Tag Archives: Exhibitions

Introducing exhibition entry gates

Photo of a visitor entering the exhibition through the barrier

Image of Jake Mensah walking successfully through the barrier

This week we installed an entry gate system to our exhibition gallery at M Shed just in time for the opening of Children’s TV. Our “exhibition” gallery is located on the top floor, far away from the ground floor reception and not naturally easy to stumble across for the average wandering visitor. The project scope was to reduce the overall cost of an exhibition to the service and encourage as many visitors as possible to purchase tickets in advance. We’ll then test the success of the project against three of our key performance indicators – customer satisfaction, cost per transaction, and digital take-up.

Against each KPI we aim to:

Customer satisfaction – We don’t want people to experience a notable difference between our old approach of buying from a member of staff at the entrance and them buying online/kiosk and then entering the exhibition via the gate. We expect teething issues around the “behaviour” of this new approach but not from the technology itself which should be robust. The outcome we need is for little to no complaints within the first two weeks or until we find solutions for the teething problems.

Reduce cost per transaction – a typical paid exhibition costs approximately £7,000 to staff the ticket station. By moving to a one off fee (plus annual service) we’ll save money within 12 months and then in year two this will return a large saving for this function.

Increase digital take-up – until now it wasn’t possible to buy exhibition tickets online or using your mobile device at the museum. This is a feature that the new system enables so we’ll spend the next 18 months actively encouraging the public to buy a ticket “digitally” as part of our move to being digital by default. An additional benefit of using our website to buy tickets is that hopefully a percentage of these visitors will discover other services and events we offer. I also do wonder if we need to get a self-service kiosk to reduce the impact on the reception.

Setting up the entry gates

The third party supplier obviously manufactured and installed the gates but there was still lots for our team to deal with. We needed input from a whole gang of people. Our operations duo worked on ensuring we had the correct physical location, power, security and fire systems integration. Via collective feedback our visitor assistants provided various customer journeys and likely pinch points. Our digital team then helped with the installation and software integration for buying tickets. Design and marketing then helped with messaging. Throughout I was charged with overseeing the project and site visits with the supplier.

The major components of the project are:

  • Physical barriers – two stainless steel coated gates with a bunch of sensors and glass doors
  • Software for the barrier
  • Web service to purchase tickets
  • Onsite EPOS to sell tickets and print which is currently located at main reception

Initial observations

I was onsite for the launch and saw the first 50 or so visitors use the entry gates. My initial observations were that the gates didn’t negatively slow or concern the visitor and having asked a number of them it wasn’t a big deal. However an obvious pinch-point is that the barcode scanner doesn’t always read the barcode, leaving the visitor struggling. My hunch at this point is that our paper tickets are too thin and bendy which means the barcode scanner fails to recognise the barcode. In the coming week we’ll need to investigate if it is the barcode or barcode scanner as the primary cause and find a fix.

When multiple visitors arrive at the barrier there can be some confusion about how “one at a time” actually works. I’m hopeful that clear messaging will iron this out.

A slight issue was that we couldn’t take online payments due to a gateway issue which we’ll have fixed Monday.

Overall I’m very happy with the introduction of the gates and once we deal with the aforementioned teething issues it should be on to the next location for these gates. This is one of those projects that can only really be tested once they go live with real visitors, and the team did a fantastic job!

Text to Pay for Museum Exhibitions: A Step-by-step guide

Paying for Pay What You Think

In 2013 Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) ran its first Pay What You Think pricing model at the temporary exhibition; Taylor Wessing: Photographic Portrait Prize. The principle is very simple – visitors enter the exhibition for free and pay the amount they feel the exhibition was worth by putting money in a box at the end of their visit. It was a success and visitors responded well to it. But, there was one sticking point; because we were only accepting cash payments our visitors were telling us that they were either not paying or paying less because they didn’t have cash on them.

A quality experience, thank you M Shed for providing it! Ps. I only have a little cash with me, but would like to have paid £5…

Some of the portraits were very moving… P.s. I gave less than £5 – all the cash I had.

This got us thinking about alternative ways of collecting payments from visitors for our next Pay What You Think temporary exhibition – death: the human experience (24 October 2015—13 March 2016). Card payments were deemed unfeasible as the Pay What You Think system is not staffed in the same way as standard ticketing – so card payments cannot be taken securely. The next thing that came to mind was payment by text message. Taking payment by text is relatively common nowadays – it can often bepudsey text to pay seen in things like charity appeals and car parks. Anyone who has used a text to pay system before will know that it is a very simple way of making a payment as it generally doesn’t require sign-up or registration. Instead, the user simply sends a text message containing a specific word to a specific number and a set amount of money is paid (I’ll explain in more detail below).

