3 Key Issues Facing Museums and Heritage Sites After Covid-19 (and How We Can Fix Them)
May 10, 2022
Our business development manager, Megan Thompson, has investigated the issues facing the museum and heritage site industry because of the Covid-19 pandemic. With her extensive knowledge of business development across the visitor attraction sector, she also suggests the ways in which our VenposCloud system could help to lessen the impact.
Read on for her insights.
Covid-19 has caused significant disruption across the industry
There’s no denying that the pandemic has been a struggle for businesses, charities, and individuals alike. Months of staying at home and stringent guidelines on crowds have made it difficult for museums and heritage sites to bring in the funds needed to survive.
The stinted recovery period in the UK also hasn’t helped, as it has left international tourists reluctant to visit and some domestic tourists uncomfortable in busy areas. Plus, many volunteers across the sector haven’t wanted to return to their posts for a myriad of reasons.
Here are three of the biggest worries facing our historical attractions and how I believe we can help solve them.
- Reduced visitor numbers
A report from the Association of Independent Museums conducted in January 2022 found that 38% of museums experienced visitor numbers at less than half their pre-Omicron predicted level over the previous Christmas holiday period.
A fall in visitor numbers creates a fall in visitor spending, and after adjusting their predictions with the slow Christmas period and Omicron variant in mind, 70% of museums predicted lower-than-expected income levels by March this year. In fact, nearly a quarter of museums expected less than half the income they had predicted before the Omicron variant was discovered, leaving 7% at risk of closure and 15% planning restructures or redundancies.
As such, it’s crucial to start bringing customers back through your doors, and our VenposCloud ticketing system can help. As market leaders in integrated visitor systems, attraction booking software, and EPOS solutions, our system can make ticket and merchandise sales easier.
Even if your museum operates on an entirely non-profit basis, our third-party integration will help your venue reach a wider audience online. Our partnership with TXGB means that your museum could be featured on travel sites, like TripAdvisor, and take third-party bookings for your attractions.
Spreading the word of your attraction is essential if you want to see higher visitor numbers, and efficient access control for attractions could make your guests more inclined to return in the future or leave a good review.
- Cost efficiency
A lower income gives museums less money to spend on the systems and services they use, and the staff who operate them. With less money to spend, you need to ensure that your systems are efficient, effective, and worth what you’re spending to maintain them.
Many museums and historical sites are free to enter, and thus operate exclusively off the income earned from points of sale, including gift shops and food courts, and charitable donations. If a museum is using multiple different systems for their entry management, points of sale, and charitable donations, they could be wasting both money and time on the maintenance of these individual systems.
Many ticketing software companies use slow, complex, and inefficient systems to manage multiple points of entry, points of sales, and events. This can often lead to time consuming and expensive issues which need multiple staff members to resolve.
Our comprehensive solutions can cover anything your museum may need, from a unified ticketing system across multiple points of entry to inventory and points of sale management. You can maximise your cost efficiency by using a single programme to cover all areas of your business while receiving real-time updates surrounding your stock and visitor count.
All this information helps you to make money-conscious business decisions, from which stock to order more of to predicted visitor numbers.
- Worsening staff wellbeing and volunteer numbers
70% of museums have reported that the pandemic and the subsequent stresses it has brought have had an impact on the wellbeing of their staff. Furthermore, several venues that rely on volunteers are struggling to find the numbers they need to run the business, with health concerns, high stress levels, and bereavement preventing volunteers from returning.
The efficiency of our systems can help reduce the number of staff you need to have posted at various places around your museum, and reduce the stress levels of your active staff too. For example, our entry-ticketing software utilises QR code technology to allow visitors to scan themselves into your museum seamlessly, without the need for multiple staff members to be stationed on a till.
This frees up several staff members to perform other tasks around your attraction and prevents them from needing to deal with multiple customers face-to-face if they have health concerns regarding Covid. This can also help if you are struggling with a reduce number of volunteers to call upon.
Get in touch
If you’d like to find out more about how we could help your attraction recover from the pandemic, email contact@vennersys.com or call 01922 472 044 to speak with one of our team.
About the author
Megan Thompson has worked in business development for more than six years and has given her talents to Vennersys for almost three. Her empathetic, customer-focused nature has helped her understand the needs of those operating within the visitor attraction sector, making her perfectly suited for guiding both us and our clients towards success.
