The Event-Driven Museum, One Year Later

A year ago, I wrote a post speculating about whether events (institutionally-produced programs) might be a primary driver for people to attend museums, with exhibitions being secondary. Now, a year later, I've seen the beginnings of how that question has borne out at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), as well as hearing from folks around the museum industry about the interplay of exhibitions and events at their own institutions.

And so, in this post, a few findings, and more questions.

Many museums, big and small, thrive on events. I had originally assumed that this phenomenon might affect smaller museums in smaller markets more than large urban institutions, but I've since learned from colleagues at big hitters like LACMA and the Dallas Museum of Art that the majority of their visitors attend through events. One director of a children's museum even told me that they "eventize" normal operations--calling a Saturday a "family festival" without changing the planned programming--to draw more people. At our museum, about 68% of casual visitors (non-school tours) attended through events this year.

This isn't true for every museum. There are still many museums in large tourist centers with a hefty one-time audience. Zoos, aquaria, science and children's museums boast a significant "anytime" audience of families who return again and again. But for art and history museums, especially outside the biggest tourism markets, I wouldn't be surprised if events drive the lion's share of attendance, period.

At our small museum, events have driven a huge increase in attendance, community partnerships, and media coverage. We're still crunching numbers for the close of the fiscal year, but our attendance has more than doubled from 17,349 last year to about 36,000 this year. The vast majority of that increase has come through attendance to new events.

These events don't just increase audience. This year, we produced our events--especially the 3rd Friday evening series--in partnership with over 700 artists and community organizations in Santa Cruz. Events enabled us to partner with diverse groups who brought in new audiences and programmatic opportunities. We turned a place where “nothing happens” into a place where something was often happening. We got media attention each time we hosted an event, and within a year, we were celebrated by the local weekly as “a major go-to hotspot… that keeps things fresh and fuels the creative fires of Santa Cruz.”

So why is this happening, and what does it mean? Here are three possibilities I'm toying with for why events are taking center stage at museums:

• Culturally, we are shifting to a more event-driven society. Recreational time is down, people are more scheduled than ever, and “casually” visiting a museum is irrelevant to many people, especially those who live outside large urban cultural centers. Festivals—whether of jazz, visual art, ethnic identity, or historic reenactment—are experiencing record attendance even as more permanent institutions that offer the same content are struggling. People want to come for the weekend, the moment, the event. (Note: this is a hypothesis with little data to back it up. Can you help with some concrete information to confirm or refute this idea?)
• It's less about the event than the timing. Audience behavior could be more driven by museum hours than by the type of activity offered. Events mostly happen in the evening or on weekends, outside of work time. The majority of our exhibition hours do not. Maybe if museums were open from 3-10pm instead of 10am-5pm, the attendance would be higher overall. However, it is worth noting that at the MAH, a Saturday without an event during daytime hours typically draws half as many visitors as a Saturday with even a very low-key drop-in program. 
• Events generate media buzz and attention with greater frequency than exhibitions. The more events we do, the more we get known for events, and the more people attend during them. If society is more event-driven than ever, we have to give people explicit (and frequent) reasons to think of museums as an "anytime" experience, or they never will attend casually. This could be a worthwhile long play that introduces people to the value of a weekly "museum moment," or it could be an uphill battle against the reality of how and why people prefer to engage. 

I'm most interested in the first of these, and I'm genuinely curious to hear about any studies or data that might shed light on the (real or imagined) cultural shift towards events. In talking with executive directors of a range of arts organizations, it really does seem that festivals are performing better than their regularly-scheduled counterparts. I don't know if that has always been the case or whether festival formats are just now in ascendance. What have you seen, both from the arts management side and from your own experience as a consumer?

What Belgian Beer-Brewing Monks Taught Me about Non-Profit Business Models

If you want to drink the best beer in the world, you'd better be ready to work for it. A recent episode of the design podcast 99 Percent Invisible chronicled the hoops people jump through to get a bottle of Westvleteren 12, which is produced by the monks of the Abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren in Flanders, Belgium. You can only reserve a bottle by phone. You must pick it up in person at the Abbey at a specific time on a specific date. You can only buy a small amount, and you are limited to one purchase every 60 days.

The episode is mostly focused on the thrill of the hunt, and all the attendant ways exclusivity fuels desire. But late in the episode (minute 9), when the supplicant finally drinks the beer at the monastery, he is underwhelmed. The beer is terrific, but the experience is unfulfilling. He feels anonymous. He feels disconnected. He made it to Mecca, and it's kind of eh.

Why the disconnect? As Roman Mars, the show's host, puts it, "You, the consumers of beer, are not the real customer. God is." The monks make beer to support their monastic lifestyle, not to serve consumers. The exclusivity and the complicated path to purchasing the beer are not branding strategies to trump up the value of the beer. They are limitations that enable monks to spend most of their time being monks.

Listening to the podcast, I was struck by its strange connections to the non-profit world's approach to funding. In many ways, the monks have a much more practical approach to the problem of supporting their mission than the rest of us do. They brew beer to provide the income to support their religious work. It's the ultimate case of unrelated business income. They don't want their beer-brewing work and their prayer to be commingled; they are intentionally separate. Whereas non-profits work hard to fit everything they do under one mission, the monks split it up. The beer supports the mission. The beer is not part of the mission.

In the arts, this bears directly on the current debate around "art for art's sake" versus "art for community development." Not every arts organization is fundamentally focused on connecting with and engaging audiences. While a few are, the majority are only slowly pivoting towards a primary focus on audience engagement. Some do so with gusto, seeing the opportunity for transformation, relevance, and new relationships with the public. Others do so half-heartedly. Some even feel forced to do so. They want to be art monks, not customer-serving businesses.

It's totally valid for an artist or an art organization to have a monastic approach. For these organizations, the ultimate audience--the one they care most about--is something else. It could be "art" with a capital A, the pursuit of social justice or innovation or institutional critique. I've talked to plenty of non-profit artistic directors and curators who will say that the master is the work... or if not the work, the artists behind the work. To them, audience engagement is a distraction at best, a dilution or bastardization at worst.

So why do they even consider it? These days, a few key arts funders are shifting towards public engagement through art. Everyone is strapped, so organizations try to move with the funders. Monastically-inclined institutions pursue donors who support public engagement with the work, and they package the work into a kind of sausage they can sell to audiences. The result is not Mecca. It's something less than, something that often frustrates artists and audiences alike.

Community-focused organizations have the same problem in reverse. Even if they primarily care about deep engagement with audiences, these organizations often have to talk about "artistic excellence" to get noticed by traditional arts funders and donors. Community organizations without brand-name artists can be denigrated as "craft centers," even if the outcomes of their engagement efforts are tremendous.

The problem is that no one--neither art monks nor community-driven organizations--are entitled to funding. We all have to find supporters and customers who can help us pay the bills. Maybe, instead of shifting with the traditional funding, all kinds of arts organizations should be proudly and blatantly seeking out unrelated sources of income. I recently heard the director of a major performing arts organization pejoratively refer to for-profit music venues as "bars with bands" as opposed to organizations that exist to produce and present "real" music. But is it any less problematic to be supported by grants and high ticket prices than by beverage sales? Does it lead to more "pure" programming decisions? I don't think so.

We are always told that everything we do should flow from our mission. Maybe instead, we should think like the monks and figure out how we can make sure everything we do serves our mission. There are arts organizations (including my own) that get significant amounts of their operating budgets from endowments, real estate, or parking garages. There are innovative arts organizations that are led by volunteer staff members who make their money as teachers or engineers or marketers. Maybe we shouldn't apologize for these "non-mission-based" sources of income. Maybe we should pursue more of them. After all, they are what allow us to pursue our missions--for whomever our ultimate audience may be.

Yes, Audience Participation Can Have Significant Value

For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" I'd say that these techniques support audience development, repeat visitation, membership, maybe could even attract new kinds of donors... but I didn't have numbers to back it up.

Now, I do. Or at least preliminary ones. Last week, the local newspaper did a really generous front-page story on my museum (the MAH) and the changes here over the past eight months since I started. In the summer and fall of 2011:

• attendance increased 57% compared to the same period in 2010
• new membership sales increased 27% compared to the same period in 2010
• individual and corporate giving increased over 500% compared to 2010

We've also had incredible increases in media coverage of museum events (like that Sentinel article), new programmatic partnerships with several community groups, and private rentals of the museum for community events. After a really painful financial starting point, we've been in the black every month and have established a $100,000 operating reserve.

