This well-rounded panel of museum leaders present an engaging presentation regarding food, beverage, event rentals, and retail within their museums. Representing a mix types of institutions, these museum leaders and a leading industry F&B and retail consultant will outline solutions and tactics to address your most common challenges in approaching earned income from ancillary sources through a broadened lens.

Additional resources:

F&B/Retail and Rentals that Consider Mission, Community, and DEAI slides

Transcript

Tracy Lawler: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Art of Balance, Generating Earned Income while Remaining Mission Aligned. I’m Tracy Lawler, President of JGL Consultants.

We are a food service consultancy that specializes in working with museums. We’ve worked with about 300 museums in in the US and Canada over the years and joining me today is a fantastic panel of JGL clients that we have worked with over the years and we’re really excited to share some of our experiences and hopefully spark some insight today.

I’m going to ask the speakers to go ahead and introduce themselves. Jillian?

Jillian Jones: Good morning. My name is Jillian Jones. I’m the Deputy Director of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. I’ve been at the museum for about nine and a half years previously as the Director of Advancement and now as the Deputy Director.

In my portfolio is a lot of our earned income streams, so that’s SHOP, anything really related to visitor experience. So, our visitor experience team, SHOP, F &B, publications, safety and preservation, which is our name for security, I think that’s about it. And we see about 180 ,000 visitors annually.

Natalie Boten: My name is Natalie Boten.

I’m the Chief of Staff at the Milwaukee Art Museum. I’ve been there for about two and a half years, but within working with the museums for over 15. My portfolio, I work directly for the director. So, on any given day, it could be any part of the museum and what I get deployed to. And our annual visitation is about 250 ,000.

Catherine Surratt: Hi, I’m Catherine Surratt. I am the chief operating and business officer at the Speed Art Museum I’ve been at the art at speed for about a year and a half but I have about 30 years of museum experience and My areas are all of the operations including the revenue -generating areas of the garage the food service retail and special events.

April Farrell: Hi, I’m April Farrell. I am at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego where I’ve been for about 12 years now. I’ve been in the museum world for about 25 years. And my most recent position was director of earned revenue. I’m currently the chief advancement officer, so my portfolio is every dollar earned.

Valarie McDuffie: Good morning. my name is Valerie McDuffie. I’m the Chief Financial Officer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’ve been at the Museum of Art for just about one year, so I’m coming up on my one -year anniversary. And prior to joining the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I spent over 20 years in higher education in various leadership roles. At the Museum, I oversee finance, IT, facilities, retail, events and dining and security. We have a visitorship of over about 680 ,000 a year.

Tracy Lawler: Great. Thank you. So today we’re going to be talking about the cafe and restaurant, also known as your visitor food service program. We’re going to be talking about event rental programs, and we’re also going to be talking about retail merchandise, also known as your stores. And we really hope that this session is going to spur some thinking about food and beverage rental or retails at your organizations, whether it’s about generating more income, better connecting the mission to these activities, or just learning how peer institutions have perhaps dealt with some of the challenges you are encountering.

I did see some of you taking pictures of this. You’ll see the QR code up there on the bottom of the screen. Feel free to take a picture of that. You can access the code and get the PowerPoint at any point. This will be up throughout the presentation, so if you don’t get it now, no worries. And if you have any issues, see either me or Brooke, my colleague who’s right back there, and we will make sure that you do get it.

So, I’ve been doing this for about 25 years. And it used to be that when we were talking about putting together an event rental program or a cafe operation or a store, the focus was on the location and the square footage, the merchandise mix, what the business model was gonna be. All of those obviously are still critically important and we’re still doing that, but now there’s some new elements to the conversation. So, we’re talking about relevancy. I don’t think I have a museum client right now who is not looking at ways to expand their audience and bring in perhaps visitors who they haven’t seen before. And so having a food and beverage and retail rental program that is relevant to those new visitors is super important.

On the other hand, we work on many museum expansions, and we frequently have the dialogue, sometimes with trustees, about having that white tablecloth restaurant, that that’s something that many desire. But of course, if you want to also be inclusive, we have to face it that a white tablecloth restaurant may not be so inclusive. So how do you really align some of these core values of the organizations?

You’ll hear about community from several of our panelists today. That’s really important to many of them, engaging community in many different ways. And then, of course, DEAI. I think many museums are– that’s a core value these days. And so there’s many creative ways that you really can incorporate that into your food and beverage program while still generating that meaningful earned income.

So those are some of the things we’re going to talk about today. And we are aiming to leave a couple minutes for questions at the end. So hopefully we will be successful there.

So, I’m gonna ask each of the presenters to talk a little bit about their institution and their program and we’ll start with Jillian.

