Use This: Audience Research in Rotterdam Provides a Template for Smarter Segmenting

Imagine a concise, well-designed report on audiences for cultural activities in a large urban city. Imagine it peppered with snappy graphics and thought-provoking questions about connections to research and audience development in your community.

Stop imagining and check out the Rotterdam Festival's 2011 report on five years of trends in audience data and related audience development efforts. They didn't do anything shocking or groundbreaking, but what they did, they did very well:

• They identified the unique characteristics of Rotterdam citizens. 
• They created psychographic profiles of eight target types of cultural consumer in Rotterdam, based on existing European market segmentation research. 
• They interviewed and learned more about people representing these eight types. They identified the types' distinct interests and concerns, aspirations, media usage, and barriers to participation.
• They used clear, evocative language (even in translation!) to convey their ideas. 

While their approach is not one I have used, I learned a lot from it. I recommend checking out the short-form report [pdf] and considering how the work in Rotterdam might inspire or support your own work on audience identification, understanding, and development. Hats off to Johan Moerman and the crew for making and sharing this work.

What's Coming Up, What Happened, How Can I Help, and What the Heck is this E-Blast For, Anyway?

Like a lot of organizations, our museum sends out a weekly email to folks who are interested in upcoming events, exhibitions, and happenings at our museum. We are sensitive to keeping it short, interesting, and readable. We mostly focus on sharing what exhibitions are on and which events are coming up that week. Just the facts, ma'am.

At the same time, we generate some pretty great digital documentation (mostly photos and videos) from recent events. This documentation often languishes in corners of the social web. We capture the moments, post them online, and that's it.

In the past few months, we've started to experiment with sharing documentation on the e-blast. We've known for awhile that the most clicked-on part of our e-blast is often the Wishlist--a simple call-out for stuff we need for programs and exhibitions. As a community-based museum, it makes sense that we actively solicit participation through the e-blast when we can.

Bolstered by the power of the Wishlist, we decided to explore other non-announcement-y content to add to the e-blast.

Here's a recent e-blast we sent. It features:

• an event & exhibition announcement
• an opportunity to apply for our teen program
• an instagram video of a ten year old who did a spontaneous performance at a recent event
• a wishlist request

This e-blast had a surprising surge in clicks. Our average e-blast has a click rate of 1-2%. This one clocked in at 3%. The only other blast that has ever had this 3% clicks offered two job announcements.

Of those clicks, the vast majority - 44% - were on the video of the singing girl. Triple the number of clicks that anything else got. Documentation trumped announcement. An exciting moment captured digitally was more interesting than the promise of future exciting moments. 

A crass way to look at this is that the video was link-bait. Of course people will click on a video of--as we put it--"a 10 year old crushing a surprise performance at First Friday." But this documentation is also a direct showcase of our mission to ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections. I was in the room when Lily got up on stage and belted out a song she wrote. It was extraordinary. It brought the room together. It was a mind-exploding, unexpected moment of connection. It's the kind of magic that sometimes happens at the MAH.

If we wanted our e-blast to be as reflective of our mission, programming, and values as possible, it would primarily feature:

• invitations to get meaningfully involved
• documentation and celebration of community members who have gotten involved, shared experiences, made unexpected connections, or experienced moments of ignition
• clear and welcoming language about a diversity of available experiences where you could have these experiences too

We're moving in this direction, but we could probably do more. I'm a bit embarrassed at how simple this seems and how we had to wander into discovering it. We thought the e-blast was prescriptively for one thing. Our visitors are reminding us that any communication can and should be mission-oriented. Thanks, visitors.

If your e-blast was written in the language of your mission, how would it be different? What would it feature?

How I Learned to Think about Marketing/PR Differently, and a Job Opportunity

We just posted a part-time position at my museum for a Community Engagement/Marketing Associate. This is a big step for us, not because we haven't had a dedicated marketing person for a long time, but more because I wasn't sure we would ever want or need one. But several experiences and smart people have changed my perspective on this, and that's what this post is about.

Does a Small Museum Really Need a Marketing Person?

For a long time, I was super skeptical about marketing and public relations professionals. At their worst, they seem like self-deluded cheerleaders for their organization/cause/event, wielding exclamation points instead of analytical rigor. I've had bad direct experiences with high-priced PR firms that are slaves to antiquated promotion calendars. I love Trevor Donnell's brilliant book and blog, Marketing the Arts to Death, in which he documents the disasters caused by our inability to be audience- and data-driven in our marketing efforts.

So I assumed we didn't want a marketing person, or at least, not THAT kind of marketing person. At our museum, we distribute marketing tasks--some with our membership director, our programs staff, and our visitor services staff. The people who produce the programming or who have the relationships produce the messaging, so the conversations are authentic and personal. Curators and front desk staff blog about their interactions with objects and visitors. Program staff invent guerrilla marketing techniques, run the photobooths and program evaluations, and send out the follow-up emails.  As director, I post, tweet, and talk with visitors along with the rest of my team.

For a long time, I thought this was the best approach. It allows us all to be involved in promoting and documenting experiences at the museum. It cuts out the middleman--when someone from the press wanted to know more about an event, they talk to that event producer. It invites spontaneity and diversity of voice on a range of social media outlets, from Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest to Instagram. And it cultivates authentic relationships between staff members and the awesome community members who can make our museum better.

But then, a few things happened. We started...

• to see the limits of our distributed approach to marketing. We sometimes lose track of the big goals that should underline all of our promotion, and we don't spend the time to develop and refine those goals based on research. Our programs staff are overtaxed and spending a lot of time putting together materials to promote their events. We rarely get the chance to go deeper or follow up when creative opportunities arise. No one has time to analyze the results of our approaches when it comes to what is and isn't working. In other words, we're getting tasks done, and we're doing it creatively, but no one is steering the bus... and thus, we're not learning and adapting as much as we could. 
• imagining possibilities that no one "owns" currently. Our programming and exhibitions staff work with visitors to co-create a huge amount of stuff--from giant yarn-bomb sculptures to funny breakup stories. We don't "do" much with this content currently. We'll post a few stories on Facebook, share photos, and of course, let visitors take things home with them. But we started imagining a person who could focus a bit on these collaborations and say--hey, let's turn those stories into a funny little book, or let's make sure the local radio station knows we're capturing people's bird sounds and get them in on it. Recently, Alpo hosted a block party in Santa Cruz inspired by a guy who came to our Wearable Art Ball in a costume made from dog food bags... but we didn't have anyone to get the museum involved in the followup. We produce a lot of "wasted" media here with our visitors, and with a bit of tweaking, it could become something really amazing and shareable.
• realizing that there are community-based organizations that do marketing really, really well. Only they don't call it marketing. They call it advocacy. I got so many emails over the past year from political and cause-based groups that are super-smart about how they build movements and inspire participation. They do constant A/B testing to understand what is and isn't working. And they are driven by a passion not just to advance their cause but to do so by increasing the engagement and involvement of collaborators and supporters. That sounds a lot more like what we want to focus on at our museum than selling tickets.
• meeting people in arts marketing who changed my perspective. My favorite new conference  in 2012 was the National Arts Marketing Project in November. I went into it pretty nervous--how would a group of marketers respond to my talk about active audience participation, inclusion, and social change? Turns out they were the MOST engaged, the most thoughtful... and in their other sessions, having really interesting conversations about experimental projects, diversifying constituents, the neuroscience of choice, and the ethics of pricing. It made me think that this kind of person could help our organization if we could articulate the position properly. And smart people I met there, like Clay Lord, helped me think that through.

