Over a month ago, we were thrilled to host a webinar on virtual memberships, which explored ways to create virtual value for members through exclusive digital programming, virtual membership levels, and more. Over the past month, we’ve seen a surge of new and exciting initiatives launched in membership programs at museums of all kinds, which add value for members, as well as help solve new challenges around engagement, membership extensions, and more. To showcase some of these new initiatives, we’re excited to pilot a “Membership Lightning Talks” session.
Join Dan Sullivan (Head of Growth & Partnership @ Cuseum) with special guests Heather Wilson (Deputy Director @ Cameron Art Museum), Sarah Burgess (Senior Donor Relations Coordinator @ Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), Cat Clark (Corporate & Foundation Relations Manager @ Mattatuck Museum), Laura Hacker (Manager of Visitor and Membership Services @ Concord Museum), & Laura Conte (Membership and Patron Services Coordinator @ Taubman Museum of Art) for this special session. Each panelist will share a new initiative they’ve launched to create value for members, which will be followed by a discussion, feedback session, and Q&A among these membership professionals!
Read below for the full transcript:
Dan Sullivan:
Hello everyone, welcome. My name is Dan Sullivan. I'm the Head of Partnerships here at Cuseum. And first of all, I just want to say, thank you for being here today. All of our first timers, welcome and for all of our repeat visitors, thanks again for being here. A couple of quick housekeeping items for those watching, take a second, introduce yourself in the chat. please also, if you have questions, use the Q&A functionality down at the bottom of the Zoom screen. You can ask questions. You can use that little thumbs up button and it'll allow you to push the questions that are most relevant up to the top so that we can prioritize them for the panelists. So we're going to try to get to as many as we can. We've only got an hour, but we'll do as much as possible. Super glad you're all here and wishing all of you, another safe and healthy week.
We're super excited about this cause we are piloting a new kind of Membership Mondays today, they're Membership Lightning Talks. Over a month ago, we were thrilled to host a webinar on virtual memberships and that explored ways to create virtual value for members like exclusive digital programming, virtual member levels and, and things along those lines. Over the past month, we've seen a surge in new and exciting initiatives launched in membership programs at museums of all kinds. And that adds value to members as well as helps solve new challenges around engagement, member extensions and, and things along those lines. So we can save the session cause we wanted to showcase all of these really cool and incredible new initiatives, give the membership world a chance to hear new ideas that they might not otherwise be hearing about. And then, ultimately facilitate a discussion and a feedback session that may help guide some of these projects.
So we are thrilled that this has come to fruition. We're super excited to hear about five incredible membership initiatives today. We're going to start out with some brief introductions and then give each panelist a chance to share a little bit about what they've been working on. So for the latter, half of the webinar, we'll have a discussion, a Q&A, level of feedback session and we'll chat through all these projects.
So without further ado, like listen to this lineup. We have Heather Wilson, the Deputy Director at the Cameron Art Museum, Sarah Burgess, the Senior Donor Relations Coordinator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. We have Cat Clark, Corporate and Foundations Relations Manager at Mattatuck Museum, Laura Hacker, the Manager of Visitor and Membership Services at the Concord Museum and Laura Conte, Membership and Patron Services Coordinator at the Taubman Museum of Art.
Thank you to all of our panelists for being here again. For the 20 minutes or so, we're going to have them share some of these projects and innovations they've been working on. After that, we've got some great questions. We'd love to entertain your questions as well from the audience. So yeah, let's do this.
Without further ado,we're going to go around the room and each panelist will have a quick three minutes to offer an overview of yourself, your organization, and some interesting project that you've undertaken in the last few months. That's going to get us going in the right direction. So, Laura Hacker, why don't you kick us off?
Laura Hacker:
Okay. So I'm Laura Hacker and I am the Manager of Visitor and Membership Services at the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts. We're a small American history museum that focuses on the political literary and cultural life of Concord without particular emphasis on the revolutionary war period, cause we had that little battle up at Old North bridge with our friends from Lexington in 1775. And we also focus on the 19th century transcendentalist authors because Ralph Waldo Emerson lived here, Henry David Thoreau lived here and we have the largest collection of the raw artifacts in the world, including his desk and his bed in his chair and pretty much everything he owned.
So when we had to shut down on March 13th, we really didn't have any understanding of how long we'd be closed. Was it going to be two weeks? Was it going to be a month? But by the beginning of April, it was becoming very clear that it was months not weeks and that we needed to do something to ensure that our members knew that they were valued and supported by us with respect to their memberships, because at first in March, we were just like we'll just extend everyone's membership by three months. But we realized that, that probably, one shoe fits all doesn't really work.
So my past coworker, I have to give Genevieve full credit for this, she somehow managed to move on and get a great job at being the membership manager at Historic New England. She came up with this initiative. So lucky, Historic New England and hi, Genevieve, if you're out there. She quickly ascertained that the best way to learn about what our members needed, was to offer them a suite of options that could cater to what was both mentally and financially comfortable for them, but at the same time, wouldn't devalue our memberships or too greatly disrupt the current renewal cycles cause we didn't want to have everything like renewing and September now and nothing over the summer. So the options, we had a development meeting and we are a very small museum, so that was four people.