I'm incredibly proud of all the staff, trustees, volunteers, collaborators, visitors, and members who have made this happen. We started the summer with no money and a strategic vision to be a thriving, central gathering place. We just started to try to live up to that vision, partnership by partnership, activity by activity. We're hearing on a daily basis that the museum has a new role in peoples' lives and in the identity of the county. It feels pretty amazing.

It also feels amazing to see some of my theories validated in this way--that giving people the opportunity to actively participate does really transform the way they see the institution and themselves. I can't say that any one experience--working on a collage with other visitors, swinging on a hammock, discovering a participatory display for pocket artifacts in the bathroom--directly contributed to increased attendance and giving. They all have in concert, and they build on each other. We have a LONG way to go to really become that "thriving, central gathering place" in our vision, but it's immensely gratifying to see that we are on the way. It's always shocking to me when a visitor will say, "it feels so comfortable here," or "I love how it's opened up to the community." I can't believe it when I hear words from the strategic plan come out of people's mouths.

There are at least three significant things that have contributed to our success thus far:

1. A clear strategy. Our team focused this year on just three things: making the museum more comfortable, hosting new participatory events, and partnering wherever possible. The broad mandate to "open it up" was backed up by a lot of activity on multiple fronts--comment boards, participation-specific internships, program formats that allow us to slot in enthusiastic volunteers easily, more flexible uses of some museum spaces, and a range of options and opportunities for collaborators. 
2. Community response. Every time we've tried something new, we've gotten lots of support in terms of media coverage and enthusiastic attendance. This community was ready for a museum that reflected the unique creative identity of Santa Cruz. We try to design every new program with a partner organization with an audience for whom that kind of content or format is already appealing. We've had a few programmatic misfires, but for the most part, our new projects are succeeding because the newspaper wants to feature them in the "best bets" and people are game to come out and try. It helps that we're in a small market and we have focused on two audiences--families with kids 5-12 and culturally-inclined adults without children--for whom demand exceeds supply in terms of local opportunities for affordable cultural experiences. 
3. Trust and love from our old friends. Our long-standing donors and board of trustees have been amazingly enthusiastic about the changes at the museum. They supported us financially when we were on the skids, and they are continuing to support the future of the institution. They are excited to see new people in the museum and to hear their friends talk about the museum in a new way. Almost to a person, our donors understand that we are reaching people with a variety of modalities and that they don't have to personally like every experience or element to feel great about the service the museum is doing in the community. We're starting a new campaign based on the "renewed ambition" of the museum and we feel confident about the future.

All of this said, I know we still have a lot of work to do--this truly is just the beginning. Going into the new year, we're focusing on:

• making exhibitions and collections as participatory as our public programs
• transforming our volunteer gallery host program into something more interactive 
• helping members feel more like part of the family with us and with each other
• finding and testing out innovative formats for participatory history experiences (it's been easier to get started on the art side, and we are a museum of art AND history)
• figuring out ways to measure impact beyond anecdotes, especially with an incredibly limited budget/staff for evaluation
• pushing forward on partnerships that allow us to reach and support marginalized people in our community

In a week when I'm super-stressed out about the work ahead, it's good to take a minute and celebrate what we've done. Thank you all for helping shape my thinking on museums and for your smart, critical, energetic eye on this work. And the next time someone questions the benefits of letting audiences actively participate, send them to Santa Cruz.

The Art of the Steal: Access & Controversy at the Barnes Foundation

Last week, I finally watched The Art of the Steal, an arresting documentary on the controversy around the evolution of the Barnes Foundation from a suburban educational art facility to a major urban art museum (to open in May 2012). The documentary raises basic questions about donor intent, legal execution of eccentric peoples' wills, and, most interesting to me, the definition of access to a collection.

A quick background on the Barnes Foundation. It was founded in 1922 by Albert Barnes, a wealthy scientist who collected what is now considered an incomparable collection of Impressionist and Modernist art. Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso--Barnes collected it before it was popular in the U.S., and he collected the best of the best. With the help of educational philosopher John Dewey, Barnes founded the Barnes Foundation as an educational facility in Merion, PA, near Philadelphia. Unlike most art collections, Barnes' art was neither exclusively private nor a public museum. It was primarily used as a teaching collection for youth and adult students. The Barnes Foundation allowed a limited number of public visitors two days a week, but visitors were second-class citizens compared to the students.

Barnes protected his vision for the collection in his will. The art could not be sold, reproduced, loaned, or traveled. The school was to continue. There were slight concessions to public visitation, leading to capped attendance of about 60,000 per year. However, over the past thirty years, Philadelphia leaders clamored for the art to move to the city and be made more accessible to visitors (projections suggest the new facility will welcome 250,000 per year). The film documents the incremental subversion of Barnes' will and the eventual development of a new, highly public home for the collection in Philadelphia--exactly what Barnes despised and sought to avoid.

The documentary is shrill at times, with several Barnes Foundation stalwarts ominously repeating the word "conspiracy." There are cringe-worthy art critics who decry Barnes' rivals as "people who know nothing about art." But the fundamental story is fascinating and really challenged some of my basic ideas about museums. Despite my focus on populism and access, I am sympathetic to Barnes and his followers, who feel strongly that a serious injustice has been done.

The civic and cultural leaders who successfully challenged the original intent of Barnes' will had two basic arguments for the transformation of the collection:

1. The Barnes Foundation was struggling financially. A move to a more accessible venue in the center of Philadelphia would increase attendance dramatically, thus bolstering finances.
2. The Barnes collection is an incredible cultural artifact that more people should be able to access. Demand exceeded availability for public hours in the Merion location, and that demand constituted a valid public concern, one that foundations and politicians felt necessary to address.

I think both these arguments are bullshit. Let's look at each one closely.

First, let's talk money. The strangest thing about the documentary was the insistence by all parties--those who supported the move to Philadelphia and those who wanted to preserve the Barnes in Merion--that increased attendance would solve institutional financial crises. I kept scratching my head and thinking, what kind of art museum makes big money on attendance? Most art museums get a maximum of 10% of their income from admissions.

Consider two examples in the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which welcomes about 800,000 visitors per year, had income of $80.4M in their 2010 fiscal year (based on their public 990 tax form). Of that, $3.9M (5%) came from museum attendance, and an additional $1.7M came from special exhibitions (2%).

Now, another institution--the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which welcomes 54,000 visitors annually and manages a school for community members as well as BFA and MFA students. Their total revenue in 2010 was $16.2M (their 990). Of that, $1M came from attendance (6%), and $9.3M (57%) came from the educational program.

What's healthier for the financial viability of the Barnes Foundation--focusing on being a school, or focusing on being a museum? I don't see how a four-fold increase in public attendance--saddled with the significant costs of operating a large urban museum--will ensure stability.


Second, let's talk about access. If a donor designates a particular use of his or her property, how closely does that have to be followed? If a large body of civic and cultural leaders feel that the designation is no longer culturally relevant, does that matter? If someone owns something unique (and bars its reproduction or transfer), how much "public good" does that collection have to confer before the owner's wishes are challenged? And on a more practical museum management level, are there multiple ways to validly define access to a collection?

I don't feel qualified to answer the first three questions. But I do feel confident in my answer to the last one: yes. There are many ways a collection can be accessible or inaccessible (check out the UCL report Collections for People for a rigorous review of this). There are some collections that are entirely private. Others are accessible seasonally to a handful of visitors. There are publicly-owned collections that are only accessible by appointment or through digitization efforts. There are objects you can see, and objects you can't.

The Barnes Foundation was inaccessible to visitors who wanted to come to the facility, pay an admission fee, and view the art in the galleries. At the same time, it was deeply accessible to a cadre of teachers, students, and artists who spent prolonged periods with the work.

The controversial reconfiguration of the Barnes Foundation suggests that the first kind of access is more important than the second. That attendance trumps depth of experience. That center city trumps suburb. That granting access to 60,000 people per year is not sufficient to appropriately meet the demand to view the collection. That that demand has a moral public value.

In museum circles, we often say, "numbers aren't everything." But when we say that, what other things do we offer up as alternatives? Can we make a compelling quantitative argument for the benefits conferred to students at the Barnes Foundation, many of whom engaged in multi-year art and horticulture programs? How many one-time 1-hour visits does a three-year course of study equal? Is it really "better" to have 250,000 visitors shuffle through a museum than to give a deep experience to a few hundred? Who gets to decide?

