Interview: Annie-Claude Beaudry, Parks Canada

It’s a collaboration between Parks Canada and a well-known art symposium, joining forces for a mutual benefit. The event caters to a diverse audience and brings a lot of people inside the fort.

Because the event is a tight collaboration between the city and us, we’ve created a joint flyer that informs visitors of all the programming happening whether at the artist festival or inside the fort. We have special activities like a firing historical weapons demonstration and food. Programming changes slightly every year.

We analyzed who is already coming to the fort using postal codes, then we analyzed who lives in the region. We have information from our social science team at Parks Canada and they tell us who lives in the neighbourhood. Without forgetting our natural audience who are older couples or individuals who love history, we want to convince more families to visit and to come back. Mostly we get first time visitors so, we decided to target repeat visitors and encourage people to come back – families and people who live close.

We also target people who will bring friends, families, visitors.

To engage our community, we needed to create an attractive program and we did this by changing a part of our exhibition. A few of our rooms are now dedicated to temporary exhibitions: we change the theme, or topic, every three years. And with these new temporary exhibitions, we renew the activities for the whole site. With the redone space come new ideas, a new way to present our mandate, our messages and key messages. For example, the first year we created a temporary exhibition called “Saveurs de la Nouvelle-France,” a taste of New France. For this exhibition, we converted our outside space into a vegetable garden. This year we changed our theme to Smuggling in New France. For this exhibition, we changed the same outdoor space to a natural forest, and we talk more about the importance of the territory, how we had to use the resources in the woods to survive. The smugglers passed by the fort by the water, but also, they had to sneak through the woods. The changing exhibition provides a tone for the whole visitor experience. We don’t have the resources to rebuild the whole exhibition inside the fort but with a new theme, we can keep our activities fresh.

• First, know your target audience, who you aim to reach and who is already visiting your site.
• Look at what is missing in the neighbourhood. Be sure you are not offering something that already exists in the community.
• Analyze who could be your ally or collaborator. Who could be your partner? Is there an event that you could work with?
• And to make people stay longer, it’s good to offer something to eat and a family space to relax where people can sit, breastfeed, play freely, etc.. Even if it’s simple, it doesn’t need to cost much.

At historic places, we want people to learn but we also want them to feel free to stay to enjoy the place.