This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. As museums compete against a growing range of leisure and educational options, they must reevaluate their approach to pricing to demonstrate value while developing more holistic revenue strategies. In this lively and thought-provoking recorded session, panelists will explore how cultural organizations are leveraging pricing strategies to maximize revenue, prioritize accessibility, engage new audiences, and grow membership. Viewers will take away inspiring ideas and concrete strategies they can apply at their own institution to create more purposeful and sustainable earned revenue strategies.

Transcript

James Butterworth:

All right. Good morning, everybody. We are gonna kick off a great session this morning and it’s wonderful to see almost a full house and I can say I’m very happy to be at AAM.

I’m James Butterworth, I’m with Blackbaud and hopefully we’ve got a few Blackbaud clients here. All right, thank you. We are one of the lead sponsors so we get to say hi to groups like this and beyond that if you’d like to speak to me or other staff come down to the expo but you’re not really here to see me so I am gonna let the experts take-off I think Rosie literally is going to introduce everybody, but if you’re an accountant raise your hand, in membership, and then development. All right, so there you have it. All right, appreciate it.

Have a great time today and take good notes because there is a test at the end.

Rosie Siemer:

All right. Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome. We are excited to be here with you all today. My name is Rosie Seimer. I’m the founder and CEO of Five Seed. And at Five Seed, we’re a research and strategy organization, and we partner exclusively with museums and cultural organizations to help them better understand their audiences and to develop data-informed strategies to grow their membership programs.

I am thrilled to be here with you all and to have our wonderful panelists with us today. So, let me introduce everyone and then we will get started talking about all things pricing.

So, to start, Mary Bradley is the Director of Membership, Visitor, and Volunteer Services at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Mary started her career in the corporate world, working in call centers and with customer service. And then about 25 years ago, she transitioned to the non-profit cultural space and she’s been contributing her skills and leadership there ever since.

When Mary first started at the gardens 14 years ago, she had just three employees she now manages a department of 50 and that includes people working in the areas of membership, volunteer services, visitor services, a training team, a call center, and the visitor experience team. So as Mary likes to say she’s the director of all the feet in the door. In her free time, Mary likes to write those stories. And she draws a lot of inspiration from the 1800s cemetery that the Denver Botanic Gardens was built on. So, thank you for being here, Mary.

Next up, we have Spencer Janssen. Spencer is the Deputy Director and Director of Membership and Guest Services at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. Spencer’s been building engaging membership, annual fund, and affinity groups at the museum since 2014. In his role as deputy director, he continues to develop the museum’s membership program while also overseeing areas of the museum’s store, restaurant, programming, box office operations, and data management systems.

And I had the great pleasure of working with Spencer on a case study for my most recent book about membership innovation, but I was surprised to learn that his photography has been featured in another book titled, “Fly Fishing for the Soul, Tales of White River Guide.” And something else you might not know about Spencer, he was named the best bartender in Arkansas, not once, but three times. (audience laughs) So. (laughs) If you wanna talk about bourbon, this is your man here.

And Last but certainly not least, we’ve got Rehn West. Rehn is the Director of Development and Marketing at Nauticus, which is a maritime discovery center located along the waterfront in downtown Norfolk, Virginia. Rehn first started at Nauticus about six years ago in the development department, and she now oversees a team of five that are focused in the areas of fundraising, marketing, and membership. Over the past four years, Rehn has led the fundraising efforts for a $21 $1.5 million capital campaign to reimagine Nauticus’s exhibit and visitor entry. She is a Norfolk native and also a twin. Didn’t know that.

Alright, so today we’re going to be talking about pricing. Pricing for admissions, pricing for membership, and pricing for other earned revenue areas. Pricing, you know, it’s one of these things that I have kind of fallen in love with because it’s so complex and there are so many different ways to think about pricing strategy.

As we all know that admissions can benefit membership, sometimes compete with membership, programs can lift revenues, sometimes you know we have to have a strategy for how we’re going to apply discounts and things like that for membership.

So, we’re gonna talk about all of these areas and we’ll save time at the end if anyone has any questions for our panelists. There is a microphone in the center. Please walk toward the microphone and use it if you have a question, and we’ll save time at the end for Q &A.

So, while pricing is one of the most important decisions that an organization can make, I found that it’s also one of the most overlooked areas of opportunity for museums.

Pricing decisions are often kind of just done. There’s not necessarily a lot of research or intentionality that goes into some of that. And so, we’re going to talk a little bit about how these three organizations have approached pricing decisions at their organizations.

And of course we need to talk about diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion, DEAI because at museums, unlike at for-profit organizations, we actually have a responsibility to our communities and to make sure that we are making our organizations as welcoming and accessible as possible. So, we will spend some time talking about that as well.

So, to get started, let’s– I’d like to ask each of our panelists to introduce their organization, share a little bit of background about your Institution and tell us if you have any new exciting initiatives on the horizon and Mary, maybe we’ll start with you.

Mary Bradley:

Everybody thank you for being here I’m with Denver Botanic Gardens, and we are located pretty much centrally in Denver. We have another Campus about 15 miles southwest of Denver Chatfield farms, And so we draw different communities as a result. What was the next part?

We have currently, as of April, we have 56,000 member households, which is just insane. When I first started, we had around 26,000. So, it’s been quite the growth adventure.

Any of your initiatives? No, currently, we have indoor and outdoor art exhibits, which are drawing a wide variety of audiences and really have increased attention on the gardens, both for those who just think that they’re going to see their favorite plant as well as those who have a favorite artist. So, it’s been a lot of fun having the incorporation of both.