And so we came up with a job for a person who is part marketing/PR task-master, part journalist/media-maker, part community organizer. We made research and creative collaboration key parts of the job description. I'm excited to see what comes of it, and if this sounds like you, by all means, please apply.

Put Down the Clipboard:Visitor Feedback as Participatory Activity

A few weeks ago, the MAH Director of Community Programs, Stacey Garcia, came to me with an idea. Stacey has been collaborating with local artists to produce a series of content-rich events that invite visitors to participate in a range of hands-on activities. The events are informal, personal, and fun, but our feedback mechanism--onsite and post-event surveys--not so much. Instead, Stacey thought, why not make the feedback experience an activity unto itself?

This past Friday, we experimented with a new feedback format at an evening event focused on poetry and book arts. The event involved over fifty artists throughout the building helping visitors make their own paper, write poems, stitch books, etc. (full description here, photos from the event here). On the ground floor, Stacey created a "Show and Tell" booth out of an old refrigerator box and some paperbacks. She painted some cardboard black and framed it to look nice. We gave people chalk and the choice of four simple prompts:

At 3rd Friday I made
At 3rd Friday I loved
At 3rd Friday I met
At 3rd Friday I learned

After making a board and taking a photo, each participant had the option to have their photo shared on Flickr or remain private (90% said yes). We have an intern, Kathryn, who emailed each participant individually to thank them for coming, shared their personal photo, and gave them the link to the rest of the photos. We used a simple paper signup list to link individuals to their photos during the event so Kathryn could tie it all together.

We don't yet know how people will respond to the emails, and we have some kinks to work out with the booth and camera setup. What we do know is that this is a vastly improved feedback system. It accomplished several things at once:

1. It drew people in. Instead of interns with clipboards tentatively approaching visitors who were busy having fun, the booth put feedback on visitors' own terms. They came to the booth when they wanted to share, and everyone felt good about the sharing experience. 
2. We got more feedback. About fifty people participated in the booth out of a crowd of 320--a pretty good sample size. Our typical onsite and post-event survey would attract about 20 people to opt in. 
3. We got intriguing feedback. While I'm sure it repelled some introverts, the performative aspect of this activity encouraged many participants to thoughtfully construct and present their thoughts. I was surprised by the originality of the content and what people got out of the event. We had debated the prompt structure a bit before the event (I thought "learned" was too leading), but giving visitors the choice of prompts let them share what they wanted without too much guidance. "Loved" and "Made" were the most popular.
4. It invited visitors to memorialize their experience. Some people showed off their handmade paper or books. Others stood in the booth with a new friend. The booth was a nice way to celebrate what participants had done--and to create a digital record that they can keep and share.
5. It created an appealing body of stories about the event. As we try to build a brand for "3rd Friday" as an ongoing museum series, I feel like these photos, more than any other collateral, will help people understand what the event is like and what they might get out of it. We're definitely hybridizing program and marketing here, and I want to be sensitive to that and make sure people don't feel exploited. But I honestly believe that visitors telling visitors what they get out of museum experiences is the most effective and authentic way to share what happens in a community museum. It's certainly been a hit with MOMA's "I went to MOMA and..." campaign. Maybe this is good fodder for a future Museum 2.0 debate about instrumentalizing visitors' contributions for marketing purposes... you tell me. 

What creative ways have you found to solicit visitor feedback and share visitors' stories?

Open Thread: How Does Your Institution Say Happy New Year?

It's that time of year when inboxes fill up with digital thank you's, happy holidays, and end-of-year solicitations. At the MAH, we had an intern who worked this summer and fall to create a video (her first!) to reflect some of the new activities at the museum. We didn't really have a plan for what we would do with it, but when it was done, I suddenly realized we had a great way to showcase 2011 to our members, donors and friends. (Warning: the song can get stuck in your head, and yes, that is my dad singing.)

And that made me wonder: how do other organizations showcase their work at the end of the year? What do you do to ask, tell, share, and celebrate what's been happening at your institution? This year, I've seen everything from heartfelt solicitations (Young Playwrights Theater) to surreal pop culture singalongs (MCA Denver) to impressively-produced, collaborative, yet poignant pop culture singalongs (Detroit Science Center, which closed one month after this video was released).

Enjoy our video and share your own via the comments. I don't really have any brilliant ideas on what makes a good end-of-year video (except that it should be short). I'd love to hear your thoughts on what works and doesn't. If lots of people share their videos in the comments, I'll write a follow-up post next week based on some of the apparent trends.

Inside a Museum Website Redesign

When I started at The Museum of Art & History (MAH) in May, one of my priorities was redesigning our website. I didn't want to do anything fancy--just make the site more functional, lively, easy to update, and reflective of the new institutional vision of being a community hub. You can see the site circa February 2011 here, and the current site here. 

We got incredibly lucky with a fabulous volunteer web designer, Marty Spellerberg , who saw my request for help on this blog and enthusiastically jumped in. Marty is everything I could have wanted from a designer--he overdelivered on my vague directives and pushed me to think more rigorously about what we were trying to do. And he did it all from afar--I've never met Marty in person and have only corresponded with him by voice a couple of times. Thank you, Marty. I hope everyone who reads this hires you to redesign their websites.

OK, enough promotion. I want to use this post not to talk about the final result but the process--what we thought about as we did this and what we hope will come out of it.

We made two key decisions that I think are somewhat unusual in doing this work:

1. We tried to create a single message that clearly defines what the museum is about and put that front and center.  
2. We treated the whole redesign process, and the website work going forward, as wholly iterative and incremental.

Single Message Homepage

Marty and I looked at a lot of websites for inspiration as we started this process. We tried to focus on small organizations--nothing too fancy and unachievable for us given our budget of $0. We saw homepages of two main types: blocks (i.e. MCA Denver) or single rotating image (like JMKAC). 

While both types had strong examples, neither satisfied us. We wanted to be as focused as possible with the prime real estate on the homepage while offering navigation that would be consistent across the whole site. I wanted to be ruthless about homepage creep and avoid the "my program should be on the front!" battles that can lead to incoherence. We are rebranding our museum in the community--not with marketing dollars, but with a singular message about being a thriving gathering place around art and history. I wanted the website to be the front line for that message.

Marty pushed me to look at websites in a whole different sector--online services. Many of these websites, from MailChimp to Kaleidescope to Posterous, have a consistent format:

• The main ("above the fold") area is one big value proposition. A big image, big headline, large copy.
• This culminates in a strong call to action, usually with a button.
• Four or six features are highlighted, with no more than a couple of lines each and an image/icon.
• Optionally, other relevant information provided to strengthen the pitch (testimonials, blog).
• At the bottom -- last chance! Repeat the call to action.

While we weren't able to be as laser beam-focused as many of the online services sites are, we did pursue this strategy in the eventual homepage. If you look at the MAH homepage now, you will see:

• Clear, unchanging value proposition in the middle: "Your Place to Explore Art & History." This message is supported by a slideshow of images, all of which reinforce the message (we have rules like "all images must include people" that help us make sure we're doing this).
• Two calls to action (and yes, these could look better) to check out upcoming events and join the email list.
• Four supporting events or experiences in a series of unchanging categories: "Meet, chat, study, make, and dream," "Dive into the past with family and friends," "Be inspired and feed your curiosity," and "Support our community."
• At the bottom, below the fold, a restatement of the main message and a repeat of the call to action to join the e-newsletter.