The Barnes Foundation was not founded as a museum. It was founded as a school that used a privately-held art collection as its curriculum. I don't see why museum standards of access should be applied to such an institution just because it would be politically convenient to do so.

And that, I think, leads to the real reason governors, mayors, and heads of Philadelphia-based charities pushed to move the Barnes Foundation to the city. The Barnes collection is an extraordinary cultural jewel, and Philadelphia wants that jewel in its crown. It doesn't really matter if the collection is accessed by 60,000 people or 250,000 people, whether those people have a deep experience or not, and whether their admissions tickets will improve the institution's financial health. What matters is that Philadelphia can tout the Barnes collection and its wonders in its tourism and marketing materials for the city.

In some ways, this is a good thing. It implies that civic leaders do understand the incredible value of cultural institutions as identity-builders and tourism-attractors. But I don't think that justifies such a blatant disregard for donor intent, trumpeted with a one-note, "more attendance = better" horn. What do you think?

What Hours Should Museums Be Open?

An exhibiting artist approached me recently at an evening event at the museum. "Hey!," he said, "I have some feedback for you. You know, the hours that you're open--they're not very accessible for people who work."

He's right. They aren't. We're open Tuesday-Sunday, 11am-5pm. And if you work and or have a family, that doesn't exactly make it easy to visit.

This isn't rocket science. But it's a question that many museums seem to address inadequately. We try so hard to make our visitors feel welcome and comfortable once they're inside, ignoring the glaring obstacle that may prevent them from even getting in the door.

It's interesting to me that so many museums debate admission fees but don't get comparably riled up about open hours. Some of the most innovative, community-focused museums I know of are trapped in the 11-5 game, and it's frankly a little bizarre--especially from visitors' perspective.

The obvious outcome of daytime hours is fewer visitors. But it also has a lot of other chicken-egg effects. Imagine if a theater or jazz club was only open during the day, and what conclusions one might draw about audience type and preferences based on that decision. For example, in museums:

• Retirees and vacationers--two groups with daytime availability--become primary audiences that receive significant attention and subtly influence programming choices. Who would be "core" audiences if our institutions were open from 3-9pm instead of closing at 5? How might programming shift to support them?
• Evening events provide rare opportunities to experience the museum after work. Are these events popular because of programming, or are they popular because of the hours? Would events be as significant in the experience of young adult audiences if there were more opportunities to experience the exhibitions after work without special programming?

In thinking about whether, why, and how we might rethink hours at my institution, I've come with the following list of pro's and con's for shifting the hours later.

PRO:

• more accessible to working people
• more symbiotic with times people are recreating downtown (dinner, happy hour, shopping)
• separates school tours from public visiting hours, which can be helpful in a small building

CON:

• requires changes to staffing and signage
• can't rent the museum for lucrative evening events as often. If we're open every evening, it cripples this business. If we're open only a few evenings, it may confuse visitors.

What do you think? What questions should I consider in examining this? What have you seen change--or not--when hours change? What institutions are worth looking at to learn more? I'm particularly curious about other cultural and community organizations--libraries, performing art spaces--and how hours impact their use and value.

Getting in on the Act: New Report on Participatory Arts Engagement

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act, about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. Authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard pack a lot into 40 pages--an argument for the rise of active arts engagement, a framework for thinking about ways to actively involve audiences, and lots of case studies. It is framed as a kind of study guide; pop-outs provide questions that tease out opportunities and tensions in the narrative. This report is not an end-all; it is the opening for a conversation.

Here's what I think is really strong about the report:

• Coordinated, succinct research findings supporting the rise of active arts engagement. Pages 9 and 10 pull together data from the NEA, the Irvine Foundation, Dance/USA, RAND, and the Knight Foundation to tell a tight, compelling story about the demographic shift from consumptive to active participation and the extent to which traditional arts audiences are also participating in art-making outside of traditional arenas.
• Excellent case studies, especially from the performing arts sector. I've often been asked about examples of participatory practice in theater, dance, and classical music, and this report is a great starting point. I was particularly inspired by the case studies related to art and civic action (like Paint the Street) and intrigued by the "implications" pop-outs asking questions about how the case studies might impact your own organization's practice.
• Useful differentiation in their Audience Involvement Spectrum (see image at top) between programs that provide "enhanced engagement" and those that invite audience members to make contributions that impact and alter the end result. It can be easy to conflate engaging activities with participatory opportunities, and I'm glad they were explicit about the difference.
• Useful definitions of participatory activities as "curatorial, interpretative, and inventive"--this is a reframing of the Forrester research framework for online participation which is probably more appropriate to the arts context.
• Useful designations of four broad goals for active participation (page 14):

1. Participation in Service of a Community Need or Societal Goal
2. Participation in Support of, or as a Complement to, Artistic Vision
3. Participation in Service of an Artistic Process or Product
4. Participation as the Fundamental Goal

What's challenging about the report is how many different frameworks it presents. I counted at least five different schemes in the six-page section on "Participatory Arts in Practice," and none of these were explicitly referenced in the subsequent case studies. I found many of the frameworks useful, but the lack of context and detail was frustrating. How did the authors come up with the intriguing blend of curatorial, interpretative, and inventive opportunities shown in the Audience Involvement Spectrum's Venn diagrams? Why is a photography contest an example of "crowd sourcing" wheres a community drawing contest is an example of "audience-as-artist"? What's the relationship between the goals of participation and the techniques employed?

I admire and wholly appreciate the brevity of this report, but I fear it's too short to be genuinely useful for organizations that want to act on it. The authors present complex ideas about active arts participation, and it's clear that a lot of research and thought went into their work. I'd love an extended version with more explanation about how these frameworks might work in practice, how they map to the case studies provided, and how organizations with particular participatory goals might best achieve them. If the goal is for organizations to adopt these frameworks as their own, I think we need a lot more supporting material--and maybe fewer different taxonomies.

What do you get out of the report? What next steps do you think we need to make it as useful as possible--and how can we, as active participants--take the lead?

Public Service, Advocacy, and Institutional Transformation

Yesterday, I had lunch with Monica Martinez, the ED of Homeless Services for Santa Cruz county. I was amazed not only by her energy and intelligence but by her simple, transformative goal: to end homelessness. As she said (and I'm paraphrasing):

We're not in the business of giving people food or a bed in perpetuity. We're in the business of finding a solution to this problem. Our goal is to tackle the root causes of this issue and provide people with services that help them transition out of homelessness. Sure, sometimes that involves a bed or a meal for awhile, but not forever.

Talking to Monica, we found that we have a lot in common in trying to transform how our respective institutions serve and interface with the community. Monica is trying to reposition her organization as a social justice organization working on solutions to end homelessness. I'm trying to reposition our museum as a cultural hub supporting creative and intellectual community growth. Both of our organizations are classically seen as insular organizations that serve specific, closed audiences--homeless people in her case, cultural elites and students in mine--and we're both trying to demonstrate that our institutions not only have value for the whole community but also opportunities for everyone to get involved in a meaningful way.

Our conversation made me reflect on the museums that most inspire me from a public service perspective--institutions with missions that stretch far beyond their walls. This isn't so much about expanding outreach services as it is about fundamentally repositioning what the institution is there to do. A few personal favorites include:

• the Pittsburgh Children's Museum, whose vision is to make the Northside the best place to raise a child in the city by supporting diverse programs (not all museum-led) throughout the troubled neighborhood
• the American Visionary Art Museum, whose mission is simply to "expand the definition of a worthwhile life" by presenting and encouraging creativity in untraditional venues
• the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which has grown into a full-scale advocacy operation with a clear mission to save the oceans and inspire conservation
• the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, which strives to be a cultural instigator that changes the way people throughout the city engage with each other

I know that every museum has these ambitions to some extent and that the rhetoric of many crosses these boundaries. But how many institutions are really aggressively transforming their work away from service to a narrow band of audiences to community-wide advocacy work? These museums work differently. They have different goals they are shooting for.

I know my museum is very far from these goals--we're still just laying the groundwork to be able to provide consistent cultural services to the community. But even as we do so, we're thinking about it in terms of changing and supporting how culture and learning happens in the County, not just at or via our programs. That's why I'm talking with people like Monica, to understand how the museum can be a partner in how we make progress throughout the community--not just at 705 Front Street.

