I realize I may be coming a bit out of left field as I am
a conservator, but I have worked with hundreds of smaller institutions, some
entirely volunteer with no professional staff. The fundamental question in
your question is what is the purpose of membership? I have seen numerous
institutions struggle with defining this, and probably even more that ignore it
completely. For some, membership is a revenue stream, although in my
opinion, a relatively ineffective one. In the more modern view, it is a
communication device. You as an institution can not get your message out
if you can not reach people. Who are the best people to reach? In
the commercial world, this is your past customers. It is much cheaper for
a store to market to their past customers than find new ones. So, I would
suggest (and this is only opinion, not fact) that for your anniversary year you
offer free membership. That would be for current members renewing, new
members, people walking in the door to visit, radio promotions, giveaways for
contests, standing at the door of malls handing out applications,
whatever. Your goal is to build up as much as possible your contact
list. Hopefully at the end, it will be at least 10 times bigger.
Then, when you announce the next fundraising dinner, it will be sold out in
days, or the next new event at the museum, it will be mobbed. "Customer
retention" is the difference between success and failure in the business
world. It is also relevant for museums (and historical societies are
museums for this discussion). Just remember to get email addresses when
people join. This is critically important. This allows you to build
your outreach potential. Do not accept a membership without an email
address. Train everyone taking applications of this need. All
museums are competing with many, many other avenues of entertainment (yes, you
are in the entertainment business) so the long-term trend WILL be less
visitors. But you can reverse this by aggressive marketing to your ideal
constituency. Best wishes!!
Marc
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2017 9:08 AM
Subject: [MUSEUM-L] Ideas needed
Hello, I received this email on our state museum list
serve. It is coming from a small county historical society here in
ND. We got a couple of I would be interested too type replies but haven't
seen any ideas. So I would like to post it to you all. Do you have
strategies that work for small underfunded institutions in sparsely populated
rural settings? I imagine there are others out there with similar issues
so please post to the list. Thanks in advance
Jenny
Yearous
Curator of Collections Management
State Historical Society of
North
Dakota
______________________________________________________________-
Hello
All!
I hope everyone had a good holiday season! Going through the end of
year financials, we noticed that our yearly memberships are down, and seem to
have been trending down for the last few years. Since it's the 25th anniversary
of our opening, I was thinking that this year might be a good year to do a
membership drive, and see if we can get those numbers back up. I was wondering
if any of you have done a membership drive recently (or not so recently) and
have a particular strategy, or something that worked well for you? Did it work
at all? Any ideas would be
appreciated!
Thanks!
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