:13:08] Dr. Richard Benfield: This is what we did. Secondly, defining the market to get maximum visitation. If most of you want increased visitation, then we have to define the market we're going to go after. And then we have to go after them for that maximum visitation. I'm going to gloss over this very quickly because this is Dave's forte and I'm certainly not an expert at it, but we need to adopt technology.

[00:13:31] Dr. Richard Benfield: It's very much a technological age for gardens, whether that be time ticketing, zip code analysis, apps, text messaging, GPS mapping, whatever. The key there, and I don't think it's on the slide, so if you're writing anything down and Insert this before we send this to you tomorrow. Zip codes are key for defining markets.

[00:13:52] Dr. Richard Benfield: Okay. Zip codes are key. If you're not collecting zip codes, then start it yesterday. The rise of the millennials and how they behave, they now represent 40 percent of the Demographic makeup, the United States. Unfortunately, all goats like me are disappearing us baby boomers. So you need to do the middle, go through the millennials and figure out how they go.

[00:14:14] Dr. Richard Benfield: And we're going to talk about who's eating your lunch, museums, aquariums, zoos, and halls of fame. I'm just going to throw up some examples, then turn it over to Dave, So with that, we're going to go through a couple of examples on it. The idea of market penetration, where you look comes from a botanic garden in Wisconsin, they divide theirs up into their core area, secondary tertiary.

[00:14:33] Dr. Richard Benfield: I think that's my regional market that I was talking about day trippers and anything beyond that becomes national and international. So you can get an actual quantifiable figure as to what your market penetration is from the zip codes that you get. So I'm going to do some examples here.

[00:14:51] Dr. Richard Benfield: We're going to go through them very quickly. So you can see the experiences you're going to talk about. First of all, the experiences that people are doing. this is. An example from Iowa, this is Des Moines, Iowa. And here's the deal about experiences with the Reimer garden in Ames, Iowa.

[00:15:09] Dr. Richard Benfield: They had a meeting in 2012 of all their staff for 1 hour. And the director, Ed Lyon, said to all of the staff in there, I want you all to come up with one good idea for an experience that we can use to promote our garden, because we only get, I think at the time, Ed was getting 70 odd thousand people come to the garden.

[00:15:29] Dr. Richard Benfield: Next one, Anna. They came up with this Lego Fest.

[00:15:35] Dr. Richard Benfield: Where you put Legos in the garden, they put eight Legos in actually, I think it was about 19 structures, but eight separate areas that bison you see there is 95, 000 pieces of Lego. They went from 75, 000 people to 300, 000 people in a university garden, and they would then started to franchise that across the country.

[00:15:59] Dr. Richard Benfield: With the designer, a man called Sean Kenny, who is a master Lego builder, heck of an idea, and a real experience, as you can see, for children on the left, for families, etc, etc. Next Anna, next we're going to go to, we're going to go to Norfolk Botanic. Their deal was, very much part and parcel of, they were asked to help clear the shelters.

[00:16:22] Dr. Richard Benfield: Promotion so what they did was invite dogs into the garden with beer only well behaved dogs. Just so you understand and from that point in time, Norfolk Botanic Garden would open for box bruised and the like on Friday nights. It became a major experience. It was very great. By the way, the Picture up on the top right there is I think that's the cutest picture in all my collection there of people with dogs.

[00:16:47] Dr. Richard Benfield: Here's the interesting market, if you will, part to this. When COVID came, we ended up with three million new dog owners in the United States. And they all wanted, had to, should walk their dog. How many botanic gardens up to 2020 allowed dogs in the garden? But many opened, many didn't. The decision was certainly based on the individual gardens, request.

[00:17:13] Dr. Richard Benfield: But the idea that that's a market that many gardens took advantage of and now have Fido Fridays, Barks and Brews, whatever it might be. Anna, next please. And then this is Morton Arboretum. It comes, it comes, it's a show called The Troll Show, The Troll Exhibits. it's been in Morton, coastal Maine, up in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where this artist, Thomas Dambo, takes all recycled materials and builds trolls.

