Selling a Product vs. Building a Movement

Do you consider yourself an "activist" for your organization, avocation, or art form? I've been increasingly turning to that word as a descriptor for the mixture of advocacy, passion, and action that I try to bring to my work. For me, it's a more comfortable term than something like "evangelist," which just feels like boosterism. I feel like I'm on a mission, and I know a lot of colleagues feel the same way.

I've always thought of this activist stance as a behind-the-scenes thing, something that might be useful in talking with professionals in the field, but not necessarily with visitors. Sure, I admire cultural organizations that have a strong mission to change education or diversify access or transform the role of art in everyday life, but I'm an insider. It seems wonky and possibly confusing to talk strategy with visitors. It's a distraction from their experience at our venue. Visitors care about us because we provide enjoyable, enriching, creative opportunities for them. Who's really going to read the fine print to find out why?

The election season, as well as a recent research study on museum membership, has change my perspective on this. A national election is the ultimate participatory project. Everyone of a certain age is in on it, and for the most part, the folks putting on the show want everyone to be engaged. There are multiple potential levels of involvement available. Advocacy groups of all stripes fall over themselves to give you opportunities to get involved, fight the good fight, fund the need, defeat the bill.

When you are part of a cause you believe in, you get incredibly invested. When you hit a personal goal that helps a larger effort, you feel like a real contributor. As Jane McGonigal has written, "the chance to be part of something bigger" than yourself is one of the four things that make people feel happy and fulfilled. With the exception of work and sports fandom, opportunities to be part of something bigger is in short supply. Election season stirs it up and makes us all remember how energizing it can be.

This is especially true for young adults today ("millenials"), who exhibit many of the same attributes of the World War II "greatest" generation--increased civic engagement, optimism, sense of communal purpose and responsibility, and conformity to group norms. Consider this recent study about the perceived benefits of membership in an aquariuam, referred to as a "visitor serving organization" in the chart below. As Colleen Dilenscheider reported, young people were MUCH more "cause-oriented" in their reasons for membership than their older counterparts:

This research and the post-election buzz is making me think differently about how we invite people to be involved with our organizations. Why AREN'T we asking visitors to join the fight for arts education? Why WOULDN'T a science museum engage members in the crusade to draw clear lines between science and pseudoscience? Why not build a grassroots movement to define the most effective ways we can make our communities stronger?

I realize as I write this list that we do invite certain people to participate in these conversations, but not our onsite audience. I talk a lot about the "why" behind our work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History when I'm with donors, at conferences, or presenting at Rotary Clubs. I know that these folks care a lot about building strong communities and that it's intriguing and exciting to discuss how that might be driven by a cultural institution. These conversations are the basis for institutional partnerships and much of our funding. But they don't happen on enough levels with enough people to be accessible for broad involvement and shared activist energy.

For some reason, when it comes to talking and engaging with the people who are already in the door, we clam up about core messages and focus on selling them tickets to the next event or exhibition. This has two negative effects:

1. It blocks our most engaged participants from getting involved in the most important work of the organization. If what we really are working on is building social capital, why are we hiding that? Why not give visitors ways to advocate and act to help advance our goals? Why not restructure our marketing and community engagement efforts to more closely model successful campaigns and activist movements?
2. It creates a disconnect between the "why" and the "what" that may weaken institutional progress. Imagine a theater company where the leadership talks publicly about diversity and access but there is little evidence of it on site. Is the organization really doing what they talk about, or is it just lip service? If we create "reasons" for the work we do that are different in different contexts, we're losing energy and diluting our ability to get the most important work done.

Granted, I know that people still want the great experiences that our organizations provide. They don't want to go to the aquarium solely to learn how to save fish. But when we invite them to get involved in the work that drives us, about which we are most passionate, we create incredibly powerful advocates and partners in our cause. That's what's sexy and exciting about what we do. We need more tools to open it up.

What's the String that Ties One Experience at Your Institution with the Next?

Reader, I was wrong.

In 2008, I wrote a post arguing that museums should focus on the pre-visit, not the post-visit, if they want to capture and retain visitors. I said:

In many ways, the ability to successfully set a powerful and useful expectation for museum experiences is MORE valuable than the ability to extend said experience. When you set an expectation, you frame an experience. Once visitors have already banged on the exhibits and watched the giant nostril show, the experience belongs totally to them. The chances of reaching and holding onto them back at home are small. They’ve formed their impressions of the on-site experience, and their chance of returning, becoming members, etc. is heavily based on those impressions. You can send them all the pleasant follow-up emails you like, but such notes are unlikely to be the motivating factor that brings them back through your doors.

While I still believe that framing the experience with marketing and at the beginning of a visit is important, a workshop last week taught me that the end of the visit is potentially very, very important when it comes to encouraging deeper involvement with the museum. I now realize that people can have a great experience and have NO CLUE what other opportunities (return visit, membership, in-depth programs) are available to them. I don't care how many platforms you're active in--if they are not connected to each other, people will not aggregate the experiences.

What's missing for these visitors who attend, enjoy, and don't (or sporadically) return? They are missing a string.

Let me explain. For a long time, I've thought of museum visits or cultural encounters as pearls on a string. Each experience is a pearl. They are not necessarily linear or identical to each other. But if you want to deepen the commitment between visitor and institution over time, you need a string that visitors can hang their pearls on, a thread that holds the growing relationship together. No string, and you've just got a bunch of visits rolling under the furniture.