And in the development meeting, she brought it up and we're all like, "That sounds great." And kind of made some tweaks. Our Director of Advancement signed off in a way we could go. So we're lucky that we didn't have lots of layers of bureaucracy that we had to go through. So the options that we presented were you could join and renew at your full rate, providing us the greatest financial support and you would keep your renewal date. You could join and renew at the full rate and get a three month extension. You could join and renew and take $10 off your membership price. Or the fourth one is, you could join or renew and you can receive a three month family membership that would begin when we reopen and you could give it to somebody as a gift.
So when we were thinking about messaging, we kind of prefaced the initiative with the idea that while we're all in these difficult times together, we realized that we're not all facing the same challenges. And so with this in mind, we want everyone to be able to tailor their members to best meet their own particular circumstance. And since implementing these options in late April, we found the greatest number of people were choosing just to renew and keep their original date, which was great. So we even had people who were individual dual members, who you might at first glance have thought, "Oh no, it's a value member, huh." So that was really, you know, nice to see and learn. Second most popular choice was the three months extension, but people have taken the $10 off and the gift memberships. And most happily for us is that we have met our projections from May back and, and July projections are looking like we're going to meet that as well. So we're really happy with the way this has worked out.
Dan Sullivan:
That's fantastic. And I mean, I think that your success story of being in a strong position or having everything work out, it's just really inspirational, especially for a lot of organizations that are trying to figure out a new path or how to, you know, alter the path they've been on. And by the way, I just watched Hamilton. So I feel like 1776. Okay. So Cat Clark, can you tell us a little bit about what you're up to?
Cat Clark:
Sure. So, I'm Cat Clark. I work at the Mattatuck Museum here in Waterbury, Connecticut. And so we've been working on a lot of virtual programs during COVID and now the world is the public, we also plan on doing some more virtual programs and keeping it virtual. So I work with the by night committee, which is our young professional group for ages 20 and plus. And so we've been offering those events for member prices and regular prices. And so in April we hosted our usual murder mystery event, which we host every year and we have a brainstorming team, helps put that together and I help script it and I direct it with our actor volunteers. And so this year, because of COVID, we had to bring it virtual and we didn't cancel it. And we decided to move everything online, and we were lucky that it was very successful. We had 150 something participants.
So our murder mystery event was really successful. We had 150 people from like 20 States and we did it through, Facebook. So we did it through Facebook live and Facebook, and it went really well. And so that kind of snowballed into a series of other Map by Night virtual events. So we did a scavenger hunt, we in June, and then we also are doing this week, Tuesday and Thursday, we're doing a virtual escape from. So the virtual escape from, is going to be via Zoom. And we're really excited about that. And so we're also doing a trivia night in September and possibly another murder mystery in October. So the whole virtual Map by Night has really allowed us to kind of engage with more people and It's been really great for us.
We were kind of worried that it wouldn't have as many people, but it's been really great. And then I can put in the chat where you can find more information about those events and my email address in case you have any questions, if you're thinking of hosting your own murder mystery, and you're like, "How do I do it?" You can ask me in this or you can email me whatever works.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome, man. For those that are frequent attendees of our webinars, Cat has a bit of a celebrity around here. So we're excited to have her. So Sarah Burgess, can you talk a little bit about what you're up to?
Sarah Burgess:
Hi everyone. So I am Sarah Burgess and I'm the senior donor relations coordinator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Richmond, Virginia. So the VMFA is a privately endowed state supported art museum and educational institutions serving the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia and of course beyond. We have an encyclopedic permanent collection and supplement that with rotating special exhibitions, much like most art museums do.
So the new initiative I'm going to talk about briefly today is a series of virtual member programs that we're calling Cocktails with a Curator. So we started this out as initially a weekly webinars series featuring a different curator each week, speaking informally about their work at the museum. I'm sure like everyone else here, we had to cancel a number of planned member programs in the spring. The museum did close on March 13th, like most places did. And so we had a number of programs scheduled between March and the end of June that had to be either canceled or, or theoretically postponed as a result. And we knew that we needed a way to engage with members during the museum's closure.
And, and like Laura said, none of us really knew of course how long that closure would be, but we knew we needed to do something. We have a large membership base, a little bit over 36,000 numbers, but the majority of our member programming is focused on the middle levels of membership, which we call the VMFS circle. And that is a base of about more, closer to 3,600 members. And so we conceived this idea as a replacement for canceled spring programs and also giving our fundraisers a tool. They use our typical member programs to reach out to donors and we needed to give them a resource that they could leverage for that purpose during the closure. And of course this also gives our curators an opportunity to speak about some of the things that they are continuing to work on during the museum's closure.
So like I said, we started those as a weekly series. We didn't begin until May. We had some internal things to work through technology issues, just making, just getting everyone on board, making sure curators were comfortable delivering programs from their homes, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm happy to talk more about that during the, during the Q&A but we initially started with three programs. We weren't sure how they would be received necessarily. So we committed to three in May and fortunately I think it was a parent after the first one that was a very popular series. We had great feedback from the members that t- tuned in and the attendance has continued to grow every week. So we're really excited about that. We ended up offering the programs weekly for eight weeks until the museum reopened July 4th weekend. And we're planning to continue to offer these on a monthly basis for the foreseeable future. I mean, at least through the end of our programming season, which will wrap up in June of 2021 and then, who knows?
