Museum traffic & member acquisition

We hear voices.  The voices of donors, visitors, members, and staff. The voices that make cultural experiences possible. They tell us things they might not tell you. Some of this might validate your existing assumptions. Maybe some will even be new.

1. Members, donors, and team members have a variety of reasons for supporting you. Don’t assume the reasons are totally altruistic. Some do it for the love of the cause. Others for recognition, or to serve a different purpose. It pays to know as much as possible about each of these segments.

2. In the search for greater diversity among your visitors, don’t overlook the role of temporary exhibits. Not only do they allow you to energize your offerings, carefully chosen and heavily supported they are a great tool for attracting a diverse audience.

3. It’s crucial to ensure marketing and membership – if they are a separate function in your organization – collaborate and coordinate, especially in promoting a temporary exhibit. Too often great marketing drives museum traffic but the opportunity to convert to membership is lost.

Listen before you decide

4. Research, carefully crafted and objectively implemented, is important and should be ongoing. Visitor intercept research, post-visit outreach, focus groups, quantitative surveys can provide both episodic and tracking insights. Don’t try to operate as proxy for your visitors. Listen to them. You can maintain a formal research function on your own, with modest expense. Of course, if budget allows, seek outside help.

Turn visits into membership

5. Maintain a lapsed member strategy. Often members leave for unavoidable reasons [relocation, change in family or financial circumstances], but sometimes for reasons you can address. Don’t just accept defection – understand it.

6. If your museum is open to hosting and promotes outside events, be sure to provide membership materials. Every exposure is an opportunity to convert a visitor to a member.

7. The top 3 sources of information about museums and cultural activities in our research are:
   • Word of mouth
   • Newspaper or online local entertainment source (ie: Time Out, social media, etc.)
   • Internet/search

Don’t overlook the opportunity to test paid media. You can really target and broaden your outreach, especially for temporary exhibits.

8. Most organizations have community outreach activities and events. They can be highly successful. Sometimes you need to take the museum to the community rather than vice versa. Pop up exhibits in high traffic areas can be fun [depending on the nature of your museum].

9. Our research shows most visitors visit multiple times in a year. Generally, over 50% of your visitors are repeat visitors, so promoting membership among daily paying customers is important. Make sure your front desk staff is prepared to promote the rewards of membership in a welcoming, non-intrusive way.

10. Finally, member satisfaction is important to measure and track. Donors, too. Capturing an OSAT [overall satisfaction] measure on a 5, 7, or 10-point scale gives you an ongoing metric for the overall relationship and an early warning if trouble is brewing.