We're still working on interpreting statistics on use. We've made so many changes--not just to the website, but to our whole institutional positioning--that it's hard to glean specific insights about the homepage. But there's no question that people are repeating our main messages back to us and commenting on how well the website reflects what they've read, heard, or experienced about how we're trying to shift the museum.

Iterative Redesign

People always talk about iterative redesign, but the truth is that it's really pretty scary. It means launching things that aren't done, shifting your website slowly over several weeks or months, and potentially confusing people along the way. But Marty encouraged us to commit to an iterative process for two reasons:

1. It allows us to incrementally experience the new changes and to openly discuss what  should shift based on the response to the intermediate steps. This was important both on the back end--i.e. we switch to Wordpress and notice a bunch of little issues that need to be cleaned up before going to the next design step--and the front--i.e. we learn that our users want a tab for exhibitions and are not satisfied by a "what's on" tab that includes all programmatic experiences. We learned that layman's terms like "events" were much more understandable for people than "programs." And so on. We could keep making these changes with our designer rather than Marty already being out the door.
2. It supports a culture of a constantly improving website. Every shift makes the website better. No shift makes it perfect. Most everyone on our staff and several interns are empowered to edit the website, and we add things as we can--even if they're not complete. We add events before we have an image to go with them. We incrementally improve the information about volunteering and donating. We don't need things to be finished to put them on the public site--we just need to have enough to know we're offering the base of something worthwhile. I think this is a healthy process for us moving forward--especially as a team with no single staff member who is "responsible" for the website. It's not a 0-1 game. It's an evolving site--just as the museum is evolving.

Someday, when we have a non-zero budget, I expect that we'll do a more serious redesign of the website. But for now, we're incredibly happy with what we have--and even more so, with how the redesign made us think about our communication with the outside world and our work processes to support it.

Do You Have a Good Argument for Your Institution?

At my grocery store, if you bring your own shopping bag, they give you tokens that you can use to donate money to local nonprofits. As I drop 5 cent tokens into my slots of choice, I often wonder: could my museum be on this list? Would it be appropriate to ask for donations here alongside the food bank and the women's shelter? Would anyone put their token in our slot?

This boils down to a fairly basic question: what's the value of our institutions? We all have arguments we make to prove our worth--economic, educational, social--but many of those arguments are insider-focused. They are successful with audiences who already believe in the intrinsic power of art or the role art plays in civic engagement, but it's unclear how helpful they are to the people who aren't attending, participating, or supporting. I don't think many of them pass the the grocery store token test.

Last year, the Fine Arts Fund in Cincinnati (now called ArtsWave) released a terrific report that examined this question in detail. The Fund wanted to find the most effective ways to promote public action for the arts in their city--not among established arts supporters, but among diverse members of the public who may have only a glancing relationship with arts institutions.

Here's how the project worked: researchers worked with small focus groups to understand their associations with arts and culture organizations and developed several framing arguments for public support of the arts. Then, they interviewed 400 people by phone and online, presenting them with a short framing argument (80-120 words), followed by a series of open-ended questions intended to determine how memorable the argument was, how it influenced their perception of the public value of the arts, and how likely it was to inspire action. The goal was not to find out what people like about the arts but what might impel them to actively support arts organizations and projects.

The results are fascinating--not just for the arguments that did work, but even more so for the ones that didn't (jump to page 15 of the report). A few gems:

• To many people, "culture" is about ethnicity. If you talk about a "cultural institution" or an "arts and culture" project, people might think you are talking about something specific to a set of individuals who share common heritage, not something universally shared.
• People often think of art institutions as providers of individual entertainment opportunities. If you want to go to the museum and I want to go to the baseball game, we're each making our own choices with our recreational time and money. This perception makes it hard for people to get behind the idea of public support for the arts--why should I subsidize your personal interest?
• Arguments about broadening your horizons through art and the spiritual and health benefits of art work for established arts enthusiasts, but for others, these arguments may fall flat. A lot of things can broaden your horizons, reduce your stress, and connect you to transcendence. While these statements were interesting to some people in the study, they were perceived as highly specific to individual experiences and did not impel any sense of public responsibility.
• If you talk about arts and kids, people may quickly assume that you are talking strictly about the education system and the role of art in schools.
• While arguments about the role of art in engendering civic pride and local distinction were effective, arguments about the role of arts in city planning or civic improvements were not. Participants quickly got distracted in talking about the problems of their city and were not sufficiently convinced that art has a role in addressing those issues.
• Arguments appealing to the long history of arts support in the city made some people feel defensive about contemporary public issues and interests. "We should do it because we've always done it" is not compelling to people dealing with difficult tradeoffs and stresses.

What did work? The framing argument that was most successful in Cincinatti was:

A thriving arts sector creates “ripple effects” of benefits throughout our community... The arts ripple effect creates at least two kinds of benefits:

1. A vibrant, thriving economy: Neighborhoods are more lively, communities are revitalized, tourists and residents are attracted to the area, etc.
2. A more connected population: Diverse groups share common experiences, hear new perspectives, understand each other better, etc.

The authors noted that this "ripple effects" framing was effective because:

• it focuses on public benefit, not individual enrichment.
• it positions the arts as having a geographically diffuse effect, not tied to specific events, institutions, or districts with which individuals may or may not associate.
• it pairs a practical idea of community health (economic vitality) with something more emotional and aspirational (bringing together diverse voices).
• it doesn't focus strictly on the dollars and cents of economic impact (which invites potentially unhelpful comparisons), but more broadly on the idea of vibrancy and vitality.

Some of these findings may be specific to Cincinnati, but I find the overall report extremely helpful as I think about how to talk about arts in Santa Cruz--both as the director of an institution and as a member of the city arts commission. It can be hard to step outside our own rhetoric and circles of support to realistically judge what people do and don't understand about what we do and why our institutions exist. We don't have an unalienable right to public support. We have a responsibility to frame what we do in a way that inspires people to act. And maybe, hopefully, to drop a token in our proverbial slot.

What inspires you to support the arts? What arguments do you find effective or unsuccessful in your region or organization? When a friend asks you why he/she should support the arts, what do you say?

Pranksters in the Museum

Two recent events have got me thinking about pranks and unauthorized activities in museums.

1. Improv Everywhere staged an event at the Metropolitan Museum in which an actor posing as King Philip IV of Spain signed autographs in front of his portrait, as painted by Diego Velazquez in the 1620s. After some silliness, engagement, and confusion, they were instructed to leave.
2. Two students, Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler, created an unauthorized ad campaign for the Smithsonian as part of a school project. These "historically hardcore" images attracted a lot of attention on the internet, and when Jenny contacted the Smithsonian about it, she was instructed to remove the Smithsonian logo.

In both cases, outsiders co-opted the museum for their own devices. These unauthorized projects were engaging and attractive. Neither harmed the museums in question, though they both had questionable qualities. The Improv Everywhere actors gleefully passed themselves off as authorities and told visitors that yes, this young man in front of them was in fact 400 years old. The students' ads made unauthorized use of the Smithsonian logo and could be argued to dilute or misrepresent the institutional brand.

So here's the question: what's the right response to this kind of activity? There are two knee-jerk camps--one that says this is all unacceptable and another that says museums should loosen up and embrace the deviance. I feel like it's more complicated than that.

