SnapGuide

Since the reopening in 2013 the goal of the Rijksmuseum is to bring visitors and the collection closer together. For the 60.000 pupils who visit the museum annually, this turned out to be a big challenge. It is no secret that teachers and the Rijksmuseum have had trouble holding the attention of these teenagers and to teach them something about the rich but troubled history of the Netherlands.

As a starting point, we reversed the roles. We did not wonder how the teachers and the Rijksmuseum could hold the attention span of young people, but we started from their perspective to search for ways of holding the attention of this mobile-first generation.

This is how SnapGuide was born. SnapGuide is a web-based mobile platform that uses minimal mobile data of their precious data plan and uses popular online creators who serve as virtual tour guides, each of them given a relevant theme. For example, the theme colonisation and slavery is narrated by Ronnie Flex, from the perspective of his Surinamese and Moluccan ancestors. The theme of fashion & lifestyle is narrated by lifestyle YouTuber Jiami. In the Dutch version, you can also choose different narrators such as: Mertabi, Teske de Schepper, Rutger Vink or Défano Holwijn. At this point, we have added relevant tour guides for the international audience as well. None other than NikkieTutorials and Rafael van der Vaart provide an English spoken tour.

Once you have chosen a theme via SnapGuide, Snapchat videos will guide you through the museum providing fun and insightful assignments that stimulate the creativity of young people. In this way, young people can identify as creators that create content in a museum. All assignments and tours are formulated according to the national standards and meet the educational requirements. This makes it not only a fun, but also a useful program. The users have to answer the questions of the assignments in a Snapchat video of ten seconds and these are shared with their teacher. Back in the classroom, students are laughing at each other’s videos instead of discussing boring questionnaires.

Since the launch of SnapGuide, over 7000 pupils have used the app and it has been used for more than 12.500 tours. This means that the pupils have followed multiple tours from a variety of tour guides. Out of all the pupils, about 25% used SnapGuide without visiting with school. This result has exceeded our expectations since we expected this percentage to be 10%. And to top it off, we won a Lovie and a Ciclope award for SnapGuide in 2017.