So each program is just a little bit about the program itself. They're very informal, intentionally relaxed. We have each curator talk about something that they're working on, whether that's an exhibition that recently opened that most people haven't had the chance to see because of the closure or an upcoming project. And then we are pairing each program, each topic with a sort of a fun cocktail idea. So we give members a suggested cocktail and a recipe to make a drink from home. And we send an email weekly with the next program and the next cocktail. And it's been, it's been fun to see how each curator kind of interprets the format differently. We had one curator make a gin and tonic on camera, like cooking show style. But we, I mean, across the board have heard from people that they really appreciate the relaxed tone and that it, it's kind of, of having an intimate setting. We curators are letting members into their homes. They're talking personally about projects and we've also had some cameos from children and pets and that kind of thing.
So it's definitely been a departure from a formal talk in the lecture hall with everyone. We're all collectively managing this new normal together and something that was a little bit, perhaps a little bit less polished seemed to really be the right fit and that really was compelling for people that were tuning in. So it's been interesting and encouraging to receive that feedback. And yeah, as I mentioned, we're planning to continue the monthly now that the museum has reopened, but we know a lot of people aren't going to be comfortable coming back for programs. And we're also not ready to resume large scale events yet at the museum. So that's the overview
Dan Sullivan:
Right on. Yeah. Thank you for, for sharing. And two questions that came in from the audience, while you were talking, first of all, are those live events and second of all, do you charge for them?
Sarah Burgess:
They are live events in, we're using Zoom webinar. We are recording them and we're providing the link to Zoom club recording, following each lecture to people that register whether they attended or not. We've not currently put the programs online, more broadly available, but we are considering that. So we are offering these programs to a level of membership that received programming from us typically, a lecture series throughout the year. And so that is to sort of compensate for those lost programs and just an added perk.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you for, for elaborating. And before we move on to Laura Conte, Cat Clark, can you just clarify that same question? Are you charging for your programs and how are you facilitating them?
Cat Clark:
Sure. So we actually do charge. We charge $15 for members and $20 for non-members.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. And for your online programs, are you doing them on Zoom? How are you hosting that?
Cat Clark:
Us, we've been doing a mixture of Zoom, Facebook live for things that we charge, we've been doing Zoom, things that are free, we've been doing Facebook live and then for the murder mystery, we did Facebook, but we only gave the link out to people who paid for it.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Thank you. Out of curiosity, any platform performs better from an engagement perspective than another?
Cat Clark:
I like Zoom. Facebook was nice because of everything we wanted to put in it. Because we got a secret Facebook group and then had all the participants join that secret Facebook group. So it allowed for sharing images and sharing videos and allowing people to comment with Facebook live. And so they both have their different functions that work best.
Dan Sullivan:
Great. Yeah. Thank you for elaborating Cat, and thank you, Sarah. Laura Conte, can you tell us a little bit about what you're up to?
Laura Conte:
I am Laura Conte and I'm the Membership and Patron Services coordinator at Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, and Southwest Virginia. And we're an American art museum with the frail and center of American art including works like Sargent and Atkins. And one of the biggest questions we faced, when we switched to virtual was, how do we facilitate engagement for targeted membership groups? So really looking at the general membership, as well as our leadership groups.
And then in turn, fulfill those membership benefits, utilizing and repurposing some of our programs that were already developed. So for general members, we created a members only page on our website where we cut our didactics, exhibition audio spotlights, things like that. And then for our upper level members, we really wanted something that would allow for a more intimate setting, like what we were having physically at the museum before we closed, but also a way to keep it cost effective in terms of both staff time and then actual hard costs.
So in May, we launched a live new virtual tour series as a new benefit for our upper level members and donors. And we're calling it Curated Crib as an homage to the 90s MTV TV show. And we facilitate these tours twice a month on a set schedule via Zoom. They're hosted by an artist or a collector where we show some of our key pieces from their personal collection or they narrate in their studio space about their creative process. We've actually had a couple of cases where the artists are also collectors. They showed us both, which is really cool. And the tours are all structured roughly the same, moderated by our museum staff.
We sort of start with introductions, the networking period and we do a toast at the top of the tour and sort of like Sarah was saying, we invite our hosts to share an advance, their signature drink and so that we share that with our attendees, if they want to make that signature cocktail, which changes every time, that's really fun. And then we have questions moderated via chat during the tour. And then we open it up for a Q&A session at the end and we also record it and provide it to those who registered for it if they don't attend. And so far, we've had great success with them. We've actually more than doubled our attendance in four sessions, which has been really cool.
Dan Sullivan:
Wow. That is, that's amazing growth. That's great. Okay. And thank you. And last but not least, Heather Wilson.
