Curious Minds Discovery Zone chooses Blueshift online store to help with managing capacity at very affordable cost

By | January 26, 2021

GILBERTSVILLE, Pa. — Curious Minds Discovery Zone, a children’s museum in Parsons, Kansas, has gone live with Blueshift online store from Gateway Ticketing Systems. They’ve relied on the store for the past three months to address their capacity management needs during COVID-19.

Curious Minds Discovery Zone takes a hands-on approach to learning to help encourage children to explore their world. The Museum was founded by a group of parents that collaborated to bring their own children learning opportunities by touching and exploring the exhibits. Children and their guardians can play and explore as they move around the Museum’s science and pretend play exhibits. Children expand their imaginations as they interact with the pretend play stations that include a doctor/dentist office, grocery store, restaurant, and farm area. Kids are encouraged to explore the world around them in the science center filled with microscopes, magnifying glasses, rocks, fossils, and shells.

When the Museum was planning to reopen after closing due to COVID-19, they needed a ticketing solution that would address their capacity management needs.

“In order for our very small children’s museum to open during the pandemic we needed a way to limit the number of people in the museum at one time,” says Becky Falke, Director of Curious Minds. “Our solution for this was to add online ticket sales.”

An important factor for Becky and Curious Minds was price versus feature availability. Becky continues:

“As we started to look at companies that provided online ticket sales, we found their pricing to be out of our budget and most provided more services than we needed.  When we found the Blueshift online store from Gateway Ticketing Systems, it was the perfect solution for us! Blueshift provides us with online ticket sales that we can afford. And customers are able to reach the store, which matches our website theme, from a link on our website.”

Dave Carey is the Product Manager at Gateway Ticketing Systems who worked on the Blueshift online store. He worked closely with Curious Minds to help them find the right solution.

“Curious Minds Discovery Zone is the perfect customer for Blueshift,” says Dave. “COVID-19 caused them to change their plans for how they would be able to open. They needed capacity managed products available to their guests and a website on which to book them. Not only that, but they needed to provide their members with a way to reserve a date and time for their next visit – all things Blueshift does with ease.”

Dave continues: “Our Implementation Team was able to set-up the products quickly, the Managed Services Team created a web store that looked great, and their go-live happened in time for their opening. We were even able to create a custom ticketing option that allows their Family Membership patrons to reserve their tickets online. We went from their contract signing to them selling products on their web store in a little more than two weeks!”

Curious Minds Discovery Zone went live with Blueshift on November 4, 2020. “Working with Gateway Ticketing Systems has been friendly and helpful,” says Becky. “They walked us through this process and made it easy and understandable, especially for a company that does not have an IT department and minimal knowledge of computers.”