I want our museum to be the host for dialogue--not just through panel discussions, but through exhibitions and events and commissions and community experiences that both invite and challenge people to engage with each other around the issues that matter most. And I think that requires us to be an advocacy organization--not for homelessness or oceans or children--but for the power of art to transform, the power of history to enlighten, and the power of a welcoming host to spark new ideas and change.

Does this sound like director-ish bloviating to you, or is it useful? How do you see institutions living up to--or falling short of--these kinds of goals?

Anyone Who Says this isn't a Business is Nuts.

It's a rough week for cultural practitioners. In the Netherlands, State Secretary for Culture Halbe Zijlstra slashed 200 million euros from the national budget for the arts, leading to the close of the innovative National History Museum project and crippling many superbly inventive and inspiring organizations like Mediamatic and the Waag Society. In Minnesota, the state budget standoff has closed the Minnesota History Center and the many other arms of the MN Historical Society.

And here in Santa Cruz, I've got two very expensive bottles of champagne on my desk. Well, they only cost me $8 apiece... but we aren't opening them until we have $50,000 committed to each one.

Let me explain. When I came to become the director of The Museum of Art & History two months ago, we were on the financial brink. We were operating week-to-week and racking up unpaid bills. Within ten days on the job, I made two tough decisions. I laid off a full-time employee, and all remaining employees (including me) took a 20% salary cut.

Now, our fate--and our salaries--lies partly in the hands of those champagne bottles. When we can raise $50,000 in an operating reserve, we'll open the first bottle and our salaries will go up to a 10% cut. When we raise $100,000 in operating reserve, we'll open the second bottle and go up to full pay. I am doing everything I can to ensure we will be spraying that champagne all over ourselves within a year. We've had two months in the black and we're going to keep pushing.

This is the first time I've really grappled with the reality of "the museum as a business." Sure, I've been part of discussions about business models and have written/tracked plenty of budgets, but I haven't dealt with money on the day-to-day, how-am-I-going-to-pay-this-month's-payroll, feel-like-rockstars-as-we-reduce-our-liabilities level. It's surprising to me how unaware I'd been of this side of the work and how much of my emotional space is focused on it now. I feel as much pride about having a month in the black as I do about some of the great programmatic projects we're launching.

At my institution, we're trying to build our capacity around this both by opening the books to staff and by use of public visual metaphors like the champagne bottles. Turns out those champagne bottles are the best marketing tool we've got--everyone who walks in my office asks about them, and we've received several donations from people who tell us they want to help open the first bottle. On our website, we're telling people how much it costs us per day to run the museum (about $2,500) to help everyone understand how essential their donations are to our service to the community. I've been thinking about a sign at the front desk clearly showing people how donations of different levels support different institutional needs... but frankly, the numbers are so high that it's a little overwhelming. I'm still working to find the most digestible ways for people--staff, volunteers, visitors, supporters--to understand where our money comes from, where it goes, and what it's for.

I suspect there's a lot more we can be doing, both for our professional field and for constituents, to increase awareness and understanding of the business of museums. What has helped you grapple with these issues? What do you wish you knew? I'm thinking about proposing an AAM session on this topic and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Kickstarter: Funding Creativity in a New (Old) Way

Let's say you want to make a documentary about the World Cup. Or sail around the world. Or produce an art exhibit with elementary school students. Or build an open-source PCR machine for copying DNA. How would you fund it?

Kickstarter is a website for creative folks to find funding for their dream projects. The site doesn't link them with foundations or grant applications; instead, it makes it easy to reach out to regular people for donations of as little as $1. Currently, the site supports US-based projects only. A Kickstarter project has three parts:

1. Project description. This is typically a video plus text, although some projects just use a simple image instead of a video. Project creators can also write updates (a kind of project-specific blog) to share either privately with backers or openly with all.
2. Funding goal. Kickstarter is an "all or nothing" funding scheme. If you make or exceed your goal in the timeframe you set, you get the money. If not, the backers' credit cards are not charged. Kickstarter makes money by taking a percentage on projects that succeed.
3. Pledge levels. While backers can fund you at whatever level between $1 and $10,000 they desire, most Kickstarter projects offer rewards at discrete pledge levels to motivate people to give specific amounts.

For the most part, Kickstarter projects are managed by young, creative individuals with small projects (and smallish funding goals) in mind. When I first started exploring the site, I assumed it was mostly a place for charismatic hipsters and a few star artists with enough social media savvy and clever video production capabilities to produce enticing pitches. But then I started finding more humble projects related to broader issues, and I began to see Kickstarter as a potentially fascinating space for museums and cultural institutions.

Why should cultural and arts organizations care about Kickstarter?

• Kickstarter is a symptom of changes in donor culture. They are tapping into a large audience of people who don't care whether their donations are tax-deductible or not. Kickstarter backers aren't investing in companies or projects. They are making donations--in most cases, to entities that are not non-profits. These backers are excited by specific, near-term projects and want to support them directly. These are people who like to have a personal connection to a specific project and may be less interested in museum-style donor levels that are more about general (and vague) support for the institution.
• Kickstarter backers are mostly young adults with money who are broadly interested in supporting the arts and creative practice. While arts professionals moan about the erosion of support and the disinterest of younger potential donors, Kickstarter is a fertile ground for research into the kinds of projects, presentation styles, and pledge gifts that appeal to this much-desired demographic. (For example, check out the charming way this comic book artist personalizes his relationship with potential backers in this video, minute 2.)
• Kickstarter may be a good place to fund small experiments or to jump start campaigns. The all-or-nothing funding approach makes many project creators conservative about their ambitions. A documentary film crew might use Kickstarter to pay for travel costs, or a dance troupe to pay for recorded music so they don't have to hire musicians for their live performances. While Kickstarter is not likely to be the best solution for a huge fundraising project, it could be the perfect way to fund a discrete part of a capital project with high public appeal or a small wacky experiment that doesn't fit into the budget.

Success on Kickstarter: A Tale of Two Projects

To illustrate some of the key elements of a successful project on Kickstarter, I want to compare two projects that look very different on the surface: Jim Babb's Socks Inc. game and the Neversink Valley Museum's capital campaign launch materials. Please take a look at their pages and then come back.

In their presentation, these projects appear completely different. Jim's is a fun game involving sock puppets. He has a very catchy video pitch and pledge gifts that include things like a "sock clone" of you ($200, three backers so far). The museum's page is much simpler. There's no video, just a picture of the planned new community cultural center. The pledge levels include membership to the museum and traditional donor gifts--books, tickets to a party, naming opportunities.

At first glance, I assumed that a project had to be hip like Jim's to succeed on Kickstarter. But both these projects made their funding goals ($11,000 for the museum, $6,000 for the socks), and in the case of the museum, director Seth Goldman told me they raised an additional $7,000 for their campaign from less web-savvy people who preferred to write checks instead of donating online through the Kickstarter site.

So what do these projects have in common?