When assessing these kinds of unauthorized activities, here are the three things I'd consider:

1. What's the quality of the project? Many of the people arguing for the fake Smithsonian ads mentioned how great they are, and that the museum should be pleased to thrilled to get such creative ad work for free. While the ads are indeed funny, engaging, and lovely, not every unauthorized use is. A museum would do better to evaluate this on a case-by-case basis--so the institution can say yes to the gems and no to the duds--rather than having an ironclad rule either way.
2. Is it a project that would be improved with institutional support? Watching the Improv Everywhere video, I'm struck by the fact that it is the deviant nature of the activity that makes it fun. You watch the action expecting to see the guards intervene, and they become part of the drama. I'm not sure the activity would be as surprising or engaging if it were sanctioned by the museum, and I certainly think it would be a bizarre use of staff time to conduct such an event. Mark Allen of Machine Project talks a lot about the benefits of artists creating "shadow organizations" within museums to comment on and respond to their peccadilloes. Without the formal institution, there can be no deviance. That said, there are some projects that are best conducted with institutional support--Machine Project typically works in this fashion. And some truly outsider projects, like the fabulous Vital 5 unauthorized podcast tour of the Portland Art Museum, create products that I'd love to see museums adopt and champion.
3. By shutting down the unauthorized project, are you working against your core values or mission? In many cases, the reasons these projects get rejected is to protect the institutional brand against interlopers. But brand is not as important as mission--and both contribute to public image. In the Improv Everywhere situation, I only see a loose connection between the Met's mission and the unauthorized activity insofar as the museum wants to engage people with the art. But the Smithsonian ads are a different story. The Smithsonian is a public institution that is actively seeking to make itself more open and pursuing a vision that positions the Smithsonian as belonging to everyone. By shutting down a high-quality deviance that was garnering enthusiasm for the institution, the Smithsonian may have done more harm to its image than good. Any organization's public image is shaped by lots of material and commentary in the marketplace--not just that institution's press releases and logo. It's worth remembering that when evaluating any given deviance.

What do you think about these kinds of pranks and unauthorized uses of the institution? How do you think museums should respond to or engage with the pranksters?

Quick Hit: How Do You Follow Up with Participants?

When someone leaves a comment, makes a sculpture, or writes a poem at your institution, is that the end of their participation? This email from TripAdvisor is a great example of the simple power of getting back in touch with participants--to thank them, and more importantly, to demonstrate that their participation mattered to other visitors.

There are great examples of this kind of thing focusing solely on the participant--for example, the Chicago Children's Museum practice of inviting kids to write postcards home to themselves from the museum. But a lot of participation extends beyond the individual, and we should celebrate that. Too often, we treat participation as a one-on-one transaction between participant and institution, when in reality visitors are always making things for each other as well. These kinds of messages help people be more aware of how their actions impact others, helping them move from "me" to "we."

Imagine sending someone a simple email to say that "fifty visitors have played with your toy/enjoyed your video/responded to your comment." This kind of message does three things:

• it validates participation in the eyes not just of the institution but other "people like you"
• it reminds visitors that they participated and that their work lives on at the institution
• it may inspire them to come back again to see how their work has evolved and what others have shared

Of course, this requires capturing an email address at the point of participation, which isn't always easy, especially for low-tech projects. But in a few recent projects where I've offered visitors the option to have something emailed home, I've gotten 95-100% participation. People are eager to continue their relationship with an institution after having a creative, social interaction onsite. Why not use messages like this one to help those relationships along?

Are the Arts Habit-Forming?

Imagine this situation:

You go to an arts event, one of a type you rarely or never take part in. Maybe it's a live music concert, or a museum visit, or a play. You have a great time.

What will it take for you to do it again?

This is a question I've been puzzling over now for a few months, both professionally and personally. There's been a lot of innovation in arts programming in the last few years. Museums and other venues are offering special programs for teens, for hipsters, for people who want a more active or spiritual or participatory experience. Sometimes these innovations are woven into the institutional core programming, as at the redesigned, highly interactive Oakland Museum of California. Others layer these new activities and audiences on through monthly late nights or short-term installations.

In most cases the goal is the same: to attract new audiences and help them understand how the institution (and the arts experience) might fit into their lives. Internally, staff members spend a good amount of time grappling with how to invite new audiences in, and whether it is possible to use "parallel" programming to draw new visitors into the "pipeline" of core offerings.

But I'm interested in a more basic question: what does it take for a person--a visitor/audience member--to form an art or museum habit? If we want to transform museums into place for everyday use that people drop in on for a quick fix of history, a meeting with a friend, or a cup of coffee, what will that require?

I ask these questions because I think there's a pretty big gulf between the one-time or occasional arts experience and the idea of art and institutions as part of your life. For myself personally, this gulf rears its head every time I go to a live music concert. Each time I go (about four times a year), I have a fabulous time. But it never makes me want to increase the frequency of my participation. Only in the last two weeks, when I've had the unusual experience of going to three music events (symphony, rock, jazz) in a short period of time, have I started to think about the possibility of integrating live music more consistently into my life.

How do you form an arts habit? Is the psychology behind doing so the same as forming a fitness habit or a social habit (like going out to the same bar weekly with friends)? Investigating this question with friends and colleagues, it seems like people form habits that take them outside the home for at least four reasons:

1. Social pressure. If you have a friend or group of friends who like to "go out"--whether that's brunch, hiking, movies, or museums--you're more likely to form a habit that involves external venues. I've met people who tell me, "every Sunday we go to brunch and then the museum," or "our crew loves to go dancing every weekend." These habits tend to be highly socially-focused--if the group or some portion of the group isn't going, individuals won't go out on their own.
2. External schedule or pressure. Soccer leagues, weekly yoga, six-session guitar lessons, theater season passes. When something gets booked on your calendar, you attend. Some of the most successful museum programs I know of that draw people again and again happen on a regular schedule. If you love Toddler Time, it becomes part of your Tuesdays. It's funny that museums tout the fact that you can come "anytime," but in most of our lives, the things we commit to are things that happen on a regular schedule. If your calendar doesn't ping you to go to class, you might not attend.
3. Repeat exposure. This is related to 2) but slightly different. Lots of motivational literature suggests that it takes multiple sessions in a short timeframe to take on a new habit, whether a new food, fitness regimen, or activity. This is why some yoga studios offer "30 day challenges" in which you get all your classes free if you come every day for 30 days. The idea is that once you've come every day for a month, you'll be sufficiently hooked to continue your participation (albeit likely at slower frequency). I think I'm experiencing this shift with live music now due to repeat exposure in a short period of time.
4. Intrinsic pressure or desire. This is the holy grail for arts, I think--the person who shifts from social or external pressure to feeling, deep inside, that they want to make the arts institution part of their regular life. Of course, intrinsic desire is not always motivated by the purest intentions. People go to the gym and the grocery store because they feel they must. It helps that these activities have an outcome that is widely accepted as good and useful. Even internally-driven motivation is influenced by external societal pressures.

Some activities are terrifically good at encouraging regular use because they combine all three of these. For me, this often happens with team sports. A new sport instantly introduces me to a gung-ho social group, a regular schedule of opportunity to play, a heavy dose of endorphins, and the chance to challenge myself physically and mentally. For someone else, this might be knitting (which also can come with social support, regular schedule, opportunity to be creative, and a warm and pleasing outcome). There are other activities that start with only one type of motivation--say, the intrinsic desire to get a cup of coffee--but are reinforced over time by other forms, such as casual friendships with the coffee shop staff and other regulars.

