Inside a Bohaus Sprint: A Small Museum

The situation

The client is a small independent nonprofit museum, run by an executive director who works the way an owner does: on everything. A local history collection, rotating exhibits, a handful of staff, a volunteer corps and a board. Tickets sell through a point-of-sale system at the front desk and online. Membership has its own spreadsheet. Donors live in another, kept by the development lead. Event RSVPs come in through a form tool and end up in a third.

The same person can appear in all three, spelled three ways. A family that visits every summer, gives at year end and comes to the spring gala may never be asked to become members. A member whose card lapses in March may not hear from anyone until the next annual appeal.

Membership is the museum's most predictable income, and it leaks quietly.

What the sprint finds

In Discover, we collect every list the museum keeps and ask who updates each one, how often, and what it is used for. We sit with the front desk during a weekend shift and with the development lead during a mailing.

The finding is a data problem before it is a marketing problem. There is no single record of a person. Renewals depend on someone remembering to filter the membership spreadsheet. Donor acknowledgments are written from scratch. Event guests are thanked once and never asked back.

We also check what the museum already pays for. Many small museums have a donor CRM such as Bloomerang, Altru or Little Green Light, licensed for development work but never extended to membership and events. Others have nothing yet, and a cleaned, well-structured list in a low-cost CRM is enough.

In Diagnose, one contact record with automated renewal follow-up ranks first. It touches every income line, and it costs little to run once the data is clean.

What it builds

In Build, we merge the lists. AI helps with the slow part: matching the same person across spreadsheets despite nicknames, married names, old addresses and typos, and flagging likely duplicates for a staff member to confirm. Nothing is merged without a person approving the match.

Each contact ends up with one record showing membership level and expiry, giving history, events attended and visits where the ticketing system allows. The point of sale and the event form feed new contacts into the CRM rather than into new spreadsheets.

Then the follow-up. Members get a renewal sequence that starts before expiry and stops the moment they renew. Lapsed members get a short win-back series. Event guests who are not members get an invitation to join. Gifts trigger an acknowledgment draft for the development lead to personalize and send.

Hand over

In Hand over, the development lead and the front desk lead learn the CRM in depth, including how to review possible duplicates and edit the sequences. Volunteers who work the desk get a short session on looking someone up and recording a membership sale. A playbook sets data entry rules so the record stays clean, and names who owns it.

The director gets a dashboard of members by expiry month, renewals, lapses and new joins, plus a 30/60/90-day roadmap.

What changes

Renewal stops depending on memory. Members hear from the museum before their card expires. Event guests are invited to join while the evening is still fresh. The development lead stops reconciling three spreadsheets before every mailing. The board gets one membership number everyone agrees on.

The staff is the same size. It just stops chasing lists.

What this means for your business

When the same customer lives in three lists, the first fix is the record, not the campaign.

For a small museum, that is members, donors and guests in one place. For a dry cleaner, route customers moved out of a notebook. For a marina, slip holders and service customers in one system.

That is a Bohaus Sprint: six weeks, fixed scope, four phases (Discover, Diagnose, Build, Hand over), and one live system inside the tools you already use, with a trained team, a playbook, a dashboard and a 30/60/90-day roadmap.