Exhibitly (in progress)

What is Exhibitly?

Exhibitly is a new take on mobile applications and CMS portals for facilities and their guests. Like other products on the market, our platform will allow facilities to share additional content such as audio commentary, imagery, videos, and text related to exhibits showcased in their facility. Guests will be able to use the mobile application to access this additional content using either QR code scanning, image recognition, or a number entry system. Guests will also be able to access facility information (address, hours, calendar of events, etc.), audio/video tours, interactive facility maps, polls, and much more. So what makes Exhibitly different?

Mobile Initiative Pain Points

More and more cultural institutions are seeking ways to engage with their guests and offer a more participatory experience. One of the solutions that is gaining a lot of traction in the industry is mobile applications. While a great solution if built correctly, mobile applications still have a few roadblocks preventing their widespread adoption in the industry.

1. Cost – depending on the scale of your model, a mobile application can cost thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars to develop and maintain. Many institutions simply cannot afford the overhead or man hours needed to build a mobile application.
2. Development – cultural institutions do not normally have a staff with mobile application development experience. This means they must hire a team of developers or contract with a mobile development company to build their application.
3. Singularity – each institution that has a mobile application developed has done so with their own vision for the layout, graphics, content, etc. This ‘singular’ approach can be a roadblock for adoption by guests as they are left with the task of searching for, downloading, and learning a new application for each facility they visit.

Removing the Pain Points with Exhibitly

Exhibitly is approaching the problem with a different solution than what has been offered in the past. Our model aims to eliminate all of the pain points above by delivering a robust, single application that can be used in any facility around the world.

1. Cost – any cultural institution will be able to participate for free, regardless of size or number of exhibits. By eliminating the cost of entry for institutions, we free up those resources and allow them to be directed to areas such as content creation or exhibit expansion. Our application will also be free for guests to download and use. We will not ‘backdoor’ charge guests with in-app purchases to access additional content.
2. Development – we will develop the application along with the CMS portal. No need to hire your own developers.
3. Singularity – one app means one community. Instead of a different app for each facility, we will incorporate all facilities under a single application that guests can download to their mobile devices. With this model we create a community of facilities and guests, allowing guests to share content with their social networks, make recommendations, see all nearby facilities, earn rewards, etc.

Get Involved

At this time we are still in pre-development planning and would like to get as much feedback from the community as possible about our model, the feature set, and current mobile initiatives. We have set up a short survey that facilities can take and help us develop the best possible product. We can never get enough feedback so we urge everyone to take the survey. You can access the survey by clicking here or copying and pasting the following URL in your browser: http://survey.exhibit.ly/survey/index.php?sid=75353&lang=en.