Pass It Down is an award-winning digital storytelling platform licensed to cities, libraries, and museums to create a way to collect, preserve, and showcase their stories and archives. It’s an all-in-one platform giving clients the ability to showcase their stories across any phone, tablet, computer, or kiosk to create interactive exhibits and experiences for their users.
Chris Cummings, Founder & CEO of Pass It Down, was generous enough to share his time to discuss his growing company, how it evolved into what it is today, how they continue to improve their platform, and hinted upon some exciting features which are coming in the future.
Chris discussed the value of building a good team when starting a new company and performing market research. He also mentioned how important it is to spend time outside the office talking to customers than inside of it. Chris and his team took the time to; listen and ask questions; work with curators, oral history professionals and experts in the field; learned methodology and best practices; developed user personas and performed user testing. Owing to client and user feedback, Pass It Down has created an intergenerational design for people of all ages to use their storytelling platform.
The company’s passion goes beyond preserving and sharing stories but to also see the smiles on their user’s faces. Observing their users, ages 5-85 years old, interacting with their kiosks within museums and exploring and be wowed by their experience is important to their growing company.
Some key highlights from our discussion were that their storytelling platform is empowering museums to have control they never had before. Chris argued that previously, museum technology was designed to organize a collection but was never meant to make them publicly available or engaging to the public. At Pass It Down, they are big believers in evolving collections, it is not enough to just save history, it needs to be shared. By marrying those two principles together, they’ve constructed a platform that creates an interactive experience for the public and showcases what’s most relevant, when it’s most relevant, so people find something of value. Pass It Down is helping museums to turn their visitors into participants, forming a bond with their users.
As Chris mentioned it’s a newer company and there’s a lot of work to do, but they are getting there. They already have requests from nine countries to use their platform in different languages, are engaged in new and exciting projects in multiple cities, are expanding their reach globally, and improving their storytelling platform every step of the way. I believe in Pass It Down’s mission and passion. They are helping to save our world’s history and I look forward to following their progress.
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