Museums Are Spending More but Getting Less from Their Tech

Walk through any museum’s back office and you hear the same sighs. Ticketing screens still look like Windows 95. Donor data lives in a tool no one can customize without a consultant on retainer. Marketing works from spreadsheets because the “CRM” can’t store the fields they need. Point solutions arrive promising quick relief but soon become another silo.

Staff copy-and-paste visitor lists, then re-key gifts because two systems refuse to share a language. No one trusts the numbers, so meetings stall while departments reconcile reports. Hard costs rise with every new license. Soft costs pile up as talented people spend hours on manual fixes.

This patchwork was never a strategy; it grew one urgent purchase at a time. Now IT budgets strain under maintenance fees and integration projects that never end. Programs slow, donors wait, and visitors notice the gaps. Museums need a single, modern foundation that ends the sprawl and frees staff to focus on mission again.

The Tools That Piled Up Over Time

Each “must-have” tool solved one pain point and introduced two new costs: a license fee and an integration project. Staff hours drifted from curation toward technical triage.

Two Paths, One Choice
Before the first dollar is saved, leaders want proof. The comparison below uses a mid-sized art museum (~300 k annual visitors and a twelve-person advancement team) to show what three years of technology really costs. One column reflects a familiar mix of Tessitura, Blackbaud, email plug-ins, and custom integrations. The other column combines HubSpot’s all-in-one platform with the MuseumHub layer built specifically for museums. Every figure comes from published vendor price lists, common nonprofit discounts, and salary benchmarks from SMU DataArts.HubSpot folds CRM, CMS, marketing automation, and reporting into one contract. MuseumHub adds ticketing, donor journeys, and museum-specific dashboards. Duplicate licenses disappear, middleware vanishes, and administrative hours drop sharply.

Hidden Costs Below the Waterline

License fees sit at the tip of the budget, easy to spot and simple to justify. Beneath that, a larger mass of expenses drifts out of sight. Month after month these invisible charges pull cash and staff time away from exhibitions, outreach, and education. They rarely appear in board packets, yet they drain mission dollars all the same.

When leaders ask why technology costs keep rising, these hidden fees tell the real story. Shifting to a single, modern platform makes the entire iceberg visible and, more importantly, removes most of its weight from your budget.

Speed to Value

Traditional museum platforms average nine to eighteen months from signed contract to live launch. During that time staff wait, consultants bill hours, and enthusiasm fades. Million-dollar implementations are not uncommon. HubSpot onboarding wraps in two to four weeks, and MuseumHub is implemented alongside it. Within sixty days your team publishes events, automates renewals, and watches real donor data flow into a single record. Faster wins improve morale and place savings on the financial statement far sooner.

One Platform, One Contract

Here's how work flows at a typical museum: Marketing drafts an email in MailChimp, exports a list, uploads it to Tessitura, asks IT to sync donors back into Raiser's Edge, then waits for a ticket sales report in Excel.

Five logins, three approval chains, a morning consumed.

Here's how work flows for museums using MuseumHub: CRM, CMS, email, automation, tickets, membership, and reporting live in one interface. A curator drags a “Special Exhibit Ticket” module onto a page, schedules a donor segment email, and sees purchases update the same record in real time. Accounting cuts a single purchase order and IT monitors one uptime feed.

Less effort on glue work means more energy for visitor experiences.

Open APIs Bring Every Museum Tool Into One View

HubSpot publishes public APIs for more than twelve hundred applications. MuseumHub extends those endpoints for cultural-sector data. The result is a living dashboard that pulls records from systems you already own. Future tools use the same open door, so the museum avoids lock-in and keeps data portable.

Snapshot: Minnesota Historical Society