[00:17:38] Dr. Richard Benfield: Those things are, a legendary symbolic, Scandinavian nasty beast. They put in the garden for the kids to find the trolls. Unfortunately, sometimes as you see in the bottom middle, the trolls find the children. It's very sad. And of course, there's a marketing or a management garden management lesson for you on the right.

[00:17:55] Dr. Richard Benfield: Don't park on the grass or else you'll get, get, dissuaded by the troll. So that was the Morton Arboretum. Next one pleaser. Please, Anna, and then San Francisco Botanic Garden put 12 pianos in their garden and let people come and plink and plonk on them as you can see the kids on the right, though they would also put some rather nice pianos in, and there were even concerts and people moving up and just coming playing that could play the piano.

[00:18:21] Dr. Richard Benfield: And it was, it was a raging success as well. An experience that people can go and get. So there's some examples of experiences. We'll talk a little bit about marketing to new audiences, getting new audiences a minute. But now I think I'm going to turn it over to Dave Anna. So I think the next slide is Dave.

[00:18:38] Dave Asheim: All right. Thank you, Richard, man. That was just a chock a block full of. Great ideas and trends. this is a great time. I'll talk a little bit about what we do and how we fit into Richard's vision of how to increase engagement and hopefully increase attendance. in the meantime, feel free to start asking questions in the chat window.

[00:18:59] Dave Asheim: We'll, parse those over to Richard and then we'll be done in 10 minutes or so. our company has been around, as I mentioned, about 15 years. The place that we feel we can add most value isn't providing a solution where people can use their phone, in the garden space. Obviously, we don't want that to be distracting to the garden experience, but we feel that there is enough demand and we know from working with hundreds and hundreds of gardens, including many of you that are on this call that, visitors want to richer experience when they come.

[00:19:36] Dave Asheim: They're staring at their phone anyway, whether they should or they shouldn't. and we like to try to encourage them to interact with, the items in the garden. Missouri Botanical Garden on the left hand side uses a smartphone tour. You can scan that code now if you like. We'll send you this presentation.

[00:19:53] Dave Asheim: And instantly pops up a mobile app, nothing to download. And one of the nice features is we've built a little GPS navigation. So you can see the blue dot of where you are and you can see all the points of interest that look interesting to you. And the blue dot will follow you around and you can tap that and up pop some, information about.

[00:20:14] Dave Asheim: That tree, that plant, that building, and they also use it for an evening experience. So they've got a garden glow. I'm sure Richard's familiar with all of these kind of evening things. I know the Atlanta Botanical Garden has a wonderful Christmas light show, and we'll be working with them to create some interesting experiences there.
[00:20:37] Dave Asheim: Cincinnati Nature Center, they also have a smartphone tour. They found that most gardens are trying to eliminate signs. So if you can have a QR code near the front, or maybe occasionally through the venue, you can pull up a map like you see in the middle. And then when you tap one of those markers, up will pop some information.

[00:20:57] Dave Asheim: Maybe it's a, it's a video, it's a song, it's some pictures. Maybe it's even some questions to learn about, in this case, the cardinal. So fun kinds of activities. They also use scavenger hunts just to take people to different areas of the Cincinnati nature center that normally they wouldn't go to. You can see in the middle, the venue is pretty darn big.

[00:21:20] Dave Asheim: So there's plenty of trails that the average visitor doesn't get to. mobile technology can help you move in those directions. Geofencing, something that I think is evolving. It's getting better and better every year. The idea that I could have my phone basically kind of turned on, ready to receive information.

[00:21:42] Dave Asheim: It's pretty powerful. No one has to scan anything. They walk through the garden. If they're interested in getting, some information as they walk by that magnificent tree up, can pop some information on their phone and they can read it, watch it, Dismiss it and then just move on. So the idea of geo fencing is something I think all of you should at least kind of think about because it can really enhance the visitation and eliminate a lot of signs.

