Historic Environment Scotland keeps the nation’s heritage alive by tempting visitors back for more

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Historic Environment Scotland, a non-department public body with charitable status, is tasked with the responsibility of safeguarding and promoting Scotland’s heritage. The organization oversees more than 300 historic sites, including Edinburgh Castle, Stirling Castle, and Skara Brae Prehistoric Village. To help fund the conservation of these irreplaceable representations of Scotland’s built heritage, and ensure that appropriate numbers of visitors are allowed on-site at any given time, admission to many of the sites is controlled by ticketing. However, the organization was facing a challenge. It lacked visibility into its sites and the people visiting them, making it difficult to market effectively or plan personnel schedules to meet demand.

Historic Environment Scotland is the lead public body established to investigate, care for, and promote Scotland’s historic environment. The organization was created by the Historic Environment Scotland Act 2014. Each year, millions of people from around the world visit the historic sites that are under Historic Environment Scotland’s care. These sites number more than 300 locations including Edinburgh Castle, Stirling Castle, and Skara Brae Prehistoric Village. To help fund the conservation of these irreplaceable representations of Scotland’s built heritage, and ensure that appropriate numbers of visitors are allowed on-site at any given time, admission to many of the sites is controlled by ticketing.

Historic Environment Scotland set out to turn ticketing data into actionable insight, aiming to understand what attracts visitors and keeps them coming back for more. The organization engaged IBM Premier Business Partner, Avnet Technology Solutions, to deploy and manage a new analytics solution: IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software. The organization opted for a cloud-based solution so that it could benefit from enterprise-class technology and reliability at low cost and effort. The solution is hosted on virtual servers in a multi-tenanted environment on SoftLayer, the IBM cloud platform that Avnet recommended to the organization. Taking ticketing data from 78 of the historic sites managed by Historic Environment Scotland, Avnet built a custom data warehouse as a basis for analytics with the Cognos solution. With just four days’ training, the organization has given its business users access to self-service reporting and the ability to slice and dice data as they choose.

• Historic Environment Scotland is using the solution to build a deeper understanding of visitors to its sites: who they are, where they come from, and what they choose to do during their visit. Armed with these insights, the organization can adapt its marketing strategy to appeal to similar people, and introduce improvements to the visitor experience to make it more likely someone will return or recommend a site.
• By providing dashboards showing daily figures on visitor mixes and demographics, Historic Environment Scotland is improving its ability to respond to demand – for example, stocking specific merchandise in its gift shops to appeal to the tastes of the largest or biggest-spending visitor groups.

• Attracts visitors with optimized pricing and promotions, helping to increase sales
• Enhances the visitor experience by enabling better capacity and visitor flow planning
• Boosts efficiency with reports available in minutes rather than weeks