Yes, pre-visit marketing, announcements, and welcomes are essential to get that first pearl in a visitor's hand. But we all know that it's easier to keep a current user/visitor/patron than to acquire a new one. How do you build your relationship with that person who has gotten their first pearl? How do you give them the string?

Last week, as the kickoff for the Loyalty Lab project, the experience design firm Adaptive Path facilitated a workshop at my museum for staff and visitors in which we created a "map" of the visitor experience at a museum event. Our goal was to wholly understand how visitors experience our events before, during, and after the visit.

One of the surprises was a series of observations from casual visitors--people who attend an event or two per year, who are not members, and who tend to come because of word of mouth or an invitation from a friend. They all reported having a great time at the museum... and immediately letting go of it afterwards. There was no followup. They had not been asked to join an email list or take a newsletter or join the museum. They had not taken photos in our photo booth and gotten an email about them later. They were not part of our Facebook community sharing photos and stories from the event. They came, they made a pearl, and then they dropped in their pocket with the rest of their day.

We realized from this discussion that we have a huge missed opportunity when people are leaving the museum. On their way in, they are excited, curious, ready to engage. They are not ready to hear about membership or take a newsletter about what's coming up next time. They bolt right past those tables to the "good stuff." But at the end, they've had a great time, and they want a takeaway from the experience. They WANT to join the email list. If we're smart, we should be developing a takeaway that both memorializes the visit and leads them to another. In other words, we should be giving them a string for their new pearl.

As a concrete example, consider the library. The pearls are the books you read. But the string is the library card. I've always thought of the library card as the first thing you get at the library, but it actually comes at the end of the first visit, when you have loaded up with books and you want to take them home. The card is a passport to continue your experience with the books and with the library. You want the card because it's your ticket to proceed. But it also becomes the connector that ties one experience to the next.

At our institution, we have several string candidates. Visitors make a lot of stuff here, and we're talking about ways they might be able to exhibit or share it with others in a way that encourages their return to see how their stuff has evolved. We're considering expanding our photo booth survey machine. We're talking about punch cards that serve as cultural passports with a range of museum-related missions or lead you to "earn" a membership. Or, there's just the simple starting point--a newsletter, a membership brochure, a friendly volunteer inviting you back. We're talking about shifting from having "greeters" to having "goodbyers" who thank you for coming and invite you to a next specific event.

What's the string in your organization? How do you invite people back, and how do you help them collect and aggregate their experiences with you in a meaningful way?

Introducing Loyalty Lab

A woman walks into your museum. She's visited a few times before, and you vaguely recognize her as the lady who loved bubble painting, thought the bike sculpture was funny and didn't like the video installation. Last time she had a kid with her, and he got chalk all over his hands from the mosaic activity they did with a volunteer. They wrote a comment about their experience that got turned into a bird by other visitors in the public sculpture hanging in the middle of the museum. You remember seeing them stand in front of the magic mirror in the history gallery, laughing as they made themselves into giants in the glass.

In the admission log today, she is registered as a tick mark under the column marked "General." That's it. No information about who she is, why she's here, what she's looking for, and what she gets out of her connection to the museum. No memory of her relationship with us.

Our museum has a big challenge when it comes to tracking and rewarding participation. Like a lot of small museums, at the MAH staff and community members build relationships on a daily basis. Staff members invite visitors to help write exhibit labels, create art installations, and give opinions on upcoming programs. Visitors become volunteers and take the lead on new projects and activities. Visitors tell staff members and volunteers again and again how their lives are changing because of their involvement with the museum.

This is wonderful and maddening at the same time. It is wonderful to see the uptick in membership and donations and the positive energy from people who come in the door. It is maddening to have no way to track or intentionally encourage these relationships to grow. Like many small museums, the MAH cannot afford expensive ticketing or membership software systems. We have email newsletters and memberships and conversations, but none of those things talk to each other. Our computers are amnesiacs when it comes to participation. We have very high ability to form relationships with visitors, but very low ability to capitalize on those interactions.

With the support of the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, we're starting a new project called Loyalty Lab to change that. In the Loyalty Lab, we will develop a series of low-tech, low-cost strategies and systems for small institutions to track, celebrate, and act on personal interactions with visitors. I'm not talking about RFID chips for every visitor or a Nike+ system to track their every move. I'm talking about human-scale, simple, delightful ways to acknowledge people's involvement and encourage them to go deeper. It could be loyalty cards. It could be charm bracelets. It could be free hugs. We want to be as creative as possible in exploring the options.

Our goals are to:

• Measure and increase membership acquisition and renewal 
• Measure and encourage repeat visitation 
• Increase participant perception of the MAH as a friendly place with high community value

And we want to do it with you, too. We've created a little blog that we will use to track our project openly. It's starting with a workshop tomorrow with Adaptive Path, an experience design firm that focuses on mapping "customer journeys" and developing tools that enable users to more enjoyably and successfully navigate the offerings of the business or organization. In museum terms, that means understanding how visitors hear about us, why they come, what they do when they are here, and what happens after they leave. It means finding the points along the way where we lose people, and the opportunities for us to track and celebrate people's deepening involvement. You can learn more about this process from an Adaptive Path slideshow here.