[00:22:12] Dave Asheim: One more service that seems to be popular. This service on the left is called text chat. We've got quite a few gardens around the country that have signs that will say, got a question about this, text it in and someone takes out their phone and says, Oh, yeah, I've got a question. When does this bloom?

[00:22:31] Dave Asheim: Could I grow this in my house? You know, people have yeah. Tons of questions, but there's not volunteers and docents walking around. Those texts go into a central database, a volunteer, or somebody on staff can answer those questions either on site, or they could be at home answering them. And it's just a wonderful way to create an engagement with a visitor without having to have that person physically there.

[00:22:54] Dave Asheim: So texting for that use for texting for membership and events, lots of ways to use text messaging. If you folks haven't embarked on a texting program, I think you're really missing out open rates for email or 25, 30%, maybe lower open rates for texting, maybe 90 percent or higher. So consider a text messaging as a way to drive attendance, drive engagement.

[00:23:20] Dave Asheim: while the visitor is there. All right, Richard, back to you.

[00:23:26] Dr. Richard Benfield: All right. Allows me to so here we find ourselves in August of 2024. And we want more bodies into our garden. what are the efforts we must pursue? Where do we go? I know. So I've I finished off that five trends, if you recall, about four slides ago with who's eating our lunch. And I found this very interesting, came to me about two weeks ago from the Natural History Museum in London. You remember museums are running at about 60 percent of where they were pre COVID. Their idea to get more visitors Is to build a garden. I just find this remarkable. Look at this. This comes from their press release.
It will integrate it's to the overall visitor experience talking experiences to technology, the museum's garden, and they have wildlife gardens sensory gardens. Darwin center, they've gone on the Darwin as a living extension to our exhibits and natural sanctuary in the, in the heart of the city.
So we have to stop someone eating our lunch. We have to eat our lunch ourselves. The issue of course, when people want to go to gardens is where are they going? when people decide in the United States, what they're going to do for their vacation, what they're going to pursue in that leisure activity. Dr. Richard Benfield: The first thing They figure out is the destination. Where am I going to go? They don't figure out what they want to do. They figure out where they want to go. The other things they consider are accommodations, funding, transportation, all of those kinds of things. You have no control over that. And so you only have control over two things, which is the destination, you being the destination. And lastly, The idea of what they do. So, I went to the web in England and I said, boy, if I was in England and I wanted to go to the United States, I think we might want to go to the United States. I live in a place called Overwallop. Yes, there is a place called Overwallop. It's right by Middlewallop if you're looking for it. so, they say we want to go to the United States and gardens. The first thing they do is research the destination. So what do you do when you type in visit USA?
When you see visit usa. com, the official travel site it talks about a very specific and distinct market segment. Then you say, right, well, I want to go to gardens. And so you look up the top left and you can go into outdoors. It says gardens and city parks, you click on that. And when you click on that, you get what you see on the right. So where it says experiences where to see wildflowers. That's the nearest you'll ever come to a garden on a visit USA and by the way, If someone can tell me why in the United Kingdom, we'd want to promote bottom right. Elwood, the world's tallest concrete gnome. I just don't know. Is that a priority? Apparently it is. And you can also do it regionally. And I'm going to come back to those seven, bottom left, seven regional tourist agencies, because they are key to you as a garden. Because if you're located in, let's say for example, Cape fear, which is of course in the Carolinas, you immediately look on that little map there and you can see that your desk, your area, you're actually in the, in the, in the middle area. So, that regional breakdown, because the United States is a big country. You go to California. Or you go to the northwest. You don't generally go to both. It's just too far. So, that's going to be key. Next, next slide. Anna. So this is the travel South representative. It's just one example of the travel South and they are paid by visit USA. They break their regions down into seven regions, which then promote those areas, travel South USA, the regional destination marketing, the lady on the right, her name is Liz Bitner. She's a very dear friend of mine and is her job to promote. People to come to travel South USA. So to you, if you are a garden in travel South, is any of you ever called Liz Bittner? There's her number, by the way, and you ever called Liz Bittner and say, I want you to push my garden because I'm not getting enough international visitors. I want to do this. So, as I say, the big key for our international is getting on the destination map. And that's one of my issues. And I won't go into it now. But With APGA, I'm working very hard to make sure that APGA starts to recognize international and many of you, I suspect all of you that are APGA members, you will have had a survey from APGA in the last week saying we're doing our strategic plan. Would you click on here and take our survey? Do that in the survey say we want more international and national visitors to our garden and the strategic plan should help us do that. There you go. That's me. Shamelessly pushing poor Michelle Provodnik to do that. Next slide. Please.   Well, a couple of things. Let's just see what we're looking at for tips for these next five years. Audience diversification. I think to kind of start parsing out your markets. Who are they? We mentioned dog owners. Are they millennials? What are you doing for millennials? And if you want a really good millennial idea, my dear friends at New England Botanic up in Tower Hill in Massachusetts, have a wonderful call.

