Stone Mountain Park’s recent app launch using the Tour Buddy App Builder features a multi-guide app that showcases 6 foreign language self-guided app tours, enhances engagement and creates a better experience for both the park employees and visitors. Caroline Figiel of Creative Digital Productions shares more about the experience using the Tour Buddy App Builder and the overwhelmingly positive impact on Stone Mountain’s visitor experience. To learn more about using Tour Buddy to create a foreign language app tour for your destination, click here.
Creative Digital Production’s Mission:
Our Mission…to interpret Stone Mountain’s and Georgia’s history using engaging audio spots on an affordable and easy to navigate delivery platform in multiple languages.
The Results: A Foreign Language Tour App Featuring 6 Languages
A beautifully crafted 6 language mobile app where visitors can imagine another time and place; designed so that each user can take a self-guided tour of each site and know exactly where they are on the GPS enabled map without the attention of a tour guide or fumbling with a paper map.
The Buzz: Visitor Engagement & Experience
Do park employees on the front lines of tourist engagement feel proud to offer a quality product? Yes! Is visitor feedback overwhelming for both the content and the delivery platform? You betcha!
The Story:
As interpretation specialists, we knew that we had been given, not mounds of boring information for a report, but instead… the seeds for some really good storytelling about Georgia and the mountain which would “edu-tain” every person who downloads the app. You see Stone Mountain itself, is not only the largest exposed granite mass in the world, but is also the site of the largest bas-relief carving in the world. Did you know because of political events, temperamental artists, and financial struggles, the carving took 55 years to complete? That in itself is a sweeping saga worthy of a summer blockbuster!
From the beginning my partner Danny, and I knew we would uncover many fascinating events and amusing legends, so we decided in partnership with Stone Mountain Park, to let many of the stories tell themselves through fictionalized characters based on the time period of the subject matter. As the scripts began to unfold, our characters came to represent a cross section of Georgia’s population in the 1700-1900s including a frontier doctor, farmer’s wife, field slave, rich planter, and real life super hero. Some of their stories would tickle your funny bone while others would tug at your heart.
As script writing and production of the initial 22 “edu-taining” audio spots were taking place, we began phase two: implementation. In order for media interpretation to be successful, the production can’t stand alone. If technology fails, the carefully crafted content won’t be heard and users will become frustrated, so it really was essential to offer a delivery platform that allowed visitors the best user experience. With 132 media files, Tour Buddy’s Multi-Guide App was our best choice.
On the back-end for us, the app was very easy to load and could handle a lot of media because it was a Multi-Guide App. We were able to create one tour and then copy it so that we did not have to enter data multiple times. Once downloaded, visitors enter in a special passcode for their specific language to find the GPS guided tours, insightful video links, picture gallery and social media links.
Stone Mountain Park can now reach each visitor to inform, engage and entertain in order to create lifelong memories and a unique understanding of Stone Mountain Park and its history.
That in itself is worthy of a tale!
