Hello everyone,
At the RA we have some spaces that visitors can come into for free, without booking a ticket or having a membership card scanned. These include free galleries, displays, shops, cafes and courtyard. At the start of Covid, as a cost-saving measure, we turned off the motion sensors (managed by Intelligent Counting Ltd) we used for visitor counting.
Now that we have removed some of the requirements to book before visiting, we are considering all options for tracking visitation in all our spaces, and wondering if anything more accurate/cheaper/with better Tessitura integration exists.
How do you track unticketed visitors in your organisations? Do you encourage booking to ensure as many people as possible have ticketed attendances with an account?
So far it seems to us that for certain closed spaces manual counting by security guards will provide the most accurate count, but for more open spaces some kind of motion sensors will be necessary.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and discussing pros and cons!
Carlo
For anyone coming into a gallery space, we require (free) tickets. They don't necessarily have to be booked into a constituent record, but we do require a ticket. Pre-pandemic we had people in each exhibition with scanners that would scan tickets into associated access areas. We have wanted to eliminate that close contact since the pandemic. Now, we hold the tickets at the front desk and staff in the galleries use clickers to count. At the end of the day, that number of tickets are scanned into the appropriate access areas. We don't worry about knowing exactly who went into each gallery.
Before we re-opened our indoor spaces, we had our courtyards open to the public. To track attendance in these spaces, we again used clickers. At the end of the day (or week), someone would sell that number of tickets into a performance set up for that specific space. We then used a custom utility to mark the tickets as attended in bulk.
AnneThe Historic New Orleans Collection
Hi Anne,
Thanks for the reply! Requiring free tickets for free gallery spaces sounds like a neat solution, but some people here are worried about that adding an unnecessary obstacle in the visitor experience. Do you think your visitor numbers to free spaces are at all reduced by the requirement?
Nice to hear about the custom utility to mark tickets as attended - that's a handy idea! I've been wondering if the way to go might be unmanaged people counters. These are infra-red sensors that just display the number of people that went in one direction minus those in the other, and someone would go take a readout and reset them at the end of each day. These would have a one-off cost of about £200 per sensor, vs the managed third-party solution (which is based on video sensors and feeds automatically to a basic online dashboard) which costs upwards of £12k each year.
Does anyone have experience of infra red vs video counters and their accuracy?
Thanks,
I don't think our visitor counts are at all reduced by requiring tickets. Most of our visitors are walk-ups without reservations and the only thing we require from them for a ticket is a zip code or country where they live. We may not have the daily attendance that you have, however, so we rarely have more than a few people waiting in line for a ticket. Pre-pandemic when we had visitors walking around with tickets that had to be scanned we did have some that objected to having to keep their ticket out, but we told them it was the trade off for free admission. I don't think anyone ever left or cut a visit short because of it.
I got the idea for the utility from a TLCC poster presentation -- another org had done it and I had Tessitura consulting replicate it.
We've talked about the sensors but we like having the data all in Tessitura and not in two separate systems. I'm also not sure that we could justify the cost when we already have staff in the galleries who are able to count with clickers. We aren't seeing the daily visitor count that makes it impossible to count.
Anne