Jillian Jones: Thank you. So last year, the Buffalo AKG reopened after a $200 million expansion renovation and this was the largest expansion in our history. So, we’re a very old soul in a new body and There’s a lot of finding yourself in that, and that was last summer that we reopened. So, we’re just rounding the corner on a full year of normal operations.

As part of our expansion, we reimagined all of our visitor amenities, including the Culinary Arts Program and our shop, if you will advance the slide, Tracy. With Tracy’s recommendation and taking into account this much larger footprint that we have, we built two F &B outlets. One is a full service cafe and that offers breakfast, lunch, and dinner, coffee, a bar program, and that has different service models over the course of the day.

And then we built a smaller coffee and bar outlet that also serves as catering staging in a different building. We decided to self -operate for a variety of reasons that we’ll get into later in the presentation,

but that means that all of the F and B staff are part of our core team at the museum. Next slide, please. We also seized upon the unique and very necessary enclosure of a formerly outdoor space to establish a multi -purpose indoor space that we sort of now call our living room.

It is free of charge, this entire wing has no admission charges, and it is surrounded by things that encourage revisitation. A shop, a free gallery, a multi-generational play space, and of course our cafe is right next door to it. This is also our primary event space. So, we built a model for the facility rental program that really emphasizes and prioritizes its community -centric nature by pricing the spaces high and doing less rentals overall.

And then our former shop was larger. It had a really wide variety of merchandise that we generally procured at trade shows. It was kind of disconnected to our local community and it was generally in the red, mildly profitable sometimes. We went for agility here and flexibility. This shop is much smaller, the footprint is smaller, the product selection is smaller, but it’s focusing on local makers and those kinds of partnerships. And so far, with our first year, it is profitable. So, yay. Uniquely, it has only one employee, that’s the shop manager and otherwise the shop is served, the visitors to the shop are served by our visitor experience associates and so we wanted to keep their experience fresh and they rotate from the galleries to the desks and then into the shop in their weekly posts.

Thank you. Thank you. Natalie?

Natalie Boten: Yeah, so we, the Milwaukee Art Museum, our Santiago Calatrava edition is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary sailing out into the Lake Michigan just next year.

While this is an architectural marvel and masterpiece for Calatrava, it has become a symbol for the city in and of itself.

But the building has its own inherent challenges when it comes to our earned income and ability to do certain types of things that we’ll get into in just a second. So, our restaurant space is located in that expansion.

And I’m sure as many of you have experienced or have noted that post -COVID, our staffing challenges in our restaurant were almost amountable and because of this we decided to work with JGL to search out for the right third -party vendor.

That transition has fully happened and was realized on March 1st, so we’re just a few months into that partnership. Since then we’ve made some incremental improvements in the front of house. We’ve transitioned out of kind of the shift grab and go model that we were in into more of a fast casual with some aspirations to fully transition into a full-service dining outlet with a second kind of more casual space in the near future.

Next slide. We’re fortunate that we have multiple different spaces throughout the building to offer as rentals. The most particular and biggest destination for those rental spaces is our main entry way in the hallway, but we do have other meeting spaces that are available. When we transitioned to our third party, we experienced a few kind of hiccups with our current year’s bookings, but we currently have a new events team in place, and we’re really looking to expand our rental business through corporate events.

We’re still trying to find a balance between how many events we want to do and being able to prioritize our mission-driven work, but it’s something that we’re working on moving forward. Our retail outlet remains self-operated. This is one of those inherent challenges that I mentioned regarding the building.

When it was designed, the artistic vision of Santiago Calatrava did not include having a space for commerce and so the store itself was tucked away and became kind of hard to find. So within the last couple of years, we have relocated that the store to be in the main entry. It’s accessible in a free part of the museum but it shrunk the footprint of the store itself fairly significantly.

So, we’re looking to actually expand upward. There is another space that is identical to this particular space, just two different flights of stairs, so we have already built able access to expand up. Profitability -wise, our outlet is usually exhibition dependent, and whether or not we were able to include exhibition stores in the exhibitions, but we’ve recently hired a new CXO who is really concentrating on an appropriate product mix and new branded merchandise to hopefully to have that be more regular.

Tracy Lawler: Great. Thank you. April.

April Farrell: So, we just opened two years ago after being closed for five years. We did and $10 million expansion, and we really kind of re -envisioned the entire revenue business before opening. So we are still in the slightly experimental phase, we’re still fine tuning, but we’ve kind of learned a lot over the process.

The main thing that we are kind of still fine tuning is our restaurant situation, it’s called the kitchen, and we have an incredible partner, but in the RFP process and working with JGL, Of course we had the white tablecloth requests from our trustees, we had visitors who wanted a quick grab and go and a place to sit down. So, we really found a partner who was kind of willing to work with us on meeting all of those needs.

