How Museums Can Easily Convert Visitors to Memberships on SimpleTix

EverWonder Children’s Museum in Newtown, CT uses hands-on exhibits and programming to cultivate a lifelong love of learning in the fields of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. By easily converting visitors into memberships using the feature-rich ticketing platform, SimpleTix, they can cultivate and grow their community of learners.  

At EverWonder, children are encouraged to think, inquire, and wonder about the world around them. It was founded in January 2011 by a group of mothers who wanted to create a rich children’s museum experience for their own community. For the first years of its life, EverWonder existed as a mobile entity without a physical location. Two years later, they opened a physical location called The EverWonder Experience, and in April 2015, EverWonder Children’s Museum opened in a larger location with dedicated space for birthday parties and field trips.

Like many museums, memberships help sustain the EverWonder’s mission and provide members with exclusive benefits throughout the year, like early bird access and discounted pricing for special events. Annual memberships are good for up to two adults and four children. Grandparents often buy a membership so they can bring their grandchildren during visits. 

EverWonder wanted to make it easier for visitors to purchase an annual membership. As Niki Giordano, the museum’s office manager, pointed out, “Members bring other people, and they are your best advertisers.” 

SimpleTix made the conversion to memberships easy

Visitors to EverWonder can convert their general admission ticket to an annual membership and have their full price ticket deducted from their membership payment. To deduct that ticket purchase previously, staff had to transfer the amount to a gift card and then apply the gift card against the membership. “It worked, but it was clunky,” Niki admitted. 

However, new members can also save $20 on their membership if they were referred by another member. “So then we had two gift cards,” Niki explained. “We can’t apply two gift cards to one membership purchase, so we have to move all the money to one gift card and delete the other gift card.” 

We discussed this challenge during a check-in call and created a new feature based on EverWonder’s feedback. The new feature allows a visitor to convert their general admission ticket to membership via a follow-up “thank you for visiting” email. 

The email contains a message asking them if they’d like to become a member. If they choose to do so, they click on a button and are redirected to SimpleTix. From there, they can select the type of membership and which tickets to convert. Our system will automatically deduct the price of the ticket from the annual membership, and the guest will be asked to pay the balance. 

As Niki told us, the ability to buy a membership and have the price of admission deducted from a recent visit is a common marketing tactic used by museums. We are excited to introduce this to even more museums in the coming months.

SimpleTix made the conversion to memberships easy

During our conversation with Niki, we reviewed other features that would be helpful for EverWonder. Some already existed or just needed to be tweaked. Some – like easy membership conversion – were new. In either case, it’s feedback like this that ensures SimpleTix fully supports our customer’s needs. 

“We appreciate that when we talk to you and say this would be useful, you listen,” Niki told us. We couldn’t imagine operating any other way. 

SimpleTix’s easy-to-use interface, robust set of features, and affordable pricing make us the ideal partner for museums of any size and focus. In addition to supporting membership conversion, our platform makes it easy to upsell, create timed entries, limit capacity, and much more. 

If your museum would like to work hand-in-hand with an event ticketing platform that can help you maximize memberships, ticket sales, and donations, schedule a demo today!