Curate One helps museum curators wow visitors

In 2013, Daniel Jecha was the Interactive Design Director at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, a historic tourist attraction in Virginia. His team was tasked with creating digital experiences for visitors.

The experience was fulfilling, and a little frustrating.

“I just know that we could have done more in-house if we had a really good tool,” Jecha said.

He was certain that a comprehensive digital tool designed to allow museums and similar sites to easily create multimedia learning materials would be game-changing for organizations with small staffs, and even smaller budgets. But the tool he imagined did not exist.

Not yet anyway.

Jencha shared his idea with developer Brad Carlsen. Soon after, the pair co-founded Curate One, an “all-in-one digital storytelling platform” designed for museums. Launched in 2016, the bootstrapped company is currently piloting the tool in several historic locations.

“Curate One puts the power in the hands of the curators. They can pull in the content themselves without the need of a designer or developer,” company CEO Jencha said.

The web-based platform is easily modified and duplicated. “This is a very, very powerful template with the specific experiences that we know museums are looking for,” he said.

“There is not a lot of efficiency in the effort that museums have to put into creating these things,” he explained. “Traditionally, they’ll (curators) add in an object, and it’ll be siloed into one experience, without the ability to leverage that same object in another experience. Let’s say, an object, maybe George Washington’s bust- they’d have it on the website. And maybe they’d have it on a kiosk in the museum. Maybe they’re also featuring it in an audio tour. That’s three different times that they’re pulling in the same bit of content. That opens it up to be outdated on one siloed system.”

“With Curate One you could make a change to the copy or add another photo and you just hit publish and it’ll be (updated) in all the places,” he continued. “We’re trying to help cut down on the level of effort in content entry if they’re reusing similar content across different pieces.”

Curate One successfully completed the fall cohort of FOR-M and presented the business at the FOR-M Founder Showcase in November.

Today, the storytelling platform is being piloted in the place where it was first imagined- George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The company hopes to soon add some Milwaukee region-based organization to its list of pilot locations.

“We’re really looking for partners- local museums, regional museums, that are interested in working with us. Mount Vernon has been a great test bed for our ideas and we’re matching up their needs with our product road map. We’d love to find more partners like that,” he said.

The company anticipates a 2024 product launch with scaled pricing based on customer needs. To learn more about Curate One, connect with the company here.