Open Forum

We're looking to acquire some CRM software for our museum, and specifically looking at Patron Manager and TAMRetail. 

Does anyone use either of these at their museum, or have another software to suggest? Looking for feedback, good & bad!

Thanks in advance!

------------------------------
Stephanie MacLean
Marketing & membership coordinator
Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art
San Bernardino CA
------------------------------

I don't have any experience with Patron Manager, but our institution has been using TAM as our point of sale system since before I was hired.

Since CRM is one of the core elements of our business, you need to make sure that the CRM system you choose can be easily integrated into your other business systems. You want to make that data easily accessible to ticketing, email and postal mailing systems, event registration and reservation and whatever else you do. TAM is basically a black box. You cannot easily get data into or out of their system. Patron Manager appears to be built on top of Salesforce, which is a very open CRM package that can be easily integrated into other systems. For that reason alone, I would find it significantly more appealing than TAM. 

More than that though, TAM is not a CRM software package. It's focused pretty squarely on point of sale and inventory with an ecommerce add-on. It has some contact management built in as a consequence of handling online sales (and shipping), but those features are minimal and probably will not meet your needs for actual contact management. This is especially true when trying to track things like donor relations, volunteers, membership and all of the other specialized CRM needs of a museum.

------------------------------
Matt Popke
Denver Art Museum
Denver CO
------------------------------

The POS system we use is Booklog. As for CRM, we're finalizing our integration/implementation of Portfolio (Amergent), but this may have more moving parts than you need.  I'm not in a position to speak to their merits, but if you're interested, I could put you in contact with the folks who are?

------------------------------
Bruce Falk
Contracting Officer
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Washington DC
------------------------------