Floral tattoo, event that they run every year and they bring in tattoo artists and it packs the millennials in and they have all sorts of wonderful, areas, or stuff for, for, for, for millennials. I'm sure they share it with you. and it's a, it's a great thing for millennials. Not so much for me and my age, you know, with tattoos, but it was certainly good there.

Ethnic audiences, we need to diversify our audiences. And contrary to many other attractions, ethnic audiences have a strong propensity to go to botanic gardens. I have been to the one in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and it was packed mostly with, when I was there, Young girls coming out on their 16th birthday for this festival.

They run number two, focus on the experience. people go in there, they go for nature. They go to spend time with their friends. They go to spend time with their family, put seats in there, no wooden seats, make them participate, pay to rate, meet the gardener. One thing Disney changed.

It's the only thing that Disney does, Cast members at Disney are not allowed to speak to the visitor. So Mickey Mouse will never say a word to you or your children. It's all done very much without any verbal connect. Gardens, when they do their garden thing, is the only one where they encourage the gardener to talk to their participants.

So, as opposed to putting your gardener in at five o'clock in the morning and telling him or her that they can leave at nine, ask if they'd stay and chat and talk about the garden, ask the plant doctor and the desire to go behind the scenes. And see something different is really quite a strong element for participation and experience strategic investments in technology. That's what Dave talked about digital membership cards, apps. GPS maps, scavenger hunts and games.

Dave showed you those. And lastly, program growth to be competitive with those guys that are eating our lunch. For example, opening in the evening. Next slide please. And you'll see here, this comes from a group of gardens in the Dallas Fort Worth area. The primary organization is the garden, and you can see that beautifully straight blue line where people are coming all throughout the day, or they're not coming in the evening.

Yet their competition, that's that Pier 1 and Pier 2, they're eating their lunch in evening attractions, So next one, Anna, so because you've got to start winding up here. So six things you can do tomorrow.

First of all, invite your local Visitors and Convention Bureau. Not to phone them, but tell them to come to the garden. We want to show you our garden and what we've got to offer invite your local newspaper to write an article on your garden or better still write a press release for them and do it on a monthly basis on what's new in the garden.

Yet again, my dear friends in New England Botanics. Did their wonderful job with that every night, say every month saying what's new in the garden newspaper, desperate for that kind of what my newspaper friends called fillers. So give them a filler. Remember, I told you about the Ryman Botanic Garden in Iowa, then you should hold a one hour strategy meeting where everyone has to come up with one idea for one new experience in the garden and everyone has to do it, whether it be The assistant governor, whether it be the executive director, tell the APGA, particularly on that strategic plan and visit USA.

Those people in London and Washington and the headlady is in Stowe, Vermont. We need more garden visitors internationally, and we won't get it unless we put it on our surveys. Now, I want you to chat with engage and Dave's going to give you an offer about engaging mobile experiences. And the last one is invite me to your garden and we can chat.

