Optimizing Cultural Events: Salesforce Ticketing for Museums and Galleries

We’re declaring 2024 as the “Year of Webinars” here at Advanced Communities, and last week marked the premiere of our first webinar of the year. This webinar was dedicated to event and membership management in Salesforce for museums, galleries, and cultural institutions.

In a 45-minute session, our speakers, Mike Brown (Senior Solution Engineer, Salesforce.org), and Rebekah Hunter (VP Alliances, Advanced Communities), explored the capabilities of Salesforce for Arts and Culture and delved into how cultural institutions, such as galleries and museums, can streamline their membership management and event ticketing using the Salesforce Experience Cloud platform.

For those who prefer the written version, we’ve provided a short recap of the webinar in this blog.

The complete recording of the webinar is available below and on the Webinars page of our website.

Introduction to Salesforce: Addressing Сhallenges by Unifying CRM and Ticketing 

We understand that museums are complex organizations, and there’s more to your institution than just creating a modern experience and welcoming guests to your door. Here’s an overview of the various functions and departments your organization may have, along with external pressures that may impact it. The operating environment can become quite complex at times, necessitating your organization to respond and adapt in real-time. Upon closer inspection, it’s not surprising that you may have some siloed systems.

When considering the systems within your organization, there are instances where they are often acquired for department-specific needs. Due to the importance of certain features to particular departments, finding a single system that caters to all needs can be challenging. Let’s take ticketing, for example. How does ticketing data flow into finance, reach the marketing team, or connect with the membership team? Are you managing this process manually or automatically? Consider the data movement and the imperative need for optimization to seize the opportunity to build a lasting relationship with your guests.

When we engage with organizations undergoing digital transformation, these areas often emerge as critical focal points. These are the areas where organizations recognize the need to evolve or enhance functionality to meet guests in this new digital frontier where everyone is mobile and online. Reusing legacy systems can make it challenging to stay aware of where your stakeholders are. The solution to this challenge lies in adopting a platform approach.

Introducing Salesforce for museums & galleries

In the realm of technology, Salesforce is grounded in the cloud. “Trust, Security, Innovation, and Scale” are the foundational principles of the platform, ensuring the security of your data and keeping your technology investment up to date with new features and functionality, thereby keeping your organization competitive. Built on top of this foundation is the metadata layer, facilitating efficiency to allow your organization to move quickly and surface insights to meet your guests where they are.

There are three key points we’d like you to keep in mind:

• Salesforce is configurable. Right from the start, you have access to a wealth of functions and features to cater to the diverse needs of your organization, be it in CRM, Sales, Service, Fundraising, and more.
• Extend your investment with prebuilt partner apps. An excellent example is AC MemberSmart, particularly for events, ticketing, and volunteering. The app enhances and expands the capabilities of your Salesforce investment.
• A strong sense of community. Salesforce boasts a robust community of certified professionals who are ready and willing to assist you in building out the platform and optimizing your Salesforce experience.

Salesforce customer 360 degree member view

Once you have your Salesforce platform up and running, our North Star is to unify that data and understand the whole person. We recognize that a visitor may also be a member, donor, program participant, or corporate attendee. Salesforce unifies all that information in one place, enabling you to understand how individuals want to engage with you and through which channels. This, in turn, will empower you to enhance the online experience and build long-lasting relationships with your guests.

Why is Advanced Communities the best choice for museums and galleries? 

The AC product AC MemberSmart tailored for museums and galleries is designed for Experience Cloud. The Experience Cloud serves as a window to your Salesforce CRM. It’s not a standalone platform but an extension to Salesforce for an external audience to interact with you and the data on the platform. Because you are engaging through Experience cloud, you have an opportunity to:

• Surfacing relevant events when logged in
• Managing interests and preferences
• Viewing account details and past orders
• Updating account information
• Selecting channel preferences
• Engaging with staff or bots through real-time messaging

Bots on Experience Cloud portals offer exciting opportunities for museums as they can quickly answer questions, saving time and improving the efficiency of support teams. They can also assist in creating a case if needed or guide a user through common workflows, such as requesting a donation or applying for a volunteer position.

Introducing Advanced Communities and its AC MemberSmart

Advanced Communities is a two part partner: we are not only a consultant for Salesforce meaning that we implement SF licenses and build out Salesforce communities (Experience Cloud sites). We’re also an app developer. When building SF portals for our customers, people started asking for specific functionality like event management or donations functionality. By fulfilling their requests we ended up building a number of components for Experience Cloud and one among them is our AC MemberSmart package that we’ll be talking about today. 

Whatever the project, our goals remain the same:

• Increase engagement across the platform
• Reduce time and support costs
• Support the growth of commercial and nonprofit
• Empower audiences through self-service portals
• Maximize the value of Salesforce

Meet AC MemberSmart as a museum ticketing solution

AC MemberSmart is an app that’s built directly on the force.com platform and is designed specifically for Experience Cloud. AC MemberSmart was designed with professional and trade associations, membership organizations, and nonprofits in mind. It provides enhanced functionality and is highly flexible to serve as the ultimate solution for any membership organization or association. AC MemberSmart may be used as a robust ticketing software for museums, exhibitions and galleries helping with cultural event organization and optimization.

Some of the included components and features that you’re going to see in the package are:

• General and timed admission
• Education (classes & camps)
• Event management
• E-Commerce
• Subscription management
• Fundraising and Donations
• Payments
• Groups
• Member Directory
• Organization Directory
• News & Blog
• Job/ Volunteer Board

Thanks for joining us!

Thank you to everyone who joined us, for your time and engagement. We received an excellent response and were busy answering all of your questions. And we absolutely LOVED it!

More amazing events are coming soon, so stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter to receive webinar notifications!