Selling the Experience: Powering a Museum’s Digital Transformation

How a website rebuild and nearly a decade of technology partnership helped the Dr Pepper Museum grow into a national tourist attraction.

Non-Profit Organization

The Work

Building on an existing partnership spanning several years, Four Columns came into the project with a strong foundational knowledge of the museum’s target market and strategic goals. The rebuild included a full site strategy and architecture project, not just a design refresh. Four Columns tackled custom design for both desktop and mobile, forms and booking functionality built around how visitors actually plan a trip, on-site SEO, and hosting, security, and back-end maintenance to keep the site running long after launch.

That rebuild included a secure, high-performance framework that loads faster, holds up better for SEO, and is far easier for the museum’s smaller team to manage and update on their own. In addition, Four Columns provides ongoing training to staff members to help them understand the site’s backend and booking system. This new build marked the first time the museum could sell anything through its website, unlocking a new source of revenue in the process. Three popular experiences, Make-A-Soda, the Extreme Pepper Experience, and the Paranormal Experience, became bookable online, so visitors could reserve a spot before ever arriving in Waco.

In the years since, Four Columns has remained closely involved in the museum’s technology needs, handling ongoing requests, questions, updates, and new projects as they come up. For example, our team migrated the museum’s 80-terabyte video archive onto a custom-built platform, giving staff a searchable library of their own footage for the first time. Standalone projects such as that one have equipped the museum to better manage its technology and maintain a modern, robust online presence.

Since the site relaunched, the museum’s digital presence has translated directly into stronger numbers at the door. Yearly ticket sales have grown more than 6X since 2017, and over a comparable eight-month stretch year over year, online orders are up more than 8X. Much of that growth comes directly from online bookings; the rest reflects something bigger: a stronger, more visible online presence that makes the museum recognizable outside of Waco. In partnership with the Four Columns team, the Dr Pepper Museum has grown from a local Waco attraction to a national tourist destination. Each year, the museum draws in more and more visitors across the world, and March 2026 brought three record-breaking attendance days, including the museum’s highest single-day attendance in its history.

Results like these are what happen when a marketing partner sticks around long enough to actually understand a client’s business, not just build a website and move on. Over more than nine years, Four Columns has stayed close to how the Dr Pepper Museum operates, taking on projects that fall outside a typical scope and building infrastructure the museum can rely on well after launch. That kind of partnership is what turns a single project into a track record, and it’s the kind of relationship any growing organization should expect from the people building their digital presence.