• They picked sensible funding goals. Seth needed $25,000 for the capital campaign materials, but he felt that $10,000 was more reasonable in terms of what he could drum up online. After researching the fees and determining the true costs of all the gifts, he set the amount at $11,000 so they could net $10,000 for the campaign. Similarly, Jim focused on what he actually needed (and it looks like he will far exceed his goal in the time allotted). Not all projects are successful--I recommend this blog post for a sobering look at what happens when a project doesn't quite make it.
• They developed pledge levels that were scalable and supported the project appropriately. Some projects on Kickstarter offer such fabulous thank you gifts that it's unclear how the creator will actually recoup any money for the project. Jim and Seth were very smart with their gifts and pledge levels. Jim noted to me that $25 is "the sweet spot" for donations, so that's the level at which he offered his first physical item (a patch featuring one of the socks from the game). Seth made the same decision--at $25 you get a book as well as a museum membership. Both of these projects offer gifts at levels below $25, but they're "free" for the project (membership in the museum's case, digital thank you's and behind the scenes blog access for the socks). Jim also told me that "the most important gifts to think about are between $25 to $250, since people donating amounts higher than that are contributing because they really want to support the project." In the museum's case, Seth capitalized on this by inviting funders at the $200 to a party hosted by a board member on the capital committee. As Seth noted, "we reversed the party concept. Instead of saying there's an admission fee for the fundraising party, we'll make it if you give $200 on Kickstarter the reward will be an invite to the party."
• They were willing to aggressively "beat the drums" to promote their projects. Both Jim and Seth made it clear that you have to do the work marketing your project to be successful. For Seth, that meant emails and frequent Facebook updates out to museum members, whereas for Jim it involved a Twitter campaign and some guerrilla marketing to players of his past games. Jim noted that only 20% of his backers were people outside of his professional and personal networks, so it's essential to focus on people you know and not on "going viral." Jim told me "people are much more likely to check out a project and donate to it if a personal friend encourages them to pledge, so start there and encourage people to share in their communities." In Seth's case, this paid real dividends as the adult children of some museum members began donating and spreading the word. In one case, a man in Texas donated $1,000 to the campaign. Seth contacted him to thank him and express his incredulity that a stranger from far away would make such a gift, but then the man explained that his mother was a museum member and that she loved the museum and he wanted to do this as a gift for her. She had forwarded the link from the museum newsletter to her son, and he had taken it from there.
• People who pledge have the opportunity for ongoing engagement with the project. The thank you gifts are invitations for deeper involvement over time. For Jim and the sock puppets, backers have the opportunity to test the game and eventually develop new levels and missions for other players. At the Neversink Valley Museum, every backer at the $15 level or higher received a museum membership. As Seth commented, "I can give you a better answer next year for how fabulous this is. A lot of people who wanted to come to the party got all the benefits below $200… so now they’re all members of the museum. So we’ll see how connected they are to the institution, will they renew their memberships, and will they donate above basic membership when it comes time to renew." The hope is that Kickstarter is the beginning not just of a project but of new relationships that can support the organization over time.

Could you imagine using Kickstarter at your institution? What do you see on the site that helps you think about how your organization raises money or communicates with audiences?

Notes on Structure Lab: Legal and Financial Models for Social Entrepeneurship

Last week, I attended Structure Lab, a half-day workshop on legal and financial structures for ventures for social good. Like many people in the arts, I'm interested in new models that help people combine mission-driven work with an entrepreneurial spirit. And as someone in the planning stages of a new venue (a cafe that offers craft beer, Belgian frites, and intriguing encounters with strangers), I was looking for information and tools that can help me make the best decisions for the financial and mission-related viability and health of the new company.

The Structure Lab is set up as a "game" in which you explore cards in various categories (values, assets, financing, etc.) to better articulate what you are really trying to do with your project concept. The idea is that you specify your values, relationships, and assets, and then match those up with potentially fruitful legal structures, financing models, and growth potential. We each worked individually on our own sets of cards, coming back together for discussion as we progressed through the various stages. The cards were a brilliant touch--they helped structure the day, supported simple prioritizing and sorting activities, and gave participants with a tangible, reusable take-home. While I'm not sure I'd recommend the workshop (it was quite expensive for what I received), I definitely benefited from the format.

The good news? I collected some tools to use in planning and discussing a new business. The bad news? I didn't learn too much about hybrid legal structures that might apply to small-scale ventures like mine. For me, the first half of the workshop was great, but the second piece--the matching--was too brief. I didn't feel like I had the pre-knowledge needed to make useful decisions about how to line up various kinds of legal structures or financing strategies to my goals. I learned new vocabulary and questions to ask myself and others, but the exercise itself felt a bit frustrating and haphazard.

The rest of this post is separated into two sections--one about what I learned about how to think about business formation, and the other about hybrid structures for social entrepreneurship. If you've started a business or organization before, the first section is probably rudimentary, but for me, it was really helpful.

Tools for Planning & Forming a Social Venture

The first half of the workshop focused on three things: values, relationships, and assets. Each of these categories was crafted to help participants narrow down to particular legal structures of interest. For example, the values section was posed in terms of spectrums: from simplicity to complexity, security to risk, constancy to nimbleness, autonomy to engagement. If you see your venture as a simple, risky, nimble operation, a quick and flexible legal structure (like the LLC) may make sense. On the other hand, if you want to start a complex project that is highly engaged with partners and will have a long-term prospectus, more complicated legal structures (like nonprofits or corporations) might make more sense.

The relationships cards asked participants to list individuals and organizations with whom the company will have different kinds of relationships. Who are your investors, co-conspirators, and believers? Who can validate your idea? Who are your buyers, your recipients, and your regulators? For each relationship type, I wrote down who fell into the category, what kind of involvement I saw them having, and how that translated to a certain kind of role in the company (owner, manager, governor, contractor, transactor). The idea here is that your plans for different relationships dictate certain kinds of business directions. A company in which employees are co-owners might translate well to a coop model. A company in which program recipients are involved with governance suggests a community board model. And so on. This relationship bit helped me think about how different kinds of folks will be involved with a highly participatory, community-co-created project in the long-term. It also helped me identify people I should be spending more time with in the short term (and it made me think of you, Museum 2.0 readers, who I see as potential co-conspirators).

Finally, we looked at assets. While these included expected cards for cash, credit, equipment, property, and IP, they also included distribution systems (vehicles for delivering the program) and brand/relationships. Again, we listed out specific items in each category along with engagement strategies for each. But this time, instead of mapping those to roles and ownership stakes, we mapped the assets to three kinds of asset management--protection, leverage, and share. For me, this was pretty interesting, particularly when it comes to intellectual property. I see the cafe I'm building as an R&D space for the cultural sector, and I want to be able to share research and ideas that come out of it freely with cultural organizations, while protecting my ability to also leverage that research for sale to for-profit companies that are interested in research around customer loyalty and community engagement. I'm usually so sharing-oriented, but I appreciate the complexity of figuring out how to balance giving things away with selling them--it's what I do in my work all the time (and it was an important part of the distribution of The Participatory Museum).

As noted above, the workshop became more confusing and less useful when we moved into matching what we'd written to various legal structures, governance models, and financing models. Part of this had to do with the shift in interaction--we stopped writing and personalizing cards to our own projects and were instead expected to read the little cards and glean from them enough information to make informed decisions (something that others may have been more able to do given much greater levels of experience with financing and legal structures). The cards were helpful for expanding my vocabulary and thinking about the options, particularly when it came to the market interaction, governance, and growth cards. The cards were tagged with various legal structures, so that, for example, you knew that endowments only work for financing non-profits, stock options are only applicable to corporations, and so on.

One of the governance ideas I liked most (and thought could easily extend to non-profits) is a Stewards Council. This is a structure that is apparently gaining traction in the social entrepreneurship world in which a company has a group of advisors with limited economic interest/investment who have some powers to weigh in on and even veto board decisions that may impact the ability of the company to accomplish its mission. This is a kind of check against board interests that are purely focused on shareholder returns and might steer a company away from its mission. But I think this might also make sense in non-profits, where boards are often funders and may not be able to steward the mission as successfully as a more diverse group of community members.

Legal Structures for Social Good (in the US)

Before the workshop, I'd read a good deal about the L3C, B Corp, and other nascent legal structures for social entrepreneurship. I'd been particularly excited about the L3C, which is a mission-first, low-profit LLC that is eligible for program-related investments (PRIs) by charitable foundations. B Corp is newer--right now it's a national trustmark (a certification, like organic), though Maryland just passed a law making "benefit corporation" a legal designation.

I was disappointed, and a little surprised, that the workshop facilitator did not talk at length about these structures nor was able to answer most peoples' questions about them (including basic questions like what "low-profit" means in the L3C context). Yes, these structures are still emerging, but L3C has been on the books in a few states for awhile and many of the workshop participants, like me, seemed particularly interested in them.

What I did learn, however, was not that encouraging. It seems that most L3Cs are large organizations, and they are formed as L3Cs specifically to access program-related investments (PRIs). Here's a brief primer on PRIs. Foundations make charitable grants and donations to non-profit organizations. They also manage investment portfolios that allow them to keep building their endowments so they can continue making charitable grants into the future. The IRS requires foundations to distribute at least 5% of their assets each year to charitable/social organizations. This 5% can be used for grants to non-profits or program-related investments in for-profits. The challenge traditionally is that to use a PRI to invest in a for-profit, both the foundation and the for-profit company have to go through lots of work with the IRS to justify that yes, the company is doing social good and is eligible for some of the foundation's distribution of assets. The L3C structure was set up so that for-profits and foundations can more easily partner and make PRIs possible. This seems to be working, though the question of whether the L3C label is sufficient evidence on its own for a company to be eligible for PRIs has not yet been tested in court.

