Located in Altoona, PA, the Railroaders Memorial Museum and Horseshoe Curve Landmark are popular stops for Railroad enthusiasts from all around the world. Learning the history, and understanding the significance of this living memorial to the workers of the Pennsylvania Railroad was vital for this project.
The Museum offers many historic attractions as well as hosting live events. One of our goals was to update the look of the site but stick with a traditional historic feel that compliments their established branding, but add a fresh, young feel that would appeal to visitors of all ages.
The museum is non-profit and needed NOVA6 to create and execute a fundraising strategy. Our team understood it was vital to offer visitors a variety of ways to financially support the museum. The most obvious and simple way to raise funds was to develop a donation portal and create multiple on-line campaigns, including: general donations, recurring donations, restoration project donations, and in memory of donations. The memorial campaign was designed, such that, the user can purchase a brick or honorary plaque to be placed in the roundhouse for their loved ones.
Additional fundraising initiatives that NOVA6 executed include a public membership signup that featured the membership benefits, which can be purchased online. We also designed a call to action for corporate sponsors to call for information regarding business memberships. The museum needed the corporate sponsors to speak to a specific contact person to design their business membership benefits.
NOVA6 transformed the Railroaders Memorial Museum gift shop into a virtual, e-commerce, store to bring in more sales from outside the area. The functionality of the store allowed users to purchase souvenirs and memorabilia using paypal. The website had more than 400,000 visitors in 2015.
The website was designed to effectively promote upcoming events, with a focus on the alive@5 concert series. We created a platform for users to purchase online tickets in advance, which was not a functionality of the previous website and increased ticket sales exponentially.
Another promotion effort was to communicate the facility was available for rentals, groups, and field trips. Shortly after the new website went live, the previous mentioned activities increased.
