Transforming Visitor Experiences - How Thanksgiving Point's Mobile App Revolutionized Engagement to Enhance Guest Experiences
Thanksgiving Point Institute is a nonprofit farm, garden, and museum complex that draws upon the natural world to cultivate transformative family learning. Using the natural world as a springboard for exploration, Thanksgiving Point combines place and process to shape today’s problem solvers into tomorrow’s makers and innovators.
Between May 2022 and April 2023, Thanksgiving Point's mobile app underwent a remarkable transformation, from an underutilized ticketing platform to a feature-rich and highly popular application. With a redesigned interface and added interactive elements, the app witnessed a significant increase in users. We recently talked with Spencer Gregory, Thanksgiving Point’s Email Marketing Manager, to learn why they reinvented their app and how they attracted over 28,000 new users in one year.
InstantEncore (IE): Thanksgiving Point launched its mobile app in 2017. As of May 1, 2022, your app was installed on 4,288 devices. One year later, your app was installed on 33,230 devices. How did you acquire so many new downloads in a single year? What changed?
Spencer Gregory (SG): I think the biggest thing that changed is that we internally assigned someone on our team to focus on the app.
“Since we launched our mobile app, it had never fully been utilized and given much focus. Before we used it primarily as a ticketing app. Now, we’ve completely redesigned the entire look and feel of the app and added other interactive elements like games, guides, dining reservations, daily programs, audio tours, and more!”
IE: The first jump in new users happened in June 2022. What did you do in June to promote the Thanksgiving Point app? Which communication channels did you use to deliver your message to members and visitors? What was your message?
SG: June of 2022 is when we started to really focus on advertising the app. Before June, our app wasn’t ready to be highly promoted to our guests, it was confusing to navigate and we weren’t very proud of our app. Since we made a lot of changes, we focused on utilizing email marketing to really promote the app. We used our pre-visit emails and post-visit emails to announce that we had an app. This was a huge selling point for our members, because they could digitally save the membership card. We continued to promote awareness of the app and later started to promote the app with various promotions and giveaways.
Thanksgiving Point has guides in its app for each of its five venues - including the Butterfly Biosphere.
IE: The largest jump in new users happened in November and December. Does that track with increased attendance during the holidays? What did you do to promote the app during this time? Did your message change from the one used in June?
SG: The largest jump in new users primarily happened in November and December due to one of our largest events of the year, Luminaria. This event draws thousands of people each night to explore the over 50 acres of our Ashton Gardens to explore over 6,500 programmable luminaries blanketing a hill along with a 120-foot tree and tons of festive lights throughout the gardens. We really utilized the pre-visit emails for guests to download the app to view their tickets. We have usually directed them to our website to view their tickets but instead primarily focused on communicating with our guests to download the app to view their tickets. Just that small enough change in communication brought us higher numbers in active app users.
“We also offered a promotion for about a week and a half to download the app to get free hot chocolate during Luminaria. This helped to get over 20,000 active downloads.”
IE: What are your goals for the Thanksgiving Point app?
SG: Our goals for the Thanksgiving Point app are to consistently get better and better. Working with the Instant Encore team has been fundamental to our success. We have constantly brought new ideas and the Instant Encore team has been incredible to help us in the right direction to obtain these goals. We will continue to receive feedback from our guests on how to make this a better experience. Of course, our main focus is to improve the experience for all of our members. However, we continue to make goals to improve the app for our guests who are not members.
Thanksgiving Point recently created a Dinosaur Personality Test. they added it to their app with an iframe.
IE: How does your app make your organization better?
SG: The Thanksgiving Point app makes our organization better because it allows us to connect with our guests in a meaningful way. Pre-visit emails and social media posts will only go so far to get guests to come experience Thanksgiving Point, but our app allows us to communicate with our guests during their visit on property and hopefully makes a strong enough impact for our guests to stay connected long after their visit.
IE: How does the Thanksgiving Point app make your patrons’ experience better?
