Dear Jerry,

Interesting question. How one goes about answering the question really 
depends on the information you seek to retrieve and make use of.

I've served as CEO of an institution with precisely the situation you 
mention - food service that is available to those who have purchased 
museum admission and to those who have not. Further, I've worked for 
several other institutions that have this same issue.

Conversion rates, or sometimes "Capture Rates" here in the U.S. are, as 
you clearly pointed out a bit like alchemy. Here's a few of the things 
I've learned.

I found that a good measure of performance for both the museum store, 
the food service, and other concessions was a comparison of the per 
capita sales to admissions. This not only gives you a good set of 
statistics to assess performance but, when recorded with other factors 
such as holidays, special events, weather conditions, etc., can provide 
you with a reasonable predictive tool. To make this data more meaningful 
we still needed to record the capture rates.

Like you, I was curious about the conversion or capture rate of guests 
to the museum v. guests to the store or restaurant. We tried a number of 
tools as you suggested, however they were not accurate to the level I 
had hoped for and/or they were cumbersome to administer. The best 
solution actually came in the form of a solution to another challenge, 
how to distinguish guests of different types from each other and how to 
weed out those who had come onto the museum grounds without a paid 
admission.

We had printed out tickets all along, but a ticket goes into a pocket, 
purse, or waste bin and we wanted to be able to identify guests by 
sight, not by confrontation. This was compounded by a desire to know 
which guests were members, which were part of a group, and which were 
general admission. Members and groups would get privileges otherwise not 
extended to general admission guests for example (including discounts, 
etc.). So the solution was to give each guest a color coded (with a 
printed mark) sticker to wear on their clothing. The advantages were 
many, such as identifying a member at a distance and being able to 
strike up a quick conversation about a member benefit. One of the 
advantages was being able to distinguish a paid admission guest from a 
recurring member or a non-paid guest. We set up our system so we could 
distinguish Members, NEW Members (that day), General Admission (Adult 
and Child), Group Admission (Adult and Child), School Group (Chaperon 
and Student), and Guest of the Museum (this might be business, donor 
prospect, whatever).

Then we modified our POS system to allow for a single key stroke 
designation to identify different types of guests. With that done we 
were able to specifically count the different populations, compare them 
against admission sales, and associate specific transactions to specific 
types of guests. It was very easy to have staff simply tap the correct 
key at the beginning of the transaction as they were also asking for the 
guests postal code (a vital statistic for guest studies). One nice 
benefit was having our guests out in the community still wearing their 
stickers and thereby letting everyone know they were there because of us.

By the way, we also were able to track conversion or capture rate in the 
form of conversion from a museum store or restaurant visit and then an 
admission or membership. We adopted a policy of encouraging guests to 
present their store or restaurant receipt when purchasing admission or 
membership to receive a discount.

I've seen this type of system in various forms used at other 
institutions and they all seem to work well on a variety of fronts. The 
device may differ such as the metal tabs used at the Metropolitan Museum 
of Art to hand stamps, to stickers, to wrist bands. I think the medium 
needs to be selected so that it reflects your environments and the 
culture of your institution.

Cheers,

Larry Fisher
Museum Planner, Designer, Imagineer
6 Belvedere Drive
Bristol, Rhode Island
02809
p:(401) 253-5335
e: [log in to unmask]



On 1/13/2011 6:51 PM, jerry.symonds wrote:
>
> Dear All,
>
> Can you help me work out this statistic?
>
> Let's assume that the ABC museum charges for Admissions and has a 
> restaurant/cafeteria which is open both to those who have bought 
> tickets and ALSO to anyone who wants to come in and eat i.e. who have 
> NOT bought a ticket.
>
> And on a sample day:
>
> There are 100 visitors who have paid to visit the museum.
>
> Of which 70 have eaten at the restaurant
>
> And there are an additional 40 people who have eaten at the 
> restaurant, who have NOT bought tickets to visit the museum.
>
> Now, depending on how you calculate conversion rates, if you might 
> either arrive at 70/100 = 70% OR 70 + 40/100 = 110% !
>
> Both measures are of course useful to know!
>
> The problem we have at my sites is that we do not know which people 
> who eat at the restaurant have bought tickets to visit the museum or 
> not. So, we calculate the "larger" metric of 110%, in this example.
>
> My question to those of you who work in museums who charge for entry 
> AND run restaurants which are open to both those who have bought 
> tickets and those who do not, is how do you work out these statistics?
>
> The obvious answer is to ask those buying meals in the restaurant to 
> indicate if they have bought a ticket to the museum that day: but is 
> this practical? Another answer might be to give a discount in the 
> restaurant to those who have bought a ticket to the museum, so 
> encouraging ticket holders to identify themselves when buying a meal 
> in the restaurant.
>
> Thanks in anticipation!
>
> Jerry Symonds -- Senior Internal Auditor
>
> Historic Royal Palaces
>
> England
>
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