This is a year-long project for us at the MAH. We'll go from research to prototyping to final design from now until early summer of 2013. We'd love to have you join us as contributors to the Loyalty Lab blog or just follow along and comment on our progress. We've already heard from one museum--the Boston Children's Museum--where they are experimenting with a "V.I.F." program (Very Important Family) to reward repeat family engagement. I know there are other organizations--museums and beyond--playing with innovative approaches to membership, pricing, and tracking to support and encourage deeper relationships. The goal here is for all of us to learn and experiment together.

How do you think about loyalty and relationship-building in your organization?

Guest Post: What YBCA is Learning from a Personalized Museum Membership Program

This guest post was written by Laurel Butler, Education and Education Specialist at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, CA. Laurel is the "Art Coach" who runs an unusual personalized YBCA:YOU membership program that started last year. YBCA:YOU is an intriguing take on experiments in membership and raises interesting questions about what scaffolding people need to have social and repeat experiences in museums. Joël Tan, YBCA's Director of Community Engagement & creator of YBCA:YOU, will monitor and respond to your questions and ideas in the comments section.

Two strangers stand next to each other in a gallery, staring at the same piece. Secretly, each wishes the other would turn and ask: “What do you think?” They want to connect with each other about the art. But they don’t.

If an arts experience is not shared, is the experience still transformative? Or are we missing a crucial part of the process?

I’ve always been the type of person who likes to ask strangers what they think. So, when I was hired to manage the YBCA: YOU pilot program at YBCA, the challenge was clear: How could I turn these fleeting, missed connections into meaningful moments of interpersonal engagement? Or, more simply: How can I make 100 art lovers become friends with each other?

The YBCA: YOU program is an integrated, personalized approach to the YBCA arts experience, designed to revolutionize the way the community engages with contemporary art and ideas. Participants in the program get an all-access pass to our space, and are able to use it any way that resonates with their interests. They also work with me, their personal “arts coach” to meet their aesthetic goals and maintain a consistent practice.

It’s a little like a gym membership with a dash of case management and counseling. This isn’t a coincidence ─ YBCA:YOU grew out of years of audience development research and was highly informed by our Director of Community Engagement Joël Tan's prior work in AIDS case management and public health. How many institutions really take the time to sit down with individual audience member and talk about what art they like, or what art they hate, or how they wish their arts experiences were different, or better? Apparently, the idea was exciting to other folks as well: A single press release generated twice as much interest as we had anticipated. At first, we were concerned about capacity ─ would we really be able to “get personal” with 150 people? But we were convinced that no survey, questionnaire, or aggregated data could provide the nuances and subtleties that come with a face-to-face meeting.

So, we sat down with every person who signed up for the program, and listened to their story, taking notes on the kinds of arts programming that might best support their interests and goals. There was Henri, who wanted to explore his budding interest in performance. We told him about Lemi Ponifasio/MAU at YBCA, and the Second Sundays series at Counterpulse. There was Jane, who was interested in the East Bay arts landscape. We recommended that she check out Art Murmur on the first Friday of the month.

The “Aesthetic Development Planning” (ADP) meetings were as diverse as you might expect from 100 plus Bay Area arts enthusiasts. However, there was one salient piece of feedback that kept coming up over and over: People wanted to connect with other people around the art. Traci felt put-off by the “scene” that surrounded the art world. She felt that she lacked formal training and knowledge, and was afraid of “saying the wrong thing”. Anton felt that his reading of art was so consumed by scholarly critique that it was hard to articulate a purely intuitive response. Many felt that there never seemed to be an appropriate context or venue for that kind of thing. You can’t simply turn to the stranger next to you and ask “What do you think”?
We’d been thinking about YBCA: YOU as a way to develop a deeper, more personal relationship between YBCA and its visitors, but what about creating community within our constituency? What does it take for an institution to connect people on an individual level?

We began by integrating our Art Savvy program into YBCA:YOU. Art Savvy is a facilitated gallery tour that uses the principles of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to engage in deep observation and conversation around a piece of visual art. It’s a great way to get those two strangers in the gallery to talk to each other. We held YBCA:YOU Savvy sessions around our exhibitions, films, performances… even gallery walks and field trips around town. The folks who attended these events raved about how much fun they had, how much they had enriched and deepened their connection to the art. And yet, out of over 100 potential participants, we never got more than a dozen-or-so YOUers to show.

So, last month we decided to make phone calls to each of the YOUers to discuss the progress of their aesthetic development and talk about their experience of the program thus far. Again, the conversations were complex and diverse as the cohort itself, but one trope kept coming up over and over:
“It’s not you, it’s me.”

These folks made it clear that the program was, indeed, motivating them to make art more of a habit, but they needed more time to incorporate the idea of aesthetic development into their own lives, on their own terms. I realized that I was being impatient – the program, after all, hadn’t even been in place for six months! I couldn’t expect to see a radical social transformation right away, because the personal transformation needed to take place first.