Rosie Siemer:

And Spencer.

Spencer Jansen:

Hi, I’m with the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, we just recently reopened after a major renovation. So, we’ve been open in one year. We celebrated one-year last week. So got done with all those fun activities for that.

We have a pretty large collection focusing on contemporary craft and works on paper. But we also have a theater that does children’s theater productions for the very young. But we’ve also expanded that into offering concerts, ballet performances, and movie screenings with a local cinema society. We also have a full-fledged classroom that offers classes for all ages and very intensive classes, not workshops, but we do eight-week, four-week classes. Not college accredited, but it is very much a place where you can really learn a new skill and craft. That’s about it.

Rehn West:

Hi everyone. I work for Nauticus. Like Rosie mentioned, we’re right along the waterfront in downtown Norfolk. We’re very unique, in my opinion, in terms of what a museum offers, and that our campus houses our main museum, so we focus on the maritime industry, big push on workforce developments and getting folks into jobs in the maritime industry, also the maritime environment, and then we celebrate the connection to our US Navy, being right there in the world’s largest Navy base. So, besides the museum, we are also home to the last and largest battleship built by the US Navy, which is the Battleship Wisconsin. And then we are also home to a sailing center. The sailing center primarily serves at risk youth. We have an amazing after school program. Sailing is just the hook, but we’re getting students in there on the water and teaching them leadership skills, but also the art and science of sailing. And last but not least, we weren’t doing enough. We are home to is only cruise terminal.

So, as we gear up for a year-round service next year with Carnival Cruise Line, that is something that our campus and our staff all works as one to tackle. So, in addition to year-round service and everything else we’ve got going on, we are, as Rosie mentioned, finishing up a $21.5 million capital campaign to completely redesign Nauticus. Nauticus turns 30 years old next month and with the campus and how much it’s grown our museum really didn’t have much put back into it in terms of our exhibit so we worked with Roto who you will see in the exhibit hall definitely recommend stepping by their booth to completely reimagine the exhibits and our lobby to be way more engaging and friendly for our visitors. So that’s about it for us.

Rosie Siemer:

Alright. And each of you have led your organization through major pricing changes in recent years.

Let’s talk a little bit about DEAI and how that came into your pricing strategy and how your organization really kind of thinks about accessibility and inclusion. And Spencer, maybe we can start with you.

Spencer Jansen:

Sure. First thing that comes to mind is we are a free museum. We do not charge for any of our special exhibitions or our permanent collection. Now the other things I mentioned about the classes in the theater that is a paid thing but it was a very conscious effort when I started in 2014 the last paid exhibition happened in 2013 and I was in membership at the time so I actually thought I was going to get fired because all these people that joined for the special exhibitions were not renewing and it just wasn’t looking great but really it’s it’s turned a corner we’ve had the highest membership level we’ve ever had partly because we just reopened the new building after a three-year stint of being closed.

But that really, it was really important for us. We went to the community. We didn’t have one main funder that helped build this building, but it was a community effort. So we decided we really need to make sure that the community is welcome and invited to the museum.

So even little things like changing the word visitor to guest, we felt was an intentional thing of, you know, when I look at those two words, A guest is someone you invite. You want a guest to stay, but a visitor is transient. If a visitor comes in, they leave. But when I have a friend at my home, it’s not a visitor, it’s a guest. So even changing language can create more accessibility for people when they read it.

It’s subtle things, but it’s also those bigger, broader things of, okay, we are a free museum, and then we have to look at the earned revenue to make up for that sponsorships and development as well.

Rosie Siemer:

Mary, how about for you?

Mary Bradley:

Yeah, we’ve had for quite some time, I would say well over 20 years, eight free days a year so that people can come at no admission ’cause we do charge admission.

The problem with free days, particularly as we are increasing our attendance and our membership, is that it can be, for those of you who are close to my generation, a soilent green kind of an opportunity where you’re just all, you know, going down the pathways and it’s so crowded you can’t enjoy yourself. And so, we’ve really focused a lot of effort on seeing how we can expand opportunities for people to visit the garden who might not otherwise have an opportunity or would prefer to perhaps avoid the crowds during our free days.

And so, we have a variety of options, we have the SNAP program, we call it Explorers Club, and Charge a Dollar per Person for Entry.

We also had at one point received a grant to start a shuttle program, and we have a person who is basically a community liaison and goes out to the wide variety of communities in the metro area to invite people to come and folks will have access to a shuttle that then comes to the garden so they can visit without any charge and get to explore and those are throughout the year there’s no limitation outside of avoiding the free days for them to come and see it and then in regard to membership you know it’s challenging, because what’s the point of membership, you’ve got to raise the money.

So, we try to incorporate what we can in terms of discounts, on a variety of things, military discounts, senior student discounts, both for our membership and for our admission pricing.

Rosie Siemer:

Rehn, how about for you?

Rehn West:

So, to visit Nautica and stay in the battleship, we do charge admission, and we have a brand-new membership program that we launched last year, thanks to Five Seeds Help, which I think we’re going to dive into a bit later. But in terms of providing access, I mean, like I mentioned, we really want to serve our military community being right there in Norfolk.

So, my team, my fundraising team, is constantly looking for different sponsors to offer free admission to active duty and veteran service members throughout the year. Most recently, we celebrated the Battleship’s 80th birthday, so we had a sponsor that provided free admission all month long for those folks, which we saw about 3,500 come through, so that was great in April. We also host toddler times, and we kicked those off in advance of us starting our renovations because we recently opened a children’s exhibit, so we hosted about five of those for free to start, and now members are able to participate in those for free.