Heather Wilson:
Hi, I'm Heather Wilson. I work at the Cameron Art Museum. We're in Southeastern North Carolina in Wilmington, North Carolina on the coast. And we too have a permanent collection, a growing collection of modernism works and we also have rotating exhibitions. The big question we wanted to answer as soon as we shut down and I should say, we're still not open, we wanted to figure out how to keep engagement going with our members. That was the biggest question. So our development director started calling members and, and checking in to see how they were. We launched a virtual series of programs that we're calling Connect with Cam. We do have some programs for children called, Art Explorers. We have lesson plans for parents and teachers, but we also have been doing something called, Escape into the Vault, where our director goes down into the vault and you get a chance to see what you would never get to see otherwise.
And those have been wildly successful. I think she's had like 2000 views for Escape into the Vault, which is great. We did start a Zoom program for members, a conversations program, much like what other art museums are doing. We realized that we have this rare opportunity to connect with curators in other parts of the country that we might not otherwise have the opportunity to connect with. So we had an upcoming exhibition by an artist named Elizabeth Bradford, who's a North Carolina artist, the curator who curated that show was in Charlotte. We put together a virtual exhibition through Exhibbit, they're a company out of New Zealand. They do a great virtual exhibition program, if you're interested in that software where you actually kind of feel like you're walking through a gallery. And we also zoomed with Carla Hansel, who's the curator for that show.
So it's a sneak peek of what will open, when we get to open at that exhibition. And then the next month we Zoomed with Dakin Hart, who is the senior curator at The Noguchi Museum in New York, because we currently have an exhibition of Noguchi's work. Next month, or actually the end of this month, we're going to Zoom with Audrey Flack. She's in New York, she's 88 years old. I can't think of when we would be able to bring it to the camera. And, but we have a work of hers in the upcoming exhibition called She Persists.
So it's been a great opportunity for us to have our members engage with artists and curators that they wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to. Each of those conversations we've had about 40 participants, which we feel is great. We are working on some leadership level experiences as well. We have a compass leadership group that usually has kind of exclusive programming and we're going to do all of that virtual in the fall. So we're coming up with ideas for that. Like what Laura was talking about, looking maybe at some people's collections and things like that. So that's what we have going on in Wilmington. I hope that's helpful.
Dan Sullivan:
Super helpful. Yeah. Thank you so much. So, okay. First of all, a couple of people have asked how many members do each of your organizations have? Can we just go right down the line real quick and just let us know how many members you have. Heather, can you start?
Heather Wilson:
I was afraid you were going to ask me that question. Let's say we have 2000.
Dan Sullivan:
Okay. Awesome. Well, Laura.
Laura Hacker:
So we have just a little under 900 members. We're, we're pretty small institution.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Laura Conte.
Laura Conte:
We have about 1800 members.
Dan Sullivan:
And Sarah Burgess.
Sarah Burgess:
We have 36,000 roughly.
Dan Sullivan:
Okay. And Cat Clark.
Cat Clark:
I think we have about 600.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Okay. So there, that's great. And, I think another question that a lot of folks are wondering is, how are these views or how would your engagement trend as a summer is progressing along? So for example, Martina asks, has there been a drop in your viewership since the summer began? We feel like engagement has really dropped as things started to reopen, even though we're still not sure we'll be able to reopen potentially for months. I'm not going to put anybody on the spot here. Does anybody want to jump in here? Are you seeing anything as far as engagement goes trending?
Heather Wilson:
Yeah. Well, I've seen a drop in our children's programming for sure. And it may be that they're getting outside or I don't know, but I think we've seen a drop in children's programming. We're also doing a virtual, we're doing live streams of local musicians on Thursday nights. I've seen a drop in that on Thursday nights as well. But Escape into the Vault, it still does really well, as does the conversation.
Dan Sullivan:
Absolutely. Anybody else want to share?
Sarah Burgess:
For us, we're pretty much holding steady. We have about the same number of people for the... So I mentioned that we have 36,000 members. The majority of these programs are being offered to a smaller subset, which is about 3,600. So we have like between roughly give or take 250 people tuning in for each one and that's been consistent. We do have a program coming up where that's, we've invited the entire membership base and we have a larger percentage, maybe 1200 people signed up to attend that program so far.
Dan Sullivan:
And Laura, Cat, Laura, any of you want to throw anything in there? Any changes in your viewership or engagement?
Cat Clark:
Yeah. I think we've seen like a depth in our, like these Map by Night programs, cause murder mystery was so big for us, like having 150 people from all over the United States was amazing. And then it started kind of going down from there. So far, I think we have like 30 people registered for our escape room, but our viewership tends to sign up very last minute. So I'm sure people will be signing up tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock in the morning or Wednesday night. So we see a lot of people registering last minute. So we're hoping to see more than that.
Dan Sullivan:
Definitely. Laura Hacker, I think you were going to say something.
Laura Hacker:
Well, we haven't been doing, like weekly programs that people would be signing up for. We do have our history at home, which is an email that goes out and it's full of wonderful videos and ideas, you know, for things for kids to try at home, fun facts. Like we just did it with Henry David Thoreau's birthday just this weekend. So we did a whole one on him and we had two curatorial videos about his spyglass and his walking stick. And then we had some instructions on how kids could make a walking stick.
But these are little snippets that we've been putting out. We are beginning to bring our Lyceum programs online and we had the first one and it was wildly successful. We had about 500 people sign up for it and we did a pay what you want sort of thing. If you could sign up for free or you could, sign up and give a donation. And we probably made more than if we'd had an in person Lyceum. So we're going to be continuing with those as the summer moved along and into the fall. And they'll all be virtual.
