For Creative Discovery Museum, understanding the full journey of a constituent is critical.
A visitor might start as a museum member, become a donor, attend an event, enroll a child in a program, and make purchases in the museum shop. Before Veevart, those interactions lived across separate systems and required significant manual work to connect.
Today, Creative Discovery Museum has a unified view of its constituents, faster reporting, and a more seamless experience for guests.
"It was just a complete flip. A paradigm shift from where we were before Veevart."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
Significantly Fewer
For Month-End Reporting
Month-end reporting across four budgets
Unified Constituent View
Member and donor information that previously lived across three separate databases can now be viewed together through one system.
Annual Visitors
One of the nation's leading children's museums, with every interaction captured in one system.
A Manual Process That Hid the Full Constituent Journey
Before Veevart, much of Creative Discovery Museum's membership and constituent management was manual. The process consumed a significant portion of the membership and events team's time.
"The bulk of my 40-hour work week was manual entry of memberships and creating that constituent journey by hand."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
The challenge went beyond data entry. Information about members, donors, and other constituents was fragmented across three different databases. The museum could see individual pieces of a constituent's relationship with the institution, but not the complete picture.
That made it difficult for teams to share information across departments or understand how different interactions connected.
For example, a constituent might interact with education, development, events, and the museum shop, but those interactions were not easily connected.
The result was a fragmented view of the people the museum served.
Building One Complete View of the Constituent
Creative Discovery Museum wanted more than a new CRM. It wanted a system that could bring together the different pieces of a constituent's journey and make that information useful across the organization.
During implementation, the museum worked closely with Veevart to review legacy data, identify what was needed, and prioritize improvements.
The goal was clear: make the system easier for guests to use while creating a much more complete view of constituent activity behind the scenes.
"We need to see the path our constituent goes on, whether they were a member pre-COVID, a capital donor, or an annual donor. Seeing that entire journey helps determine where we go in the future. That storytelling helps shape what our strategic plan looks like for the next five years."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
Veevart also opened up new opportunities around memberships, donations, e-commerce, events, and fees.
Digital membership cards, gift memberships, recurring donations, fee coverage, and shop items gave the museum new ways to engage constituents and capture additional revenue.
Month-End Reporting in One Day Instead of 10 to 15
The most concrete operational improvement is month-end reporting. What previously took between 10 and 15 days can now be completed in a single day across four different budgets representing more than $1 million in revenue.
The reporting also holds up to outside scrutiny. Creative Discovery Museum outsources its financials to another museum, whose finance team defined what a proper checks-and-balances process required. Working with their Veevart account manager, the museum built base reports to meet that standard.
The faster process frees the team to focus on other projects instead of spending nearly two weeks on month-end work, and gives the museum a more timely view of its financial information for planning and decision-making.
"They told us what they needed for a checks-and-balances system, and we worked with our account manager to create those base reports. Typically, month-end reporting was taking me anywhere between 10 to 15 days. Now I can do month-end reporting for four different budgets, over a million dollars in revenue, in a day."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
Broadening Giving Beyond Major Donors
Before Veevart, some of the most common giving opportunities in the museum world were simply out of reach. There was no way to set up recurring donations, no way to invite guests to cover transaction fees, and no easy path from an everyday purchase to a gift.
With Veevart, those moments became revenue. Members can add a small donation when they renew. Guests can cover credit card fees on everything from a single ticket to a thousand-person after-hours event. Donors can set up recurring gifts on their own, online.
None of it replaces major gifts. It builds the base of the pyramid underneath them, capturing support the museum was previously leaving on the table.
"Veevart really opened a lot of doors for us to capture more than just our higher-level donors. We were able to get $5 donations from a member when they bought a membership, or have them cover our fees on a thousand-person after-hours party. As a nonprofit, it opened up so many ways to cover fees and expenses you don't really think of."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
Data That Scales With the Museum
Creative Discovery Museum welcomes more than 300,000 visitors a year and serves 7,000 member households, placing it among the nation's leading children's museums. At that scale, understanding how people interact with the institution becomes increasingly valuable.
At that scale, understanding what visitors do across the institution becomes increasingly important.
Veevart allows the museum to connect interactions across memberships, camps, education programs, ticketing, and retail, creating a more complete picture of how constituents engage with the institution.
That information can then be segmented and used for planning, budgeting, and future growth.
“All of this is holistically brought back together through Veevart, and we can now report on that and plan accordingly.”
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
The result is a system that supports not only the people walking through the museum's doors, but also the people the museum serves beyond them.