And we are also going to be changing our hours recently, or not recently, we’re about to change our hours to be more accessible. In conjunction with the restaurant, we’re switching from a 10 to four model to an 11 to seven model so that people who have full -time jobs can come afterwards, enjoy the sunset. We are lucky to be on the ocean. We really feel like that’s a capitalization that hasn’t seen fruition yet. So, we’re hoping that that changes that. The revenue that we have been able to generate from our events and rentals has been pretty astounding. We were doing on average about 300 a year with some weddings.

This year we’re looking closer to 800 ,000. We are very lucky though in the fact that we have multiple event spaces with external load in and load out pathways which means we’re not interrupting our visitors. We can keep the galleries open, and it allows us a lot more freedom to have up to three events at a time. And of course, now, you know, I’m hearing my colleagues talking about balancing mission and how many events and how few events, and of course our trustees are seeing dollar signs, and we’re trying to kind of balance like we are still first and foremost a museum.

Our store space is self-operated. We are following the similar model that Jillian mentioned. We have a store manager and buyer, and then the staff are all front of house experience people who kind of rotate around.

We have really leaned into the locality of our space, working with local makers, showing representation across the board with the products that we’re choosing to show. We’re also doing a lot of collaborations with local makers, what allows us to have events. We have a series called The Shop Presents. It’s usually a product launch with a maker that comes with a book signing or a lecture and it’s driven really great new audience moments for us to come into the institution and realize that they have a place there. Yeah.

Tracy Lawler: Thank you. And Valerie.

Valarie McDuffie: So, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021 completed its expansion known to many as the core project. So, phase one of the core project led by Frank Gehry.

This is a two hundred and thirty-three million initiative that expanded gallery and public spaces creating inclusivity and accessibility. We are a world -renowned museum and the PMA food service operation is outsourced to a third party. We have four outlets for public consumption with a commitment to generating additional revenue along with our institution’s equity agenda.

Even after the expansion, the space can still be challenging. When we have a blockbuster exhibition, we’re currently in exhibition mode right now. So, fingers crossed, going to do very well. Our cafe seating becomes very limited. This has us, you know, looking at ways to further activate outside spaces to support these types of overflows.

Our event vernal is another area with capacity for growth We had self -imposed restrictions that limited our ability to drive revenue Along with increasing our pricing structure at one particular point that actually priced us out the market.

Additionally, we’ll talk a little bit about our retail space this program here is self -operated and was budgeted to be profitable in FY 24. However, our program has gone through some major restructuring during 24, so we will actually see a loss in 24 instead of adding to the bottom line for the museum.

We went from over 4 ,000 square foot of retail space to 2,000 square feet. So you actually see here what we call our twin stores and then we have a small exhibition space when we’re in exhibition mode Those are significant changes and as a result again, I talked a little bit about what we’ll see we do intend to move forward with the Balance budget and FY 25. So it just took some reshifting And thinking about what about what we’ll look like as we move forward after closing down our main store.

We do have a commitment to local sourcing, which is important from an equity agenda perspective, and we’ll talk a little bit about that later.

Tracy Lawler: Great. Catherine.

Catherine Surratt: So, the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky is going to celebrate our centennial in 2027. And in preparation for that we are in full construction mode. On the three acres surrounding the museum, we are in the process of building an art park that’ll be available to the community 24 /7, 365 days a year. We had a very generous bequest that the museum received probably 14 sculptures that will be installed on this site.

So, this it will have no additional payment or any payment. You can enjoy it whenever you want to. And our construction continues to the indoors. We had a very generous donor who provided us with funds to redo our cafe and our entrance. So, this is a rendering of our cafe. So hopefully when I return to  Louisville, it looks a little closer to that ’cause we are in process. Early last year our food service provider let us know that they did not want to continue And so we took went through a process of talking to several local Providers to take this place and we ended up selecting Organization that was woman -owned and black-owned. Part of what we wrote into our contract was that we wanted the food to be accessible to all of our stakeholders, not just our board, but our community, our guests, all of our guest families.

We are actually situated on the campus of University of Louisville. So, we’ve never had students really come in and our new provider has already worked with the university to be able to accept their food service car.

Our rentals, we are lucky that pretty much from April until July, we have weddings every weekend, and our facilities rental director is amazing at layering in a lot of corporate events. We are also a frequent venue for local fundraisers for lots of organizations, and if you all know, we had this little thing called the Kentucky Derby a few weeks ago, and so we always benefit from events during that time. As I said, our retail space has just recently been completed as part of the renovation.

Our entrance and our store are one in the same. This is an area that we have set aside for children, but our goal in redoing these spaces to make them feel welcoming, to have people feel like they belong. The first thing you see, which I don’t have an image of when you walk in is a seating area where you can get oriented for your visit to the museum.

Tracy Lawler: Thank you for setting the stage and the foundation just describing all of your programs.

So, we’re going to jump into the cafe and visitor food and really talk about DEAI. I know several of you have incorporated that into your food service program.

