National Trust App – Your insider’s guide to 550 special places

The app acts as a real-time guide, curating content that helps you discover something new every time you open it. It’s a companion for the whole visit experience; from planning and research right through to making the most of your time while you are there. As well as educating and intriguing members about National Trust sites and spaces before they went, we used geofencing technology to detect when users were at a property and offered them timely, relevant information to help them make the most of their visit, see and do new things, and encourage them to come back.

Released for mobile and tablet on

• iOS

• Windows

• Android

Drawing on the amazing photography at our disposal, as well as location-based tracking, we augmented member experiences before and during visits, with an endless scroll of possibilities.

There’s an impressive range of daily events taking place at National Trust sites and we used that to keep people interested – even when they were already familiar with their local sites. By notifying app users of everything going on near them, we helped drive more visits.

Using geofencing across all 550 locations, we could intuitively switch users’ apps to ‘visit’ mode, letting them know what’s happening right around them.

The wilderness often doesn’t have Wi-Fi, so special care was taken to ensure a rich, current and useful offline experience.

As people fall in love with more places, they can collect where they’ve been and make a wish-list of where they want to go next.

• 351,459 users in first month

• 650,000 additional visits at National Trust sites attributable to app

• 80% increase in app sessions since launch

• 68% increase in new users

• 12,816,405 location views

• People spend 12.7 minutes on average using the app

In its most recent member survey, the National Trust asked visitors if the new app had inspired their visit that day. Three percent of respondents said yes: which amounts to the 650,000 new days out noted above.