GLAMi nomination: Contactless donations experience

Over the last year the Digital Media team at National Museums Scotland have been trialing the use of contactless payment technology to create new ways for our visitors to donate.

The National Museum of Scotland in the heart of Edinburgh is free to enter. We receive over two million visitors every year and rely on the generosity of our visitors’ donations to support our ongoing work. With the continued rise in contactless payments in the United Kingdom and across Europe, we wanted to use this digital technology to make it easier for people to give – and to make the process of giving as rewarding as possible.

Working with the digital agency Wiedemann Lampe, we created a video-led donations kiosk to request donations from visitors to our free exhibition on Ancient Egypt. Keeping the “one-tap-and-you’re-done” philosophy that makes contactless payments so simple, the kiosk creates a frictionless giving experience and also rewards visitors for their donation.

To achieve this, we linked up a contactless payment terminal from Payter to a display screen that featured our key messages and video clips of the exhibition curators waving and beckoning to passing visitors. When someone donates using a credit/debit card or mobile payment mechanism (Apple Pay or Android Pay) a “thank you” message appears and the screen changes to reveal the featured curators’ favourite objects from the exhibition in high definition. A totaliser screen (in the shape of a pyramid), then displays the progress made towards a top-line campaign target.

To enable these interactions, we designed a very flexible and lightweight Content Management System (CMS), that can change with minimal effort and importantly, at minimal cost. Any displayed text can be edited on the CMS, video files can be swapped out for a completely new look and the donation amount can be changed to respond to visitor behaviour.

To enable these interactions, we designed a very flexible and lightweight Content Management System (CMS), that can change with minimal effort and importantly, at minimal cost. Any displayed text can be edited on the CMS, video files can be swapped out for a completely new look and the donation amount can be changed to respond to visitor behaviour.

This project involved working closely with a range of companies (Wiedemann Lampe, Payter, Black Cat Displays and The Edinburgh Film Company), to build bespoke integrations around this new-to-market technology. The contactless terminal is connected to a Linux-run PC, which runs a Docker platform with two containers for the Payter App and a Rails App. On receiving a donation the contactless terminal communicates with the CMS and the screen displays the thank you messaging and video content.

Two further trials of contactless donations have been run at the National Museum of Scotland:

• The first was embedded within a small exhibition as part of a public fundraising campaign to help the museum acquire an extraordinary find of Viking age treasure – the Galloway Hoard. In just a six-week run, the stand-alone contactless terminal raised close to £2,500 – more than twice as much as the “text to donate” mechanism generated through the full run of the appeal.
• We are also currently running A/B tests in our Entrance Hall area, positioning a contactless terminal next to our most popular coin donation boxes. Donations from both international tourists and our loyal local visitors have generated over £1,500 since Christmas 2017.

The evidence and observed visitor behaviour from these trials is being fed into plans for a larger roll-out of contactless donation points across the museum and our three other venues in Scotland. The digital team is also in the process of re-purposing the interactive experience with new video content and messaging for use in a forthcoming fundraising campaign around two new galleries.

We are the first museum in Scotland to roll-out contactless donations for visitors and the first UK-based arts institution to build a bespoke video-led interactive experience around contactless terminals. The team have made the software available for use by others and, as the tapping continues, we have been sharing results and learning with the wider sector, across the UK and as far away as New Zealand!