Part of CMA's mission is that we do not charge general admission or have general admission tickets or check in. As you would imagine this makes some things difficult on the data end. My team and I are looking for other museums with a similar situation to chat and swap notes and I thought this TUG would be a good start.
Hi in advance!
Jim
We have a good number of programs that allow for free entry at Mystic.
It would depend on what you're looking to report on. Would you want everyone to get a ticket, but no one to pay a price? Would you need to know how many adults vs children vs seniors? Would you want to know how many people came in from various different geographic locations?There's definitely ways to do all of that, it just come down to how you'll need to report on things on the back end.
This is only an idea I heard from the last conference, but one of the Boston Musuems had set up free wifi at their events, but to access it you had to put in guest data (name, email, zip code). If you were looking purely at obtaining guest info for marketing and development efforts, this could be an idea.
Thanks Melanie. (I'm not sure if maybe you meant to reply to the discussion I started about collecting guest info at front gate?) In any case, I appreciate the suggestion. We do something similar here--every time a guest connects to our free wifi in the building, they receive a prompt asking if they'd like to join our email list, with an incentive for a discount at our store. We don't actually require them to provide their information in order to get the free wifi (I think that might be illegal in CA) but they at least have to say "no thank you" and X out of the prompt to continue. We have been successful in capturing a significant amount of emails this way, but it's a small % of our guests who access the wifi compared to those purchasing tickets at the front gate.