We are a part of the Museums for All program, which I’m sure most of you are. And then thanks to our local healthcare system, we did have a sponsorship with them to also allow in Virginia residents with Medicaid card holders. And this winter, through that support, we’re also hosting a Medicaid weekend where they’re able to get in for free. So, we’re always looking for different avenues and in order to do that I do have to get a sponsorship for it but most folks in the community are really looking to support that.

What else do we do? It’s probably there’s a lot of other things but that’s just a little bit.

Rosie Siemer:

No that’s great and I think so some of these discount programs that you all are talking about is what economists would call price discrimination, where we’re being really targeted in who we are reaching with our accessibility programs. So, it’s not just a blanket discount or free admission. It’s more for military or for folks who truly have a financial need.

And so, I think that’s one way that we see museums be very successful in balancing the need for revenue and accessibility. Another thing to note as we’re talking about free admission, I think it’s just important to call attention to the fact that there have been a lot of studies that have found that attendance to museums is really price and elastic, which just means that if you raise the admission price, people who have a habit and behavior of attending museums still go, and if you lower the price of admissions, people who have a habit of going and purchasing tickets and visiting museums still go.

So, I think that price is just one barrier that we need to be aware of, but it’s– you know, there’s some research that also shows that it’s not the top barrier for why people don’t visit museums.

There are other barriers, like not feeling like it’s a welcoming place, not having anyone to go with. Time and transportation. I’m so glad Mary that you mentioned transportation because that’s a that’s a big barrier for a lot of folks To be able to come through our doors. So, you know price is not necessarily, in all cases a panacea just to remove the admission price, but I do think that you know, for example at your museum Spencer, you know free admission is embedded in your DNA and so I always like to say that if the strategy is not wrong if it’s right for your organization. And so free admission may not be right for every organization but if it is something that’s really a focus of your institutional priorities and it is demonstrating your commitment to the community then maybe that is the right strategy, and you need to have a way to also be financially healthy as well.

All right, so keeping with that theme of DEAI, Spencer, I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about your membership program, ’cause you also just recently launched a new membership structure.

Spencer Jansen:

Sure, we launched a new membership program with the opening of the new building. So, one of the things that we really looked at when we were devising the names and the price points and the benefits was, “How do we make this accessible to the most people possible?” One of the first things we did is we eliminated the idea of a family membership. Families come in all shapes and sizes.

So, we just said, you know, kids, grandkids, they’re included on any membership level that you have. It became too difficult to say, “Oh, well, you have a kid and you’re going to enroll them in a class for 20% off. They need to be at a certain membership, which might be $20 more than what they have in their household budget for a single mom of three. So why put up that financial barrier? The goal is to get them in the doors. And we have other ways to raise the revenue to really reach that bottom line through sponsorships and our major gift programs and grants.

So really saying to one family or five families, I’m sorry, your children aren’t here. We’re not allowing your children to come because you’re not at that membership level. We just said that’s ridiculous. The other thing we did is we wanted to do a pay what you wish membership.

That’s not something we have on our website. It’s something that you call, or you come in and you ask about it or the front desk will say, you know, in that conversation with a guest, they will say, oh, well, they can read if maybe they’re not willing to have the price point of what our membership is. It starts at $70 than 90 and up. But we said, just let ’em be a member. We have a lady that Is that a apartment complex next door to the museum that is retired teachers?

They’re income restricted. We gave memberships to everybody in that building because they actually let us use the parking lot for our staff parking, so we can allow more people to park in our parking lot. So, we said, “Just give everybody membership.” And then she comes every day to the museum. And when one year rolled up, which was literally two, three weeks ago, her membership was up. And She’s like, I can’t afford the $70. We said, that’s fine, do you have a dollar? She gave us a dollar and she’s a member. We don’t, there’s nothing in our system that denotes her any differently. We don’t ask for a WIC card. Presenting that WIC card or SNAP benefit is a barrier. People can be embarrassed to do that. All we care about is to belong to our museum and really grow our community of supporters. So that was one of our first things that we did with that.

Is that what you?

Rosie Siemer:

Yeah, that’s great. And I will mention that I’ve seen a lot of success, organizations have success with offering free community partnership membership.

So here again, I completely agree that that verification process can be a real barrier. And so, some organizations are finding success with working with community organizations that serve those populations and then providing free membership through those organizations.

So that’s another another opportunity Rehn would you like to talk a little bit about your new membership program? Because I think it ties into a lot of what Spencer was just saying. Yeah, absolutely.

Rehn West:

So, as you all know, I mentioned we’re coming up on the final phase of our big capital campaign to completely reimagine what it what it means to visit Nauticus. So, in advance of, we had to schedule this into two phases because we couldn’t afford to close the museum for a year, unfortunately. So, in advance of our first phase, which was going to open two new exhibits, which they opened last summer, we said, oh man, we really need to look at our membership program. Because our membership program, frankly, hadn’t been reinvested in and looked at Probably since like 94 the prices were very low Another another reason this was that we weren’t really reinvesting back into our membership program is until about 2018, 2019 Nauticus was solely a department of the city which makes sense we have a great partnership with them But that means you know revenue and expenses it all just went into the city and would reset the next year So, at times there wasn’t enough emphasis with just everything we had going on to push membership and drive revenue to then see the benefits back to our museum.