The benefits of regular sessions at the gym, or visits to the dentist, or a therapist, or time spent with friends, are all pretty self-evident after six months. But, as Abigail Housen’s Aesthetic Development Stage Theory (PDF) tells us, it takes just as long to develop aesthetic muscles as physical muscles, and the results are not always so immediately clear. YOUers by and large were making art more of a habit in their lives, but not in drastic terms. They were branching out of their comfort zone one performance at a time, looking at the world around them with a new set of eyes to find the potential of art embedded within their daily lives.

It seems to me now that the capacity to make space in one’s life for art may precede the type of community participation that we were looking for as an indicator of programmatic success. I still believe that, with enough time and consistent personalized contact, a program like YBCA:YOU can revolutionize the way the world engages with contemporary art and ideas. However, like any revolution, it has to begin with the personal.

Supporting Museum Tribes & Fans through Shared Ritual

Many people (Paul Orselli, Linda Norris, Pete Newcurator) in the museum field have written about the question of museum "tribes"--based partly on Seth Godin's book, partly on the longstanding fan culture that pervades our lives through sport, celebrity, and shared experience of mass events. The question is usually, "How can museums cultivate fandom among visitors?" or "What would a museum look like that embraced and supported tribal followings?"

I spent an (early) morning today with the local chapter of Kiwanis that got me thinking about this question again. I was struck by how ritualistic their meeting was--idiosyncratic nametags, a special song to welcome guests, a donation pool in which people offer "sad" or "happy" dollars to commemorate recent events in their lives, a raffle to choose who will create the trivia game for next week. There was a lot of camaraderie among the participants, but it was apparent that the structured ritual was just as important as the friendships to holding the group together.

So often when we talk about fans, we focus on shared affinity. People like the same sports team or band or craft activity, and therefore, form tribes based on that interest. But sometimes we forget how important ritual is to heightening that tribal sense and transforming individual collective fandom into something more communal. It's knowing the cheer as much as it is caring about the team. It's knowing when to stand up and when to clap. Fandom without shared ritual isn't tribalism--it's loneliness.

These tribal rituals, while often fan-driven, are hardly spontaneous. Professional cheerleaders of all kinds lead us through the motions, show us the way to fit in, and model the experience. And that makes me wonder if museum staff members should be starting rituals to help fans get involved.

I realize this may sound like social engineering, but in practice it's often quite charming and lowkey. At the Indianapolis Children's Museum, they have a "closing parade" every day to usher (potentially upset) children and families out the door. There are staff in plush costumes. They hand flags to little kids to wave. I even think there's a goodbye song. This ritual doesn't just leave families with a warm feeling about the museum--it encourages fans to share the experience with each other (as I'm doing with you right now).

Do you have institutional rituals that involve visitors or members?

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.

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!

Innovative Punch Card Systems that Motivate Deep Engagement

When I moved across the country, a friend gave me a gift of a National Parks passport. This little booklet that lists all the US national parks and has a spot for a special stamp that you can obtain at any of them. In the years I have owned this passport, I have visited several national parks. But I have never stamped the passport. It sits in the glove compartment, helpfully taking up space.

I have another item in my glove compartment—a National Parks annual pass—that I use all the time. This card allows me free entry into national parks. It’s a membership.

I find it very strange that the parks passport and the parks pass are not related. Why doesn’t the passport motivate me to visit more parks with rewards? Why isn’t my annual pass fee or renewal status in some way correlated or discounted based on my stamp collection? In short, why isn’t this a better incentive system?

Recently, I’ve been exploring the range of unusual punch card incentive and loyalty systems. In February, I wrote about the complex and somewhat creepy system that Harrah’s casino employs to promote loyalty, but today I’m focusing on the lowly punch card. We’re all familiar with the most basic version, ubiquitous in coffee shops, in which you can slowly accumulate stamps or hole-punches and receive a free drink after six or eight or ten purchases. There are virtual versions, such as the REI coop system, in which members of the coop receive 10% back on all REI purchases available in store credit or cash at the end of the year. There’s even a theater that offers a play with forking paths (such that you can’t see the whole show on one occasion) and a diminishing ticket price for each subsequent visit.

I’ve often wondered why I’ve never seen a museum with a punch card system. Even at the most basic level, punch cards do a couple of important things:

1. They establish an expectation that you might visit multiple times.
2. They allow staff to see, with no complex technology, that you have visited previously.

Presumably, a membership does these things as well. But many large museum membership database systems are dismal at tracking members’ or visitors’ repeat attendance. While the visitor is “growing their relationship” with the institution over several visits, the museum plays the amnesiac, treating each visitor like it’s the first time. And where the databases fall short, punch cards thrive. Seeing that a person’s card has been punched several times allows front-line staff to engage in conversation about what they liked on previous visits, what’s new, and what they might particularly enjoy.

But a simple punch card is not enough. Like national parks, people visit museums infrequently enough that the punch card does not incentivize repeat use. If you get coffee every day, and there’s a place that offers you a free cup for every ten you buy, then you can get free coffee every couple of weeks. Museums don’t work that way. I suspect that most people (with the exception of rabid young families at children’s and science museums) would lose a museum punch card before making it to visit number ten.