What are museums and arts institutions doing to tap into these forms of motivation? If you want to encourage people not just to come once but to come regularly, how do you do it (besides hawking a membership)? Here are a few ideas I could imagine supporting the development of new habits around arts participation:

• Market your venue explicitly as a social one. The single most likely reason I will go try something new is if a friend, date, or family member invites me. Even though data shows that the majority of people visit museums in social groups, there's a misperception--especially of art museums--that they are places for solo contemplation. Especially for infrequent arts participants, marketing that emphasizes the museum as a date venue, a post-brunch stroll for the girls, or an after school hangout, can help people see that they can suggest a museum to friends the way they might suggest a restaurant.
• Create more regular programming that you encourage people to buy or register for as a series. There's a reason theaters work so hard to get season subscribers (and it's not just the advance payment). When you "sign on" for six plays, you have an external motivation to attend. You don't have to remember, consider the opportunity, and motivate yourself each time a new show comes--it's already on your calendar. I've talked to some busy parents who say museums aren't part of their lives because their kids are already jam-packed with soccer and violin lessons and play dates. If families in your area coordinate their outings on an advance calendar, your institution needs to get on that schedule to be a viable part of their lives.
• Introduce new participants to committed members at every new event. New audiences may not be aware that there are other people who see dance performances or jazz shows or science exhibits as part of their everyday lives. One of the most powerful motivators I've had in athletic situations is when an experienced player welcomes me into the game, gives me some pointers, and invites me to join the team to hang out after the sweating is done. Too many new arts experiences are lonely, transactional, and devoid of social engagement with other participants. If your institution or event has members or regulars who love the programming, those people are the best ones to welcome newcomers and share their (hopefully infectious) joy with them.
• Help people understand what they will "get" out of regular participation. To a newcomer, it's not apparent that a museum offers many kinds of programs, or that regular attendance to an arts event might provide deeper or multi-faceted experiences over time. What they see is what they get: that day, that event. Gyms are incredibly good at selling people on the idea of increased fitness, attractiveness, self-confidence, and muscle tone over time. They introduce every new member to the wide range of activities offered and explain how all of them contribute to a healthier you. But arts professionals are more squeamish about trumpeting the value of their offerings. People are not bombarded by marketing messages and societal pressure to engage with cultural venues. There aren't ads on TV talking about how great it is to get lost in art. Cultural institutions need to be overt and unapologetic about the benefits of sustained involvement. Visitors, especially new ones, aren't going to connect the dots on their own.
• Encourage people to use the institution for a broad range of reasons. Jasper Visser wrote a great blog post about untraditional uses of museums, celebrating people who come in to shop, do homework, or meet new people. We need to make these myriad uses more explicit. The people who feel comfortable having a social event at a museum or popping in to spend time with a single artifact tend to be people who have great experience with and comfort in the institution already. Most visitors feel like they have to "do it all" to have a successful experience. We need to debunk this impression if we want people to use the museum casually. I love the Dallas Museum of Art's list of "100 experiences" you can have at that institution. This kind of list helps people understand that there are lots of ways to "do" the museum and that they don't have to leave exhausted to have done it "right."
• Find a way to encourage a participation blitz. What's the 30-day yoga challenge equivalent for the arts? Could a group of institutions in your town get together and offer a set of experiences, events, or cultural practices that people could partake in daily for a month? This could be an exciting way to jump start participation in many institutions, and at the same time, to support the development of new social relationships that center around the arts.

What do you think it takes to build an arts habit?

Month at the Museum, Part 2: Marketing, not Science

Kate McGroarty's month living at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is over. The young actress and teacher beat out 1,500 other applicants and spent 30 days exploring exhibits, participating in live demos, talking to visitors (both in-person and online), and romping through the museum at night. She blogged, tweeted, and Facebooked her experience for a crowd of eager followers. She learned that "Science is beautiful, engaging and just about EVERYWHERE." And she earned $10,000 for her efforts.

Now that the smoke has cleared, so what? What is this project really all about and what did it accomplish?

Month at the Museum was a marketing success for the museum. It got people excited about a huge and potentially impersonal institution by connecting them to a unique, highly personal experience. In July, Director of Public Relations Lisa Miner told me, "Under the past five years, we've undergone a lot of changes. This is a way to talk about those changes and all the things that happen in the museum." The goal was to "reintroduce" the museum to people who hadn't visited in a long time, and to do so through authentic, energized experiences of the museum roommate.

Lisa's goals were met. Kate's enthusiasm and humor made her an attractive spokesperson for the inner life of the museum. Her tweets, posts, and Facebook updates are uniformly upbeat, quirky, and riddled with exclamation points.

And it works. On her Facebook page, hundreds of people have made testimonials to how inspiring she is and how much they've enjoyed following her experience. Kate was able to put a personal face on a large institution. People were excited to talk with her online and then to visit her in person--something that's pretty much impossible to do with other museum staffers visitors meet through their web presence. I have no doubt that her efforts will bring people back to the Museum of Science and Industry and help people reconnect with what they enjoy about the museum.

Despite all its positives, I struggled with this project. Partly, I felt uncomfortable with the unrelenting Mickey Mouse club feel of Kate's posts. I haven't found a single negative or even complex comment about Kate's experience. It's all "totally awesome."

But my bigger struggle is based on a misunderstanding I had about what Month at the Museum is fundamentally about. When the project started, I thought it was about science. I had this mental picture of someone coming in and initiating unorthodox projects, testing hypotheses, and generally playing with science in a way that science centers don't typically engage.

But that's not what happened. Month at the Museum was a creative marketing project, not a scientific endeavor. The storyline of the experience was simple: girl comes to museum and is transformed by science. Lisa Miner told me this story before the project even started; Kate just substantiated it. In July, Lisa said:

This is really the best time to have someone move in and be able to really see the changes we've made here and ultimately the changes we make in someone's life. We've heard from a lot of famous people how they were totally inspired by this place--and that's just a single visit. What could happen for someone over a whole month?

I was a bit surprised that Lisa already had this fixed idea of the story, but Kate delivered in her final blog post:

How did one month in the Museum of Science and Industry transform me? I expected to come away from this experience with a new understanding and appreciation for science. The month has definitely lived up to that expectation.

I used to think that because I was more naturally drawn to the arts and literature, science did not have a place in my life. INCORRECT! The only person who told me I couldn’t love science was myself. Silly, silly Kate. And now I have a whole new world to discover for the rest of my life.

This is marketing, not science. Lisa and the museum team decided what story they wanted to tell, and then they found a way to tell it. I appreciate their success, but it is also somewhat antithetical to the scientific process in which you make a hypothesis, experiment, and discover the results. Science is about answering an unknown question, not telling a scripted story.

This prescriptive marketing approach to Month at the Museum meant that there were few surprises or plot twists to the thirty days. "Science can change your life" is not a new storyline for science centers and museums. Institutional marketing, educational programs, and exhibits constantly reinforce that message constantly. Instead of posing it as a hypothesis and seeing what would happen, Kate immediately took on the message, joining the museum team as a cute, funny new cast member.

I appreciate that this project is about marketing, not muckraking. But I wish there'd been a little more focus on the nuance of making science part of your life--the story behind the institutional message. I wish that Kate had been more of a scientist, experimenting with herself and her own attitudes, rather than a science communicator.

The Museum of Science and Industry has had a great marketing and PR success with Month at the Museum. Next year, I hope this gives them the confidence to be a bit more experimental--and scientific--in their approach.

Discounts, Secret Deals, and Value: Learning from Groupon

Let's face it: there are people who are into coupons and there are people who are not. For people who love them, the coupon page is like a treasure hunt, full of exciting things to be discovered. Coupons are usually time-limited, and that's part of the appeal--to find the thing available THIS WEEK ONLY in time to use it.

