For our January event, we heard from Julie Cumming, Marketing Manager at Dundee Heritage Trust, who has spent over three years attracting families with children to sites like Discovery Point and Verdant Works Museum.
Dundee Heritage Trust manages Discovery Point, which is home to the RRS Discovery (the ship built in Dundee to take Captain Scott & Shackleton to the Antarctic in 1901) and Verdant Works Museum, which brings to life stories from Dundee’s industrial past in an 1833 jute mill.
They’re a charity with a small team working to small budgets, so they’re always looking for creative ways to get families with children into their museums.
Working with Influencers
Working with influencers is beneficial for a number of reasons. In addition to spikes in followers and engagement and an opportunity to reach different audiences, they offer a fresh pair of creative eyes; because they literally do this for a living and they know what the audiences want right away, they’re going to come in with new ideas.
Rather than relying on user-generated content, you can also be confident that they’ll have the proper equipment and excellent presentation skills as well.
How to Find Influencers
You could wait until your local destination marketing organisation or VisitScotland contacts you about these visits, but for Julie, this meant that their influencer marketing was sporadic. Furthermore, they didn’t have any control over what or when the influencers were posting or what themes they were bringing up in their content, so she decided to coordinate a more in-house approach.
Julie recommended researching influencers by noting who you see popping up online and by talking to colleagues.
TOP TIP: VisitScotland can also suggest tried-and-tested influencers
Julie said that they’ve also collaborated with influencers who initially reached out to them. If you’ve got any kind of doubt about whether they’re the right fit for your brand, meet up with them for a coffee and get an impression from there.
How Much Do Influencers Charge?
Julie’s research showed that it can vary wildly from £200 right up to £6,000 (the most Dundee Heritage Trust were quoted for a single visit).
TOP TIP: Even if you think an influencer’s fee is out of your reach, don’t be afraid to go back to them with your budget and ask if there’s anything they can offer in that price range. Julie has found that influencers tend to be flexible and they’ll often be able to let you know right away.
TOP TIP: Julie recommended reaching out at the start of the year and getting influencers booked in for briefs which aren’t attached to a specific time. She recommends saying “we’re keen to work with you this year. When is looking nice and quiet for you?”.
If there’s an influencer whom you really want to work with, but whose rates are out of your marketing budget, ask around to see if there’s another organisation that you could pair up with. If you have a bigger brand attached to you, you will definitely get a higher response rate.
How to Track Return on Investment (ROI)
This can be tricky. Julie tracks this information using Dundee Heritage Trust’s visitor surveys, which asks how many people say that they found one of the museums through Instagram. Although they’re not specifically saying “I found you through this influencer”, if they see a spike in Instagram followers or engagement from when that influencer had posted, they could attribute the spike to the influencer marketing with some confidence.
TOP TIP: When convincing a line manager or senior stakeholders about hiring an influencer despite a lack of ROI information, contact other businesses and attractions that have had those influencers in and ask them for feedback.
Case Study: Working with the Olive Tree Family
Julie wanted to be able to work with an influencer to promote their offering for children at the museums and the Olive Tree Family seemed like a perfect fit with their focus on lifestyle and days out content.
Julie initially reached out by Instagram DM and then they took the conversation onto emails and planned things from there.
TOP TIP: Consider the timing of your ask. Julie asked the Olive Tree Family for a collaboration right after seeing a video they’d made in Dundee and found it helpful to piggyback off that earlier visit. As a result, the Olive Tree Family brought their two children to visit Discovery Point and Verdant Works.
TOP TIP: When planning an influencer visit, it’s easy to get caught up in promoting the big exhibitions or attractions in the museum, but don’t forget to point out activity sheets that you’ve got for kids and other child-friendly aspects of your site.
TOP TIP: Julie has found that collaborative posts on Facebook don’t do as well as on Instagram, so she recommends that you just work from Instagram with influencers.
Collaborating with Other Attractions
On that same visit, Julie worked with Explore Dundee, who run the open-top bus tours in the city. She’d invited the Olive Tree Family to visit Verdant Works and Discovery Point which would’ve been a 10-15 minutes’ walk from each other for the family, but the partnership enabled both organisations to show potential visitors how they can travel from one museum to the other.
The partnership was relatively easy to establish. She contacted Explore Dundee, explained the idea and asked if they could offer the Oliver Tree Family complimentary bus tickets. Julie also let them see the video before it was posted to obtain their approval.
Outcome
The Olive Tree Family made two Instagram videos, one at Discovery Point (which gained 9,000 views) and one at Verdant Works (which gained 14,000 views). For the latter, they played into the Dundee’s Hidden Gem theme, which Julie had set out in the brief (more on that later).
