In a village hall in rural England, an elderly man stands before a microphone. His voice trembles as he recounts stories of his childhood, of ration books, blackout curtains, and tightly knit communities that found resilience amid hardship.  In a neighbouring city, people born in different ages and faraway countries share family recipes and taste Ash Reshteh, Borsk and Hot Pot for the first time. Capturing these moments, their emotion, pride and collaboration is at the core of heritage engagement.

Thanks to new technology, across the UK, the past is being brought to life, preserving oral history in a new way, and creating social value through barrier breaking and positive action.

FlexiAD

Oral history is as old as civilisation, and is still the best way to connect communities with their heritage. Unlike written records or museum artefacts, oral stories offer a visceral sense of history, democratising who gets to tell the story, preserving emotions, voices, and accents, and removing barriers such as literacy, language and competency.

FlexiAD is an audio capture app that can be used to prompt, record and professionalise stories to be used in projects on any subject. Originally conceived to help public sector organisations and charities adapt their campaigns for local relevance, FlexiAD’s potential for oral history and heritage engagement is profound. By simplifying the technical aspects of production, this tool allows the communities themselves to capture and share stories with professional-quality results. A mobile phone is all that’s required.

Technology such as FlexiAD, coupled with oral history, can create a social platform designed to streamline the process of capturing, telling and understanding stories. 

Heritage Engagement for the 21st Century

The beauty of heritage lies in its ability to bring people together, sparking conversations, and creating a shared sense of belonging to a place. Yet, many heritage organisations struggle to remain relevant in a digital world. Younger audiences, in particular, experience the world through voices and faces on social media. By offering a platform that transforms raw recordings into polished narratives, and using AI to prompt the next question, making it feel for the storyteller, less like a presentation, and more like a conversation.

Local museums could invite residents to record personal memories on their smartphones, upload the files, and watch as the platform seamlessly integrates their voices into branded, high-quality videos and audio stories. The result is not just a marketing campaign, but a living tapestry of local heritage.

This approach aligns perfectly with the principles of social value, ensuring that heritage engagement is not just a one-way transmission of information but collaborative. By inviting communities to contribute, organisations foster a sense of ownership and pride, creating a legacy that benefits both current and future generations.

People Interviewing People

FlexiAd also enables a different kind of conversation. FlexiAD can provide prompts from other participants in heritage projects and allow them to respond, providing conversations, social chains and collective memory making. This concept, “People Interviewing People” is an interviewing technique where the traditional interviewer, in this case FlexiAD, acts as a facilitator between two experts on a subject rather than asking direct questions. 

For engagement purposes, this allows multiple local people from different backgrounds to engage and talk freely to each other about their location without being interfered with by an “outsider.” Examples of this are Variety’s Actors on Actors,and LadBible’s The Gap. This way of engagement delivers better results and increases ownership of the project.

FlexiAD can further enhance the experience by introducing Artificial Intelligence, enabling stakeholders to interact in a more natural way.

Reducing Costs to Promote Social Values

Traditionally, producing high-quality audio and video content required significant investment—professional studios, editing software, and technical expertise. For small heritage groups, the costs were often prohibitive, limiting their ability to engage broader audiences. FlexiAD changes this by automating much of the process, reducing costs by as much as 80%.

This affordability unlocks opportunities for organisations that previously couldn’t justify the expense of digital storytelling.

Heritage engagement isn’t just about preserving the past, it has to shape the future. Projects that incorporate oral history and storytelling have the potential to deliver substantial social value, from improving mental health through community connections to inspiring young people to take pride in their heritage.