Hello! We are a museum with free admission. We issue tickets to everyone who comes in and we have been using Special Access Areas to track how many people visit each exhibition -- prior to COVID we had people show their ticket in each gallery and it was scanned there. Now, we keep all the tickets at the front desk and use a counter in the galleries and then scan tickets at the end of the day (we don't worry about matching up specific people with exhibitions). This has worked fine for us, although the NSCAN report is a bit confusing for admin. We opened a special exhibition with timed admission in November 2022 and issued a separate ticket. Visitors have been required to have a museum admission ticket and a special exhibition ticket. This tracks in my mind with other museums I've visited, but it is confusing our admin team and they are wondering how other museums track visitors. So I'm curious -- how do you track museum visitors? One ticket? Do you have separate tickets for special exhibitions? Do visitors need both? Do you track attendance in galleries using Tessitura? Or do you have automatic people counters?
Thanks!Anne RobichauxCRM Specialist
Hi, Anne. Here at MFA, Houston we have paid general admission that includes some special exhibitions. These exhibitions don't have a separate ticket and are tracked with people counters. We also have slightly higher priced timed ticket exhibitions that have separate tickets. The tickets for these "ticketed" exhibitions include general admission, so the visitor just needs the exhibition ticket to access everything else as well. We scan all general admission pre-sold tickets at the Museum entry and have auto attend for day of general admission sold at the box office/admission desk. The separate ticketed exhibition tickets are scanned at the entrance to the actual exhibition. Hope that helps. Feel free to email me at neda@mfah.org if you have any questions.
Best,
Neda
Thanks, Neda! That makes a lot of sense. I'm going to talk to our team about just having one ticket if/when we do a separate ticketed exhibition again. I think it will be less confusing for both admin and our visitors.