If you’ve ever wondered whether the challenges you’re facing at your historic site or house museum are typical or unusual, there is some collective evidence to draw on.

For the past decade, Ken Turino and I have led Reimagining Historic House Museums workshops across the country for the American Association for State and Local History, based on our book of the same name. We begin each workshop with a simple but revealing question: What is the greatest challenge facing your site?

We have collected these responses from a wide range of locations (such Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Texas, and Maryland) from a wide range of participants (staff, boardmembers, and volunteers). From a sampling of these lists, I used ChatGPT to analyze and synthesize the responses into the seven overarching issues, each representing a structural or strategic challenge. While the data was not collected in a scientific manner (participants are self-selecting, not random), the consistency of responses across regions and institution types is striking.

The most frequently cited—and arguably most consequential—is relevance and interpretive stagnation.

Participants consistently described static, unchanging tours; an inability to engage visitors; and historic sites that are dull and boring. They state that:

• the site feel stuffy
• it’s not interactive
• it doesn’t change
• there’s no reason to visit again
• tours are primarily anecdotal
• guides or leaders are unwilling to tell difficult or sensitive histories
• tourist trap offering no value
• it’s irrelevant, old, and decrepit.

This is not a failure of content. Most sites have compelling stories, significant collections, and deep knowledge of their history. So what’s the real challenge? It is a lack of interpretive strategy.

Many historic sites remain anchored in object-based interpretation or docent-led scripts that prioritize factual accuracy over audience meaning-making. While these approaches ensure correctness, they often fail to activate curiosity, emotional connection, or personal relevance. The consequences are predictable: low repeat visitation, weak engagement, and limited connection to contemporary issues.

At a deeper level, the problem is not that the stories are old—it is that the intended outcomes are unclear or unarticulated. Sites struggle to define what visitors should know, feel, or do as a result of their experience. Without this clarity, interpretation defaults to information delivery rather than purposeful engagement.

A useful corrective is a more intentional approach to interpretation—one that begins with outcomes, is organized through themes, and is delivered through purposeful design.

Start with outcomes. What should visitors know, feel, or do? This outcomes-based approach—aligned with practices promoted by Conny Graft in “Evaluation Is Not Just Nice, It Is Necessary” in the Reimagining book—forces clarity and provides a basis for evaluating success beyond attendance.

Then organize content through themes. Themes are not topics; they are ideas that give meaning to the material. Thematic interpretation, long advocated by the National Association for Interpretation, helps transform information into insight and provides coherence across the visitor experience. A terrific resource is Interpretation: Making a Difference on Purpose by Sam Ham.

Finally, design experiences intentionally. Using an audience–content–design framework ensures that visitor needs are understood, content aligns with outcomes and themes, and formats—tours, exhibitions, or programs—are selected, organized, and delivered to create meaningful interactions rather than simply convey information. This is the purpose of interpretive planning.

Taken together, this approach shifts interpretation from coverage to purpose, from information delivery to experience design.

If your tours, exhibitions, or programs haven’t changed in years, it’s unlikely your outcomes have either. And if you can’t clearly state what visitors should know, feel, or do, then interpretation is being driven by habit rather than purpose. The question isn’t whether your stories are compelling—it’s whether you’re using them to create meaningful change for your audiences today.

This is only one of the seven recurring challenges we’ve identified. In upcoming posts, I’ll explore the others—and what they reveal about the current state and future direction of historic sites and house museums.