Dear Katie and Listers,

Here are some suggestions for boosting attendance at small museums.

First,  see if you can schedule meetings at the museum.   Clubs like Rotary,
the Business-After-Hours of the Chamber of Commerce, Optimist, Kiawanis, and
the likeusually  will be happy to hold a meeting at the museum as a special
event.   They invite their membership.  You add them to your numbers.    Teachers
groups, retired folk, church groups,  ladies study groups are all possible
candidates.    If you have 2 or 3 of these meetings per month,   it could add an
extra 100 people per month to you attendance figures.   Plus, the added
benefit is that once these folks have been the museum, they will usually come back
and bring their families.     If you don't have an auditorium or social hall
for these meetings,  arrange chairs in a back gallery and hold these events
after-hours or as breakfast meetings early in the day.

Second,  work your local real estate agents.   When I ran a small historical
society, I got several board members who were real estate agents involved in
sponsoring a Monday morning breakfast for the agents in their company.   The
real estate agents in my town would meet for a "caravan" every Monday morning
where they would tour, as a group, new properties that were listed.    We
started the caravans at the museum with a free breakfast, donated by another board
member who owned a fast-food franchise.   We distributed museum brochures to
the agents.  We asked the agents to include these brochures in the newcomer
packets that they give to clients.  We gave the real estate agents a brief
orientation and tour of the museum.    For a period of a few months,  we had a
different real estate company each Monday morning doing a caravan at the museum.
This gave us a tremendous outreach with newcomers.

The advantages of these two ideas are that they cost little to implement and
that they are scheduled events.   Nothing is worse than having overworked
staff sit around waiting to host visitors and no one comes --e.g., extended hours
of operation.   It is better for the small museum staff to have targeted
audiences, scheduled groups that have to meet anyway.   Meeting at the museum is
added value, both for the outside groups and for the museum itself.

Cordially,
Pamela Sezgin
Museum Consultant

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