So that’s when our foundation was started and long story short, now we have a very healthy foundation and membership is one of those big drivers, but we knew that in advance of opening those two new exhibits, we needed to reimagine this program to one raise the prices a bit. Because our admission prices were also going to raise, which are set by the city. But we wanted to make sure that we were engaging our local community, which is something that Nauticus had not been putting a lot of emphasis on. They were really focusing on that, made a Memorial Day to the Labor Day tourist visitation because we do have the battleships.

So, we would see a good amount of folks in the summer, but what were we doing to get the local community to become a member? So, we did reach out to Five Seed because I was at a loss coming from a strictly fundraising background in marketing and then inheriting a membership program, which they all do coincide together. But we worked with them and said very similarly to Spencer, that what can we do with our new levels to make sure that everyone is feeling that it’s worth it for their family, especially with our community being so transient with the military and making sure that grandma, grandpa, if your neighbor wants to come or your dog, anyone can come on our new membership plans.

And we were able to speak with other attractions in our local area and talk with them about their pricing and realize our pricing was very low so long story short we launched that new program about three months in advance of opening our first phase of exhibits and we first let our members know they were the first ones to know as I’m sure you all know they’ve got to be the first ones to know if they’re going to be angry. And we let them know, and we automatically moved them over into the new program. There was no, hey, we need you to renew first. It’s, hey, we’re going to put you into the new program and give you a couple extra months so that you can experience what this new program is like.

And you can bring your friends and your friends’ kids. And

— Could you try it?

– Sorry. And so, we launched that with the members first. And then we launched it to the public and say, “Hey, we want everyone to come in and it is 50% off.” So, the rates were even lower than what the membership prices were. So, we went from about 650 household members, which it just kills me to say, but since then we’ve doubled. So, we’re sitting at about 1,800 household members right now, which I know can seem not like a huge number compared to other attractions.

But for us, I mean, that’s just shown in a lot of our new members are loving this program and we’re seeing it was this time last year that we had to launch this new program and most of them are renewing unless they have had to move out of the area because we do deal with that a lot with the military.

So I know it rambled a bit, but that’s kind of how we launched the new program and then we added new benefits on a big stickler for our members was that we are located right downtown kind of similarly to the national aquarium and I’m not sure what their parking is like, but our parking is two parking garages all the way across the street you got to slip all the kids over and we weren’t offering a parking discount and so we really pushed with the city of Norfolk to really give us some wiggle room and help us get a parking and discount for our certain level of members. So I think it’s at the Nauticus six. So we named them all Nauticus two, four, six, eight, 10. And that’s been great and then adding on new benefits.

Rosie Siemer:

Yeah, and I think first I would like to acknowledge that Nauticus and you and your team were really thoughtful about making that investment and thinking through that membership change in a well-in-advanced of grand opening which is really important because I’ve seen so many organizations have a real missed opportunity to raise prices and launch a new program until after grand opening and so you know if you can back up and put those new changes into place you will then benefit because it’ll be established when you start getting all of that momentum and earned media and tension and visibility, the spike in membership that comes with grand opening. So, I think that’s a really great thing that you did there. Also, I want to pick up on your 50% discount because this is something that if you talk with me and anyone else from 5Seed, our philosophy on discounting membership is not discounting on acquisition but in this case it was a really strategic discount because we were essentially doubling the price of membership and we knew that there was going to be a lot of sticker shock and potentially some resistance to that and it was a very limited I think two months.

Rehn West:

Yeah, just two months and then it was at the same time that our new exhibits were opening. So, they’re coming in and seeing these awesome new exhibits, and it’s 50% off? I mean, it’s a great deal.

Rosie Siemer:

And you’ve got a second phase of openings.

Rehn West:

Yes, yes.

Rosie Siemer:

Yeah, so now those members are there, and they’ll get to be part of that. And then when you grow, hopefully you’ll be in a much better financial position because that membership program is now appropriately priced ’cause you were definitely kind of underpriced for the market.

Yeah great, and then Mary you also made some changes to your membership program but you also had an admission price increase just this year. Would you tell us a little bit about how that’s going and have you had any pushback to the changes?

Mary Bradley:

No. Here’s the deal so yeah, our admission pricing termination has not been strategically aligned with our membership pricing increase.

Two different beasts. I love, however, that I have both admissions and membership under my purview. It makes life very flexible and easy. I strongly recommend, if anybody’s restructuring, talk to me, I’ll let you know. However, our pricing for admission has to go to a city council approval process. We have a contract with the city.

We ourselves are not city employees, but the land we’re on, the buildings we build, belong to the city, and so that process is handled by our CEO, CFO, going and charming city council. And so, the last time admission prices had been increased was in 2020, oddly, right four things. And then again, admission prices went up this year. And meanwhile on membership land, we had not increased membership pricing of, pardon me, overall since 2012 until 2023.

Note, don’t wait that long. Because A, you might have to make it a larger increase than you your folks might want. and be, that’s just way too long to wait, and you should probably do it every three years in minimal fashion, so it’s not a huge pain for people. Denver Botanic Gardens is one of five pretty large cultural facilities in the city. However, of those five, we have the lowest admission pricing and as it turns out, pretty much the lowest membership pricing. Does that contribute to our thousands of members?

I don’t think so actually, I think they just really like coming and seeing us. However, all to the point, we did look at all of our pricing structures and our membership levels. We, similarly, to Spencer’s Museum, really do not want to define who’s coming in terms of this is a family and a family consists of this and this and this and this. And instead, we have friends and family. You can bring whomever you want to. It lets in, you know, X number of people, et cetera, et cetera. And we have a dual and an individual plus and it goes up from there.

