| This article is part of our series on Custom Museum and Cultural Attraction Membership App Development for US Institutions: Building a Timed-Entry, Membership and Donation Platform |
Intro: Two Audiences, One Application
A cultural institution’s platform carries two audiences who relate to it differently, and the list of museum app features has to account for both.
The visitor comes once, needs a ticket that works, a map that helps, enough information for a good afternoon. They may never open the app again.
The member’s relationship runs for years. They want a card recognized at the door, their benefits honored, and the renewal process to be simple. Added to this, those who become donors would want some sign that the institution knows who they are.
Most feature lists in this category are written for the visitor and quietly disappoint the member. This is the wrong approach, given where the revenue sits. Institutions weighing vendors route this work to a custom software development team, and the visitor-facing half of it falls under custom mobile app development.
This piece covers the features of a custom platform for such an institution. These include ticketing, membership, giving, the on-site experience and the back office. It also marks where museums, zoos, aquariums and gardens differ, and closes with what to leave out of a first release for the custom software development.
Ticketing and Timed Entry
Ticketing is the visitor half of the equation. This part has to work for someone who may only use the app once.
Slot Inventory and Allocation
Entry to cultural institutions is controlled through time slots, each of which allow different capacities. The number of people allowed at a time is also different for different seasons, and based on whether a special exhibition is running or not.
Institutions also control how much is held for advance sale and how much is walked up. Added to this, they control what is reserved for groups and the overbooking position, considering no-shows are a permanent reality rather than an exception.
Purchase and Ticket Types
There are different ticket types available, and software platforms allow visitors to book their slots based on the type they opt for. There are categories for general admission and special exhibition tickets that run as a second time inventory within the first.
Other than this, visitors can choose between combination tickets and purchase concessions that are governed by eligibility. There is even a free admission category that still requires a slot where the institution manages capacity that way.
Groups and Schools
Institutions need to have a group booking feature with its own workflow. This includes enquiry, hold, confirmation, headcount changes, and invoicing rather than card payment. School booking features are also needed, which should span a whole morning and require coordination with the education staff of the schools.
Redemption at the Door
Redeeming tickets and memberships at the door need a consistent system too. Such a software system makes scanning fast enough for a queue, manages work amid connectivity issues in buildings, and handles ordinary issues that visitors might face. These cases can include a dead phone, a ticket in someone else’s email, a visitor at the wrong slot, or a party arriving separately.
Membership Features
Once a slot is booked, the software’s job shifts from serving a single visit to serving a relationship that’s supposed to renew every year.
Membership Tiers and Guest Privileges: Platforms for cultural institutions need to have membership tiers with the benefits, household composition, and named cardholders ascertained for each membership. They should have guest privileges that the door staff can check quickly.
Digital Versions: Digital membership cards should also be available through the platform, including wallet passes, which is one of the clearest wins for institutions. That’s because a card saved in a phone is a card that’s present with the visitor all the time, unlike cards kept in a drawer at home.
Accessibility via Phone: Visitors can join, renew, and upgrade flows that function on a phone in a gallery. The end of an enjoyable visit, when visitors decide to go ahead with a membership, is the highest-converting moment.
Managing Lapsed Memberships: Cultural institution platforms should also offer lapsed member handling with reactivation. There needs to be an auto-renewal feature with attached cancellation and disclosure requirements.
Benefit Redemption: Enforcing the benefits available to visitors at the point of use is essential. These include admission, discounts in the cafe and shop, preview and event eligibility, and reciprocal recognition for members who are visiting from participating institutions.
Gift Memberships and Acknowledgement Generation: Gift memberships are another critical part. These behave differently from purchases made for the buyer’s own household.
The software should also have the provision of generating an acknowledgement on joining, which carries requirements for substantiation and benefit disclosure. It is a compliance artifact rather than just a confirmation email and the benefit valuation is held as maintained configuration.
Giving and Donor Features
Some members become donors, and the features that ask for a gift sit right next to the ones that manage a membership.
One-Time Giving: Software for cultural institutions should have features for one-time giving with campaign and appeal attribution. This lets the development team see what a channel produced.
Recurring Giving: Recurring giving with the infrastructure sustainer programs require several elements. These include card updating, failed payment handling with notification rather than silent lapse, self-service changes that require no phone call. Any friction in changing monthly gifts can lead to monthly donors opting out.
Gifts: Tribute and memorial gifts are another important part of the giving infrastructure. They should include provisions for notifying the family or honoree. This small feature matters enormously to the people using it. The software should also have prompts that match gifts of different types. These gifts arrive through donor-advised funds and other vehicles.