So, April, do you want to talk a little bit about what you’ve done at MCASD?

April Farrell: Yeah, we did two things during the RFP process. I think that was key. We created a committee of 10 different staff members to be the ones to kind of make the decision.

And we included a lot of maybe traditionally unusual voices in the room. We had everyone from each department represented from security and facilities to curatorial. And some of the people whose voices we didn’t usually hear in these kinds of decisions were the most profound and the observations were really key in who we ended up choosing. And then the committee decided that we really wanted to have about five vendors for preferred vendors for our bar and catering, and we wanted them to be diverse across all board, across the board. We wanted representation in ownership and in who their chefs were in the food service style and in the price point So that you could have a budget wedding or you could have something that was really over the top. And that when we have our list of partners on our website, that there’s a representation of the community. So that was great.

Tracy Lawler: Thank you. And Catherine, I know you also incorporated that in your recent selection.

Catherine Surratt: Absolutely. As I said, we selected a vendor that was woman owned and black owned. But in addition, what I spoke about before was the accessibility to all of our audiences.

We have a community day once a month, and frequently we receive post-visit survey information that people said, “It’s great food, “but we can’t afford to eat there.” And so very much important that all of our community felt like they could come into the cafe and have something that they could actually purchase.

Tracy Lawler: Wonderful. Thank you. And I know we find among our client base that sustainability is something that is really important to many museums as well. And I know Natalie, you’ve had a recent experience with your transition to culinary. Can you talk about that?

Natalie Boten: Yeah, absolutely. We didn’t necessarily incorporate ideas or a request for sustainable practices. The RFP, we did, however, were really, really impressed with the partner that we did choose and how they introduced that as part of their presentation and how they live that as a model. So, some of the things that they are really concentrated on doing are everything that they make is from scratch, reducing on packaging. They’re locally sourcing food and products when they can. They use a completely green chemical line and all of the, to go flatware and other paper products are all either recyclable or compostable.

Tracy Lawler: Thank you. And then talking about measuring success, I think we’ve heard some of you say that your cafes are visitor food or maybe not yet profitable and we know they could be challenging, but how are you measuring success when you look at these programs? Val, can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing at PMA?

Valarie McDuffie: Absolutely, I think first and foremost, seeing an increase in sales at our in our cafes as well as our restaurant stir just seeing those sales go up but then then there’s also that customer feedback right the flow of traffic in our cafes was very challenging initially we’ve made some significant changes in that area so you know getting additional customer feedback that says we’ve improved in those areas you know the way finding is better having better. Having representatives at the front of the cafes that are able to actually help direct and flow the traffic so that customers have a more friendly customer experience, as well as then also when we are in exhibition mode, just having places for people to sit down with their families and their children so that they have, again, that good customer experience.

Tracy Lawler: Great and Catherine I think you had some things to share there as well right?

Catherine Surratt: Yeah, I think that for us it will be the expansion of the customers that actually frequent the cafe will be most important as well as feedback on the selection and the ability for them to purchase and feed their families when they’re in the museum.

Tracy Lawler: And then Jillian of course you’re a year into your new museum and expansion how are you evaluating success?

Jillian Jones: Well so success for us obviously profitability is very important here and we’re not yet profitable in the F&B space however for us what’s really important is a departure from the former experience in our community recognizing that. Prior it had been that you entered the cafe you were greeted by a host you sat down at a table there was no way to just get a cup of coffee or feel your relaxed self in the museum And now you can, and so we’re measuring success on things like customer feedback and net promoter score. And even if that White Tablecloth restaurant was a more profitable venture, I don’t think we’d go back there, just because it’s no longer our brand.

Tracy Lawler: That’s a great point. And I know that we have, as a consultant, I know that very few museums across the country are brave enough to self-operate. I know AKG had a history of doing it, and so I think Jillian’s been very successful there. But talk a little bit about that decision making when you were making that decision to stay self -operated. What played in there?

Jillian Jones: Sure, so few museums do this, and I think that Tracy was a little surprised by us saying that, well, this is kind of our operational model, and we’re comfortable with it. But I had mentioned the word agile earlier, agility is one of our core values at the museum. We want to be able to be flexible, right? And so we are constantly innovating the way that we operate. And remember, we were doing all of this planning while we were under construction. And we really had no way of knowing how visitors and how we were intuitively going to use the space after we opened.

So, we were hesitant to lock into any sort of exclusive contract with anyone and let them operate our spaces, especially because they are such community-centric spaces. They’re not just event spaces. We also had really strong philanthropic partnerships with three food and beverage businesses that are global in nature that happened to be headquartered in Buffalo.

And we didn’t want to give the appearance of preferential treatment or forsaking any of those relationships, so we wanted to balance that too. So far, I’m really happy that we did this.