Dan Sullivan:
That's incredible. Yeah. The idea of having 25 or 50% of your overall member base engaging on a single event is pretty amazing. So here's a question from Margaret and she says, and we're going to stay with you, Laura. You spoke to this kind of variation that I wanted to ask about. Can you comment on the back-end of implementing your four membership options? How large a membership do you have? What software are you using? How cumbersome was getting everyone to make their selections and implementing it on your end. Can you talk a little bit?
Laura Hacker:
So, it was pretty easy. So you're aware, as I said, we're very small. Our membership base is around 900. So what happened was Genevieve came up with this great idea that she'd been thinking about. And we had the four of us in our development meeting and she brought it up, we discussed it and our director of advancement said, "That's great, go ahead and do it." And since it was really just Genevieve, sort of working on it with having us take a look at things and make sure with edits, she had full control over the timing, the messaging, what was going on the website. So it was done in about, I would, I'm going to say like less than two weeks. She just changed all the messaging on the renewal notices and the renewal email. And it made a huge difference. Like when we sent out those May renewals, we really started seeing things come in and it continued into June. It's very easy. We just had little check boxes on the renewal notice and you could pick one, two, three, or four. So you would just check off the option that you wanted.
Dan Sullivan:
Great. So this is a question from Diana, suppose most of your supporters or members are seniors who don't have access or who don't care to go on Zoom, virtual activities don't necessarily work for them, does anybody have any interesting ways that they've been engaging their older, members and older audiences? Heather.
Heather Wilson:
Dan, I will say that the phone calls that our development director made at the very beginning back in March really helped because he talked. I mean, we have 2000 members, right? He called members and donors. It's a lot of people, it's a lot of phone calls, but he talked to people and helped them to figure that out. And I'd say that, maybe I think the most successful aspect of Connect with Cam, is the relationships that we're delving into. I think I have members that just email me now that, you know, never would have emailed me before. And a lot of them are older fits who are asking these questions, "Heather, how do I get into Zoom? What do I do? And, and so I'm sure there's a large part of our population that we're not reaching, but I feel good about the people that we are. We also do Facebook live meditation on Mondays with the work of art from our collection, and that's become pretty popular with some of our older folks too.
Dan Sullivan:
Very cool. Anybody else want to throw anything in there? Engaging older audiences members? No. Okay. So another question, this is from Christine and this one is actually for Sarah. We've got two in a row for Sarah. First of all, are you limiting the number of members that can participate in your virtual cocktail programs? And secondly, some, Maria Rose Reynolds says we've got a similar program, but a noisy few really didn't appreciate the boozy content. So how are you handling those types of complaints?
Sarah Burgess:
Sure. Well, we haven't received any complaints about the boozy content, but in the weekly email that we send out, there is a little sentence at the bottom of everyone, below the cocktail suggestion and recipe that says something to the effect of, if you prefer not to drink alcohol, we hope you will join us with a glass of ice tea or your drink of choice or something like that to be inclusive. But we haven't really had complaints about the content.
And sorry, I'm bad with retention. So we initially, we don't really, we have a webinar license that allows up to a thousand participants, which we're fortunate enough to have the budget to do. For the general member lecture, I mentioned that we have over 1200 people signed up. We did upgrade to accommodate up to 3000 members. The cocktails with the curator series, we're promoting to our friends, circle members and above. We're not limiting the registration. Anyone can sign up, here's about the program. Of course, we send a followup message asking anyone that attended as a guest to consider membership. And I've had people reach out to me, expressing interest in tuning in, and we've actually, by allowing that, had some new people join us for the first time or upgrade. So that's been nice to see.
Dan Sullivan:
Great. By the way, for folks that are asking in the Q&A, we're going to get to as many questions as we can. If you have a specific question for just one panelist, you can always reach out after the fact and we can get you in touch. So one of the questions that I'm wondering is like, let's say you're working on something innovative, what's the first step to getting that project launched? Like what, how do you go, how do you go about getting that buy-in? How do you move it forward to the finish line?
I mean, we've got a really great spread of institutional size in this panel here. So obviously you all are facing these in different ways, tight budgets, administrative hurdles, things like that. Can you talk a little bit about how you go about getting that internal buy-in and how you move a project forward to the finish line? I'm going to go right down the line. Laura Hacker, can you start us off?
Laura Hacker:
Okay. So like the first thing we would do is identify a need. So in this case, it was how we were going to support our members and ensure that their memberships were valuable to them in these unprecedented times, so that they would continue to renew or they might continue to join up with us. And then we needed to determine what needs to happen to meet that end. And so actually we were inspired by one of the Cuseum webinars where it was one of the early on ones, where it was like, "Well, you know, how do you figure these things out?" And it was just, "Ask people advice." Ask advice because no one, you're in a vacuum, no one is going to know what to do by themselves. And that's what got Genevieve thinking, what, let's set this up, so we're sort of asking our members what they need. They will be the ones that we're taking advice from because they're the ones this really impacts the most. So we went straight there and we gave them the options to voice their needs.