SG: We have recently added guides for each of our properties. Thanksgiving Point is a non-profit organization that consists of 5 venues: the Ashton Gardens, Farm Country, Museum of Natural Curiosity, Butterfly Biosphere, and Mountain America Museum of Ancient Life. Providing our guests with guides to explore each specific property has helped them to engage and interact with things such as daily programs during their visit or make dining reservations or create a mobile order from their phone. We hope that the Thanksgiving Point app helps our guests to have a better experience when on property that will make a lifetime impact.
IE: From May 2022 through April 2023, your app users displayed their membership barcodes over 129,000 times. How can Thanksgiving Point members use their digital membership cards onsite?
SG: Because of our huge success, we decided to go completely paperless with our membership cards in March of 2023. When a member comes on property their digital membership card is scanned along with providing photo ID. This interaction has helped our members to quickly get scanned in so they have more time to experience the venue and less time trying to check-in.
IE: Aside from accessing digital tickets and membership cards, what else can patrons do in your app?
SG: Our guests can reserve or buy tickets, make dining reservations, explore daily programs and helpful guides, play fun games like the Thanksgiving Point Wordle, listen to audio tours, save time with mobile ordering, read stories on our blog, view upcoming events, and much more!
IE: I noticed that you use quite a few iframes to embed web content in your app. Do you have any advice for organizations who want to do that but haven’t worked with iframes before?
Thanksgiving Point uses iframes to add a variety of content for the 2023 Tulip Festival.
SG: The majority of our app pages are built using an iframe. This allows us to quickly make any changes needed to any of our app pages and allows us to add more custom content like the Thanksgiving Point Wordle and dining reservations from OpenTable. I would recommend working with the InstantEncore team to make sure your width and height are set up correctly so the iframe fills the entirety of the screen. With iframes it can be challenging for the iframe to be set up properly on all types of screen sizes. However, the InstantEncore team helped us with the iframe code for each page to fit properly.
IE: Do you have any tips or tricks you’ve learned to make managing the app easier?
SG: Plan to manage the app and make changes as much as you can. We have found that our guests, especially our members who use the app the most want to see new content. However, they want an app that is familiar and easy to navigate. We have found that we have had to test a lot and conduct surveys to help manage the app in the way that our guests want and expect.
IE: Over the past year, Thanksgiving Point created 109 push notifications sending a total of 437,819 messages to patrons’ devices. What is your strategy for using push notifications?
SG: We have had to test our push notifications a lot to see what our guests are really wanting. You have to be careful with what type of notifications you are sending out and who it is going to. At least for our guests, we have found that specific notifications like “Welcome to Thanksgiving Point” that goes to a specific guide to wherever they are visiting work a lot better than over promoting them with marketing spam.
Thanksgiving Point uses Appscension’s integration with Prospect 2 to send automated push notifications.
We have really been utilizing the new Prospect2 integration that allows us to schedule out app notifications like you would a pre-visit email or text. We still occasionally send out promotions to everyone from time to time but have found the less is better. However, I feel like each organization is different and will have to test out their app push notifications differently from Thanksgiving Point.
Tip: Learn how you can automate push notifications with Prospect 2
What is your favorite thing about the Thanksgiving Point mobile app?
“Our favorite thing about the Thanksgiving Point app is how easy it is for our members to scan their digital memberships. This has really been a game changer for Thanksgiving Point. It has allowed our members to really have a connection to Thanksgiving Point besides the typical marketing that usually annoys people.”
- Spencer Gregory, Email Marketing Manager, Thanksgiving Point Institute
SG: We have the Thanksgiving Point app to promote our upcoming events and things happening at Thanksgiving Point. However, we have learned the more subtle the marketing the better. When we first started, our home page was full of marketing material. However, with surveys we found that people wanted more helpful links such as reserving tickets or things to explore while on property.
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InstantEncore is an EcoSystem partner of the Tessitura Network, the licensor and developer of Tessitura Software. The Tessitura Network does not support or verify the effectiveness of the integration or the capabilities of this product. Any and all support and questions regarding this application should be directed solely to InstantEncore.