Our F&B team is our team. Our executive chef is very embedded in the operations team at the museum. She’s creating her own programming that are bringing new visitors to the table.

We’re gonna pilot a drag brunch next month. That’s gonna be a lot of one. We’ll see how that goes. And she’s running that. It’s not a special event, but the cafe is running it. I’d say the downside is the active management. Since it reports to me, I have bus tables. I’ve spent a lot of time in Toast and Resi trying to figure out how these systems work. I’ve created checklists about cleaning that just isn’t getting done that I think needs to get done better.

And so there’s a lot of active time managing that operation that a third party would otherwise do for us.

Tracy Lawler: Thank you. Those are all great points. And now, of course, the Milwaukee Art Museum recently made a change from self -operation to contract operation.

We actually recommended that to the museum initially, and that predated Natalie’s arrival. There was a little bit of a period where the museum wanted to really digest that, but then you did ultimately make that change.

Can you talk a little bit about the benefits to the museum?

Natalie Boten: Yes, absolutely. So like Tracy said, we tried really hard to maintain that self-operation, but really what it came down to was what Jillian was mentioning is that the active management of the cafe space and our catering operations, which is more than we can really handle. It’s not a core competency of our management staff. And the burden that it was placing on our HR team to constantly be in the hiring phase was taking away from their ability to be able to provide services and do things for our staff that were providing for our core mission.

And our, you know, the quality was thus impacted and ultimately then the visitor experience. So some of the things that we’ve seen out of the benefit of this has been the fact that not only has the quality gone up, but our management time has been able to be directed towards other things. And then from just a practical standpoint, we’ve seen food costs go down because we have a third-party provider that has larger buying power, and we see staff now eating in our cafe and being able to participate in the culinary experience at the museum as well.

Tracy Lawler: Those are great points thank you. And then looking at sort of the idea of developing outside business for your cafe or restaurant of course that can help increase relevancy and I know several of you have had discussions there. Now April you’re getting ready to expand your hours and try and bring more people in, correct?

April Farrell: Yeah, I mentioned that I think briefly earlier that our cafe has only been open for lunch and breakfast, as well as our museum only be open from 10 to four. So, they really wanted to capitalize on summer, on the ocean, and have happy hours and dinners. And we thought, well, why don’t we do the same thing? So, we’re kind of tucked away off the street.

So, unless you knew it was back there, you wouldn’t know it was back there. So, we’re working on some wayfinding signage and vinyls that kind of say, you know, down here at the kitchen and here’s where you go for a coffee and just kind of helping people navigate the space. And we’re hoping that will drive a little more public traffic. It’s also in a public art space. So, you don’t have to pay admission to go. You could come for lunch and leave and not come in the museum.

Of course, we don’t encourage that, but it’s possible.

Tracy Lawler: Wonderful, thank So we’re going to go ahead and move on to event rental. Of course, I think most of you probably know that the event rental function is the one where most museums make the lion’s share of their income because you’re generating both the rental fee as well as typically commissions on food and beverage.

But of course, balancing that with some of these community needs, and other goals can be not a problem, a challenge, we’ll say. So, community accessible meeting space is something that really so many of our clients want to incorporate. They want to be part of the community, they want to welcome the community, but they’re balancing that with budgets and with the earned income they’re trying to generate from these rentals. So, I know that Val, you have experimented with that at PMA. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Valarie McDuffie: Absolutely Tracy. As part of the closure of the main bookstore, or excuse me, the main retail space, which was about 2 ,000 square feet. We have launched the LEC, which is our Learning and Engagement Center, and that center during the day actually functions as a space where our students who are there for educational programming can do some great things. But then it offers us the opportunity to sort of open it up to community partners in the evenings and maybe even in the afternoons if we don’t have educational schools in that space during the day.

So, it’s a way that we’re being very flexible in order to see how we can actually create community space with our partners. One that we haven’t put a price tag on at all yet because we’re trying to make sure that we’re very flexible and nimble in terms of that space.

Tracy Lawler: That sounds like a great program. And April, I know You’re also piloting something can you share that?

April Farrell: Yeah, we’re hoping to launch kind of a holistic program for community give back divided by Operating budget, so, if you’re five million and up we’re happy to offer a 15 % discount to user spaces if you’re in that middle tier of a one million dollar operating to five We can do a rental at just hard cost so you’re just paying for security and event staffing and Porter service basically, which can be really affordable. And then for our smaller community programs that are under a million, we would like to actually have a number of give -backs that the museum itself underwrites those hard costs.

We’re talking about a panel that would vet and choose, you know, two to three per quarter. And the hope is that by them still needing to use our food and beverage that the commissions that we would collect would cover the hard costs at the museum underwrites. So that’s kind of what our plan is and hopefully we’ll be able to launch soon.

