Summer 2026 · For museums & cultural institutions

The museum summer revenue checklist.

Fiscal years are closing. Fundraisers are winding down. Summer is the best window museums get to lay the groundwork for next year's growth.

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12+

years serving cultural institutions

100s

of hours saved on day-to-day admin

“ACME completely transformed our operations. What used to take days to configure now takes hours, and we’ve saved 30–40% in admin time.”

Director of Ticketing, Major Botanical Garden

Trusted by cultural institutions nationwide

Seattle Aquarium•Heinz History Center•Major Botanical Garden•and hundreds more

See the full checklist ↓

or jump to:Membership Ticketing Donors Operations

01 / 04

Membership

For: Membership Directors, Guest Experience

Turn the visitors you already have into members, before the summer crowd thins out.

Identify your highest-conversion membership targets from this year's visitor data
Export visitors with 2+ visits and no active membership. Filter by ZIP codes within 30 miles of your institution. Send that segment a time-limited membership offer before summer ends.
Audit your membership conversion flow from the guest's point of view
Complete a membership sign-up yourself from a mobile device. Count every step. If it takes more than 3 minutes, you are losing members who were ready to join.
Surface a membership prompt immediately after a great guest experience
Add a membership upgrade prompt to your post-visit confirmation email. A guest who just had a great experience is more likely to join in the next 24 hours than at any other point.
Flag members at lapse risk before the renewal window closes
In your CRM, filter for members with renewal in 90 days and zero visits in the last 6 months. Send a re-engagement offer 60 days before renewal. For high-tier members, send a personal email from your membership director, not an automated sequence.
Build a re-engagement sequence for members who lapsed in the last 12 months
Pull lapsed members from the last year. Write a 2-touch sequence: one personal note, one offer. Send before September when programming picks back up.

The ACME Advantage

Visitor and membership data is already unified in ACME, so this segment takes minutes to pull, not a week of manual cross-referencing, and at-risk members are flagged automatically before the renewal window closes.

When using Salesforce I can track all the individual interactions with the museum, because ACME and Salesforce talk to each other I can see all that information in one spot.

P. Parisi, Membership Development

02 / 04

Ticketing & Revenue

For: Ticketing Directors, Operations

Plug the revenue leaks in your booking flow before peak-season traffic hits.

Fix your checkout drop-off before peak season
Time your booking flow on mobile from start to confirmation. More than 3 minutes means lost sales. Calculate your initiated-to-completed checkout rate. That gap is your number.
Set up an abandoned booking email if you don't already have one
A single follow-up email sent within 1 hour of a dropped booking recovers a meaningful percentage of lost revenue automatically.
Review your pricing structure for peak summer dates
Check if your pricing reflects actual demand by day and time. If weekends and school holidays are not priced differently from Tuesday mornings, you are leaving revenue on the table.
Audit your upsell and add-on opportunities at checkout
List every add-on your institution offers. Check how many are surfaced during the online booking flow. If fewer than three are visible before confirmation, you have a missed revenue moment.
Set up a waitlist for sold-out sessions
If you do not have an automated waitlist, you are losing revenue every time a cancellation happens. A real-time waitlist notification converts significantly more than a manual follow-up.

The ACME Advantage

ACME's Abandoned Booking recovers dropped checkouts and its waitlist triggers automatically on cancellations. Set them up once, before summer hits.

ACME has transformed the way guests and staff engage with ticketing and membership sales processes. Transactions at the ticketing desk are fast, the online process is intuitive.

Head of Information Technology, Seattle Aquarium

26%

of guests who get a recovery email come back and book.

ACME's new Abandoned Booking feature catches every drop-off and automates personalized follow-ups, recovering lost revenue without your team lifting a finger.

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03 / 04

Development & Donors

For: Development Directors, Major Gifts

Set your fall fundraising up now, while your calendar still has room.

Build your fall donor pipeline before October makes it too late
Query your CRM for members with 3+ years tenure and zero donation history. Cross-reference visit frequency. Members with 3+ visits last year convert at the highest rate. Write a 3-email cultivation sequence now, while your calendar still has space.
Review last year's donor campaign and identify your three best-performing segments
Pull conversion rates by segment from last year's campaign. Identify the top three and make sure they are prioritized in this year's cultivation plan before you build the sequence.
Identify members who attended a major event and have never given
Filter for members who attended a gala, opening night, or major event in the last 24 months with zero donation history. Event attendees have demonstrated commitment. This is a high-probability segment.
Map your member-to-donor conversion rate and set a target for next year
Calculate what percentage of your current members have ever donated. If you do not know this number, find it before fall. Set a specific conversion target and build your fall campaign around closing that gap.
Write your fall cultivation sequences now, before programming season starts
Three touches per segment, one goal per sequence. Pre-building in August is dramatically easier than doing it when exhibitions, board prep, and events compete for the same attention.

The ACME Advantage

ACME surfaces tenure, visit frequency, and donation history in one report. Your highest-probability donor list in three clicks, not three hours.

ACME's ticketing and membership solution is proven and robust, but continually evolving as our sector changes. We value the level of control we have over processes across our multiple museum sites and the fast, flexible reporting we get through ACME.

Heinz History Center

04 / 04

Operations & Technology

For: COOs, IT Directors, Ticketing Managers

Find the manual work quietly draining your team's time and budget.

Map every manual task your team runs weekly that your platform should handle automatically
Ask your team to list the five most time-consuming recurring tasks. If any involve exporting spreadsheets, manually reconciling data, or rebuilding reports, those are platform constraints, not process problems.
Audit your reporting setup and identify gaps costing you decisions
List the five reports leadership asks for most often. If any require manual preparation, check if your platform can surface them automatically. Decisions made on last month's export are decisions made too late.
Check how many systems your team logs into to complete a single guest transaction
Count the platforms involved in a complete guest journey from booking to post-visit follow-up. More than three is a fragmentation problem. Each handoff is a place where data gets lost and staff time gets wasted.
Calculate the real cost of staying on your current platform
Multiply the weekly staff hours spent on workarounds by hourly cost. That number is what your platform is costing you every week beyond the subscription fee.
If a platform transition is on the horizon, start the evaluation now
Major platform changes take longer than expected. Starting the evaluation during a planning window means you are not making infrastructure decisions under deadline pressure.

The ACME Advantage

A purpose-built platform tailored to your workflows means less manual work from day one. One client saved 30 to 40% in admin time after switching.

We value the control we have across our multiple sites and the fast, flexible reporting ACME provides. Most importantly, our frontline team now has an intuitive POS with everything they need to deliver excellent customer service.

Head of Information Technology, Bowers Museum

Your summer, set up right

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