Custom apps for cultural institutions: museums, theatres and heritage sites.

Most cultural institutions combine Adlib, Axiell or Memorix for collection management, ITix, Stager or Spektrix for ticketing, and separate tools for donations, audio tour hire and education. The core functions work: tickets get sold, objects get registered, donations come in. But every joined-up visitor experience stalls because no single tool was built for your specific programme, your collection or your audience. The ticketing system knows nothing about the educational flow, the audio tour knows nothing about membership, and the collection system knows nothing about what the visitor sees on their phone.

A museum wants a visitor app that combines guided tours, deep links to object information, audio content and a route map in a single tap-through, integrated with the ticketing system so that a guest has the tour content on their phone straight after buying a ticket. A theatre wants an app where subscription holders can find their season pass, vouchers and programme recommendations, plus a low-threshold donation flow without endless redirects. An archive wants a researcher portal with IIIF viewers for manuscripts and a request system for depot requests. On a standard package, that always ends in a long wish list that nobody can deliver.

Experience also shows that in culture, a software decision can echo for years. A museum that once chose an audio tour equipment supplier pays annual buy-out fees for content it produced itself. A theatre that chose a ticketing system without an open API cannot analyse its own audience data. The only way to break that dependency without a huge migration is to build your own layer that supports your visitor experience, with integrations so data is entered just once, and with a roadmap steered by your curators, your audience development team and your education staff.

A custom app solves that differently: the visitor flow is exactly what your programme requires, the collection integration is built properly once, and your education team gets a tool that serves a school class or a family day well. We work with cultural clients on an ongoing basis and also build broader app development projects, combined with a custom ticketing system where that is worthwhile. For one specific museum institution, see our page on custom museum apps; this page looks at the cultural sector as a whole.

The cultural sector has a wide range of app needs. For one museum, a visitor app with audio tour is the most important thing: stories about objects, a route map across the galleries, a sign language track and subtitles that can be called up in any room. For another museum, it is a family app in which parents and children go on a treasure hunt together, with a quiz, audio fragments at child height and a collection book at the end that can be read further at home. For a third museum, it is a member portal that links membership, donations and advance notifications to a simple profile, giving the feeling of being personally involved with the institution, without an external membership administration dictating the visual identity and communication.

For theatres and concert halls we build apps that bring together a season ticket, performance information, programme booklets and venue floor plans, linked to the ticketing system the institution already uses. We build an accessible donation flow into it, with no separate microsite, just one field and an iDEAL button, and integrate with the fundraisers' CRM where wanted. For subscribers there is a digital season ticket that can be transferred when exchanged, a recommendation engine that suits the performances they have attended, and a notification flow for changes to the programme.

For archive institutions, we build researcher portals with IIIF viewers for manuscripts, photographs and historical maps. We integrate with the collection management system for metadata, with the ordering system for depot requests and with the visitor booking system for reading room appointments. For genealogical research, we build search flows that make scans of deeds and population registers searchable, with an OCR layer on handwriting models where the material allows. Open data publication via Linked Open Data and alignment with the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed hubs are part of our standard approach, not as an afterthought but as an architectural starting point.

For education apps, we build tools that work both in the classroom and in the school hall: a teacher dashboard with groups, a pupil app that guides students through an exhibition, and an after-school module that links the visit to SLO attainment targets. We often work with partner platforms for cultural education and, where wanted, integrate with SOMtoday or Magister for group registration. For concert halls and youth theatres, we build similar school performance flows with a booking system, programme information and teaching materials in one package.

For organisations that run events, such as a museum night, a festival weekend or an opening, there is overlap with our event technology: badge systems, phased access by time slot, push notifications for programme changes and an interactive floor plan for on-site orientation. We also build immersive content apps for organisations working with VR or 360-degree video: a digital extension of an exhibition, a virtual tour for those who cannot attend, or an AR layer that continues the story beyond the gallery walls.

Finally, for donor and friends associations, we build apps that combine membership, recurring donations and a credit of visits. Integration with CRM packages such as Salesforce NPSP, Stichting Donateursbelangen tools or your own administration is standard in our approach. For institutions with an international audience, we build multilingual flows in at least Dutch, English and German, and for large museums also French, Spanish or Chinese, linked to the exhibition labels and audio tour content.