And by the way, I will come for nothing. I'm retired. I can drive. I might have to bring the dog, but otherwise. we can come and I can chat about whatever you come up with in one to four. I would be delighted to help you all out as much as we can, such that we do indeed get, new visitors. In the meantime, Anna, one more international visitors you got, and this was my flyer that I provided at APGA on the left.

So as earned income becomes more and more important, financial diversification to deliver your mission, we need more visitors. And so that's the, the. Little company that I have, with a grand staff of me and the dog, and we can deliver. I can let you know what you're there. We can start if you wish with zip codes and zip code analysis and how you can explore your zip code analysis.

I'm also publishing that book. Critical issues in garden tourism management. It comes out in 2024. As I said, I'm retired. I have a dog. He needs dog food. So if you would buy a copy, that would be great, or at least get your local library to buy it. That would be good. And I will come to your garden, Dave.

[00:33:52] Dave Asheim: Yeah. We oftentimes are asked if we can do a technology assessment and we do those Complimentary. And, so maybe we'll come at the same time that Richard is there, but should you want, a group of experts?

I mean, we've been doing this 15 years. We'll be glad to just look at all of the technologies that you're, you're using, see if they're up to, up to snuff and see if there's anything that maybe, you should be adding. So complimentary and, glad to do that for you folks.

[00:34:22] Dr. Richard Benfield: at the risk of alienating one member of our audience, Dave, I'm perfectly willing to go, to our member gardens today, to go and have a look at what you got, but I ain't coming to Cape Fear this weekend.

I'm sorry. And it's just not gonna happen. So anytime after this weekend, I'd love to see Cape Fear, which I'm shamelessly admitting that I haven't been to, but I'd love to come and see Cape Fear because I've heard so many good things about it. Thanks, Richard. We've got a question.

[00:34:48] Dave Asheim: Yeah, we have a question earlier about AI.
And Chris asked the question, is AI available in text messaging? And yes, Chris, we use AI not only in writing the text, which can be a little tricky to make Text sound really fun and interesting as well as in the responses. So that's available, but maybe Richard, what are When you talk to all the executive directors and presidents, does AI come up?  And if so, what, what do you talk about?

[00:35:18] Dr. Richard Benfield: I think we're very much in the infancy stage now with us in AI, that we're still trying to find it out. And I think I'm at the same level. I'm not an AI expert. I've spoken to a couple of people. We've actually made reference to it in the garden.

There's a whole section on AI. But it certainly has a lot of potential for us, but it also has a little downside. So, we need to do another session on that sometime AI and gardens. And if Dave sets that up, you won't want me speaking, but I can certainly recommend 2 or 3 people who can speak very.

Well, about, the future of AI and where it's applicable, what its applicability is. So James has got something just beginning our explanation and are excited.

[00:36:04] Dave Asheim: it's a double edged sword. It can be so helpful, but it's also so scary because there's no boundaries, that's, what's a little fearful. How about some, we have a few more minutes. How about a few more questions for, Dr. Ben Field, and then we'll wrap this up and send everybody the notes in the morning. This has been such a fantastic presentation, Richard. We just all learned so much, and I think everybody walked away with five to ten new ways to think about tackling the problems of engagement and getting a larger audience.

[00:36:36] Dr. Richard Benfield: they've, just, Stephanie from, from somewhere, just, just posted. You said gardens are eliminating science. Can you elaborate? I'm not too sure they're eliminating science. I don't mean that by, by. I can't recall saying that, to be quite honest, Stephanie, maybe or maybe you, you, what I said.  I do know there's a couple of things that, that, that handheld maps are still very important. Good walking around a garden. Visitors seem to be very tactile. They like maps. Now this may be a demographic thing. I don't know. Certainly Dave's got answers that you could use it on your phone. But, but I was just at the Cornell Botanic Garden last week and waiting for my, my, my dear friend to come and four people walked up.

