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What does a successful day at your museum look like? Perhaps it involves a number of group tours, sold-out ticketed exhibits, and zero long lines that could create a burdensome experience for guests. Instead, your museum runs like a well-oiled machine; guests can navigate through it with ease and your team can track this movement.
This ideal scenario is entirely dependent on having access to one crucial tool: effective museum ticketing software.
At Doubleknot, we’ve seen firsthand the impact that effective ticketing software can have on museum operations. To help your team navigate the ticketing software market and choose the right solution for your museum, we’ve created this guide. In it, we’ll discuss the most essential museum ticketing software features to seek, including:
- Unified Ticketing, Membership, and CRM Systems
- Online Ticket Sales
- Mobile Sales and Mobile Validation
- Environmentally-Friendly Ticketing
- Flexibility in Pricing
- Add-On Donation Options
Ticketing software touches every aspect of your museum’s operations—from the guest experience to incoming revenue, to capacity and safety considerations. It’s crucial to not only use ticketing software in your operations but to choose the right tool for your museum’s unique needs.
Whether you’re investing in an integrated museum management and ticketing solution for the first time, or you’re looking to scale up your current solution, the following six features are essential for successful operations. Let’s get started.
1. Unified Ticketing, Membership, and CRM Systems
Your museum likely uses dedicated constituent relationship management (CRM) software to collect data about visitors, members, and donors in unique supporter profiles.
By investing in museum ticketing software that can integrate directly with your CRM, you’re then able to track additional data about every single transaction that happens in your museum each day. This includes attendance, reservations, registrations, merchandise sales, and more.
Beyond integration with your CRM, museum ticketing software should integrate with your organization’s membership management solution. That way, you can manage memberships alongside ticketing and streamline the member experience overall.
How This Ticketing Software Feature Enhances Your Museum
A unified museum ticketing solution that integrates with both your CRM and membership management solution can enhance your museum in numerous ways.
For example, you can store all ticketing data within visitor profiles, providing your team with a comprehensive profile of both overall operations and individual visitor relationships. Further, you can sell memberships alongside tickets, offer special ticketing benefits and discounts to members, and reduce transactions overall.
2. Online Ticket Sales
Modern museum visitors see convenience as a top priority. They’re not interested in waiting in long lines to purchase tickets in person or visiting in person to buy timed tickets for another date. Instead, they’re looking to purchase tickets where many financial interactions already take place—on the internet.
The best museum ticketing software solutions enable online ticket sales alongside in-person sales, allowing visitors to purchase tickets using the method they prefer. Additionally, the solution should use a mobile-responsive design, so that guests can purchase tickets on their mobile phones if that’s how they’re accessing the internet.
How This Ticketing Software Feature Enhances Your Museum
Online ticket sales can enhance your museum in two key ways:
- Improving capacity management processes. When you can view both in-person and online ticket sales in one solution, you can easily see when capacity-limited tickets are sold out. This prevents you from selling more tickets than are available.
- Offering timed-entry tickets. Guests don’t want to purchase a timed-entry ticket in person, leave, and return for their time slot. With online ticketing, visitors can conveniently purchase timed-entry tickets from their own location.
3. Mobile Sales and Mobile Validation
It naturally follows that if visitors can purchase tickets on their mobile phones, they should be able to use their phones as e-tickets as opposed to printing paper tickets. With mobile validation features, guests can breeze through your museum, scanning their e-tickets, receipts, or membership cards easily using their mobile phones.
In addition, employees should be equipped with an intuitive mobile ticket validation app. That way, they can use iPhones or tablets to validate tickets, as opposed to needing to use a fixed POS instance such as a cash register.
How This Ticketing Software Feature Enhances Your Museum
Mobile validation features can drastically enhance your museum’s efficiency by speeding up the ticketing process.
When you have one or two registers open for ticket validation, lines can quickly grow unwieldy. But, with mobile validation, you can have multiple staff members working on ticketing. Simply equip them with iPhones or tablets and they’ll be able to quickly scan QR codes on guests' phones.