So the upside is that an L3C is eligible for a pool of investment from foundations that was previously difficult to get. There's a second upside that only really makes sense for very large organizations, and it has to do with tranching, or segmenting, of investment. Basically, the idea is that a foundation could invest in an L3C at a very low rate of return with high risk (because it's a good mission-fit investment to make), which would allow the L3C to offer other more traditional investors a higher rate of return at lower risk in a different tranche of investment. This can make a socially beneficial company more likely to attract investment. The foundation with the PRI effectively jumpstarts the viability of the L3C by taking on the most risk and lowest amount of return.

This is all great for big companies, but for small projects like mine, an L3C might not be that useful. I'm not planning on pursuing complicated tranched investment strategies, and I don't have pre-existing relationships with foundations that are making PRIs in the arts or in community development. While the idea of incorporating as a mission-first company really appeals to me and fits with my thinking, I was told that an L3C model can actually scare off potential investors who see the company as not serious about making money. And it apparently takes an incredible amount of time, relationships, and education to help foundations that don't currently make PRIs consider doing so.

And what about the B Corp? We spent even less time talking about this during the workshop. This one really is new, at least the Maryland legal version, and at least for me, a corporation of any kind (B, S, C, coop) is more complicated than how I want to get my business started. I do think the B Corp certification is interesting, and it might make sense for a non-profit to go through the assessment and check out the rating system to understand what the B Corp folks see as indicative of a socially responsible business (though you should note that B Corp certification is not available for non-profits).

Ultimately, the workshop facilitator noted that many people who start social ventures choose their legal structure based on discussions with funders. Funders who are interested in charitable donations are more likely to engage with a non-profit, whereas those who are interested in investments (even at low profit) are more likely to get involved with companies. So if you are interested in putting some money into a project that will promote civic engagement through substantive interactions among strangers and serve as an experimental R&D center for public-facing cultural institutions, give me a call and we can figure out the next step together.

Should Everyone Work on the Front Line as Part of their Career?

Let's say you're a person eager to break into museums. What's the fastest, most effective way to get employed?

When I was 21 and pondering this question, I came upon an answer that worked for me: work on the front line. I figured I could pay someone a lot of money to go to graduate school, or I could pay nothing (and hopefully get paid) to learn on the job. This decision fit well with my learning style--I tend to lean towards real-world experience and self-directed endeavors. Over my first year in museums, I worked at five different institutions as an educator, exhibit builder, exhibit cleaner, art model, and whatever else I could find. I never stayed at any one institution for longer than I was learning (about 3 months on average), and I never made more than $7 an hour. But I learned enough to know what I wanted from full-time employment and how to get it.

Now, several years of full-time museum work later, I'm consulting. I don't miss all-staff emails or office politics. But I really miss the time I spent working on the floor of museums, interacting with visitors and watching how they engaged with things I'd built. I've come to feel like front line time has been the most educational and undervalued part of museum work.

Spending time on the museum floor can be exhausting, but it's also a pleasure. It's a learning environment free of meetings and bureaucracy. It's a place to learn, one interaction at a time, how to serve visitors better. The stultifying, repetitive tasks teach you how to be more efficient and effective. The constant interaction with visitors gives you an opportunity to delight, mixed with a healthy dose of reality. In most museums, the people who design visitor experiences don't operate them--so they (and I'm included here) miss out on the important feedback loop of how visitors use what is presented.

The challenge is that front line time is not typically valued highly--in any industry. The people who sell the postcards and guard the art and shelve the books are the lowest folks on the totem pole, both in terms of dollars and power. This means that people who want to move up in an institution must move away from work on the floor. Graduate students try to get entry level jobs that involve desks, not aprons. And senior professionals are not encouraged to waste their time talking to visitors in the lobby. While many museums are starting to institute weekly or monthly "floor time" requirements to help all staff become more connected to visitors, these policies are the exception, not the norm. I worked at one museum where my boss asked me politely not to spend so much time on the floor because it wasn't a good use of the salary they were paying me.

This is a problem. It subconsciously trains staff to think of direct service positions as inferior, whether they came in feeling that way or not. It encourages young professionals to avoid front line positions for fear they'll be trapped in Visitor Services, unable to reach Education or Exhibit departments. It exacerbates the extent to which designers, marketers, and program developers may think of visitors as "other" instead of as familiars for whom they have respect and regard. It prevents the whole institution from learning effectively from front line interactions. And it tells people like me, who get inspiration and energy from working with visitors, that those activities are not a valued part of the design process or the workday.

I don't want to overglamorize front line work. It can be monotonous and physically and emotionally demanding. Rather than drawing a line in the sand between low paid front line work and highly paid office work, I think it would be more effective for visitor-facing institutions to develop hybrid job descriptions in which front line work is a duty among many. What's exhausting for ten hours can be valuable and enjoyable for one or two. Designers and educators who rotate through floor time have a better sense of their clients and goals. Staff at all levels can pitch in with hosting, admissions, and guard work and learn something from the experience. And everyone benefits from leaving their desks for a couple of hours and moving around. It clears the brain better than surfing YouTube ever can.

I'd like to find ways to balance front-line and behind-the-scenes time, especially for designers, marketers, and educators. But I realize I'm writing from my personal experience as someone who enjoys interacting with people and finds that conducive to learning. I appreciate that that's not true for everyone. What impact has front line work (or its avoidance) had on your professional career?

In Support of Idiosyncrasy

People often ask me which museums are my favorite. I don't like to give a list. I've only visited about 0.01% of the institutions out there and I suspect that the other 99.99% includes some real gems. But when I really think about it, all my favorites (so far) have one thing in common. It's not the extent to which they are participatory. It's not their size or type or subject matter. It's the extent to which they are distinctive, and more precisely, idiosyncratic.

I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. The institutions that stick with me are the ones that have a peculiar individuality. In some cases, that's based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum. Other institutions are idiosyncratic in their relationship to their environment, like the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, or to their community, like the Wing Luke Asian Museum. Some are scrappy and iconoclastic, like the City Museum in St. Louis, whereas others are august stalwarts like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. While most of my favorites are small (idiosyncrasy is easier to maintain without too many committees), some are quite large--places like the Exploratorium where a singular ethos infuses a massive facility.

Idiosyncratic institutions aren't just quirky and weird. They are usually staffed by people who feel incredibly passionate about their particular focus. These institutions are often more connected to their specific, local communities than more generic institutions. They are akin to local news organizations and charities. They reflect the soul of the community and can be responsive to its unique interests and needs. They are places that people point to with pride and say, "that's our place."

Even the business world is getting wise to the power of idiosyncrasy. The 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea shop (shown at right) is not a small community-owned place. It's a Starbucks. Over the last year, Starbucks has been opening stores in a few cities with a very different look--one that emulates the handmade, community vibe of locally-owned coffee shops. Whether you think this is a brilliant move or a corporate swindle, it demonstrates that even a large company with a highly branded, consistent image sees the benefit of individualizing offerings to different markets. Starbucks can't be a small funky startup, but it can try to look like one.

Why are museums going in the other direction, trying to become more consistent rather than celebrating their idiosyncrasies? To some extent, it's externally-driven. Funders and potential donors tend to look for particular benchmarks of professionalism (appropriately), and few are comfortable funding the most risky or content-specific institutions. But that's only part of the story. Mostly, institutions move away from idiosyncrasy on their own accord. I see three significant internal reasons for homogenization in museums:

1. As money gets tight, museums look for exhibits, program strategies, and revenue streams that are "proven" by other institutions' successes, rather than charting their own potentially risky path.
2. Many museums no longer employ in-house exhibit developers, relying instead on a short list of contractors and consultants. Design firms' projects often have a common look across different cities and institutions.
   
3. Small museums, which are most likely to cultivate local, distinctive voice and approaches, often have an inferiority complex. Rather than asserting their uniqueness, they try to emulate large museums.
   

The institutions that seem most prey to a "cookie cutter" approach are science centers and children's museums. These institutions have three additional reasons for homogeneity:

1. The audience cycles frequently as families "age out." Institutions may feel less of a need to offer something unusual or distinctive if the audience will keep refreshing every few years.
2. The content is often seen as not being community-specific. Science is science, and grocery store exhibits are grocery store exhibits. Funders like the NSF have encouraged science centers in particular to share their techniques and evaluations, which is fabulous but also leads to rampant and sometimes unthinking imitation.
3. These museums have undergone the fastest growth in the industry in the past thirty years. There is a big business of selling exhibits, copies of exhibits, and exhibit recipe books, and many individuals who start new institutions rely almost entirely on these vehicles to fill their galleries.
   

