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Museum Venue uses EMS for Internal Department Communication & Special Event Planning
October 03, 2018

Museum Venue uses EMS for Internal Department Communication & Special Event Planning

Allegra Pierce | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with EMS Software

We use EMS for two purposes. Each department in our museum uses EMS to book meeting spaces and plan their own internal events or events on behalf of the museum. I work in the Culinary/Special Events department. We work with external clients to plan private events at the museum. We use EMS during our whole process. We create bookings, build BEOS and invoice through EMS.

EMS helps everyone know what is happening in the building at any given time. We have many people and programs at the museum at any given time and we're able to give internal departments ability to see everything that is happening. We also use it as a communication tool. We have programmed several notifications that notify specific departments about reservations and resources. We also use the reporting function every day across departments.
  • Allows us to create specific reports for each department. For example, each month we report on financial earnings based on external events. EMS allows us to pull events based on parameters we set.
  • We are able to create resources specific to what we provide as a museum. For example, we can put completely customized menus into EMS. There is a lot of freedom in creating new resources.
  • We have many various event spaces as well as "non-building" items that need to be booked as rooms. For example, we have hundreds of tours that go through our building. We are able to set up tours as "rooms" and our staff is able to view the tours going on the same way they could view meeting rooms or event spaces. We also utilize this for van reservations.
  • It would be helpful if we could create multiple invoices per reservation. Currently, we can only create 1 invoice per event. So if a client needs a zero balance invoice, we can't send them a formal invoice. We have to send them a Summary of Charges. Once their payment is processed, then we can process the official invoice.
  • We have to use separate ticketing software for our museum. It would be helpful if EMS could talk to ticketing software or if it eventually had a ticketing function.
  • It would be helpful if EMS could also talk to staffing software or have a staffing function.
  • EMS saves us time in offering one place where all departments can store information about upcoming events. All departments have access to EMS and can store their information there.
  • EMS allows us to track revenue on a monthly and yearly basis allowing us to create reports we then use for decision making. For example, we were able to to determine revenue gained and use that data to predict future revenue.
  • EMS reporting allows us to provide a large overview of events taking place in our museum on a daily basis . We send out a Daily Calendar Report to our Protection Services Staff and Guest Services staff. They are then able to give a summary to their employees in their daily debrief meetings.
EMS handles all of our needs very well. Even with a growing staff and growing resources and services, we're still able to work well within EMS capability. For example, while we have a limited amount of rooms, we have growing amount of items that are listed as "rooms" such as group tours and pre-set lunch reservations. We are constantly adding new resources and there is no danger of outgrowing EMS.
For our purposes, the configurability works well. There are certain reports that we would like to configure more in terms of format. For example, there are elements of our service orders templates that our catering staff would like to change. Overall, we are able to function fine with the report and service order templates.
EMS is well suited to event venues that have several rental space options. You are able to view multiple areas at the same time so you're able to see multiple reservations at the same time. It also serves as a useful communication tool across departments. We have 200+ employees and several employees in each department have access to EMS. We're able to add notes and comments that can be seen by all necessary parties without having to use another tool such as a google sheet or shared document. In our venue, most of our services are in house (catering, facilities, av, etc.). EMS allows us to add all of those details into one space.

I found it was less useful in a venue that only had one main event space. It was still somewhat useful for creating BEOs, but we did not need EMS to it's full extent. We also only had 4 employees so communication was less difficult.