Submitted by: Tyler Vawser

Learn how Museum Hack uses Zight (formerly CloudApp) to share documents and photos with clients.

About our power user, Tyler Vawser

When you think juicy gossip and untold stories of famous art and artists, you probably think Hollywood or at least the latest copy of Vanity Fair. However, for Museum Hack – a company of renegade tour guides that lead “unconventional” tours at the world’s best museums – this is everyday life.

Featured in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, Newsweek and more, Museum Hack is changing the world’s perception of what museums are actually all about and helping others see art in an entirely new way. From themed tours du jour like like Game of Thrones and Pokemon Go to more meaningful tours like Big Gay Met and Badass Bitches, Museum Hack is making a social statement while using art to educate, inspire – and keep us on our toes!

We were luck enough to chat with Tyler Vawser, Head of Business Development, about Museum Hack’s expansion, how they’re using CloudApp to seriously kick up sales and why the power of storytelling is best when applied and not just talked about.‍

Q – What are/were some of your biggest challenges throughout your workday and how are you solving those challenges?

Tyler – We’ve been expanding rapidly to new cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. Every city we’re in requires new renegade guides and new tours. That means a lot of communication. From Slack to email to text messages, we have to quickly share images of art, maps. Each tour is customized, fast paced, visual and highly interactive. Our guides have to know every corner of their museums, are expected to discover the juicy details and stories behind the art.

Growing has required us to be faster at training, creating tours, and developing new experiences for our team building adventures.

‍Q – Museum Hack has experienced a ton of sales growth – congrats! Can you explain how CloudApp is helping you do that?

Tyler – We have a great sales team! We use CloudApp in training to show workflows and tools. Every day they talk to VPs, team leads and HR departments that take employee engagement and happiness seriously. Our team building events are much more exciting than an average team outing. CloudApp helps us share photos and documents with our clients before and after a tour. (After a tour or storytelling workshop, we love to send photos of teams laughing and having fun.

Our sales team also works with other museums and helps them “hack” their collections. Whether we’re creating an Escape the Museum event or talking about how to make an exhibit more accessible, CloudApp let’s us make it easily annotate and share.

We also use CloudApp in traditional ways to share screenshots, highlight web features we want to implement, and or to quickly create a password for a confidential PDF.

Q – How much time would you say you’re saving per day now?

This is so hard to calculate! It’s a multiplicative effect that keeps building.

Tyler – We might save as many as 4 hours a day across the organization, or it could be 20! It’s hard to say but it has multiple effects. We use Slack and CloudApp together to save time explaining a process or to get everyone on the same page. We also use screenshots and GIFs in our training documents. For example, a trainee who can understand a process right away starts working faster and saves their manager’s time.‍

Q – Can you tell us a little bit about what you think your customer’s experience should look like?

Tyler – Museum Hack really is an experience company. We started by creating an experience that made friends laugh and see art in an entirely new way. We’ve told thousands of stories and so we want our customers to feel and understand the power stories have. Our customers are many (the public, corporate teams, museum directors, and even brands), but the goal has stayed the same. We’re always asking, “How can we make this more interesting and exciting?” We want our customers to experience something in a new way that opens up possibilities after our tours or engagement has ended. Here’s a cool link that talks about our work and vision for our corporate clients: https://museumhack.com/manifesto/

‍Q- Where is Museum Hack? What is the overall vision?

Tyler – We’re creating great experiences at museums right now, and we’re growing beyond that space.

Team Building is a large part of our business. We host teams for excursions through the museum that offer the same, fun and fast-paced approach as our public tours, but optimized for bringing a team closer together and fostering a great company culture.

Recently, we’ve developed brand activation events for companies like Bloomingdale’s, FujiFilm, and Bark Box. Activation events are our sweet spot and we want to partner with agencies and brands that take customer experience seriously.

We’ve also been able to take our storytelling techniques and strategies (we tell 1,000 of stories every week) to the corporate and nonprofit world. Storytelling is a hot topic right now, but it tends to get stuck in theory. We’re all about experience and application. So when a sales team or fundraising team has finished a Museum Hack storytelling workshop, they are ready to find, create, and tell their own powerful and engaging stories. We’re even helping leadership teams use stories and experiences to motivate their staff and communicate better.