The best place to begin a marketing plan is by studying local demographics.
There are no "average" museum goers; educational levels, ages, tourist
versus residents versus school audiences all vary wildly from place to
place.
 
As someone who has been through two museum start-ups, and is currently
involved with a third in the master planning phase, I recommend the
following.
 
1) Get the census (1990) records for NYC and the greater NYC area and
analyze them. The easiest place is from the Univ. of michigan gopher server
[una.hh.lib.umich.edu] with a gopher. You can download these quickly to
disk, then print and analyze them at leisure. It beats looking them up in a
gov't documents section or other library. I recently did this and
downloaded 1990 and 1980-1990 trend reports in an hour that would have
taken me hours at a photocopy machine to copy.
 
2) Visit your local convention and visitors association and ask for copies
of their visitor studies. These will contain reams of info about ages,
preferencesm, economic impact of their spending - thousands of dollars
worth of survey ino that you could not afford to pay for. Consultant
companies will do the same and charge you big bucks for doing so.
 
3) If you can afford it, commission your own study along specific
guidelines from a survey firm. You may be able to get a t.v. station,
Jewish foundation or other source to pay for this. Be SURE and get the firm
to do an accurate sampling, not just a randomly selected number of
interviews.
 
4) Ask your colleagues at other Jewish museums, which are growing in
numbers, for their marketing and attendance info. We colleagues will share
almost anything.
 
5) Get on an internet gopher and search for SURVEYS. A number of surveys
are on searchable on-line databases (like Harris polls) and you can search
for "Museum" and see what opinion surveys have been done in the last few
years.
 
Your marketing program will have to be tailored to your unique environment.
Be wary of paying big bucks to marketing firms who do not know what a
museum does or how. Please e-mail if I can be of further service.
 
Byron A. Johnson, Executive Director
Tampa Bay History Center
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