Here are some clever innovations on the punch card system:

1. Menchies, a frozen yogurt shop in Los Angeles, offers a punch card with a free yogurt after you’ve purchased seven. When my dad entered as a first-time customer and bought a yogurt, he was given a punch card with six punches already completed—functionally, a two-for-one coupon for his next visit. Not only did this bring him back to Menchies, it was probably more effective than a coupon would have been in priming him to take a new punch card and presumably continue frequenting the shop. Some museums have been experimenting with sending students home from school trips with a free ticket for a followup visit with the family; maybe starting them with a punch card would be a more effective way to connect them to the institution.
2. Tina, We Salute You, a hip coffee shop in London, makes their punch cards a social in-venue experience. Rather than carrying your own card, you are invited to write your name on the wall and draw a star for every coffee you’ve drunk (see image at top). Purchase ten and you receive a free coffee—and a new color to continue advancing your stars. This creates a feeling of community and entices new visitors to the shop to add their own name and get involved. There’s a game-like “keeping up with the Joneses” aspect where people feel motivated to get more stars, to have a more adorned name, etc. because their participation is being publicly showcased. Instead of the reward when you reach ten and get a free coffee being a private feeling, you get to celebrate with the store and the rest of its patrons. Again, this could be a lovely way, particularly for a small museum, to encourage visitors to think of themselves as part of the museum community and to desire a “level up” in their nameplate on the wall. It’s like a low-budget, dynamic donor wall.
3. The Winking Lizard Tavern is an Ohio-based chain of thirteen restaurants that puts on a yearly “world beer tour,” this year featuring over 150 international beers. People can join the tour with a ten dollar entrance fee, which grants them a color guidebook of all the beers, a punch card for the beers they’ve tried, and an online beer-tasting tracking system. When you hit fifty beers, you get a gift, and at one hundred, you receive the “world tour jacket” featuring the names of the year’s beers. This is functionally a membership, including email newsletter and special events, but it is driven by the idea that you will keep purchasing new (and different) beers. It’s a brilliant way for each entry, each purchase, to enhance the value of the punch card rather than making people wait entirely until the end. If only the parks service had taken this path with their passport. You could easily imagine a similar system for a museum to incentivize visiting different institutions, exhibits, or trying new experiences across the institution (educational programs, lectures, performances, discussions, etc.).

Punch cards and incentive schemes aren’t just about getting people in the door. They’re also a way to establish a deeper connection with regulars and to reward people for whom the museum is a significant part of their lives. As more museums have moved towards offering “value memberships” that are essentially discounts on admission, membership renewal relies largely on repeat visits. If the member doesn’t come several times, she won’t renew. Particularly at children's and science museums, there are many visitors who use the museum as an extension of their other family learning activities and environments, but membership programs don’t fully exploit this. While children's progress in online educational game environments is tracked and provides feedback to parents, no such feedback exists for museum visits. Exhibit designers spend hundreds of hours developing content that is developmentally appropriate for different kinds of learners, but that information is not used to enhance and amplify the learning value of the museum experience. There are many children's museums that provide label text at adult eye-height encouraging parents to observe and learn from their children's approach to play. Why can't the museum automate some of this observation, bake it into a membership punch card system, and provide recommendations that can help families "grow with" the museum? If the Winking Lizard Tavern can do it for beer, why can't we do it for children's education? Why can’t we do it for any visitor who is eager for the deepening, complex relationship museums purport to offer?

There is no such thing as a townsquare for faceless individuals. When you are treated like a "regular," that connotes special value. Punch cards are a simple step towards acknowledging that value, encouraging repeat participation, and moving towards more robust museum communities. How might you use them to meet your institution's goals?

Hackerspaces: DIY Science Centers for Adults

Like many people who've worked in science centers and interactive experience museums, I've always been perplexed by the fact that hands-on workshop audiences top out around age 14. So many of the activities available in interactive museums--exploding toothpaste, liquid nitrogen ice cream, collage-making, robot wars--are just as interesting, educational, and fun for adults as they are for kids. So why don't adult workshops succeed?

There's a growing type of institution that is successfully engaging adult geeks in hands-on workshops with a DIY, member-based approach. A few weeks ago, Nick Bilton told me about the hackerspace he helped found called NYCResistor. I had never heard of hackerspaces, and I thought he was talking about people with computers getting together to crack codes. But it turns out hackerspaces are the next step in the evolution of the DIY/maker movement--physical member organizations for people who like to mess around with electronics. They are more than just workshop spaces--they are member institutions, like museums. And their unique structure and bottom-up approach offers some instructive lessons for museums that want to really embrace visitors and members as co-creators of the institutional experience.

Hackerspaces are about people, not content

Hackerspaces are hybrid private clubs/public educational spaces. NYCResistor's tagline is: "we learn, share, and make things." There are people who pay for membership ($40-$100/month, depending on where you are in the country), and there are others who pay for workshops, which range from straight skills (learn to soldering) to artsy/sciencey (needlepoint circuits) to dangerously silly (shrinking coins). In hackerspaces, membership doesn't just mean expressing affinity; it gives you useful privileges including private cubbies and a key to the space.

Hackerspaces are mostly small non-profit co-ops, with 25-100 members and under 1000 sq ft of space. In some cases, such as AS220 labs, they are part of larger community art spaces. Their numbers are growing, and the wiki-based list of worldwide hackerspaces includes as many "planned" as "active" institutions.