And then lastly, it was to decide who's going to be involved. I mean, here, as I said before, we really sort of have an advantage because we're a small group and it was very easy to just say, "Yes, go do this." So, I mean, I feel like that's, that's an upside of a small institution though. We can't obviously do the curator talk kind of things because we have one curator and he'd have to like to disguise himself for each one.
Dan Sullivan:
I just imagine one of those silly mustaches and glasses. So Cat Clark, can you talk a little bit about on your side, you've got a new idea or a new project, how do we move that forward? How do we get the buy in internally? And then how do we get that forward to the finish line?
Cat Clark:
Sure. So we have a Mattatuck committee that we meet with on a bimonthly or quarterly basis who helps us decide, what events we want to do. We have like four staple events that we do every year. And then with COVID, we've been doing the extra events, like the Escape from a Scavenger Hunt trivia nights, et cetera. So those events, so we meet with them and we talk about what kind of events they've heard about. And then we take those ideas, our, our development team, which is me and a couple other people. We talk about like all the logistics, we flush out all the pricing descriptions, et cetera. And then we take those to the higher ups in power and say, "Hey, we have this great idea. Can we run with it?" And then promote it on Facebook and it goes from there.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Sarah, obviously a much larger organization and quasi government. So how do you get these things pushed?
Sarah Burgess:
Yeah. Well, I mean, fortunately I think, we started out in the advancement division and we all agreed on the need to do something. And we were brainstorming and we had a few ideas circulating and our division director took those to the senior leadership team to, we do have multiple layers of those kinds of approvals to work through, which can take some time and then getting the curators on board with doing this content on a new platform, people, new technology for everyone, myself included. So there are those kinds of hurdles, which really just take time. We're lucky that there wasn't so much reluctance as hesitation to get started, I guess you could say.
One of our main hurdles was choosing a platform. We, like you mentioned, we're a state supported institution and our technology is run through the Commonwealth of Virginia. And Zoom is actually not supported by the state as a platform. So we had to negotiate an exception to that thinking that Zoom was the best way to offer these events and give the members the best experience as a viewer. So that also took some time to negotiate, but it's really just time and persistence. We're able to get everyone on board and get it done.
Dan Sullivan:
Right. And Laura Conte, how about on your side from idea inception to trying to get buy in from your team to getting this thing to the finish line? What does it look like on your side?
Laura Conte:
So we are also a small to midsize museum. So luckily we're four through a small team and, and the curated cribs specifically are run almost entirely by the development department. But starting from the beginning, it's kind of a brainstorming session within the department. And then it went to our full staff and then we started doing trial runs with things and internal implementation working out all the kinks and our senior leadership was on board. And we had some cross departmental stuff as our communication, as far as coming up with ideas for who might be able to host and what that sort of, that would look like. But other than that, there was no resistance. we also knew that there was a need to fill that. So, that's it.
Dan Sullivan:
Sure. And that's what's been special about this time as for the most part, a lot of organizations and really at every level, there's been a bit more of an inclination to, I don't know if I want to call it, take a risk, but maybe jump into something that you wouldn't normally move to the finish line so quickly, you might sleep on it a few more nights. But the reality is things are evolving extremely quickly and the need has been there to get these ideas pushed forward and do as much as we can at every stage to keep our members engaged and our constituents engaged. Heather Wilson, what about on your side?
Heather Wilson:
I mean, it's just like what Laura said, we're a small to midsize museum. Our staff is not huge. And I think the scaffolding was already in place for a lot of these events. Conversations came out of something that we had already been doing monthly with members, our member coffee. So we thought, well, how are we going to continue member coffee? Well, we'll have to do it virtually. I think a lot of the first step for us has been listening to what our members need. Also, listening to what our educators need, need, in New Hanover County Schools, what they need and, and thinking about how we can meet those needs as best that we can.
One of the things that has come out of kind of recent what's going on in the world, we've developed an art and social justice series that starts this week. We're actually going to have one this Wednesday and we're going to be engaging with artists from our collection. I've been talking to them about what role does art have in social justice? We've already gotten about 150 people interested in this one on Wednesday. So we're excited about that. But yeah, I mean, I think development events, we do have a development committee, for our campus leadership group. We do have a compass committee, so we've been doing a lot of Zoom meetings with committees and running things through, but we're all excited to engage with our members this way.
Dan Sullivan:
That's great. Thank you for sharing. I'm going to jump into the Q&A for a second here. And this question is from Christine Jennings, have any of you found a particular time of day or day of the week that is more successful where you get the best attendance from, for your virtual events? I'm not going to put anybody on the spot, but anyone that wants to jump in. Or maybe you do them at the same time every week?
Sarah Burgess:
I can say that we started offering these programs at 4:30 and based on feedback we received, we moved them to 5:00. But they've consistently been on Wednesday afternoons, which we find to be successful for in-person programming. So we just kind of stuck with that for virtual.
Dan Sullivan:
Great. Thank you.
Laura Conte:
We actually launched our curated cribs specifically before we sent out a member survey, but we did do a member survey to our entire membership to get a sense of when they like it. But consistently we found the evening sort of that 5:00 to 7:00 timeframe has been very successful for us, as well as we have some, some early morning, like 9:00 AM things that we've been doing as well. Those are both equally successful.
