Industries · Children's museums

Hands-on marketing for children's museums

You shouldn't have to explain field trips, member renewals, or a capital campaign to your agency.

We're the marketing team behind children's museums in Charleston and Columbia, and the consultant who builds new ones nationwide. Brand, website, ticketing, social, video, advertising, the gala. We make digital make sense.

Book a discovery call →See the work

Children's museum clients and partners:

Children's Museum of the Lowcountry
EdVenture Children's Museum, Columbia
EdVenture Children's Museum, Myrtle Beach
Museum Crafters

Twelve months, one museum

Turning clicks into visits

1.46M: paid impressions in the Charleston market
7,100+: online ticket and store purchases through the site we built
$0.56: average cost per click on Meta, at a 1.76% click-through rate
202K: organic Instagram views in twelve months

Source: the Children's Museum of the Lowcountry's GA4, Meta Ads, and Instagram accounts, August 2025 to July 2026.

Sound familiar?

The problems we get hired to solve

“Our brand hasn't been touched in fifteen years.”

The logo doesn't scale, nobody can find the real files, and the signage, the website, and the t-shirts are all slightly different colors.

What we do: Full rebrands, deployed everywhere, including inside the building.

“We're renovating and I'm terrified of the attendance hit.”

Construction means closures, confused families, and a revenue gap right when you can least afford one.

What we do: We've run a museum's marketing through a major renovation, start to reopening.

“Our team is me, and I also run birthday parties.”

Content, ads, press, influencers, the lobby screens, the newsletter, the gala: all on one desk.

What we do: We become the department, not another vendor you have to manage.

The work

One team for all of your museum's marketing

The brand, the website, the ticketing, the content, and the ads. Which is why a family gets the same museum in a hotel lobby, on Instagram, and at the front desk.

01 · The rebrand

Children's Museum of the Lowcountry

A new identity built from the logo out, then carried through a major renovation without losing a season of attendance.

Before: one weight, one color, no mark. The museum had a mascot, but he lived nowhere near the logo, so the identity disappeared on signage and gave the museum nothing to build on.

After: a badge that plants the museum in the Lowcountry, three lockups, the mascot finally brought into the system, and an eight-color palette deep enough to code every program and campaign.

Before

After

02 · The digital stack

Then we built the thing that sells the tickets

A rebrand that stops at the logo file is a design project. We carried it into the website, the ticketing, and the store, which is why we can tell you what a campaign actually sold.

Advance admission and Donate in the header: both revenue actions are one click from any page
Ticketing, the online store, and Square run as one system, not three
Conversion tracking end to end: 7,100+ purchases measured in twelve months

The Children's Museum of the Lowcountry homepage, explorecml.org — explorecml.org

03 · Social, content, and creative

Social built to fill the galleries

We run the channels end to end, organic and paid as one program, with content, community management, and the ad budget behind it. The goal isn't reach, it's families walking through the door. We ran EdVenture's channels too.

CML · museum life, cut for Reels

CML · membership video, shot and cut in-house

CML · Splash Pad

Client work shown with permission.

What we do

Everything under one roof

Take the whole thing or take the piece that's on fire. Most museums start with one project and grow into the partnership.

Brand

Rebrands, asset systems, mascots, and original IP, and in-museum deployment: signage, wayfinding, gallery graphics.

Web Development

Websites, ticketing (Blackbaud and most major platforms), online store, Square, membership flows, and board-ready reporting.

Content Creation

Video, photography, graphics, gallery screens, and email. Podcasts through The Pod Factory.

Social Media

Channel management on a calendar built around your programs and camps.

Digital Advertising

Meta and Google, Ad Grant setup and compliance, print and visitor guides, retargeting.

Influencer Marketing

Family creators, gala ambassadors, local press, and sponsor collateral.

Search and AI visibility

Show up when a parent asks AI what to do this weekend

Parents are using ChatGPT and other AI engines to research and discover activities for their families. If your museum isn't named in the answer, it isn't in the running, and you'll never see the visit you didn't get.

Answer engine optimization, run alongside traditional SEO, is how you grow AI visibility and share of voice: structured content and clean site data, so the engines can find you, understand you, and cite you.

AI search visibility →

Why MtoM

Why children's museums work with us

01
We've done the hard version
A rebrand deployed across a live museum. A full program run through a renovation. Ticketing and website rebuilt with the doors open. Not case studies we read, projects we shipped.
02
Nonprofit economics
We build around Ad Grants, in-kind media, and an ad budget that competes with programming. We make a modest spend look bigger.
03
Numbers your board accepts
What was spent, what it reached, what it sold. Because we build the ticketing and the tracking, we tie campaigns to transactions.

MtoM has been an incredible partner through a major renovation, a rebrand, and a technology transition at the Children's Museum of the Lowcountry. They took the lead on all of our marketing efforts, our in-museum communications and displays, and on creating a constant flow of visitors and new members.

Karen Coltrane, Founder, Museum Crafters; former Executive Director of the Children's Museum of the Lowcountry, EdVenture, and the Children's Museum of Richmond

Case studies

Children's Museum of the LowcountryFilling a children's museum in Charleston All case studiesSee all of our work

Before you book

Questions directors usually ask

We're small. Is there a version of this we can afford?

Yes. Most of our museum relationships started with one project, a website, a social retainer, or a gala campaign, and grew. On the call we'll name the single piece that moves attendance or revenue most for your budget.

Can you work with the ticketing and website we already have?

Yes. We've worked across most of the major ticketing platforms, Blackbaud included, and we'd rather instrument and fix what you have than force a rebuild you didn't ask for. If something is genuinely costing you revenue, we'll show you where before we recommend replacing it.

Do you manage Google Ad Grants?

We do, including the compliance that gets grant accounts suspended. We run grant and paid together so they don't bid against each other.

Our next 18 months are a renovation. Bad time to start?

Best time. A renovation is a communications problem with a revenue deadline: keep families engaged while galleries are closed, then convert that patience into a reopening spike. We've run exactly this in Charleston.

Let us help you turn clicks into clients.Book a 30-minute discovery call.

Bring your attendance numbers and your next big date. We'll tell you what we'd do first.

1We meet, and you walk us through what your museum actually needs
2You get a proposal, plus case studies from museums like yours
3Almost no ramp-up: you won't spend a month teaching us how children's museums work

Book a discovery call →