But we did increase the pricing for our dual– I’m sorry, our individual plus up through our friends and family category and the friends and family category had the largest increase in price but at the same time we offered this new category called dual and allowed people to float, you know, are they going to go down to dual or are they going to go up to the friends and family and the pricing that we established for dual, I’m making this way too complex, I’m sorry y ‘all, but essentially was the same pricing that had been at the friends and family before then we went up for friends and family.

And we rolled it out and we had no complaints. And that’s the thing, it’s scary if you have an increased pricing for a while, but it’s interesting also, don’t be scared of it. Go ahead and raise your rates if it’s time, if it makes sense. And quite frankly, your organization needs that increased revenue. So, we did not see, you know, oftentimes I anticipate we’ll see an attrition of member households and that can be offset by the increased pricing that you’re getting. And in this instance, and when we introduced it in 2023, we actually did not see attrition and our numbers just continue to grow and our retention continues to be very strong ’cause of course that’s the other piece of it.

So yeah.

Spencer Jansen:

I want to add a little bit on our project when we shut down for three years to renovate our building. So, we knew membership was just going to go away. We didn’t have a satellite museum.

We tried to offer classes and COVID happened. So all those things that we were trying to do we couldn’t do because of that. So, what we did is we really need to retain as much as we could, so we had a huge farewell party in our old building, and we actually brought in two dump trucks full of sand in a gallery and built a beach. We actually did a brainstorming session, so what do you wanna do in a museum that you never could? So, we had buckets of paint everywhere, people could paint on the walls, we had inflatable slides, and it was the coolest party ever. But one of the things we did is we built a speak easy in the back where we held our collection. And the only way you could access that that is you signed up for a new membership which we called 22 and you because we’re gonna open in 22 and what you had to do is give us your credit card or your banking information and sign up for auto renewal.

So, you want to go access the big fun party give us that information you get access and I’ll be honest the code was pretty easy to know it was the new address of our temporary building and I sent it out in a joking riddle to all the members, and they weren’t sharing it. The members that were there were sharing, oh, you gotta go to that party, but you gotta go sign up. So, it was just, and it really worked, and we were able to retain a good amount of members and keep them in the auto renewal program up until the opening, and we also said, we’ll lock in your rate for the first year of opening. So, they had one year of that lower rate, and that was kind of, that was the loudest we got about the rollout of the new membership pricing, but it was kind of just it really did work to retain people because they wanted access to a cooler party. People like food and drink that’s definitely a takeaway.

Rosie Siemer:

Food and drink are a definite and motivators. Also, I love that Spencer in terms of thinking about how you can incentivize the right kind of behavior. So, when we do offer or encourage our client organizations to offer membership discounts, we would encourage them to incentivize the thing that you want the most, which should be auto renewal or perhaps early renewal. So, there are places for discounting, I think, as long as it’s intentional, yeah. Excellent. And let’s see, so, so, I lost my thought here and oh Spencer while we’re with you could you also talk a little bit about some of the other earned revenue strategies at your organization here as a free museum?

Spencer Jansen:

Yes, so like I mentioned, we’re free so we got to keep the lights on somehow so we really one of our biggest earned revenues right now is our museum store. We just have an incredible manager at the museum store, and he has gone the extra mile to make things and create things in our store that are unique. So, we look at our collection, and that’s what is represented in a scarf or a puzzle or things like that.

It’s a lot more extra work. It’s a little bit more costly than going with public domain images, but the reality is we don’t have Van Gogh’s sunflowers in our collection. So why would we sell that?

They don’t see it on our walls, they can buy that off of Amazon, but what they can’t buy is a reproduction of Dos Mujeres by Diego Rivera. So, it does take the extra effort, but it makes us really unique.

And we also traveled around to all the different stores in our region. And if they had that product, we said no. There’s a lot of other local artists that were represented. We didn’t want to carry them because we need to be more unique and really stand out.

We are an international collection, so we actually sent our store manager to France to Missande Objet to go look at the trending products that are coming out globally to represent our collection as an international collection.

And I will say, I am seeing these products throughout our state now, and we were the first place to carry them because we were just ahead of the curve. And as a museum, we can do that. People come and expect to be a little bit more cutting edge and unique.

But that store is doing great. The other earned revenue his facility rental is a big chunk of revenue for us. When we redesigned the building, a lot of our spaces, we intentionally designed to be functional in many formats, whether it is a place for a wedding reception and you could also have a lecture or you could have a ballet performance and an artist talk in the same setting or it could also be rehearsal space for the theater.

So, making sure that only that the gallery paid for the galleries, but every other public space in the building had to have at least more than one functionality, because otherwise it’s just sitting there not earning revenue for you when it can.

And then the other aspects we would have the school that I mentioned, that’s a big chunk. That is the largest part of earned revenue for this fiscal year, and then we do the children’s programming through the theater and our collaboration with the Cinema Society.

So, all of those are our main sources of Earn revenue. Our restaurant brings in some, but that is an outside vendor, and we just get a portion of the revenue from that. And then did, forget, sponsorships and grants. Those are the big chunks, but that’s really not earned revenue.

Rosie Siemer:

Fair, fair. All right. So, one thing we haven’t talked about is how you all rolled out these changes. So, Rehn, we talked a little bit your discount, did you– because I think, Mary, you were kind of talking about this about the importance of, you know, communicating. So, it– the communication strategy for how you roll out changes, especially price increase, is really important. Rehn, do you have thoughts about how you went about this?