Giving Prompts: At the point of transaction, the software should have giving prompts such as a question asked when visitors are buying tickets or renewing membership. These prompts should be clearly presented and priced, and should be as easy to decline as to accept.
Gift Recovery: Pre-checked boxes and round-ups that take effort to remove are problems that institutions should be aware of. In such cases, gifts may be extracted through interface pressure and may cost more in trust than they raise. There should also be features for generating acknowledgement with substantiation requirements met and producing promptly.
The On-Site Experience and Content
Giving and membership infrastructure only work if the visit itself gives people a reason to come back, which is what the on-site features are for.
Location-Detecting Features: There are features for wayfinding and maps that solve the questions visitors actually have. These can be about the location of the exhibition they came for, the bathroom location, and the arrangements for refreshment. They also address queries regarding which sections are closed on any given day.
Daily Information: The visitor-facing features also include daily information like programs, their hourly schedules, institution tours, galleries under installation, and closures. Institutions can also use the software to determine the content used most and the ones that are most often out of date.
Programmed Access: Accessibility is a programmed feature rather than merely a settings screen in such software. It includes an audio description, captioning, sign language content, and large print and transcripts. Added to these, the feature should offer practical information for visitors planning around their sensory needs, mobility, or a quiet hour.
Multilingual System: The content should be multilingual for the language that the audience visiting the institution actually speaks.
Collection Search: There should also be provisions for collection search where the institution digitized its artifacts and other specialities. Visitors who want to come back to something should be able to save or favorite it for viewing in future.
Back Office and Reporting
An operational and reporting layer should be present within the software for coordinating all the different functions vital to the institution. That layer is custom web application development work, built for staff at a desk rather than visitors in a gallery.
- It should handle audience capacity and inventory management through dedicated staff. The functions of the staff include closing a slot, opening extra capacity, or blocking a morning for an event without a support ticket.
- This layer should also handle content management through the institution’s own staff. Interpretative content changes with every exhibition and a content workflow, both of which require a developer, will not be used.
- Reporting membership and giving data is another critical part of the layer. This includes reporting acquisition by channel, renewal and lapse rates for memberships, the movement, and the segments that the development office asks for. All these are consistent with what the system holds rather than a second set of numbers.
- Institutions also need to report attendance and admissions by day, slot, and ticket type. This reporting drives staffing and is frequently needed for reporting on grants and boards.
- Admissions to reciprocal programs should be managed by this layer in both directions. Apart from this, there should be financial reconciliation across ticketing, membership, giving, retail, and food service. The reports that funders and the board actually ask for, which are rarely the ones a platform ships with, should also be kept ready.
Where Museums, Zoos, Aquariums, and Gardens Diverge
Everything so far has been described as one system. But the calendar, content model, and visit pattern behind it look different depending on what kind of institution is running it.
- A history or art museum is centered around objects and exists indoors. The interpretive dept for each object matters, and special exhibitions drive spikes in attendance and separate ticketing. The visitor base with memberships mainly include people who visit there repeatedly for specific shows.
- In contrast, an aquarium or zoo is centered around experiences and is largely outdoor. It has living collections that create scheduling that no other institution has. The scheduling system includes feeding times, keeper talks, animals off exhibit. Attendance is driven by weather conditions, which is something an indoor institution doesn’t see directly.
- Membership for these institutions is family-oriented, with a high frequency of visits. This changes what benefit enforcement systems need to handle.
- A botanical garden shares the seasonal and outdoor pattern of these institutions. They have a strong seasonal programming rhythm and events that combine to form a substantial revenue line.
- As for a science center, it is similar to a museum as it has more programs and sees large volumes of visitors from schools.
The common core of these institutions is genuine. This includes ticketing, memberships, content, and giving. However, the calendar, content model and visit frequency differ enough. As such, the first release for each of these institutions should be built for their own pattern.
Final Thoughts
Institutions need to build requirements for both the audiences when creating software platforms. This helps them prioritize card recognition, enforce benefits and renew memberships over the interpretive features that demonstrate well in a vendor pitch.
Both requirements matter, but only one determines whether the institution can fund next year’s programming. For institutions defining a visitor platform’s requirements, NewAgeSysIT builds for the member relationship alongside the visit, which keeps the scope pointed at where the revenue comes from. Learn more about digital transformation solutions from one of the leading AI software companies in the United States.