This isn't just a geek thing. There are maker spaces popping up for all kinds of artists, crafters, and independent entrepeneurs who want a shared space to congregate, share ideas, and work on projects. Mitch Altman, one of the founders of the San Francisco-based Noisebridge, was quoted in Wired as saying:

"In our society there's a real dearth of community. The internet is a way for people to key in to that need, but it's so inadequate. [At hacker spaces], people get a little taste of that community and they just want more."

Isn't this one of our dreams for museums? That people will key into their love of art or science or history online, then show up at the museum, get a "taste of community," and just want more?

Hackerspaces are member-centric

Hackerspaces aren't organized around content like museums are. They're organized around members. The brand and organization of hackerspaces is heavily tied to the concept of community ownership and management. Most hackerspaces have very transparent legal structures and operate on a consensus model. Their members are unapologetically enthusiastic about their activities. They are the true institutional "advocates" that so many museums seek. As one NYCResistor blogger effuses, "Will this endless parade of awesome classes never end?" Hackerspaces don't just support members' energy for the place; they are structured to literally be BY and FOR their members, without any intermediary staffed institution.

It's interesting to think about this in the context of museums like the Museum of Life and Science in North Carolina, which is trying to position itself as a "member-focused institution." I spend a lot of time working with museums that are trying to find ways to support and connect with the love their members and advocates feel for them. But these places are museums first, member communities second, and their approaches reflect a need to retain some institutional control. Hackerspaces (so far) are bottom-up institutions, which means they can wholly support member needs. The institution IS the members. Noisebridge defines itself as "an infrastructure provider for technical-creative projects, collaboratively run by its members. We are incorporated as a non-profit educational corporation for public benefit." The second sentence could be on any museum homepage. I'm not sure about the first.

Hackerspaces in Museums?

Even if your museum can't support this kind of direct member infrastructure across the board, you might be able to integrate a hackerspace into a part of your museum and use it to explore new relationships with members and with active adult audiences. Got a funky extra gallery or an old computer clubhouse that is underperforming? Could your museum host a hackerspace? There are some truly wonderful potential connections between activity-oriented museums and hackerspaces... and then there are some challenges.

Things interactive museums can offer hackerspaces:

• the equipment, the expertise, and the insurance to support a lot of activities
• semi-private space (probably at low rent compared to retail spaces)
  
• publicity
• an educational outlet (some hackers are struggling to find ways to connect their enthusiasm to younger would-be geeks)

Things hackerspaces can offer museums:

• design ethos and brand that attracts an audience that mostly shies away from museums
• highly creative adults who are interested in supporting others' learning
• "real" projects going on, but not at the level of requiring expensive lab environments
  

Of course, there are other aspects of hackerspaces that make them a less-than-perfect match for museums. The membership structure is incredibly important to people who want a place to safely store their projects and the ability to show up and work at 3am. The DIY, shared-ownership support is antithetical to the corporate nature of most large science centers. 50-100 passionate geeks may not be a compelling audience when you have 1.2 million walking through the doors every year. But for small science centers or art organizations, which share much of the DIY ethic with hackerspaces, this may be a perfect fit.

There's also the potential for museums to be the engine for some new kinds of makerspaces. What does the hackerspace for genealogists look like? Or the one for DIY biologists? Could it start in a museum?

1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum

The conventional wisdom on museum memberships is that they are "one size fits many" programs whose primary benefits are free entrance to the museum and insider access to exhibition openings. The main audiences for memberships are value members, who think of it as a good deal, lifelong learners, who want to come to as many programs and exhibits as possible, and donors, who support the museum. But what about all the other people who love your museum? What about the families who show up on your free days religiously or the ones blogging about your new artifacts? Could you create a membership that speaks specifically to them?

This week, an interview with Brooklyn Museum 1stfans managers Will Cary (membership) and Shelley Bernstein (technology) and artist An Xiao. 1stfans is a new kind of membership launched on January 3, 2009 that combines in-person meetups, private groups on Facebook and Flickr, and a private Twitter feed featuring work by original artists (for more background, check out Will and Shelley's blog posts and videos). It has gotten a lot of attention as a "social media membership," but Will and Shelley are adamant that 1stfans is not about social media. Instead, 1stfans is an attempt to turn the impersonal engine of museum membership into a relationship-based, community-centered interaction for two specific museum audiences.

1stfans builds benefits onto two programs that were already successful at connecting people to the Brooklyn Museum: free Target First Saturdays and online social media outreach. The people who engage in these programs already have pre-existing positive relationships with the institution, but they don't buy memberships. 1stfans is an attempt to change that by providing specific benefits targeted to those audiences' needs. Cynics say they are monetizing free programs; supporters say they are providing something worth paying for to a self-selected group for whom traditional membership is not appealing. Both are true. 1stfans is one answer to a universal question: "How do we create a membership to serve visitors who already have a positive relationship with the museum but have not chosen to purchase traditional memberships?"

Want to know how the Brooklyn Museum is answering this question? Then read on, and please share your thoughts in the comments.

Can you tell me about the basic concept behind 1stfans as a membership program?

Will: The big change we’ve made is taking something that is all marketing (membership) and turned it into something that is about personal interactions and growing the community. We’ve gone from a one-directional membership experience—we send you stuff again and again, and then you show up--to a triangular relationship where Shelley and I get to know the 1stfans, they get to know us, and they get to know each other. We announced 1stfans on December 5, 2008, and since then have had 272 1stfans from 15 states and 9 countries on 4 continents.

