Gave a presentation at the annual National Association of Health Education Centers (NAHEC) conference recently, and it struck me that few groups are as focused on the mission to encourage long-term behavior change among visitors as health education centers. By it's very nature, "health education" depends on behavior change.
I had three main points to my presentation:
- We need to design with post-visit behavior change in mind. (This built off the paper Paula Sincero and I presented at Museums and the Web a few years ago).
- We need to plant a seed for later followup during the visitor's museum experience. Based on our work with StoryKiosk where visitors create stories, art works, and videos for upload, visitor creativity is that seed.
- We can tap into existing online community structures to nurture that seed. Visitor postings to Flickr for example can help maintain involvement, with a few caveats about the signup process...