I think this is a particular shame because children's museums and science centers have the greatest opportunity to introduce young visitors to the special delights of a uniquely community-focused, idiosyncratic approach. The best children's and science museums are deeply community-interrelated, often in ways that are hard to discern from the exhibits when experiencing them casually. They may feature community gardens or exhibit labels in languages tailored to locals. They may employ local artists to help create visitor experiences. They may build their exhibits to accommodate the interests and needs of particular families and school groups they have known and worked with for years. Or they may just have an unusual and distinctive spirit or ethos behind their work.

I understand why retail establishments benefit from becoming bigger, more homogeneous, and more distributed. People like to buy from chains because they know what they are going to get. But consistency should not be the number one value when it comes to providing visitors with educational, aesthetic, social, and hopefully transformative experiences. I'd argue that one of the top reasons people DON'T visit museums is that they think they already know what they are going to get. Especially when it comes to small museums with limited collections, a distinctive personality is often the best thing the institution has to offer. Trying to cover it up or smooth it out in favor of "best practices" does a disservice to the museum and the audience. It creates another forgettable museum.

Do you share my love of idiosyncratic institutions? How can you cultivate idiosyncrasy in your own work and museum?

Could You Split Your Membership?

Signs like this one (spotted in the window at a large science center) drive me nuts.

Why? Because they validate the highly-problematic concept of membership as a discount. There are many folks who've written about the problems with "value" membership and have recommended that cultural institutions reorient toward offering "affinity" or "relationship" memberships. While value membership focuses on free admission and discounts, affinity membership focuses on building relationships and supporting a community of highly invested visitors.

Making the switch from value to affinity membership programs can sound risky. Value membership is a big business, especially in a tough economic climate. Families like the idea that museum memberships offer a low-cost alternative to recreational activities like the movies, which cost money every time you go. With a membership, you can come to the museum whenever you want--something more visitors may take advantage of as more expensive recreational activities are cut from family budgets. Unsurprisingly, museums are loathe to cut or alter membership programs that successfully serve visitors' needs and generate revenue.

So what can an institution do if staff would LIKE to move towards affinity memberships but don't want to risk losing the revenue and relationships generated by value memberships?

I have a simple recommendation: create two kinds of membership. Offer an annual pass to those who want free admission, and offer a different kind of membership to those who want a deeper relationship. This allows institutions to focus specific resources—discounts, personal attention, and opportunities for deeper experiences—towards the people who want them.

While the groups do overlap, in general, annual pass holders and affinity members want different things. Annual pass holders want free admission and good experiences during their visits. Affinity members want a deeper connection with the institution, which often involves exclusive content or programs. Each of these groups may not care for the services offered to the other. Splitting the groups reduces institutional waste and is more likely to deliver satisfying experiences to different types of members. Some visitors may fall in both categories, but if the different programs are clearly communicated, frequent visitors might choose to become both annual pass holders and join the museum club.

When it comes to optimizing the experience for annual pass holders, all those expensive newsletters may not be effective. Annual pass holders tend to be a high-churn group. To increase renewal rates, institutions should focus resources toward encouraging them to attend, since "doing the math" on visits is the reason they joined in the first place. They didn't join to get special behind-the-scenes content or access to special programs. They joined for free admission, responding to marketing pieces like the sign shown at the top of this post.

In contrast, affinity members may or may not care about free admission. They may care more about being able to talk with curators, attend special events, or contribute to upcoming exhibitions or programs. Some institutions have started offering niche memberships to reach visitors with particular affinities--for example, the Brooklyn Museum with 1stfans (geared toward "socially networked" free 1st Saturday attendees), or COSI with its premium membership (geared toward families with very young children). These membership programs are necessarily small, because they cater to the interests of particular segments of the larger visiting community. For example, COSI's premium membership provides families with access to extended morning hours in their early childhood exhibit area--a benefit that only appeals to visitors who want an exclusive morning experience with their children.

There may even be some kinds of affinity membership that don't cost money to join. Every time a visitor signs up for a mailing list or leaves a comment at the front desk, he expresses his affinity for the institution. I've been working on one project in which we are conceptualizing membership as something you can achieve through multiple visits/contributions, not something you can buy right off the bat. The idea is to model membership off of more natural forms of relationship-building between humans--the more time we spend together, the more substantive that time is, the more we get to know each other and to provide for each other.

While I'm aware that some institutions have gotten push back from visitors when they introduce overly prescriptive membership types, I think that people are pretty comfortable with the difference between an annual pass and a "friends" group or niche memberships. What do you think?

Interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard Part 2: Rethinking Membership and Admissions

This is the second part of a two-part interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard on their book Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. This post focuses on my favorite part of the book, in which Beverly and John argue that museums need to rethink their financial and programmatic relationship with their best customers--their members. I've written before about the problems with value membership (and innovations like 1stfans), and I was intrigued and challenged by John and Beverly's alternatives.

One of the more provocative ideas in the book is the concept that members should not get free admission, but should instead get a set of elite perks that give them special status and opportunities at the institution. You talk about comparable programs like elite flyer programs. I love this idea, but I often find that museum staff are really nervous about making any changes that might alienate current members/donors. How would you recommend that museums transition in this direction? What will it take to make this happen?

John: I think you sort of have to phase it in. Beverly did some interesting things when she directed Old Sturbridge Village to offer pricing schemes around opportunities for members only that were fee-based. The phasing in is beginning to communicate that being a member comes with privileges, but those privileges are not necessarily free. That said, at some point you do have to draw a line in the sand and say we’re going to move in this direction and start doing it.

Beverly: What became so clear at Sturbridge was that our membership was really tuned in and loyal. Members are a group of people who have already bought in – they already like you. You’re spending a lot of money to serve them and not getting any more dollars after their initial payment to show for it. The first time we tried this, we offered an exclusive tour to members for $25 and it sold out immediately. Members told us they wanted more behind the scenes exclusive programs. We kept raising the price and they kept coming. We had families start clamoring to become members to gain access to special programs of this type. And it wasn’t just about money--we used every opportunity to deepen the relationship. Our intent was to give members a say in things, talking to them personally, what next, and they began to drive that program more.

I also heard about an incredible experience like this from the Newark Performing Arts Hall. They started a new music program by targeting small groups of members with special shows and building up, to the point that now their audience for new music is huge. I think sometimes we focus too much on the creative things we are making--the programs or the exhibits--and we forget that the recipients of these programs want a personal, special experience. Members really want a special relationship--that's why they join.

John: There are sort of three key ideas behind this. The first is going back to first principles. We have historically been in this industrial one-size-fits-all mode, not just for exhibitions and programs but for membership as well. Very few institutions take the time to appreciate that people become members for different reasons and have different needs. Second, a lot of people become members because of a sense of personal need and identity and a relationship with the institution. And yet there are very few institutions where if you took staff out on the floor, they could successfully point out which visitors were members and which were not. If these folks are your best customers and you can’t identify them, then you aren’t meeting their needs to be special because you don’t recognize them as special. And the third idea is around money. If you could treat people not as a number, and meet their needs, they would pay you for that! That’s what people want. By using a standard membership as a discount device, the institution commodifies the museum and communicates that the primary value of a museum is its price. This sells the institution short as well as the members. People are willing to pay if they feel they are getting something worthwhile. If you are just offering something cheap, you aren’t offering value.

Beverly: If you start to do the numbers on what it costs to retain members and provide for them, you end up very often on the short end of it. Many families join on their first visit because it looks cheaper, but in fact all they got was a bargain to begin with and then it costs the institution to make all the repeated contact via newsletters, etc.

One of the most challenging concepts in the book for me came under the issue of admission pricing. Following on Crawford and Mathew’s work on consumer values, you state that if the experience is superlative and truly satisfies visitors’ needs, people will not perceive price as a barrier. And yet you also talk about institutions that focus on providing free or low-cost learning experiences to visitors. Where do you feel museums fall in the experience economy, and how should they determine their pricing?