You said you migrated your members over. Were there other things that stood out from

Rehn West:

We did. So, when we first kicked this off, we sent out a direct mailer, something that we hadn’t really invested in in the past, like a very nice direct mailer for our members. It’s not asking them for anything, it was just telling them, “Hey, this is super exciting. Brand new program. I think we said it’s making a splash, and you don’t have to do anything, but you’re getting these added benefits.” And then obviously email, we did not have any complaints, I don’t think, but again, we were only looking about at 800 households that we could potentially upset.

But it wasn’t bad, I mean, we just rolled it out, you know, traditional mailings and lots of communication, and then we did host a preview for them, which was about a month after of our brand new children’s exhibit that we opened and that was real face-to-face communication with our members that did show up and prior to this we didn’t really have a lot of members that participated in a lot of events that we hosted and it just continued to grow from here. And then yeah, we rolled it out to the public and it’s still rolling along. Another thing that our membership department never did because we didn’t have the budget for which we now have it locked into our budget is just direct mail appeals in general.

So, we just sent out our first 25,000-person mailer to promote the membership program and we’re seeing a good return on that and that was advice again that we got from Five Seed she said if you’re not doing that you need to be doing that.

So, we’ll now do that twice a year, and yeah, anything else?

Rosie Siemer:

Yeah, no, that’s great. And Mary, what’s your philosophy on announcing price changes?

Mary Bradley:

Rosie and I don’t agree, so I’ll just tell you that right now.

Rosie Siemer:

We have a middle ground; we definitely have a middle ground.

Mary Bradley:

Yeah, we have a middle ground. Don’t tell them, just do it, basically. I was so scarred back in the day in my first membership experience, I’d come into a department and a decision had already been made that, and this is a different organization, but that there was gonna be this price increase, and so a letter went out from the CEO, and it was, if you will, almost apologetic in nature, and then it offered, for heaven’s sake, grandfathering, which essentially turned into a three-year process just to get beyond because every renewal you’d get some you know, Jojo would be calling and saying you guys This is so unfair And so that really left a deep scar in my psyche and then I thought just don’t tell them and see what happens and actually it works.

I mean it has worked. It has worked for me. So, I will say something to consider.

Rosie Siemer:

Yes, yes, and I think that the idea here- the big idea is not to apologize for raising prices And you know you want your members, they should be feeling like they’re part of your mission and what you’re doing and that membership is supporting and so I think that’s really an opportunity.

I would say that one of the things we found works really well is that rather than just increasing prices period making strategic changes to your membership program at the same time because then you get to talk about all of the exciting things the changes the the good part about the new program rather than just you know we’re raising prices.

We haven’t talked about any research that was done, maybe you could share a little bit about any research that you did prior to making these changes and kind of how that process went.

Spencer Jansen:

Okay, I’m gonna go back to that last point as well about the rollout.

One thing that the benefit of being a free museum is our members are typically more philanthropic in nature and we continue to continually study that and do A /B testing on our appeals, our emails, our letters to have either transactional based language or you know philanthropic language, philanthropic wins every time. We also, this is funny, we’ve done surveys for members, this is before we reopen. The number one benefit members appreciated though was free entrance to the museum. I don’t know where they got that. We put it in there just to see if they said yes and they did.

But to go to your actual question about the research, I mentioned that we were closed during COVID for this, so honestly the timing for us was beneficial because we had time to research and what we looked at was museums of our similar scope and the size of their collection, the square footage of their building, what our new building was going to become, where we were located in our city if we were a capital city if we were not what is our general makeup of our population? And then also what was locally being done?

So we looked at you know Nationally and locally to determine what our pricing was and the language that we use to make sure that those benefits I mean I had probably 600 pages of Memberships from around the country that we were looking through and also pulling different benefits. But the reality is We got all those benefits and then we went pretty much back to where we were with just a couple additional things and we learned how to be very good at being vaguely specific because we didn’t know really what we could offer with new benefits without being in this new museum. We didn’t know how it was going to operate. We didn’t know how people were going to react to it and how it was going to live and breathe with us as an organization.

So, there would be very vague but specific things that you would get as as a member. I couldn’t tell you what which you’re gonna get but we got an idea of it. Yeah, and so we’re in that phase now if you’re too okay we’ve been living with it now it’s time to kind of revamp the membership benefit see what people used and what they like and then go from there because the majority of people that really do are transactional members are the ones that are take to school that is the biggest discount I mean classes can be $300 plus so 20% off of that, you’re close to paying for your membership. But we do see most of those stay in the school and they don’t branch out into a whole lot of other things throughout the museum. So that’s one of our things is we gotta get them engaged beyond taking a class and becoming more of the member community.

Rosie Siemer:

Rehn, how about on your end, any research that?

Rehn West:

Yes, so when we were looking reimagine this program, we knew already just by going online to the Norfolk Zoo and whatnot and seeing that our prices were way lower. But that wasn’t enough for me to go to leadership and say, hey, we just should copy their prices. Like, I needed a very thorough comparator study and benchmark study that– luckily, I had Five Seed for. I know I We’re laying back to you guys, but I needed all of that to be able to go to our team and say, hey, we really do need to put some emphasis on membership and there is real value here and this is gonna be great for us, not only us, but also the community. So, we worked with Five Seed who spoke with our local attractions. I know we looked up and down the East Coast to see if anyone was similar into kind of the realm of what Nauticus does. I mean, again, I think we’re a little bit different because we do have the cruise terminal which does impact some of our what we can offer to members which were that’s our new little hurdle to cross this coming year. But it’s all good stuff and we went to the traditional studies so that I could then take it to our team and say you have to focus what you have to help me focus and also give us a larger membership budget so that we can focus on membership.