Julie expected the Discovery Point video to perform the best, but on reflection, she suspects that it didn’t because the opening shot of a stairway (rather than say, the kids playing on the ship) wasn’t very engaging.
TOP TIP: When signing off on videos, don’t just consider it from an external comms point of view; i.e. “does everything look correct in the background?”, “Have they got their facts right?”, “Are they showing all the things that I asked them to in the brief?”. Look at it through a creative lens and consider “is that the best shot that I want to have at the front of the video?”.
Managing Influencers
Setting a Brief
One of the most important things you can do to ensure a successful influencer partnership is getting the brief right. Julie was given a brief template by Lyndsey Clark, a museum consultant, which she adapted and still uses for almost everything that she works on now. Julie has found that when you set a good brief, everybody’s happy.
Dundee Heritage Trust’s influencer briefs set out the aims and objectives and give them as much project background as they can on why they’re running the campaign. For example, do you want them to visit a certain exhibition, participate in a specific craft, visit a partner organisation, or follow a theme?
Julie gives influencers some company background as well, because busy influencers are not necessarily going to have a lot of time to research everything that they need to know before they visit a site. Giving this context means that they can have a better visit because they have an understanding of what it is they’re trying to promote. And if Julie can get them excited about the stories they’ll uncover before they visit, the end product is more likely to be good.
Adding notes about timescale and budget is also important, along with the scope (what you’ll provide in the run-up to the visit, on the day and afterwards). Don’t be afraid to go down to the smallest details (e.g. “we can provide charging sockets for equipment or space to stow your bags in a locker”.) Also let them know if you can provide lunch or refreshments and if they’re going to have a volunteer guide showing them round.
In short, the brief should help them plan their visit with you as much as possible which means that both of you have an understanding of what’s going to happen. Don’t be afraid to bullet point every single detail of the day. It may sound like overkill, but Julie has found that it’s very useful, especially if the influencers that you’re working with have kids.
And finally, be specific about output. For example, you can ask them for “two Reels at one and a half minutes each which will be shared as collaborative posts on Instagram, on 1 August at 8pm” and write a checklist of what you want them to work on.
Julie also recommended giving them details of a primary and secondary contact for your organisation so that if the influencer can’t get hold of you for whatever reason, they can phone up someone else on site.
Reaching Families Through Paid Ads
The regular social media audiences for Dundee Heritage Trust’s museums tend not to be families with children, mostly because they share a lot of historical content (e.g. the ship restoration project or their talks programme).
This means that when they’re running an event such as a Santa’s Grotto at Christmas for which they need to sell tickets, paid ads become Julie’s secret weapon for saving time and boosting attendance. She’s found that a small budget can go a long way on Facebook nowadays if you get your targeting set up correctly. In 2025 for example, they reached 200,000 people through their Grotto adverts and 45% of their visitor surveys from the Grotto specifically said that they’d found them through Facebook.
Julie also finds that families tend to book on events closer to the time the event takes place. So advertising to families needs to be a slow build-up, because they’ve got so much to plan. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see lots of family bookings right away – I’m always surprised by how many families book on events the day before. And be sure to give them details about things like parking, what to expect, café opening times, baby changing facilities, etc.
TOP TIP: You can save these Facebook ads audiences so that when you’re setting up a paid ad, you can use the same audience as last time or tweak them slightly.
If you don’t have the paid advert budget, giveaways are a nice alternative. If they’re launching a new day out or a craft club, for example, Julie will give away tickets to the first session to someone who has liked, commented on, shared the giveaway post and followed the organisation’s page, which has resulted in a lot of traction.
TOP TIP: Think carefully about what your prize is and what kind of audience would be excited by that prize.
Images
Another key part of reaching families with children is through imagery which lets the audience imagine themselves having fun at your attraction.
She advised regularly commissioning new photography with families so you’re not constantly using the same photos or showing outdated displays.
Julie recommended hiring a photographer, again using that creative brief. She suggested creating a shortlist of very specific shots for specific locations or campaigns. For example, for the picture of the child ringing the bell, Julie said to the photographer: “I need you to bring a wide-angle lens, because we want to have this one image that showed the museum, but also the ship and also a family”.
TOP TIP: Ensure that a diverse audience is being shown in your pictures.
In terms of the models, you can ask the photographer if they have any friends or family whom they want to bring or put a call out on social media for families in exchange for a free visit (which usually gets a good response).
Regardless of how you source the models, Julie recommends contacting them ahead of time to ask about accessibility/dietary requirements and to advise them on what to wear (e.g. no football shirts or obvious branding).
If you want to follow Julie on social media, you can find her @verdantworksmuseum or @discoverydundee
All photos © Dundee Heritage Trust
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