Dan Sullivan:
Great. Anybody else want to throw anything in there? Success, on success. All right. So the next question is if you're sharing links to only the members, is from Maria Rose Reynolds, if you're sharing links to only the members, we're assuming that they won't share the link to people who are not members, has anybody had any issues with attendance fraud or your member on the events?
Cat Clark:
We have. Not really attendance fraud, but we were doing some, members only artists talks with like artists doing studio tours. And we were sending the links to the artists just so they would have the link for themselves. And then they were sending that link down to a hundred of their friends and saying, "Hey, I'm doing this talk, come join us." And we were like, "Oh no, this is only for members." So we had that issue.
Dan Sullivan:
Hate to see that. Anybody else have anything?
Sarah Burgess:
I mean, we know that members have forwarded the invitation email and links to their friends. Some people reach out and ask if that's okay and without the space constraints we have for physical programs, we’ve definitely been generous in our response to that and have been encouraging people to come try it out. And then following back up to say, "If you enjoyed this, consider joining at this level." But I would not say it's a substantial issue, substantive issue.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. All right. So this next question is from Jillian Usher, more of a general question, any tips for acquiring new members virtually? Are any of you doing, and maybe this is a better, another question for marketing, any of you be doing like a paid promotion of these events on Facebook or Google or anything like that or have you found any interesting ways that you've drawn new members, send a card maybe by accident, you might've gotten some new members as your artists sent this around to their Rolodex? But does anybody have thoughts there?
Laura Hacker:
So we haven't done a lot that's just for members. What we've done when we've opened things up, like for the Lyceum lecture, we did a virtual garden tour, which was a massive success, we had about a thousand people participate. Once again, it was by donation. So you could sign up for free or you could pay. And since a large part of our member base are mission members, they did pay close to what the normal $35 ticket price would be. We also got a lot of people who were coming in, who weren't members, who were paying anywhere from 10 to $50. We made choices again of what you might want to donate.
And we did get some new members through that. People who were just so impressed by the virtual garden tour, we filmed five different gardens in Concord, the Head of the Concord Garden Club, narrated everything. She was an amazing woman full of knowledge. And so we sent out over a long weekend, you got two gardens a day, if you signed up to get the emails. And we've, we figured people were going to share that. But we did very well off of it and did start to bring in a few new members from it. And we weren't seeing a lot of new members signing up outside of this time. We'd seen like the renewals were what was keeping us going.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. Awesome. Anybody else want to throw anything in there?
Laura Conte:
We've actually included some of that stuff in our renewal letters. We include information about if you upgrade, you can receive this new benefit. So we've used that and that's been pretty successful.
Dan Sullivan:
Great. One of the big questions that I know I'm wondering is how has your member base responded to all these new initiatives and how are you measuring the success or evaluating the success of these projects? So I'm going to run down the line here, Heather Wilson, can you start us off?
Heather Wilson:
That's always the question, how do you evaluate success? And then how do you kind of pivot right to fix what might not be working as well? I'd say we're evaluating success by noticing attendance and comments and the emails that we receive back. We've sent a survey out to members in our A blast, but we noticed click rates and, and, and try to keep tabs on what the engagement is. That's kind of how we're doing it right now.
Dan Sullivan:
Thank you. Laura Conte.
Laura Conte:
So we've had a lot of really excited members come back with some of these new benefits. They're very excited. We've seen a growth in the numbers. We've seen repeat attendees. We have a core group now, which has been, really great. And then we often send out a post-event survey. And so we're continually to evaluate, continuing to evaluate those, those responses to help decide well, how we move forward.
Dan Sullivan:
So post-event surveys are a great way obviously, to get a standardized way of receiving feedback, right, as opposed to kind of anecdotal feedback where it's like, "I had fun." and whatnot. Sarah Burgess, how about on your side?
Sarah Burgess:
Yeah, very similar response. And we are doing a post-event survey pops up and after the sessions in, in Zoom. We're also emailing it out and getting, I mean, overwhelmingly positive response from the survey. And so aside from that sort of qualitative feedback, we're just keeping an eye on attendance, which has really remained steady. So that's basically what we're doing now.
This, the only other thing I could add is, I would absolutely attribute this to a variety of efforts besides just this programming series, but among the members that receive these cocktails with the curator programs. We are actually doing better than we were among those membership levels at, at this time last year. So that's, I think, let's see, I have my colleague send me so I could say this. Yeah. 13% increase over last year's closing. So among those like mid-level memberships specifically, but we're pleased about that. And again, that is due to a variety of efforts, not just this program, but a good thing.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Thank you for sharing. That's great. Cat Clark, how about on your side? How are your members receiving these new initiatives and B, how are you measuring or weighing the success of them?
Cat Clark:
Yeah. So it's been tough. We haven't gotten a lot of members to come to our Map by Night. Our Map by Night events are, like I said, for younger individuals and our members are majorly senior household or senior level members. So we don't have a lot of young members. So we've had a tough time getting members to come to these events, but we have seen an increase in people in general, learning about the museum and coming to the events. Like I said, we had 150 people at our murder mystery virtual event in April and probably 140 of them were people from places that we've never like from all over the country, and I've never heard of the museum before.
