Getting them through the doors

Today Will Cary tweeted about LACMA's Project Membership - an effort to sign up 10,000 new members within 10 weeks. Prizes for joining include a trip to Hawaii!*

In the tab next to Project Membership I had a NYT article open that I had clicked through to from ArtsJournal. Titled 'Giving Museumgoers What They Want', Carol Kino's article is about the revamp of the Oakland Museum's exhibition spaces.

According to the article, director Lori Fogarty saw the renovations as “a huge opportunity to rethink how we’re engaging the community.” Community engagement is obviously embedded in the museum - from the numerous advisory councils to welcoming people to invite museum staff to their events.**

What I found just as interesting were the details about the changes made to the galleries after extensive visitor research. For example, individual wall labels had been done away with when the museum opened 40 years ago, but asking visitors now revealed people wanted to read stuff - as long as it was interesting. So more labels have been added, "some with background information, others with more personal observations by conservators, scholars, local artists and writers, all of which are signed."

Another aspect of the redevelopment which I really admire is the decision to focus on providing faster-moving exhibitions and collection installations for the local community, rather than long-lived exhibitions for the tourist market:

Part of the plan Ms. McLean and the museum staff devised involved creating exhibits that could be modified easily. Unlike San Francisco and New York, “we’re not a tourist destination,” Ms. Fogarty said. “We need to have our local community come back, so our big challenge is to have people see that there’s something different every time.”

In the history galleries, that means presenting the objects and environments on inexpensive plywood stage sets that can be broken down quickly and redesigned. In the art collection galleries, it means ensuring that the work and the wall texts change frequently.

*Ironic use of exclamation mark. Museum membership should surely feel a bit more special than joining up for a discount card - unless that's basically what your membership offer consists of.

** This page has a nice touch - listing areas that the museum can provide expert speakers and commentators on - smart media move.

What people will pay for

When I scrolled through my overnight tweets this morning (yes, this is another Twitter-related post) I saw this, from Will Cary, the membership manager at Brooklyn Museum:


And just now I spotted this, re-tweeted from the Brooklyn Museum account:


The show they're talking about is 'Who Shot Rock and Roll', which closes today in the US (yesterday for us New Zealanders). It's been very popular, and it sounds like lines to get into the show for its final weekend are significant.

One of the benefits of a Brooklyn Museum membership is that you get to bypass the lines. A normal individual membership costs $55. Suggested admission at the Museum is $10 for adults. This weekend, more than six times the normal number of people bought a membership, presumably so they could bypass the lines. I can't see any special promotion of the queue-skipping powers of membership attached to the exhibition promotion on the Museum website, but it's strongly featured on their Twitter feed; lots of people are talking about the show on Twitter as well.

It's tempting to see this as a little parable about what will tip people over from thinking about buying a membership to actually doing it. They're not buying a discount on entry (a normal Friends benefit in New Zealand) - they'e buying something that gives them the advantage of easier access.

Contrast this with City Gallery Wellington's current Yayoi Kusama show. Friends of the Gallery get a 20% discount on the entry charge ($8 instead of $10) but no queue-skipping privileges. There don't appear to be any members-only days or extended hours for Friends - based on the above, I predict that this would have attracted a bunch of new sign-ups, especially if implemented after people had seen the crazy free Wednesday queues. It might be something for galleries hosting blockbusters to look into - after all, sometimes there's nothing nicer than flashing a card and getting waved through ....