There are both virtual-only and local 1stfan members. What's the balance between them, and how do you do this triangulation with both kinds?

Will: Only 32 of the 272 so far are from outside the tri-state area, so the majority are locals. There are different benefits to 1stfans for different people. For the faraway folks, some of it is having personal access to staff at a museum you can't visit. For the locals, the meetups are happening at First Saturday--an event they were already going to. For example, on February 7, we had a free 1stfans behind-the-scenes event with conservator Lisa Bruno talking about animal mummies. We'd been twittering publicly about mummies all week, but the event on Saturday was restricted to 1stfans. 32 people showed up, and they liked the program, but the cool part was that everyone stayed around and talked to each other afterwards. And we definitely see people coming to the meetups and then following up online.

Shelley: For the faraway members, we don't have the meetups. But this week we posted a video of Lisa’s presentation on the 1stfans private Facebook group and she'll be available for Q&A on Facebook. We're curious to see how that goes.

Who are the 1stfans? Do you have a sense of why they are joining?

Will: This whole thing started with us discussing two audience segments: people who come to First Saturdays and people who connect with us on the Web—neither of whom buy memberships. And while there are some museum professionals and social media people joining out of curiosity, the majority are locals. We have all these local Brooklyn people who love the museum and come on First Saturdays and spend all day on Facebook and Flickr. This was made for them.

So you weren't targeting "Brooklyn artists" or some other demographic group. It's specific to people who come to the museum but aren't members.

Will: Right. This is part of an analytical process and drew on membership surveys we've done over several years. The challenges were there and we tried to find a solution. 1stfans was not an “if we build it, they will come” kind of project. They were already involved--we just needed to provide them with the right benefits. People shouldn’t get hung up on the social media-ness. Everyone gets fixated on this, but we’re just using it to address a problem.

Shelley: This is not about social media. Yes, we are using social media, but that's because we've always been using social media--this is an outgrowth of the relationships we already had on Flickr and Twitter, our attempt to provide additional benefits to those people.

How did you pick the price point of $20?

Will: It just felt right. As Shelley said, “everyone’s got a $20 in their pocket.” It's within the "impulse buy" range.

Shelley: At this price, people really use it a la carte. Some people want the in-person events, some people want to connect on social networks, and some 1stfans do both. Looking at the statistics on the online participation, each platform has a different number of group members, which means people are taking what they want from it.

How is 1stfans messaged relative to other membership types? Is it an add-on? Can I buy a 1stfans membership at the front desk?

Will: 1stfans is its own tier of membership and regular members can purchase it as an add-on. Since it is so wildly different from other museum memberships, we feel like we have to separate and distinguish it. We don't want people to say, "I'll just buy the cheapest membership" and become 1stfans without realizing what they are getting.

1stfans is not on our printed membership brochure because we don't want to confuse people. We advertise it at First Saturday and on the website, beacuse those are the places where our target audience come and those are the people who will like 1stfans.

Are 1stfans confused or upset that they don’t get free admission to the museum?

Will: We've only had one person ask about this, and no one has complained. Remember, these are people who come to First Saturday--which is already free--and they're at work when we’re open during the week. So free admission isn't the benefit they really need.

It's interesting that the focus for 1stfans is on these very specific audience segments. Could you imagine creating another targeted membership for, say, senior citizens who want to come in the morning on weekdays?

Shelley: It's funny you bring that up. When we first shared this idea, Will’s boss said, "this is a great and innovative project, but it only serves one part of the community. And we serve many--we have to serve our whole community."

Will: We're hopeful that 1stfans is just the first step in this direction. We’ve talked in marketing meetings about creating a package appealing to senior citizens just as we have for the 1stfans.

How do you balance the exclusive content with public content? Are there staff members pushing you to make these events available to 1stfans for free and charge the general public to come?

Shelley: That hasn't really come up with staff, but we do want to find more ways to share the content created for 1stfans with the public. For example, our 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is currently featuring Mary Temple, who is making this really great calendar of portraits of people in the news. In March, we will print a physical version of her work and display it publicly at First Saturday. She’ll do two talks about the project—one just for 1stfans and one that’s public and open to all. That’s also one of the reasons we made the video with An about her Morse code Twitter stream in January—so anyone who’s curious can get an idea of what this is about.

There's been a lot of debate in the social media world about the exclusive content, especially the Twitter Art Feed, people saying that we are selling something that should be free. You can read our thoughts (and lots of good comments from detractors and 1stfans alike) on this controversy here and here.

The Twitter Art Feed features a new artist every month. How are you selecting and rewarding these artists?

Shelley: Long-term, we're working with our John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Eugenie Tsai, to bring a mix of artists and ideas to the feed. Some artists are selected from the open call (including our first artist, An Xiao), others are projects or artists that we know of and think will work well in the feed for one reason or another, and some artists have work in our collection or are featured in our current exhibitions. Since 1stfans is a new program at the museum and one with an incredibly low price point, all artists in the Twitter Art Feed are donating their time and their effort, which is pretty amazing. One of the most exciting things for me personally is to see artists really fired up about the idea of this membership, wanting to support the Museum and willing to donate their energy to do so.