John: The short answer is: With great difficulty. It would seem to me – and I have never been the ultimate decision maker when it comes to pricing – that it begins by working back to value. If value is this mutli-dimensional piece, you have to have clarity on what is the value you are giving to people. Museums are not things that anybody needs - museum experiences are not necessities like food, shelter, clothing. So then what is a museum’s value? How can we ensure that it is as great a value as possible? And what would it cost to have a comparable value any place else in a comparable way? So start there and reverse engineer what the price of the value is and you will arrive at a fair cost. I’d recommend this approach instead of doing a marketing survey and asking people what they’d be willing to pay. The place to start is to determine what you are and what you provide, and then the economic value should fall out of that as well (of course you also have to then deliver on that value to justify the price you’ve set).

Beverly: Why do people buy $100 sneakers? Why do people spend all that money at Whole Foods? Part of what people do is seek out things that reflect something about themselves, and consequently that value added piece is something people are willing to pay for when it reflects something about their identity. It’s not only about meeting members’ needs but finding ways to support individual experiences for everyone, so that every visitor can say, “something was done for me.”

Much of this book is focused on high level analysis and discussion. But many museum professionals are not in the position to rethink their entire institutions. What do you recommend as starting points for museum staff who are not ultimate decision-makers?

Beverly: There are probably lots of entry points. If I were someone whose responsibility has to do with orientation or front desk, I would get to know people coming in and ask them what people were coming in for. At Sturbridge there was one whole set of visitors coming in and asking “what can we do in an hour?” With this knowledge, we could put together floor staff and educators together to develop something for those visitors. Visitor service staff can also provide a personal greeting and recognition that there is interest from the institution in visitors’ needs.

In education, it’s relatively simple to look through a gallery, observe people, figure out where do people gather, what reflects different visitors’ interests – and educators too could take on some of that role to customize the experience.

I think designers can think about how we can individualize and design different types of exhibits that reflect the ways people learn, in groups and as individuals, at different stages with different needs.

And so you can gather a lot of information and that can be a starting point. I also think everyone in the institution should be required to spend time on the floor.

John: And if you want to ratchet it up to the next step, organize a discussion group and encourage conversations across the institution to talk about these ideas and debate them, and see whether they make sense in your institution. Try to engage administration in these conversations, and challenge them to be part of it. The book actually provides discussion questions at the end of each chapter expressly for this purpose.

Beverly: The more we talk about these things and not get our feet stuck in the sand, the further we can go.


Thanks to John and Beverly, and here's to keeping the conversation going!

Thriving in the Knowledge Age: Interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard, Part 1

In 2006, John Falk and Beverly Sheppard, seasoned museum researchers and practitioners, released a co-authored book entitled Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. This remarkable book mixes business theory, visitor identity research, historical information about the evolution of museums, and predictive recommendations for museums moving forward. While at times wonkish, the book is also energetically adamant that museums need to change in several significant ways to be valuable and relevant to their audiences.

I've split my interview with John and Beverly into two parts for comfortable reading. This first part focuses fairly generally on the question of how to determine museums' value and developing institutional business models. The second part will delve more deeply into two topics: membership and admission pricing. I encourage you to share your own questions and thoughts in the comments, and of course, to read this excellent and challenging book.

This is a pretty powerful and provocative book—you talk about rethinking the whole business of museums. You argue that museums need to abandon the blockbuster and move towards providing personalized, customized learning experiences. In the three years since the book was published, what direction have you seen museums take and why?

Beverly: It’s really a mixed bag. I think to me one of the things that continues to be the most frustrating is the fact that admissions numbers continue to be the core metric of success. But on the other hand, I’ve heard people say, “well it shouldn’t be.” There’s a sense of frustration and awareness that there should be something else but people are having great difficulty sorting out what that should be. It’s indicative of the ways the museum world to me is a very conservative world. Even when there’s desire for change, it’s very difficult to shift practices across the board.

John: There has been receptivity to many of the ideas that we talk about in the book, but that receptivity far exceeds any change. So museum professionals are happy to say “we need to do things differently, and we know there are problems with numbers, blockbusters, etc” but the rhetoric exceeds the reality at this point. But it must be acknowledged that a leap into an unknown future is daunting and nobody knows exactly what that future should look like.

Beverly: And it’s not just the museums that need to make the shift. It is the whole system. When you go to your county for support or fill out a grant application, the question of numbers and things you do is part of their expectations as well.

Late in the book, you introduce Crawford and Mathew’s value matrix of five essential consumer values: access, experience, price, service, and product. You note that their research showed that the most successful businesses seek to dominate in only one area, be distinguished in another, and acceptable in the final three. Museums are very used to trying to be all things to all people. How do you recommend institutions prioritize their focus?

John: I was quite taken by Crawford and Mathew’s notion that to try to be excellent at everything is a recipe for bankruptcy. It rung true, and in some ways, I think the same shoe fits for nonprofits as well. It’s not about saying we’re going to be bad at something or exclude some people. It’s about being honest about what an institution can do that will help make them truly be unique in their community – their specific community. The Smithsonian and a small history museum have very different communities and thus should have very different expectations of what makes them unique. Find the thing that you can uniquely provide to your community and focus on that. Prioritizing does not imply exclusion, but it does acknowledge that you can’t serve all people equally well.

Beverly: I know in a consulting role, everyone says that their audience is “everyone.” It’s nice, but it isn’t true or useful. Finding your niche should be exciting. For example, I talked today to someone from the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Juana Guzman, and they have fabulous ideas about connecting to community, saying we must connect in really integral ways with those people whom we serve. Guzman said, “we can talk about the appreciation of art and the aesthetic experience, but we don’t talk about every art form that we could fit in here. We talk about a cultural aesthetic.” It’s about understanding who you are and where your strengths are.

And then a lot of conversations I’ve had have come back to the concept of service. While it's one of the five consumer values Crawford and Mathews identified, it's an essential one for all museums. If you have excellent service, you should pick one other value to focus on as well.

Customer service is a fairly new term to the museum field, and I meet many museum professionals who are somewhat uncomfortable or leery of business terms of this type. Thriving in the Knowledge Age is very much a business book. How can we help museum professionals feel comfortable focusing on the bottom line while also keeping close to institutional missions?

Beverly: I’m somewhat astounded that there is something unsavory in the museum field about business terms. When it comes down to it, museums are businesses. They provide services. They sell things. It may be an implicit business model, but it’s a business model. The important thing is to focus that business model on the things that make the visit valuable to individuals and families. When you do this, it becomes obvious that customer service is about supporting the quality of experience. Aspects like orientation and how you are greeted help put visitors' anxieties aside and allow people to enjoy the experience. If you don't believe me, you should read the book The Museum Experience. Your customers do not differentiate between the cleanliness of the bathroom and the museum experience. It’s the whole deal.

John: The real currency in the 21st century is not about money – it’s about time. The competition is over peoples’ time, need and value of identity. That’s the business that museums are competing in. To pretend we’re not in competition for people’s time and their desire for a heightened experience doesn’t make sense: we’re absolutely competing in the truest business sense of the word “competition” for these values.

Beverly: But I would also put that uneasiness about “business” in the same category we used to think about “marketing.” Over time, museums have grown comfortable with the idea that marketing is a reasonable set of communication functions which let people know what’s going on, how to find and participate in things, how to know they are welcome.

It seems like collections-oriented art and history museums potentially have the hardest time picking a particular community to serve because they serve two—the donors who support them financially and the visitors who walk through the door. This seems like two very different customer bases, and I wonder if it leads to a kind of schizophrenia for institutions trying to serve both.

John: You’re right; art museums and collections institutions that have historically derived most of their funding through donors have been schizophrenic because the donors are their main customer. But then the question becomes, what about the public? Are we here to serve the public or to serve these donors? Are the donors here to serve the public? And that conflict needs to be wrestled with at the highest level; in other words with the board of directors.

Beverly: Many donors to museums also fund social service initiatives, but in those cases, the funders are explicitly supporting the public mission. This goes back to the problem of museums poorly defining their role. If museums are clear about what it is that they do relative to the public, they can find funders who support those goals.


I look forward to seeing your comments, and John and Beverly will check in as time permits to join the conversation as well. (But bear in mind I'm on vacation and won't be able to respond until the weekend.) Tune in on Thursday for the second part of this interview, when we will dive more specifically into John and Beverly's recommendations for new pricing and membership models for 21st century institutions.