Insights from Bill Shaughnessy, ACME’s CEO, on Museum Technology Advancements and its Benefits
Technology continues to completely change the industry for museums and cultural institutions. It allows museums to do valuable things like improve their management capacities, build memberships, bolster visitor experience, make use of valuable data, embrace diversity and accessibility, aid in the preservation of collections, become more environmentally friendly, adopt unconventional and innovative partnerships, and so much more!
While some museums are holding back on the pace of adoption with technology, it’s important to understand the benefits before deploying new technology. Even if your museum doesn’t cater to the tech-savvy exhibits that are now emerging, there are still a lot of enterprise benefits that will help you run your museum more smoothly, create long-term members and deliver the best visitor experience.
Museum Technology Benefits: Ticketing and Memberships
There are several new, innovative ticketing capabilities that technology provides to museums and cultural institutions.
- Cloud-based Solutions: The Cloud guarantees one of the most important factors in running your museums – that you’re ticketing services are up and running 24/7. Because you aren’t hosting your servers in-house, you eliminate the burden of having to manage and maintain your hardware. This brings simplicity and scalability to your institution. Additionally, updates are made automatically through the cloud, which means you’re getting the most recent changes and advancements as soon as they’re released. Cloud-based ticketing and membership is essential for rapid innovation and scaling an institutions growth.
- Point-of-Sale: A flexible, fast and feature rich Point of Sale translates to shorter lines at the ticket booth and an all-around better visitor experience. It will allow you to host ticketing features on mobile phones, tablets, and nearby kiosks, enabling your staff to be fully mobile, with the ability to sell tickets and memberships from any location. When your team members approach visitors, they’ll be fully equipped to introduce all the great membership benefits that guests may otherwise not know about. With a flexible, fast and feature rich Point of Sale, you can shorten lines, inform your guests about current events in your museum, and build perennial memberships all at the same time.
- Customizable Ticketing Software: Innovative ticketing software won’t limit you to just the specific company’s features. Advanced ticketing software should allow you to customize your event setup, membership sale options, discounts, venue resources, and more. Additionally, it should be simple to integrate third-party resources, like a CRM, into your software. By allowing for third-parties and providing customizable features, your software can scale with you as you grow. This is why ACME has partnered with leaders like Salesforce, Blackbaud, CityPASS and TripAdvisor, to create the most powerful network of solutions available.
Museum Technology Benefits: Visitor Experience
Advancements in museum technology not only helps you grow, scale and manage your museum, it will also help improve visitor experience by invigorating your galleries with new exhibits.
While traditional methods of gallery/exhibit management have their place in the museum world, technological innovations have opened the door for a number of new and exciting ways to educate and engage your visitors. Below are some of the most talked-about museum innovations today.
- Virtual Reality Tours: VR tours are a great compliment to a gallery or event that you’re hosting. You can give your visitors a virtual look at what life was like for people living in Babylon or take a virtual dive into the farthest depths of the ocean. VR technology also opens up a world of accessibility for those who cannot physically visit a museum. Many institutions are using VR to give virtual tours of their institutions in order to expand access to individuals who before, would have never had the ability to see prized exhibits, walk the hallways of historic homes, explore lush gardens and stand feet away from exotic animals. VR technologies continue to propel the capabilities that museums have to share unforgettable experiences with their guests.
- Augmented Reality: With the help of tablets and mobile phones, museums can integrate augmented technology into their tours and exhibits. Bring important figures of history and artifacts back to life with augmented reality, enabling you to create scavenger hunts, more visually exciting tours, and more ways to engage your visitors.
- Social Media: By allowing your guests to share their experiences on social media, you can help younger generations connect their joy in your museum within their social groups. This is a win-win because museums can market and advertise their exhibits through their visitors, and a younger guest population can connect their experiences in the museum with the world around them.
Museum Technology Benefits: Data Collection
A comprehensive technology strategy will allow you to better collect, store, and analyze data that you receive from ticket sales, membership sales and your guests overall activity and interaction with your institution. In order to develop strategies that will retain and create memberships, your software needs to provide you with strong and sensible analytics about your guests’ interests and habits.
Additionally, connecting ACME to a leading CRM will allow you to upgrade memberships, manage member benefits, update account information and so much more – all in real time so that you can easily and more efficiently connect with your guests. This means smarter mass messaging and more personable technology.
It is clear that technological innovations for museums will continue to be important for the long run, and it’s incumbent on all museums to adapt and benefit from forward technical thinking.
ACME uses it’s powerful technology to liberate growth and operational innovation, and because of this, we are trailblazing the industry’s general admission, timed ticketing and membership transaction solutions. We harness the latest cloud technology to provide museums with a smarter, more reliable solution to ticketing, membership and backend management.
Some of the benefits of ACME’s leading technology include endless customizations, a straightforward and secure mobile technology platform that fuels fast and easy sales transactions, 99.9% system uptime, granular membership lifecycle management capabilities, pre-configured hardware, and so much more. Our open APIs enable powerful customizations and seamless integrations with other 3rd-party tools, and our unique “offline mode” underpins the POS, ensuring uninterrupted sales amid a network shutdown. Moreover, our success management team relentlessly trains and supports clients before, during and after implementation delivering a seamless experience for staff and visitors because we know that adopting new technology can be daunting.
Come join the movement – connect with your guests, scale your institution, and benefit from the industry’s most powerful ticketing software with ACME today.