Tracy Lawler: Thank you, I think those are great ideas. One of the other things we’ve implemented with clients over the years is, obviously your event space, your inventory expires if you don’t use it. So, if you could play with a calendar and open it up to community groups, maybe 60 days out or 45 days out, those groups do tend to book a little bit out so that that’s a great mechanism to both benefit your community and still make your budget in terms of doing those external paid rentals.

So moving on to how many how many events is the right number we’ve worked with many museums over the years where the directors have said bring it on we want as many events as you can bring it’s you know great earned income it brings philanthropic minded people to the organization it activates the building it’s you know lots of great things and probably just as many directors over the years who have said if I if I never have to have another wedding or corporate event in the building I’d be very happy. So how do you find that balance and how have you defined that? Jillian, do you want to talk a little bit about what you’ve done at AKG?

Jillian Jones: Sure so prior to our expansion we really didn’t prioritize facility rentals we didn’t have the space to do it and it was exceedingly disruptive So, we were seeing about revenues of $20 ,000 maximum on that. It was sort of something we only offered. We built it into, I guess you would say the revenues were in a different line because we built it into premium sponsorships for exhibitions.

Now, the case of facility rentals being disruptive, it’s still very much the case. So, we had a very intentional conversation with our board, with our advancement committee to say, we’re gonna price these at the top of the market to sort of discourage facility rentals. We’re gonna offer them, we’re gonna do them, but we’re not going to prioritize them, we’re gonna prioritize mission first. And thankfully there was a lot of rich conversation around that at the board level, but ultimately, they voted in favor of that. And so, we offer facility rentals at the very highest and above market rate in the area.

But we still are seeing maybe it’s an effective being new. Our revenues this year is going to be about $200 ,000 in facility rentals. So that’s a significant jump for us.

Tracy Lawler: That’s a really impressive result. That sounds very successful. And now Val, tell us a little bit of what you’re doing at PMA with respect to the volume of event rentals.

Valarie McDuffie: Absolutely, I think we’re slightly the exact opposite. And that we had initially priced ourselves out in the market and so as part of my joining the PMA, that was one of the first things I looked at is that we have so many great spaces and so we should be doing more in that respect. Our curatorial team is probably where Gillian is and that we don’t want to have these types of major events in here and this is not who we are, but we do have a good amount of great space at the PMA, and so the expansion has created additional space. And so I’m pushing very hard on, that’s an area where we can increase some revenue. We are changing our prices effective 7/1/24 in order for us to be able to really move the needle in this area.

So, we’re focusing on this area very specifically.

Tracy Lawler: Great. Thank you. And then Natalie, I know in Milwaukee just went through an effort and is still going through an effort to sort of rebalance the type in the number. Can you talk about that?

Natalie Boten: Yeah, absolutely. We also were of the AKG mindset that fewer is better and we ultimately did also kind of price ourselves out of the market. And in a mix of that and then also going through the transition through the RFP process, we saw a pretty significant drop off of our event rentals for this year.

So, I think we’re trying to recalibrate and maybe find a more happy medium that will still decrease the total number of events that we’re doing, but capitalize and maximize those that we do do, and then also really focus on more corporate events and try to get away from the weddings that are taking up the main entry space in the museum.

Tracy Lawler: Great, thank you. And then, of course, being successful in the event rental market, part of that question and formula is who’s selling the space for you? There could be a lot of different opinions there, and I know we have a couple of different examples here, So Val, you’re preparing to make a change there, so can you talk about that?

Valarie McDuffie: Absolutely, we most recently made a change that both the third party and I, so our internal event staff are actually selling the space.

And they still do need to get approval internally in order to commit to any contract, but they actually have a larger team, so they have the ability to expand in this area and additionally they’re motivated because they you know bringing in the additional revenue is a win-win for both of us they’ll actually bring in the additional sales and we’ll take our piece from the shared commission that we receive from the vendor so this is something that we have just most recently started probably been going on now for about a month and we’re really excited.

Tracy Lawler: Great and Natalie you’re handling it a little bit differently.

Natalie Boten: Yeah, we when we went through the RFP process It was very important to us that we maintain that functionality in order to be able to control the calendar as a whole and looking at what we’re doing holistically instead of Allowing events to dictate when and where our internal programming could occur And so far the first few months of the relationship, it’s worked out fairly simply. We have a really great events team that we are building and they have a very active relationship with the rest of the institution and are being able to help plan out our programming a little bit further than we’ve been used to in order to be able to continue to prioritize that work.

Tracy Lawler: Great, thank you. And moving to just the positioning of the events, I’m curious, Jillian, I know that you’ve really positioned yourself at the height of the market. What’s been the feedback there? Has any blowback from any of your community members?