Rosie Siemer:

Mary how about you?

Mary Bradley:

You know Denver, the Denver metro area has a unique opportunity that a lot of other places don’t so I’m just going to apologize in advance for that but not really because it’s called the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District.

One penny of every $10 sales tax throughout a seven-county metro area goes to the facilities that support arts and sciences. So, we benefit tremendously from that.

What this does is it creates, rather than an air of competition with our fellow cultural organizations, an air of collaboration, nobody is worrying that if I give you this information, you’re gonna steal my members and my donors and I’m gonna hate you. Nothing like that, really. I mean, there might be in the development world, no offense. But the point is that we’re able to really work together and then essentially see what the other organizations are doing, what they’re charging, because we share so many of the same constituents. So that was, it helped us more than benchmarking gardens across the country or you know whatever because we were dealing with the reality of being in the metro area in Denver.

Rosie Siemer:

Excellent, yeah. That transparency is so important and as we are all colleagues and we can share that information, I think that really helps a lot. Well, I’d love to open it up to you all for questions. If anyone has any, please walk up to the microphone in the back there and we’ll start taking some

Audience member:

Hi, really fascinating everybody. Thank you Kasha from the Canadian Museum of Nature. We’re in the middle of a pricing study ourselves for all of our products so membership admission anything and I’m wondering have any come across of you come across the situation. We’re in your museum different business units are co-funded by revenues some of these pricing products And so we’re trying to figure out when we get to the do implementation and roll out how long is it going to take us maybe to try to change some of those business models to make them work internally anybody experience that and do you have any comments?

Spencer Jansen:

You know I would say we had a point in time which we knew we were opening so that kind of was a benefit but the other thing is we also had the first deadline and then that got pushed back and back and back.

So, what I want to say doesn’t really answer your question because we had a longer runway than we originally planned, but we were looking at a six-month rollout of we’re going to open on January 1, so let’s say our goal is to hit June 1, but it’s going to take us six months to even get to that point. That was kind of what we looked at, and we wound up having eight months of it, actually. Does that answer your question but it really took six months to devise it and implement it and then six months rolled out to the people until we open our doors again.

Audience member:

It gives me a ballpark. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Rosie Siemer:

Great. We’ve got a few others coming up for questions.

Audience member:

Hi. I’m curious about the social pass that’s at your museum Spencer.

Could you say a few words about that, I was stalking you on the website.

Spencer Jansen:

Yeah, yeah. So, the social pass when we were redoing our membership program, we eliminated our affinity groups because we kind of wanted to see what was happening with membership organically and then we would create those affinity groups later.

So, one of them that we deleted was our young professionals group. So, we thought, how can we attract them and get them in the doors? And We were seeing that in the past. They really just liked the parties.

And we had a lot of people that just came to the preview parties where they could get their free food and drinks, and that’s what they did. They didn’t take classes. They didn’t go to the store, shop, or the restaurant. They didn’t get those other transactional benefits.

They wanted the fun benefits. So, we priced it at $37, which is just over half of our entry-level membership. It’s also a nod to our first year of opening, was 1937. So, it was kind of a little tongue-in-cheek and internally for that and It’s all green. So, there’s no mailer. Everything is done digitally and that’s the way to do it.

We When we did our projections, we thought it was going to be about a thousand Memberships was gonna was gonna take that and we thought okay, then we can build our budget for our parties do about 40-50,000 Because we’re getting the revenue from them.

It didn’t hit like that at all It was probably 250 signed up but the benefit is we hit where we wanted to go and we got it through our member plus membership so we actually increased our revenue because of it.

We’re gonna continue it I could say maybe in a year or two We’re gonna really have to look at it and say are people using it and or they not we’re seeing a lot of people will start and they kind of dip their toe into membership It’s a good like dating membership level and then they actually will upgrade to that marriage of member,vmember plus, traveler, et cetera. So, it’s been a good entry point. So even though it was 250, I’d say probably 30% of them have already upgraded. So that’s, is that any other questions about that group?

And one other thing I’ll say is talking to other members. We, I remember talking to Retiree and I was telling her about our theories of this social pass and said, “Well, I want to do that. That’s me. That’s me as a member. I don’t do anything else. I just come and enjoy the community of and the fellowship with members.” So, we scrapped the age thing.

So originally it was like an 18 to 35, but after talking to a couple other people, we’re like, “No, no, no, no. Again, we’re putting up barriers. At the end of the day, what are we doing? We want to get people involved. We want to get membership. And if I’m putting a barrier up because of an age limit for five people, that’s enough for me to say let’s do something different.

Audience member:

Fantastic, thank you.

Audience member:

So, this is kind of right on point with that. As you have redeveloped your membership programs, like how have you decided what to rename them? Like, Rehn, your memberships are like something two, four, six, like do those numbers mean anything? You know, and Spencer, doing away with your family membership, like how have of you like helped people find identity within your membership programs?

Rehn West:

The naming was fun.

We went back and forth with different cute names and simple names, but we came out in the end with what is the most simple thing possible? So, we are Nauticus, and then we have the different levels pertaining to how many people can get in with your membership, so very simple. So Nauticus two, two people, four, six, eight. And then of course we did add if say a family was very strict or a family of three, we do not like anybody else. We don’t wanna bring anyone else. We don’t wanna be at a four, but we can’t be at a two. We do allow an add-on of one guest or one person per membership level. And that has worked for some families.

But yeah, the naming, the naming can be fun though, but we wanted to be real simple for this first round.