Not everyone gets excited by this. Coupons have a narrative, but in most cases, the narrative is pretty mundane. I can get 30 cents off of yogurt. Great.

But recently, an online coupon company called Groupon has made big waves not by offering the best or most coupons but by focusing completely on amplifying that narrative of discovery, so much so that people get caught up in the excitement and use the site to purchase goods, services, and experiences they otherwise would not buy. Groupon is an audience development machine, and it's highly relevant to cultural institutions looking to attract people with promises of exciting new discoveries within.

Groupon is a website that offers deeply-discounted deals on goods and services, mostly from local businesses. A coupon goes up for half-price museum admission or spa treatments, and users have one day to buy. As on Kickstarter, a minimum number of coupons must be purchased for the deal to happen (although these days, 98% of Groupon businesses make their minimum). While restaurants make up the lion's share of the offerings, there are all kinds of experiences--from tree ziplines to hot stone massages to photography sessions--that garner interest as well. Groupon takes 50% of every fulfilled deal, so if a business offers a $20 product at $10, the business takes $5 and Groupon takes $5 when that coupon is fulfilled.

Groupon delivers huge volume. The Art Gallery of Ontario sold 4,285 half-price admissions in one day last month. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History sold 1,318 half-price memberships last week. For companies that sell products or personal services, Groupon can be a tricky form of advertising. Too much response, and you find yourself operating at a deep discount, scrambling to provide 2,000 haircuts to people who are paying less than market rate. But for museums, which mostly have extra space to fill (and a low per-customer operating cost), this isn't a big issue.

For now, I can't speak on the extent to which Groupon museum purchases are attracting new audiences and converting those folks into more dedicated visitors. The data is still too fresh in most institutions (please, share your experience in the comments). Instead, I want to focus on the psychology of Groupon, and the question of how this kind of discount is different from others.

I've written before about the problems of value memberships and museums that sell themselves short by focusing on membership as "good deal" instead of as a special experience. Groupon is different; it turns the discount itself into a special experience.

Does a Groupon promotion devalue the visitor (or member) experience? If you get a $10 museum admission for $5, does that make it a special treat or a cheapened experience? Are the people who buy a half-price membership less likely to take advantage of its value, and thus waste institutional resources lavished upon them?

Museums deal with this question all the time when it comes to free or discounted days. The general sense is that yes, people who come on free day do have different patterns of use from those who come on admission days, but they aren't necessarily less engaged or interested in what the institution has to offer.

What makes Groupon special is the same thing that makes free day special--the sense that this is a unique, limited opportunity. While free days and discounts make the institution more accessible to more people, the specificity of the event or coupon makes it feel exclusively for people "in the know." There's an insider feeling that comes when you get a deal or experience that not everyone gets. You even feel it when you share it with others--there's the cache of being the person who let others in on the secret.

This is extremely strange when you think about it. It's an insider experience that is completely public, just time-limited. The whole argument about discounts devaluing the experience shifts when you talk about offering something "special" instead. At the San Francisco airport, when long-term parking is sold out, they hand you a voucher to park in (the much closer) short-term parking for long-term rates. The voucher says "This is your lucky day!" and I do feel a sense of thrill that I've gotten a surprise steal when it happens. It doesn't make short-term parking (at twice the price) feel cheap. It doesn't make the experience feel more or less special at all. Instead, it makes me feel special.

I was thinking about this when a librarian friend told me "the first thing I do when I have a prolonged interaction with a patron is waive any fines on their account. There's no better way to advertise what the library's about." He explained that fines do contribute to his library's bottom line--about 3% of operating budget--but that the benefit to that patron of having that special moment, that friendly, insider feel is worth the loss in revenue. Advertising of any kind costs money. In the library's case, the goal is to build customer loyalty. In Groupon's case, the goal is to bring new people in the door.

There's overlap between the group of people who would buy at full price and those who need a discount incentive (see this great post for a geeky take on how Groupon shifts the demand curve). Last year, when the Brooklyn Museum offered a membership at deep discount on Groupon, they also offered it as a renew option for current members so existing members wouldn't feel like they had been "penalized" for buying a membership at full price. They didn't go out of their way to reach out to members and say, "Hey! Cheap renewal today!" because they do believe in the value of their membership price, but they did want to be fair. They were offering a special thing, on a special day--for everyone special enough to jump on it.

In this way, Groupon is a perfect demonstration of Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore's principles of theatricality presented in The Experience Economy. In the book, they argue: "instead of leading customers to expect free goods, companies could use the same money to create a memorable experience." They champion businesses that replace uniform discounts with surprises that reward loyalty or just being lucky. The psychology of the personal gift or surprise is very different than that of the discount. Groupon is theatrical--the ticking countdown, the question of how many people will join in, the excitement of discovering something new--and that sense of theater fuels its success.

The thing I'm learning from Groupon isn't that people love a deal. It's that people love a specific, targeted, exclusive opportunity with a dash of excitement and a light narrative thrown in. And that's something that cultural institutions could offer in all kinds of ways beyond the admissions desk.

Curate Your Own Membership: An Interview with the Whitney's Director of Membership

Audience segmentation and research has become a hot topic in museums, especially when it comes to crafting appealing offerings that are customized to different kinds of visitors. On September 10, the Whitney Museum of American Art started offering a new membership called "Curate Your Own," in which members select one of five specialized "buckets" of benefits in addition to core admission and discount benefits. This isn't just a prototype; the Whitney expects to transition all basic level memberships to segmented memberships over the next several years. I sat down with Kristen Denner, Director of Membership and Annual Fund, to learn more about the program's development and the museum's goals for its future.

How did this project start?

It started over a year ago, with a couple of moments of insight. First, we realized that our museum is different from other museums, but our benefits and membership structure were the same as others. We saw an opportunity to really differentiate ourselves, the way we do with our exhibitions and programs. Our membership program should be as unique as our institution.

Second, in 2008 and 2009, when the economy dipped and membership renewal rates started to soften, we started to think more seriously about the emotional factor of supporting the arts in the community. We wanted to find a way to really connect with our members and understand what experiences they value most at the Whitney. And we also wanted to respond to the general consumer desire for customization. I think museum visitors are ready and eager for museums to catch up to retail and the forprofit world and recognize them as individuals rather than homogeneous groups.

And so, we started a major research project--the first one we've done that focuses on membership. We started with focus groups with current and prospective members, asking about their interests and what kinds of experiences they would really value as part of membership. I wanted to test a hypothesis that we should be segmenting our members not by demographics but by interest, in order to foster that emotional connection. And we confirmed that hypothesis. Some experiences completely cut across demographics - some people like parties, some people want a solitary experience with art... and that solitary experience person might be 20 or they might be 80. People want to experience art in quite individual ways. So we wanted a membership segmentation that reflected their individual needs.

How did you end up with the five segments of the membership - social, learning, insider, family, and philanthropic?

The focus groups revealed these five strong attitudinal segments among members and prospective members. It was pretty unusual from a research perspective that there weren't just one or two dominant ones--all five of these had robust levels of interest.

How many of the specific benefits offered to each segment are new to Whitney members overall?

Several, but not all. After the qualitative research, we worked with people across all departments within the Museum saying, here are some unmet needs we heard from members. Some offerings are completely new, like lecture for the learning series members that might not correspond to any one exhibition but would be more of a deep dive into the permanent collection or exploring a theme in contemporary art. That wasn't a hard thing for us to offer but it hadn't really occurred to us before as a membership benefit. The "insiders" are another example. We heard loud and clear that these members really want to know more about the curatorial process and how the museum operates. So we offer them an exclusive discussion with curatorial staff to gain insights on the curatorial process.

