Guest platform for 22+ exhibition openings

Brief

M+ Museum opened in November 2021 as Hong Kong's museum of 20th and 21st century visual culture. Exhibition openings, from Picasso, Yayoi Kusama and I.M. Pei to the annual Party at M+, bring hundreds of invited guests through invitation, RSVP, categorisation, email confirmation, QR tickets and reception check-in.

M+ runs 6–8 exhibition openings a year, plus patrons events, dinners and parties. Guest lists come from different departments and have to be sanitised first: duplicates removed so the same person is not emailed twice, and the same guest on more than one department list merged into one record marked as cross-department.

Background

Each opening used to mean another round of manual work: cleaning lists, catching duplicates, merging the same guest across departments, then sending invitations by hand.

At 6–8 openings a year that work repeats. The lists change. The path from spreadsheet to sent invitation should not.

How we approached it

We automated the guest management path from list sanitise through to scheduled email sendout, so the team is not spending admin time on work the system can do.

Imports are cleaned on the way in: emails validated, duplicates caught across department batches, and the same guest from two lists merged into one record with a cross-department flag. Categories, invitation campaigns and send times are set once, then the system sends on the schedule. After RSVP, confirmation emails and QR tickets go out without a second manual pass.

Because openings repeat, each new exhibition starts from that process rather than a blank project. During the event, the system sends attendance summaries at set time periods so the team can see live status without sitting in the portal.

What we built

Per-exhibition RSVP: unique invitation links, bilingual accept/decline, companion management, guest categories by department, scheduled invitation and confirmation emails, QR codes and reception check-in with arrival tracking.

Guest list automation: import sanitising, duplicate detection, cross-department merge into a single guest record, and campaign scheduling so sendout is not done by hand.

Live attendance: timed summaries generated during the event, so arrival counts are available without opening the admin portal.

Takeaway

At 6–8 openings a year, the cost is the manual work between lists. Once sanitise, merge, scheduled sendout and live attendance are automated, the next exhibition is a new list on a process that already exists.