Spencer Jansen:

That’s the exact same thing, keep it simple. We looked at some of our names and they were too fru-fui and does it really, people don’t know what that means. So, our membership level is that social pass. Well, what does that really give you? The social activities, it’s a pass to the social events. Member, member plus, so two people. Traveler, which is where the NARM benefits and Rome benefits kick in, and then benefactor. And that benefactor is the most philanthropic and then we get into major gifts but the benefactor benefit that is nice is that it provides a membership for someone else so that that can go and offset the cost that we have for the pay what you wish membership is the benefactor membership. So we just tried to make sense of what it was. It does get a little confusing when we have it called member member plus because it’s a member member. But most people don’t think of it that way they’re just like I’m a member at the museum so why do they have to have some other big flourishing name to it they are what they are.

Audience member:

We’re in the process right now of examining our member benefits and rates and also looking at event and program fees as well kind of benchmarking against a lot of our friendly competition in the area and we have free admission to our galleries we don’t want to change that part of it It’s more just programs and events and things where I’m paying outsiders to come in.

But currently, because we don’t have a paid admission, one of the member benefits is they get to go free for most of our programs and events. And we’re considering instead doing a 50% discount when we do our hike rate. And I have a reason for this, and I want a reality check from this group, is that free admission for our members, they sign up and a lot of times I have a limited house, and then because they paid nothing, eh, there’s no skin in the game and they don’t show up, and suddenly I go from a sold out program to 20 empty seats. If I do 50% discount and we have a higher fee for the others, am I on the right track here I guess?

Spencer Jansen:

Uh, yes, I actually just had this conversation Monday, uh, with my boss. Because we know about 50 to 60% of people show up for anything that’s free. Um, people value things they pay for.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, we’re not going to start pricing some of our lectures and things like that yet or even have that free for members and not, but we do know that if we have a free event, we’re going to– that house number is about 25 to 30 percent more than what it can actually hold.

So that’s one thing is you’ve got to know that they’re not going to show up and make sure you can seat as many people. So, bring your cap, if you have 50 seats, sell 75. and be prepared in case everybody shows up, but they’re not, they’re not. Things get in the way and if it’s free, they’re not gonna show it because they’re like, something else that I paid for is gonna be there. But yes, I think you’re on the right track. I’m advocating to start charging for non-members for events and then members get free, but it still has the issue of they won’t show up. Because even in the previous iteration of our building, we’d announce something and tickets would be sold out in a matter of two days and they all went to members and we look around like, “Where are they?”

So, yeah, I don’t have a yes or no answer for you, but we’ve seen the same thing.

Rosie Siemer:

And I’ll just agree and say that what we’ve seen in our research working with organizations is that a very nominal fee for any type of program does generate more commitment and attendance, so I would encourage you to test it out.

Audience member:

Thank you so much. Great session. I have a question. We are trying to build a museum in Niagara Falls, so a lot of our people who walk through in would be tourists, so they don’t have a membership track. So are there any recommendations, obviously, kind of similar model, where they are just visiting there and they walk through, they never show up again, they show up to Niagara Falls.

Thank you.

Rosie Siemer:

Rehn, tourist?

Rehn West:

Tourist. Let me think. So, I don’t know, that’s a tough answer. I mean, we obviously, and I’m sure a lot of museums do this. I mean, if you buy a ticket that day or that week, you can then transfer your admission dollars into membership.

We see a lot of that with our tourists that want to take advantage of the ASTC benefit. So that means they can then visit a museum that’s a part of the association throughout the world.

And I’m not sure if AAM has anything like that.

Rosie Siemer:

Yeah, there are several reciprocal programs that I think make a real difference. So, people who are not visiting, that can be a great way to upsell them into membership at a specific level to get that reciprocal benefit because then when they, you know, wherever they travel they can use that membership benefit.

So, I agree that’s a great strategy.

Rehn West:

And training the front desk staff and incentivizing them to want to push the membership sale at the front desk versus the general admission ticket has been really great for us.

Training always, like every six months.

Rosie Siemer:

One other thought, we’re actually working with an organization right now that has a very high tourist population, and they’re considering creating a very special branded premium for membership.

So, if you join onsite that day, you know, for tourists, it’s a nice souvenir to take home, and it’s a way for them to stay connected with the organization and the experience that they had. So that might be another possible idea.

Audience member:

Thank you so much.

Audience member:

First, I just want to say thank you. This has been really insightful. I was definitely intrigued about the community partnerships.

Do you develop a program just for organizations like a senior living? Like you get these different benefits if you could expand more on that.

Rosie Siemer:

So, the community memberships that I was referring to are really just your standard memberships but being made available to community partners.

So, they go to the individuals or to the family and they’re just a standard membership but they’re free and so it’s a way for the museum to engage with the broader community.

Spencer Jansen:

I’ll add on what we’ve done. Excuse me, AMFA is we all we looked in our what we wanted to do program-wise and realize why reinvent the wheel. If we have a ballet in Little Rock, we don’t need to do another ballet. We have a great community partner that does it and actually started with the museum back decades ago. So, they come in and do their performances. Same with the Arkansas Cinema Society. They come and do screenings and programings with us.

We don’t share databases or collaborative memberships, but we’re just rolled out this week with ACS that all of their members actually can become a social past member if they want to, and come to those parties and just be with us, and then our members receive a discount for their screenings. So that’s what we’ve done with them, but not anything bigger than that right now.

Rosie Siemer:

Yes, and I think that’s it for us today, but we’ll stay up here if anyone else would like to come up and ask any further questions and thank you all very much. It was wonderful spending the time with you today.