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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