An, what was your experience like as the first artist to be featured on the Twitter Art Feed?

An: I'd been actively exploring online media and our emerging culture of branded, digital selves, with self-portrait series centered around blogging and advertising, and Twitter quickly became part of that larger exploration. I'd been using it for a while before I was selected for the January feed, but never as an art project per se--my account is a personal scrapbook of ideas and thoughts rather than what I might consider an artistic medium. So on the one hand, engaging in the 1stfans feeds was an exciting opportunity to take a new communications medium and use it as an artistic medium. On the other hand, it was intimidating for that very same reason!

Two things about the overall experience stood out. The first was the amount of work entailed. As a haiku poet and Zen artist, I've been trained in the power of brevity. The trick with the project was that, on top of the 140-character limit, each character in alaphanumerics could convert into as many as six dots and/or dashes in Morse code, thus dropping the amount of text I could squeeze into each tweet. I took time at the start of each week to prepare my tweets both to fit the character restrictions and to make them as interesting as possible.

Secondly, I loved how much 1stfans members got into it. I doubt many of us have ever sent a telegram or seen a telegraph machine, but I found myself having a number of witty, clever exchanges with folks, all in the long tradition of this archaic medium. Artist Nina Meledandri even used a combination of visual imagery and Morse code, taking the project outside Twitter and into Flickr, with a final response composed of pencils, crayons and pastels to represent dashes, and shells and stones to represent dots. The project received some criticism for being inaccessible and cumbersome (members had to copy and paste the tweets into a Morse code translator), but for the most part, the response was quite positive, and the feed became highly interactive. In that sense, the project evolved from simply a conceptual one at the outset into one that was performative and collaborative--an Internet theatre of sorts.

How did working on the Feed impact your relationship with the Brooklyn Museum?

I'd been a fan of the museum in general since I started dropping by a few years ago, and I particularly loved the sense of community around First Saturdays. However, it wasn't until I submitted a photo for Click!, a crowd-curated exhibition that Shelley organized, that I started to feel like a part of the museum. Shelley's warmth and enthusiasm stood out over email and even more so in person, and I soon found myself actively reading and occasionally participating in the blogs.

And so, well before 1stfans was developed, I already felt not simply like a visitor but both a member of a community and an active participant in their arts programming and discourse. Working on the Feed was simply a continuation of this experience. Shelley and Will were super helpful while I was in Los Angeles for the set-up, and of course, I was thrilled to tweet back and forth with 1stfans members and then to meet them in person and on Facebook. The fact that artists are willing to donate their time, effort and money to 1stfans is a real testament to the sense of community that the museum has created. In a city like New York, and in the often disparate and overwhelming art world, it's quite striking. Everything from the fact that Shelley and Will and other memberships staffers take the time to get to know members to the open online communities they've created to encourage interaction speaks to this.

Will and Shelley, have you hit any challenges or surprises thus far with 1stfans?

Shelley: The signup process is manual which is both good (we get to know people) and bad (time consuming). We couldn't use our exisiting setup to process these memberships, so we had to rethink it by using Google Checkout for payment and Google Docs to keep track of folks.

Will: The main challenge on a day-to-day basis concerns the nature of the internet: it doesn't stop when we leave the office. When 1stfans join on a Saturday, they expect to hear from us by Sunday. If they join at 8pm on a weeknight, they'll request to follow the Twitter Art Feed at 9pm, and send us an email at 10pm if that hasn't happened. Because 1stfans request to hear from us on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, we have to manually add them to the group, which sometimes involves finding their profiles on each of those sites. In order to serve 1stfans, Shelley and I have to find time to interact with them in a way that meets their demands while not taking away from the other work we have to do. It's tough, but because there's two of us we've made it work so far.

Is there a marketing strategy for 1stfans?

Will: No. We feel like we have to do an adequate job addressing our two target segments--then we’ll come up with ways to market this to other groups. We have 10,000 people at First Saturday – we want to hit more of them before we look for other segments to address. The 1stfans themselves are our greatest ambassadors helping spread the word through their own networks. The artists on the Twitter Art Feed are also doing a lot of promotion to their own networks-An was great, frequently posting about it on her blog.

What are the plans for the future of 1stfans?

Shelley: Our basic motto is be fully committed to our members, but keep finding small things that can make a big impact. Think outside the box to figure out how to involve both sets of people (faraway and local 1stfans) in one swoop, so we can be cautious of staff time and maximize effort. So, looking at February, we taped Lisa Bruno's in-person presentation on the animal mummies and put up the rough cut, then host a Q&A in the Facebook group for a few days and see how it goes. I'd say, generally, you'll find us doing things in a scrappy way figuring it's better to share as much as we can even if we can't make it pretty. Also, we don't know yet which formats work better than others, so there's going to be a lot of experimentation to find out.

Since this membership is based in the social networks, we are going to be watching carefully as that landscape changes (and it will). I think of this is a living membership structure in this way - we watch and we adapt. After all, Twitter may not be here forever, so we've got to keep thinking, adjust as necessary and grow with the technology in the same way we grow and learn with the group. The really wonderful thing is we are getting to know the people who have joined, so when the time comes to make adjustments, I'm confident that this will be a discussion rather than a top-down mandate from the sky.