Families and said, do you have a map of the garden? And I'm thinking like this idea of tactile is still there. Signs I think are actually really very important. I don't know whether they're eliminating them and at the risk Dave. I'm not too sure that the smartphone will ever do that.

[00:37:37] Dave Asheim: I had mentioned that the clients that we've been dealing with more recently, there are two camps on the signs, half the garden staff doesn't like them and half of them think that we should have bigger, bigger and greater signs.

The mobile technology allows folks to not necessarily increase the of signs because you can get some of that information on your phone. on the map question, we've probably got 20, 30 different gardens and outdoor spaces that still hand out the paper maps, but the demographic of 15 year olds to 30, 35 year olds, they're not used to paper maps.

Richard, you and I love a paper map. We take a map, we look at it, we know how to use a paper map. Younger folks like Anna, our head of marketing and most of the folks in our company, it's not something that they have grown up with. They are so digital. So if I could scan a QR code, get it on my phone, even though you and I look at that and we think it's a much smaller form factor, but it's got some advantages because the little blue dot will show you where you are and you're a little off the trail, you should be over here.

So, I am a map person. You're a map person. I love picking up a map when I come into a venue, but I do think the younger audience feels more comfortable on a digital basis.

[00:39:00] Dr. Richard Benfield: Okay, Mark, I'm going to answer a bunch of questions here real quickly, Dave, as we go through. First of all, to Stephanie, I'm in the queue here.

Stephanie, I'd love to talk to you with you about your news. New sign project to encourage engagement. I think that would be great. get them through the doors and then engage them at that's the mantra. Of course we have. So, let's chat. Whoever Stephanie is. I'm sure you let me know where you are, secondly, and I mean this sincerely.

This is absolutely sincere. Mark. Am I willing to come to Hawaii to assess needs of botanical world adventures? Yes. And I will probably be in Hawaii in January. I have a friend who owns a house on the North Shore of Oahu. I go to the five botanic gardens in Hawaii quite frequently and I even go to the ones in Kauai as well.

So, yes, stay in touch. Love to come and see you and have a look at what you're doing. that would be just terrific. Melanie sent a note saying your only best practices for connecting to outside partners to help develop the experience that you mentioned outside. It depends what you mean, of course, for outside partners.

Melanie, do you mean people that you can actually retain, whether it be origami or whether it be lights or whatever, or people that you do join things with like breweries and shelters, dog shelters and whatever it is. So, Who should we be including?

I think partnerships with places like, museums, symphony orchestras. I know a garden that did, I can't remember the composer's name, but it was like gardens and Mozart and they the admission to the garden.

You also got a ticket to the symphony that night. So there's a bunch of partners like that. I know would be willing to work for you. Stephanie would be glad to have her. I will, Melanie, I'd be glad to have a chat with you about that further from that. Stephanie, you're, you're from Florida, right?

You're Bocca, you're Bocca Botanic Gardens. Millennials in audience, engagement that comes into traditional, in entering traditional. Visitors volunteers, part time staff and wealth transfer over the next day details. Well, Chris, I could do a 6 hour lecture on that.

That's good. Because the 1, certainty in this whole discussion is we're all getting older as you rightly point out. So how do we keep changing with them with engagement? Millennials for engagement is really 1 of. Just giving them experiences. My daughter would never go to a botanic garden unless there was something there like breweries or a date with her boyfriend or some of those kinds of things, or a match.

Go to a venue in a garden, those entering traditional retirement age, that's selling memberships and getting them to come and volunteer everything, of course, but resources. and part time staff. I think we have a real potential for that. And I think that's the kind of thing we're going to have to do more of given the labor market, wealth transfer boy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Boy. Yeah. I mean, that's your development officer gets on that to try and get Some of that money there. That again is a whole new seminar In terms of where, how and where you get development money, but yet again, I think we are perfectly positioned as a cultural institution as an element of American life to be a favored son or daughter for endowment.

[00:42:10] Dave Asheim: Well, I think we've exhausted our hour. Thank you so much, Richard. Thank you for everybody and they're great questions.

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