4. Environmentally-Friendly Ticketing
Alongside online ticketing and mobile validation, seek out museum ticketing software that supports environmentally-friendly ticketing processes. This includes features such as:
- The delivery of tickets, receipts, and membership cards digitally rather than physically on paper. This can be via email or text message.
- Allowing members to store tickets or membership cards in common mobile apps such as Apple Wallet or Google Pay, rather than downloading an additional single-purpose app.
- The ability to print a single ticket for an entire group, rather than printing one ticket for each. That way, even if visitors prefer printed tickets, you’re able to reduce printing waste.
Beyond efficiency, environmentally-friendly ticketing options can benefit your organization in multiple ways.
How This Ticketing Software Feature Enhances Your Museum
With museum ticketing software that prioritizes environmentally-friendly procedures, you can save resources internally by printing fewer tickets and limiting paper waste. While it may seem like a smaller expense, the cost of printing tickets can quickly add up—without doing so, you can direct those funds elsewhere.
Further, environmentally-friendly ticketing encourages your guests to take a more “green” approach in their everyday lives, which could potentially have a greater positive impact on your community overall. And, your organization will develop a reputation for being one that values environmentally-friendly initiatives, which is becoming a growing concern for many consumers.
5. Flexibility in Pricing
Many museums offer varied pricing for different demographics and age groups. For example, you may choose to have unique pricing for each of the following visitor categories:
- Adults
- Children
- Seniors
- Veterans
- College Students
- Members
- Non-Members
- Corporate Sponsors
A key museum ticketing software feature is the ability to create flexible pricing tiers to match your museum’s unique categories. Beyond pricing tiers for groups of your visitors, you should also seek software that allows for reciprocal admission in instances in which your museum partners with another similar local organization.
How This Ticketing Software Feature Enhances Your Museum
How you price tickets at your museum can have a significant impact on how readily visitors purchase tickets for your exhibits. Flexibility in pricing allows you to:
- Remain competitive with other organizations. It’s an established practice in the museum sector to offer varied pricing for different visitor groups. With it, your museum will be in-line with industry standards.
- Attract guests by offering specials and discounts. For example, you could offer discounts via popular services such as Groupon to attract more visitors during slower seasons.
- Provide special value to certain priority groups. If you want to give back to your community, you could offer discounts to valued members of society such as seniors and veterans. This can also shed a positive light on how your museum treats its visitors.
6. Add-On Donation Options
Your team goes to great lengths to create a fantastic experience for museum guests, from sourcing intriguing exhibits to creating a convenient ticketing process. As a result of these efforts, visitor satisfaction will increase. And, highly-satisfied visitors are generous visitors, who may be interested in making an additional donation to your museum’s continued operation.
That’s why it’s important to seek museum ticketing software features that make visitors aware of the opportunity to donate. On the way to check-out, your solution should display a donation request inviting visitors to make a donation. That way, they’ll only need to enter their payment information one time to make an impact.
Beyond prompted donation requests during the ticketing process, seek museum ticketing software that can facilitate on-site donations for visitors who are inspired after their trip.
How This Ticketing Software Feature Enhances Your Museum
Many museums are not-for-profit; as such, donations are a powerful revenue source that fuels the organizations’ efforts.
After having a great experience, visitors may feel inspired to show their support. But, they can’t do so if they don’t have a clear pathway to make a gift. This type of ticketing software ensures that your museum can capture this generosity when it arises.
Wrapping Up
Museum ticketing software touches every aspect of your operations, from safety to the visitor experience, to how much revenue you’re able to raise. It even affects how environmentally friendly you’re able to be!
When choosing a solution for your museum, it’s crucial to find one with the exact ticketing software features that meet your organization’s unique needs. The six features listed in this guide provide an introduction to what you should look for. To learn more, reach out to the Doubleknot team today to explore our solution’s ticketing software features.