Jillian Jones: A little bit. A little bit, but we also have established a community rental program where three times a year we will allow a free facility rental. It’s based on an application process, and so that’s helped to mitigate that a little bit. Remember, though, that when I’m sure all of you at your museums have a discount program, so if you are a leadership level donor, you get a 10% discount or a 50% discount or whatever that is, and we wanted to maintain that discount structure, which is another reason why we increased the amount of the base rental price.

In general, it’s been embraced.

Tracy Lawler: Yeah. Well, very smart, I think, particularly looking at anticipating those requests for discounts and being prepared to handle those is important. So, let’s talk a little bit about, we’ve talked about the visitor experience and how it impacts, how event rental impacts it. And of course, load -in is front and center. That can be a real challenge. So, can you talk to us, Catherine, about how you handle that at the speed?

Catherine Surratt: Yeah, so at the speed, we have one space that’s fully dedicated to events, but to have a full experience, we also need a spill into areas that are open to the public. We have a very small building services team and they often do set up an advance of an event We had last we just had an event that was supposed to happen Thursday evening set up on Wednesday. And I was like time out. This is this is not gonna work. But so we have come to an agreement that if that if we have the need to kind of set up that we do it in the space that is dedicated for events, we can close the door and no one has to see it and prior to the event, we can pull it out. But we also experience some sort of curiosity and fascination that people can actually have events in our space, so it’s kind of a double -edged sword. We wanna just make sure that the guests that are coming in just as regular visitors don’t feel like the event is more important than they are.

Tracy Lawler: I think those are great points. And I think that we absolutely find that visitors are really intrigued by the setup of events and that can help sell them sometimes. Just pro tip to anybody who’s planning a new museum though, really if you can really think about that load in space and finding space where things can come in behind the scenes, it really can alleviate a lot of those conflicts that we see in the museum world.

And then just, finally, show of hands, I know all of you have some different policies on whether or not you allow other galas to be hosted in your museum. It is a hot topic, again, some people, so I think three of you do, four of you do, and Natalie, you do not anymore.

Natalie Boten: We do not.

Tracy Lawler: And the reasoning for that to your knowledge is what.

Natalie Boten: The best of my knowledge is we don’t want to; we don’t want people to have the perception that we are fundraising for other organizations and Which is fair. I think that there’s potentially a way for us to strike that balance But it’s really just not a conversation that we’ve actively had as of late. Yeah. Yeah, okay We do have a caveat no overtly political events.

Tracy Lawler: Yes, absolutely Okay, so we’re gonna go ahead and move on to your retail merchandise program So of course DEAI, again, super important, great way to connect to your mission. Val, do you want to talk a little bit about what PMA is doing there?

Valarie McDuffie: Absolutely. So PMA is committed to diversity, and so as part of our four key pillars, collections, careers, contracts, and community, community is one that we drive in this particular space, and it’s achieved through local collaborations with local makers. And so, we absolutely work with local makers on our product mix and we’re now getting more in that local maker space where we’re considering sort of branding our product with local makers so having a specific and unique product base that includes some of the local community makers in Philadelphia.

Tracy Lawler: That’s great, thank you. And Natalie I think Milwaukee has also focused on some of those local products.

Natalie Boten: Yeah, we have a fantastic story manager who does a really great job of bringing in local makers, finding women -owned businesses, minority-owned businesses, to not just keep full time in this shop, but also for various pop -ups throughout the year.

Tracy Lawler: Wonderful, thank you. And then just speaking, I know April, you’ve had some interesting experiences with your exhibition store and mission alignment. can you talk a little bit about that?

April Farrell: Yeah, we currently are, just open two years ago, our primary focus is our permanent collection. So, the exhibition has stayed the same for the two years we’ve been open. And then we have our special exhibition halls, which has changed once a year. So, our exhibition related merchandise is actually quite reduced from what it used to be. So, we have leaned into a lot more of kind of reaching out to local makers and artists that maybe aren’t in our collection or on view, but are still artists in our community and working with them for collaborations, merchandise, again, collaborations. I’m just using the same word again. But yeah, it’s helped us and we’ve all done it through the lens of our curatorial team so that they’re kind of, you know, they’re giving us their approval to kind of go outside of the box in a little way.

Tracy Lawler: Wonderful, thank you. And then, of And then, of course, your store is a great opportunity to really celebrate your mission and tie the mission to the retail products. Val, can you tell us a little bit about some of the things that PMA is doing there?

Valarie McDuffie: So, we have a wide mix of products that are unique to the PMA, again, drawing on those Philadelphia-based community partners in order to engage those collaborations with the PMA to have unique products is something that we are definitely doing. We’re using, you know, for example, the Rocky store, which if you know Philadelphia, you know, millions of people travel there just to see the Rocky statue. And so those collaborations as well as, again, those artists’ collaborations of drawing on local Philadelphia artists in order to brand product for us and then we’ll be looking at, especially as we move forward with our rebrand selling those products in our store.