Were there any needs that came up in the focus groups that you were not able to meet?

Seeing the installation process was a big one. In some cases, the artist is not comfortable, or there are insurance and liability issues. We really tried to figure this one out and decided we couldn't reliably offer it as a member benefit.

One person expressed a desire to spend alone time with a work of art in a kind of member contemplation room. There were security issues, but ultimately the objection was that it's not in keeping with the Whitney's mission. It’s important to us that art be available to all, not just to particular types of members.

Why did you segment the benefits, instead of offering them totally a la carte?

We wanted to do that [a la carte] initially. We wanted to do a true Chinese menu style, maybe assigning points to different benefits and letting people have ten points, that kind of thing. But logistically it was just impossible to pull off. It was going to be incredibly difficult to track who had what.

After we had brainstormed ideas for benefits, we did quantitative research and were able to rank benefits for different interests. It became really clear that certain benefits really only appealed to some segments. The overlaps we put in the core benefits--everyone wants free admission, for example, and the neighborhood discounts.

At some institutions, visitors have been turned off by being labeled with a particular segment. It can feel constraining.

We worked carefully to avoid associating the different membership series with words that leaned too strongly toward self-identification. This is definitely a challenge that comes up when you work with attitudinal segmentation. We didn't want to use terms like "cutting edge" to describe people. Because I like this handbag, I'm "fashion forward?" I think that's suspect.

What are your goals for the Curate Your Own Membership?

Our membership base right now is about 12,500, and about 8,000 of those people are at our individual ($75) or dual ($120) levels. Curate Your Own (CYO) is $85 for individuals, $125 for duals.

Our goal is to sign up 2,000 new CYO members in the next 12 to 18 months, and to convert 25% of those 8,000 current individual and dual members to the new structure. It's not about upselling as much as it is about getting to know more about them and giving them a customized experience. A lot of our current members are excited about this and want to switch. This conversion is really important and it's just the beginning... our larger goal is to eventually get to 100% of our basic members being CYO members.

How does the transition work for current members?

Members can either upgrade their membership by paying the additional $10 (individual) or $5 (dual) to add a CYO benefit package to their current benefits for the year. Or they can pay the full amount for a CYO membership and have their renewal date pushed forward a year with the new benefits.

People can also buy more than one package if they want--do you expect many people to do that?

Not the majority, but we're already seeing a few. In fact our very first CYO purchase was a gift membership that was purchased with three add-on benefit packages (so the recipient of the gift will pick which packages he/she wants). We're also getting some where people pick one additional package.

It sounds like this will make lobby membership sales a lot more complicated to pitch.

It's true; this will extend the conversation in the lobby. But we've been working on signage and training to make the transition as smooth as possible.

How do you plan to change your communication strategy once these segments are in place?

This is really what I'm excited about. Currently, all I know about a basic member is whether they are an individual or a dual. They are one person or two people. That's it. When the CYO membership becomes more prominent, I'm going to know who's interested in which kinds of opportunities. We'll be tailoring enewsletters and invitations to different groups. It will cut down on waste both environmentally and financially, and we’ll be able to communicate relevant information to our members, which is a better experience for them too.

Do you see these segments as changing the way members are encouraged to move up the donor ladder? For example, is the "philanthropic" series seen as more likely to become high-level donors than others?

Actually, the philanthropy series is mostly made for people who told us in research that they really just want the core benefits of membership. They think the other benefits are nice, but they're not going to use them. They just want to visit the museum whenever they want and they want to support the Museum’s mission.

With regard to moving up the donor levels, some of our new member benefits piggyback on higher-level benefits that used to not include basic members. For example, "social" CYO members will get four tickets to our summer opening reception. "Friend" level members at the $250 level get tickets to all our openings. So if a social member really likes the party and wants to know how they can go to more of them, the friend level may be a natural progression for them.

You've mentioned that this was a really challenging project. What were the biggest challenges?

Funding a research project that was serious. We had never done a real research project in membership before. It was a really worthwhile investment, especially as the museum is moving to a new building soon. We worked with a fabulous team from Lucid Marketing for the research--I can't recommend them enough.

And then the other thing that was challenging was just the logistics of coordinating all the different departments to come together and make this happen. We had so many smart people from education, curatorial, web, operations helping us, and we just had to make sure the project was institutionally supported and that we could really make it happen.

Well, I hope that six month or a year from now, you'll be back to report on how it's gone. I'm really curious to learn more about what segments are most popular and how people respond to the program overall.

Absolutely. What people do is often pretty different from what they say. And as you can imagine, we're pretty curious about it too.

***

Kristen will be responding to comments and questions here on the blog. If you are interested in this topic, you might enjoy this interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard and Chapter 2 of The Participatory Museum.

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?

Preservation in Action: Ambition and Excitement at Zealandia

This week at the National Digital Forum in New Zealand, a librarian stood up and said, “one of the great challenges of this sector is to make preservation sexy.” People laughed with incredulity; no matter how CSI-like the pitch, it’s hard to capture public attention with preservation projects. And yet earlier in the week, at the Zealandia nature sanctuary in Wellington, I’d seen some hints of how to do just that.

Zealandia is a nature preserve with a big hairy audacious goal: to restore a neglected valley into a haven for native birds, plants, and a few special ancient species. Their signage is upfront and specific about this plan; the large sign at the entry says, “It will take 500 years to reach our goal.” Miles of public trails are littered with evidence of the ongoing efforts: volunteers at work, temporary feeders and enclosures, experiments ongoing and hibernating.

Zealandia provides visitors with a beautiful, peaceful experience in nature. There are interpretative trails and helpful staff to aid visitors in tuning in to the bird sounds and identifying the native animals now thriving in the preserve. But the thing that stood out most was the sense that Zealandia is a place of action, where projects are actively underway. Many of the projects—like a huge, specially designed fence to separate birds from lizards until the populations of each stabilize—were both impressive in scale and were communicated well as short-term steps on a long path to a thriving natural habitat. As a visitor, I repeatedly ran into objects, staff, and signs explaining the specific science at work on the preserve and how the project was evolving. The interpretation was frequent, clear, and adult in tone and content. I felt respected as someone who could understand science and might be interested in more than just a nice walk in the park.

This sense of action, coupled with Zealandia’s ambitious goal, gave me a feeling that I was visiting something Important. Some of the signage pointed out “firsts” happening at the preserve—new techniques for introducing species into new habitats, creating a completely mammal pest-free environment, and inviting people to visit the project while underway. I felt like the sanctuary staff and their 400 volunteers were welcoming me into their vision for a future version of human coexistence with nature. This feeling was reinforced by inclusive signage that used the lovely construction “visitors like you,” as in “Seven years after taking control of the land, the Sanctuary was ready to receive visitors like you, seven days a week” which made me feel specially engaged as an individual.

As a side note, my positive feelings about the onsite Zealandia experience were somewhat undermined by their branding as a "conservation attraction" on their website and on billboards around Wellington. I presume that this branding will help them appeal to a potentially large audience of those seeking exciting experiences in nature, but to me, this veiled the truly exciting work at the physical site. Online, you can access some evidence of their powerful work, such as this clear and impressive timeline of key achievements, but these messages are not front and center as they are at the preserve. Zealandia isn't more than just a nice place to go see animals in natural habitats, and I think it's a disservice to market it that way.

