Thinking Outside the Box - Sir John Soane's Museum

Sir John Soane’s Museum is the perfectly preserved house and Museum of Sir John Soane, one of Britain’s most celebrated architects. Soane’s work includes Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Bank of England and several country houses, but it’s his home and museum which remains the best surviving example of his genius.

Soane was a visionary, who used his home as a laboratory for his ideas and as the repository for his various collections.

These include some 54,000 objects, including 30,000 drawings, paintings by, amongst others, Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner and Canaletto, architectural models, Greek and Roman sculpture, Egyptian antiquities and 7,000 rare books, including first editions of Milton and Shakespeare.

It is a vast, remarkable collection, full of curiosities and surprises.

The Museum runs around eighty varied free and charged events that it is necessary to ticket for. Previously the Museum was reliant on external ticket agencies to set up tickets, meaning that people were taken away from the Soane website, that there were no opportunities to upsell related products or for people to book multiple events in a single transaction.

It was also an ‘off brand’ experience for guests and was difficult in terms of managing multiple mailing lists from the admin side. The Museum was also paying thousands of Pounds per year in ticket agency commission.

The Museum’s digital agency Un.titled was tasked with creating a bespoke ticketing service that was fit for the Soane’s size and budget.

Since implementation the Museum has made significant savings on agency commission, has been able to collect visitor data for its own mailing list and customers are channelled through the online shop, thus increasing the exposure of the other items (events and products) and leading to incremental add-on sales.