With a month to go before the opening of death: the human experience at BMAG I set about to organise a text to pay system for the exhibition. Here I run through a step-by-step guide to text to pay. Nb. there’s a bit of a catch at the end with collecting payments – the phone companies (3, EE, Vodafone etc.) will probably want to take a slice of your earnings…

Text to pay: a step-by-step guide

Searching for a Premium SMS service provider

The very first steps in setting up the text to pay were trickier than I expected. This is because I didn’t know the proper name for ‘text to pay’. Naturally, I went to google and searched for ‘text to pay provider’ (+ various versions of those words). I found a few websites, but it wasn’t immediately obvious which service I was looking for and who could provide it. I called a couple of companies who offered similar texting services but not exactly what I was looking for. Eventually, I learnt that what I wanted was called a ‘Premium SMS’ service provider. You will have much more luck searching for Premium SMS than ‘text to pay’.

So, once I had found this out I found a couple of companies that provided the s
ervice and requested quotes from them both. I got quotes from the companies Oxygen8 and txtNation (I’m sure there are oxygen8 logomany more options out there). The better quote was given by Oxygen8 – so I went with them.

Compliance and regulation

One of the things that struck me was the amount of regulation and compliance there is involved in Premium SMS. This is actually quite unsurprising as Premiuim SMS is used when you pay for app downloads and in things like TV competitions and voting on programmes like the X Factor. Premium SMS services are regulated by an independent regulatory body called PhonepayPlus – their Code of Practice is regulated by Ofcom.

gif PPP Logo

Before you can setup and run a Premium SMS service you have to register with PhonepayPlus and ensure compliance with their code of practice. All the information you will need on how to do this can be found here on their website. It is pretty straightforward; it requires some form-filling and a payment of an annual registration fee of £155 +VAT. Once you have done this you will be assigned a PhonePayPlus registration number. Ours is ORG837-51289-03976.

Setting up ‘keywords’ and ‘shortcodes’

There are two key elements of a Premium SMS system – the Keyword and the Shortcode.

It’s very simple, to make a payment the user sends a prescribed keyword (e.g. PAY5) to a shortcode (a five digit number; e.g. 63333).

Pay by text close up

The keyword is a word that the user can send in order to make a payment. In the case of our exhibition we have five different keyword options – death1, death2, death3, death5, and death10 – each of which allows for a different level of payment. When a user sends an SMS containing one of these keywords to the shortcode 63333 a payment will be made to the value of the number included in the text; e.g. text death5 and the user will be charged £5. (The payment is either taken from the remaining credit of users with pay as you go phones or it will be added to the bill of users on phone contracts).

The keywords and shortcodes are also the bit that you have to pay your provider (in our case Oxygen8) to setup. There is a charge to setup the shortcode and then a monthly fee for that shortcode – the provider is effectively renting it on your behalf. Then there is a charge to setup each keyword. In total, to setup and run the Premium SMS for the five month duration of the exhibition it cost us approx. £320.

Displaying and advertising your Premium SMS service

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As you might expect there is a bit of compliance to get through when advertising a Premium SMS service. Basically, you have to make it as clear to the user as possible that if they text one of the keywords to the number then they will be charged, and what they are being charged for. Sounds simple, but it took a few emails back and forth with our provider to get this right. The accompanying text also needs to include contact details and your PhonepayPlus registration number. (Your provider should help you with this).

Collecting Payments (here’s the catch)

I’m sorry to leave this till last but there is a catch to all of this. If, as we are, you are collecting payments using a Premium SMS service for anything other than a registered charity then the payments you receive from your visitors/customers will be subject to a levy from the phone companies (see here if you’re a charity). In other words, if one of our visitors texts to pay £5 then we will not see the whole £5, the phone company (3, EE, Vodafone etc.) will take a slice of the payment. How much they take depends on the initial value and on the phone company – but typically they take around 25%.

Our visitors to death: the human experience are responding to the text to pay service we’re offering. We know this because we can follow payments on Oxygen’s very handy online dashboard. The individual payments reach us as a single payment from our provider at the end of the exhibition (we had the option of monthly payments).

Next steps

The Premium SMS service has one final advantage – you gain access to the mobile phone contact details of your visitors. Bristol museum will not be doing any kind of follow-up messaging using our text to pay user details – this is explained to visitors in the advertising material. Other organisations may choose to use mobile phone contact details as part of their marketing.

To some extent, the Premium SMS service we’re running for death is a bit of an experiment both to make our exhibitions as user-friendly as possible and to explore different options for income generation. It’s difficult to judge the success until the exhibition has finished – but we already thinking about using Premium SMS for our one-off events and talks.

If you have any questions or comments and would like to get in touch with me directly, my email is – darren.roberts@bristol.gov.uk