But let's get back to the good stuff. Reflecting on the impact of my Zealandia visit later at the National Digital Forum, I realized how rare it is that cultural professionals communicate with the public about the exciting ongoing nature of preservation projects. As at Zealandia, cultural preservationists often pursue incredibly ambitious goals—to digitize huge collections of records, or to save centuries-old objects. Zealandia’s signage opened with an unambiguous image: a black and white photo of the valley pre-nature preserve—barren, clear-cut, devoid of natural life. Standing there looking at the photo, and then taking in the rich diversity of plants and bird sounds around me, I was instantly compelled by the sense that the work going on at Zealandia was valuable, and that it was going in the right direction.

How can cultural preservationists communicate the largeness of their dreams, the dire state of the unpreserved landscape, and the potential richness of successful projects? By communicating the need, making the process public, and inviting “visitors like you” to enjoy the richness of the expanding cultural assets made available by the effort. I hope that I will one day walk into an archive or history museum and feel the same sense of urgency, purpose, and progress that I felt at Zealandia.

Museum Photo Policies Should Be as Open as Possible

I'm working on a section of my book about sharing social objects and am writing about the most common way that visitors share their object experiences in museums: through photographs. While doing research, I found myself digging back into old arguments on museum listservs about photo policies and I want to add my two (very opinionated) cents on this.

While the majority of experience-based museums like children's and science museums have unrestricted noncommercial photography policies, many collections-based art and history museums continue to maintain highly restrictive photo policies. As I understand it, there are five main arguments for restrictive policies:

1. Intellectual Property: Museums must respect diverse intellectual property agreements with donors and lenders, and in institutions where some objects are photographable and others not, it's often easier to use the most restrictive agreements as the basis for institutional policies.
2. Conservation: Objects may be damaged by flash photography. Some conservators argue that if non-flash photography is permitted, light levels in the galleries may be increased to accommodate visitors' cameras, which indirectly damage artifacts.
   
3. Revenue Streams: Museums want to maintain control of sales of "officially sanctioned" images of objects via catalogues and postcards. If people can take their own photos, they won't buy them in the gift shop.
   
4. Aesthetics of Experience: Photo-taking is distracting for other visitors. Looking at artwork through a lens means you are having a less rich experience. Visitors may make inappropriate gestures in photos with museum content, thus distorting institutional values and intent.
   
5. Security: Photographers might take photos with intent to do harm; for example, with plans to rob the museum or stalk another visitor.

I respect the first and second arguments. I understand the third, though I think it is misguided. And I think the fourth and fifth are bizarre and ungenerous to visitors.

To me, an open photo policy is a cornerstone of any institution that sees itself as a visitor-centered platform for participatory engagement. Here are five reasons I think museums should have totally open photo policies:

1. As long as it does not promote unsafe conditions for artifacts or people or illegal behavior, museums should prioritize providing opportunities for visitors to engage in ways that are familiar and comfortable to them. Yes, some people (especially vocal museum staff!) hate the sight of people taking photos in museums. But what about visitors? If your argument is based on visitor comfort and distraction, it should be backed up by visitor research, not personal impressions. Would staff members who hate photography be comparably disturbed by visitors sketching in the galleries? Sketching takes up more space and is more distracting than photo-taking (and pencils could be used to damage objects!), and yet many museum professionals look benevolently upon that activity as a positive meaning-making visitor experience. This is prejudicial treatment. I know that many people are uncomfortable with the growing culture of self-documentation, but no one should let their own aesthetic preferences dictate others' behavior without good reason.
   
2. Restrictive policies erode staff/visitor relations and overall museum mission statements around inclusion. The majority of cellphones now have cameras embedded in them, which means that many visitors are walking through your doors with camera in hand. Visitors get upset when they are told to put their cameras away, and it is becoming increasingly hard for guards (and, down the road, marketing staff) to control the taking of photographs and their spread on the Web. Telling visitors that they can't take photos in museums reinforces the sense that the museum is an external authority that owns and controls its objects rather than a shared public resource. How can visitors be "co-owners" of museums if they can't own an image from their experience?
   
3. Photo-taking allows visitors to memorialize and make meaning from museum experiences. There have been several studies that show that creating a personal record of an experience and reviewing it later increases learning and retention of content. When visitors flip through photos from their trip, they are more likely to recall their interest in a given artifact or exhibit than without visual aids. And it's not just about recall. There are thriving groups of Flickr users who share photos of themselves imitating art. When my mom, sister and I visited the de Young sculpture garden, we spent about an hour posing alongside the sculptures, which forced us to spend a lot of time carefully observing the art and directing each other into position (see above photo). We spent significantly more time with the art to create these photos than we would have had we just been strolling through.
   
4. Visitors use personal photos differently from store-bought ones. The majority of visitors use their cameras to casually record their personal and social experiences, not to take authoritative images of artifacts. A visitor who wants a picture of "mom with the giant penis statue" wants something that the museum is not selling. Visitors who want "the best shot ever of the penis statue" are still likely to buy in the store. And even if visitors do take authoritative (noncommercial) shots, they are unlikely to reduce sales. A great shot of your institution, shared on Flickr, serves as a free piece of marketing that may generate ticket sales. How do you measure the potential lost income from a photographer not buying a postcard against the online impressions his photo makes on others? In the related world of online image licensing, some museums have done studies of the affect of open digital photo distribution on their revenue from image licensing and have seen flat or positive effects from the actions, not negative ones (see this in-depth paper from the Powerhouse Museum).
   
5. When people share their photos of your museum, they promote and spread your content to new audiences in authentic ways. In 2008, a team led by MIT media researcher Henry Jenkins published a white paper entitled, "If it Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," which argues that media artifacts have greatest impact when consumers are able to pass on, reuse, adapt, and remix them. There are two parts to this. First, every time a photo is shared, it extends the reach of your objects and exhibit stories. But perhaps more importantly, Jenkins argues that the creative adaptation of cultural objects through photos and other spreading tools supports communities' "processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them."

At the conclusion of Jenkins' paper, the team claims:

"So what is spreadable media good for?

• To generate active commitment from the audience,
• To empower them and make them an integral part of your product's success,
• To benefit from online word-of-mouth
• To reach niche, highly interconnected audiences,
• but most of all, to communicate with audiences where they already are, and in a way that they value.

...

Those who have the most to lose are those companies which:

• have well established brand messages
• have messages that are predictably delivered through broadcast channels
• who are concerned about a loss of control over their intellectual property
• who have reason to fear backlash from their consumers.

Even here, remaining outside of the spreadable model altogether may cut them off from younger and more digitally connected consumers who spend less time consuming traditional broadcast content or who are increasingly suspicious of top-down advertising campaigns."

Of course, museums shouldn't let marketing desires, popular opinion, or cultural forces drive all decisions. The intellectual property arguments in particular are very complex and should be taken seriously. But visitors and visitor research deserve voices in the discussion about whether photo policies are open or closed. The cultural and educational value of spreadability deserves weight in decision-making. From my perspective, this value is so high that I'd recommend museums think twice about taking on temporary exhibitions or loans that would endanger the ability to allow visitors to take photos across the institution.

And one final thought on this topic: I've been surprised to learn that some museums have restrictive photo policies and aren't sure why. I've heard stories of museum staff at two large institutions trying to figure out who "owns" the policy--conservation, marketing, curatorial, etc.--so that it might be revised. If you don't know why you restrict photography in your institution, please think about both the benefits AND the drawbacks of allowing photography before you perpetuate the policy.