In April 2022, we inaugurated the deployment of several digital guestbooks at the Mémorial de Verdun, as well as at the forts de Douaumont and Vaux.

Visitors at the heart of the Memorial’s strategy

 
In addition to a magnificent collection, these major places of remembrance offer a unique and particularly memorable visitor experience, right on the battlefield.

 
The role of these visitor listening devices is to capture the emotions experienced by visitors on site, and to ask them about their relation with this key moment in our history. They are also used to broadcast portraits of French, German and English servicemen: the visitors’ book is used here to extend the visit and trigger the targeted sending of real-life stories of servicemen who passed through the battlefield.

 
More broadly, this project is in line with the ambition of the Memorial’s new management team to extend the talk beyond the visit, and turn visitors into influencers. It fills a triple objective: to keep the memory of the Battle of Verdun alive, to convey on historical knowledge to visitors, as well as a potential reminiscence of their personal history, but above all, an awareness of our universal History.

A system already approved by the public

 
Since the inauguration, several thousand visitors have asked to share their experiences at the three sites, as well as their personal stories of the Battle of Verdun.

 
Among them, around a hundred people have declared they would like to be contacted again to share the story of one of their forebears and/or family members with the Memorial team. The Memorial team is actually working on the creation of a Family Memory Centre, a project that will benefit from the feedback shared in the guestbooks.

 
We invite you to watch these two videos, which will tell you more about this great collaboration with the Memorial teams:

 
Video by GuestViews (with the Sisso agency), presenting the project’s challenges and the use of our digital guestbooks by the Mémorial team: discover here 👇

 
Many thanks to Nicolas Barret, Director of the Mémorial de Verdun – Champ de bataille, and Camille Florémont, Communications Officer, as well as the rest of the team, and to the two anonymous visitors who agreed to be interviewed! We would also like to thank the Île-de-France Region for its support in the production of this video, notably through the PM’UP scheme.

 
France 3 Lorraine report on the inauguration: see here 👇 (only in French)

 
 
Would you like to find out more about this project, or would you like to share with us a need to listen to visitors? Please don’t hesitate to contact our team: we’ll be delighted to discuss what we can imagine together…