Tracy Lawler: And Catherine what about you? What are you doing at the speed?

Catherine Surratt: So, I think it seems to be a common trend that we work with a lot of local vendors but again being a Louisville Kentucky when I first got there had socks with horses on them, like I’m new to Louisville, but I can think of a million places I could find those. So, we have really kind of pivoted to looking at more locally produced products in the Louisville, Lexington market, as well as fair trade focused products.

Tracy Lawler: That’s great. And Jillian, what about the AKJ?

Jillian Jones: Similar theme here. We’re partnering with a lot of local makers, but I’ll just share with you our biggest surprise. We went through a rebranding this past year. Oh, that’s gonna fall. So, we have this nice big AKG brand, and it uses a lot of different punctuations.

So, we’ve got the smiley face, we’ve got exclamation points and quotations and all these things. And we deploy this on our products in a way that people have really braced and so our like our hottest seller is this blush pink sweatshirt with the AKG with a little smiley face and it’s like just a buttery kind of fabric that you want to wear all the time and we cannot keep them in stock and there’s a really good profit margin on those too so it’s been a big surprise that we’ve had those that this branded merchandise that is the hottest seller.

Tracy Lawler: That’s great news and Natalie I know you’ve also been doing some work with branded merchandise. How’s that working?

Natalie Boten: Yeah, so we recently hired a chief experience officer that’s looking at the museum from kind of a new perspective and he has a pretty deep retail background and is really looking to lean heart in to our branded merchandise.

And so, we’re on that journey to start bringing the kind of that brand awareness that Jillian was talking about to the more care of museum as well.

Tracy Lawler: Wonderful. That’s great. And then of course online stores We hear a lot about that virtually all of our retail clients have them and have had Limited measures of success in in many cases, but I know you’ve done some really interesting things April with your store. Can you talk a little bit about that?

April Farrell: Yeah, I our shop manager and buyer Dante rally has a very long history of being entrepreneurial and has a lot of relationships in the community. And he does a lot of partnerships very strategically with people who have very big online presences. So that whenever there is a collaboration, we’re capitalizing on their audience as well as our own. And our own is small at this point. We were closed for five years. So, it’s been a great way for kind of online visibility. It’s helped our online retail, which has doubled in the last year by launching our own, it’s the shop at MCSD but it’s its own Instagram channel because our main channel is rightly so focused on our curatorial, our exhibits, and our campus and we wanted to really be able to share the stories of the makers and have a lot of kind of creative content on our own channel and so it’s helped a lot. But we do a lot of programming, we’re about to launch our first design market slash book fair with our local makers and the whole thing is being done with a lot of online content creators and collaborators.

Tracy Lawler: Wonderful, thank you. And Val, what about the PMA? What are you doing with respect to your online store?

Valarie McDuffie: So, our online store had its own pages, social media pages, etc. But we did also bring in a new chief marketing officer and he is actually moving that towards the main page so that we actually can capture more customers because of course you know we have thousands of followers for the main museum but for the retail store it’s a much smaller base and so we’re going to be able to take advantage of that.

So, we’ve actually seen a bit of a decline in our sales and the main in our marketing or excuse me, in our online presence in FY24. We believe that that was largely driven by some staffing challenges we had.

We lost our social media and marketing person in the retail space. We’ve now filled that position and we really believe that we’ll see an uptick in that area in this collaboration now and where we’ll move everything to the main platform. We’ll just be another further boost for the museum. So, we feel like we’ll be coming back strong in FY25.

Tracy Lawler: Great, thank you. And then of course, you know, back to that data and metrics, how are you measuring your success? You know, are you being successful financially? You know, we, when we go in and assess the project, we’re looking at a lot of key things such as, you know, inventory turnover and sales per square foot and capture rate. And sometimes those things can be difficult to gather.

So, Catherine, I know you’ve had some challenges in terms of getting your hands on the data you want.

Catherine Surratt: Exactly. We currently are using our CRM for our sales of merchandise, which is a BlackBaud product, which unfortunately gives me two reports. I have a very long retail career and this is not what I want. We’ve actually built into our strategic plan in the next year and a half to look at a point -of -sale system, but then that creates its own challenges because like many others we use our guest experience team and do we have, can we have a combined checkout or do we have to move everything to something?

So there are lots of things to consider, but I don’t feel that we have all the tools to actually manage the business.

Tracy Lawler: And April, what about you? What are some of the things you’re doing?

April Farrell: We actually also were using the all Blackbaud product for our merchandise we thought we’re already paying for it why pay for something else but after two years and a lot of insight from the front of house staff were switched we just switched to Square in March it gives us really robust reporting etc and a lot more of the data that we need .

Tracy Lawler: Okay great well thank you everybody we really appreciate you coming hope it was helpful and feel free to ask questions.