Turning Data Into a Tool for the Entire Museum
The value of connected data extends beyond the core CRM users. Education programs, summer camps, and early childhood programs now run through Veevart, and that changed not just what the museum can capture, but where that information lives.
Before, camp registration was manual and there was no form building at all. If a family reported an allergy or a diagnosis, that detail lived wherever it happened to be submitted, disconnected from everything else the museum knew about them. Now, custom forms are built into the platform itself. A detail captured at registration becomes part of the constituent record: it persists, it flows into the reports educators pull into their daily process, and it sits alongside that family's membership, ticketing, and giving history rather than in a one-off form nobody can find next season.
Allergies are one example. The broader point is granularity: each program can capture exactly the information it needs, and that information stays usable across the organization instead of being re-collected every year. The museum's power users group reflects the same breadth, with staff from development, the front line, and education all working in one system, each looking at the data through a different lens.
"Prior to Veevart, we were doing everything manually. We were not able to capture if a child had a diagnosis or an allergy. Now our educators take those reports into their day-to-day process, and they're never coming back to us saying, 'I missed this, I need this.' We capture all of that information up front."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
Connecting the Dots Across the Museum
Before Veevart, member and donor information was divided across three separate databases.
That made it difficult to understand the complete relationship between a constituent and the museum.
With Veevart, those interactions can be brought together into a single view.
A constituent's journey can include:
Membership
Donations
Events
Education programs
Summer camps
Ticketing
Museum shop purchases
E-commerce activity
The museum can now capture those interactions and use the information to understand its constituents more holistically.
"Being able to capture as much information as we can... we can now segment them into different areas based on the information that Veevart has captured."
That broader view helps the museum plan, budget, communicate, and make strategic decisions based on the complete constituent relationship.
Less Searching. More Seamless Experiences.
The benefits of a unified system extend beyond reporting and development.
Previously, front-line staff could need to search across multiple databases to find information about a visitor.
Now, information is available through one system.
“We're dealing with all of that in the back end, but then when guests visit us, we're not searching three different databases for their information when they walk in the door.”
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
That creates a cleaner experience for both staff and guests.
Whether someone is arriving as a member, attending an event, participating in a program, or making a purchase, the museum has more context available to create a seamless experience.
"It makes their journey coming into this museum so much easier and so much cleaner."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
Building the Platform Together
For Creative Discovery Museum, implementation was not simply about moving existing processes into a new system.
The museum worked with Veevart to identify what it wanted the platform to accomplish and prioritize improvements that could benefit both the museum and the broader Veevart community.
The relationship became an ongoing process of improving how the museum works.
"Every system takes time. It has its kinks. But Veevart has done such a great job from an account management standpoint. Anytime we have a change in the museum, and we're changing all the time, they make sure that journey is good for any guest who walks in the building or goes to the e-commerce side."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
That collaborative approach helped the museum create a platform that worked for its specific needs while also contributing ideas that could benefit other museums.
Why Creative Discovery Museum Chose Veevart
A Unified Constituent Journey
The museum needed to connect memberships, donations, events, education, ticketing, and retail into a more complete view of each constituent.
Faster Reporting
Veevart dramatically reduced the time required to complete month-end reporting.
Better Guest Experiences
Front-line teams can access information without searching across multiple databases.
New Revenue Opportunities
Digital memberships, recurring donations, fee coverage, gift memberships, and e-commerce created new opportunities to engage constituents and capture revenue.
Cross-Departmental Visibility
Teams across development, education, front-line operations, and other areas can work from connected information.
The Advice for Other Museum Leaders
Every system takes time to implement and will have its challenges.
What matters is having a technology partner that understands how quickly museums change and can support those changes.
"Anytime that we have a change in the museum, I mean, we're changing all the time."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum
For Creative Discovery Museum, the ability to adapt the system as the museum evolves has been an important part of the relationship.
The goal is ultimately the same: make every interaction easier for the people the museum serves.
A Complete View of Every Constituent
Veevart helped Creative Discovery Museum move from manual processes and fragmented databases to a connected system that gives the organization a clearer picture of every constituent's journey.
Month-end reporting that once took 10 to 15 days can now be completed in one day.
Member, donor, education, event, ticketing, and retail interactions can be connected.
And with more than 300,000 visitors a year, the museum has a system capable of capturing and using that information at scale.
"Veevart has helped us really look at the constituent's journey, has helped us with storytelling and helps us continue that storytelling into the future, making sure that CDM is the best place for a child to grow up."
Briana
Director of Membership and Events, Creative Discovery Museum