Uncharted Lancaster Using Adventure to Engage

You could say that Uncharted Lancaster is where National Treasure meets local history and geography. This fun and approachable online blend of information and adventure began about three years ago, with founder Adam Zurn needing a good place to walk his dogs. He started with the nearby Shenks Ferry Nature Preserve, mostly known today for its profusion of spring wildflowers, and slowly uncovered an incredibly rich history– among them a 300-year old cemetery, rumored ghosts, industrial ruins, and the site of the deadliest manufacturing accident in Lancaster history. Amazingly, much of this wasn’t documented online in any way that would facilitate visiting.

Zurn is not a professional planner. He teaches school, and not the history classes you might expect. Instead, he leads technical ones like website design and 3D printing and these are the skills he brings to his personal interest in local history. Uncharted Lancaster is the resulting website and related social media accounts that take that interest, give it a gloss of treasure-seeking, and send it out to the world wide web, where it can inform on-the-ground and armchair explorers alike.

Adventures and quests frequently take seekers to little-known sites with clues that lead to caches of 3D-printed medallions or other small, collectible treasures. Other posts are purely informative, and make sites that are difficult or dangerous for most to access – like petroglyphs in the middle of the Susquehanna River at Safe Harbor – easy to experience in a safe, convenient way. This virtual exploration has the added benefit of reducing impacts that even visitors with the best of intentions have on sensitive resources and environments.

Planners can easily adapt this playbook to educate and engage communities. Zurn, for example, partners each year with the Lancaster County Conservancy to highlight Water Week. In this adventure, explorers visit green infrastructure projects in Lancaster City. As people follow the 3-mile circuit, they interact with educational information online and collect clues in the built environment to unlock the hidden treasure’s location.

Professional planners, especially ones that run social media accounts, may be skeptical that small incentives – even really fun ones – can drive regular engagement, but Zurn encourages us not to overlook the “collector” dynamic that drives many people, and gamers in particular, to consistently interact with content. We’ll explore this and other online engagement tips in an in-depth article next month. In the meantime, check out Uncharted Lancaster’s website and Facebook page to get a sense of the potential.