So that was 140 new donor records that we got to put in email addresses that we got to capture, which was great. So we did, we were able to capture all that through, Facebook ads and promoting out to the whole United States, and for the escape room we promoted, we did half the United States, we did the Eastern and Central time zone. So we kind of halved it. But we do the same as everyone else. We do program evaluations after all our events, the one that pops up after Zoom and we send them out via Google forms. And then how many attendees we get and just general feedback, people emailing and saying, "Oh, I had a great time. When's your next one?"
Dan Sullivan:
I, that's the best outcome. Right? It's, "When we do this again." Laura Hacker. How about on your side?
Laura Hacker:
So, pretty much the same thing for the event. We do surveys. So we sent out a membership survey for history at home to see what our members might want to have in these like weekly history at home emails. And they were, we got a 100% feedback saying they loved them. And then we got, we had choices, what do you can write in something, what you'd like to hear about, or you can just pick a topic. Do you want to hear more about the 19th century? Do you want to hear more about colonial times? Do you want cooking? Things like that.
So we were able to compile that and share it with the education team that's doing these history at home emails. And then for our membership, like our, our different initiatives, where we've just added out all those different things to tracking in our membership statistics. So moving forward from May, June, July, that's another thing that we're tracking so that we can see how many people are choosing which category and who they are.
For our garden tour where it just exploded like around a thousand people, half of them from the other side of the country, we also have like millions of guides to add which we're working on.
Dan Sullivan:
If you think about that, the ongoing challenge for a lot of organizations, trying to figure out ways that they can bridge beyond the four walls of their organization, it sounds like you kind of walked into that by accident.
Laura Hacker:
Yeah.
Dan Sullivan:
And then all of a sudden we've got tons of people from all over the country and, I'm not sure necessarily, always what to do with them. So I've got, I think my last big question is going to be, what are some big takeaways that you all have to share kind of with everyone watching in the audience, what would you recommend? What have you learned? What's a big takeaway that you would want to impart on them? I realized I should choose someone to go first. Laura Hacker, why don't you start us off?
Laura Hacker:
All right. So I think the biggest takeaway is it never hurts to be generous and thoughtful and really work with the strengths that your institution has because depending on what the content of your institution is, what the size of your institution is, just follow your strengths and be thoughtful and kind.
Dan Sullivan:
Great advice. Cat Clark.
Cat Clark:
Embrace technology, use Zoom, use Facebook, use Instagram live, use all of them, embrace it. And if you, if you're not the person in your institution, that's good with technology, then find someone who is and embrace it because it's really helped a lot with all of this.
Dan Sullivan:
Absolutely. Sarah Burgess.
Sarah Burgess:
Yeah. I mean, I guess my main takeaway would be to be willing to take a little bit of a risk and try something new. We ended up being really happy with this format, but none of us necessarily knew that it would be a hit or how long this would last. So like I've said before, we started with three programs confirmed, ended up wanting to continue it indefinitely. So, you never know. And I didn't know. So of course, it makes sense. And like Cat just said, or was it Laura, sorry, leveraging whatever your institution's strengths are for, for VMFA, that's among many things, I should say. Our permanent collection and having the curators speak about their, their projects serves more than just member engagement. It's part of a longer term strategy around reputation building and all of those things. So just take the first steps and, and try it out. You never know.
Dan Sullivan:
Thank you for sharing. Laura Conte.
Laura Conte:
I'm going to echo what all the other panelists have said and add that, I think it's important to think out of the box, but also think about how to utilize and repurpose programs that you have already built to get where you want to be, with as far as member engagement.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. And last but not least, Heather Wilson take us home.
Heather Wilson:
I think it's all about relationships. I think it all comes back to relationships. One of the things I think that people have really enjoyed about our virtual programming is that they've gotten to engage with different staff members in a way that they hadn't before. And so I think, Escape into the Vault, things like that, make them feel, "Oh, this is my museum. They know me and I have a relationship with them." And so that's what we've been striving to do with our membership and donor programming.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Thank you for sharing. All of our panelists, amazing feedback, but wait, don't go yet, don't go yet. Don't leave. So a couple of quick things. So first of all, recording from today's webinar is going to be available on the Cuseum website, a little bit later today, most likely. Secondly, we'll have a link to our shared Google Doc with coronavirus resources, and I'm going to be kind of around town this week. So I'm going to be speaking at, not one or two, but three more webinars this week. So if you want to tune in, feel free, they are going to be Tuesday the 14th at 3:00 Eastern time. I think you're going to get a link in a second in the chat, they are. Webinar on Managing Risk and Liability, I'm going to be co-hosting that webinar with Zoo Advisors, all about risks, all about liability and the things you need to be thinking about.
Secondly, Thursday, the 16th, 11:30 AM, Eastern time, it's called, Reopening Plans in Action. This is part three, on a guest moderating that one with the Association of Midwest Museums. And then lastly, Thursday, the 16th at 2:00 Eastern time, our webinar is called, How to Save Time and Money with Blackbaud Altru Plus Digital Memberships. I'm going to be joining the folks from Blackbaud and some folks from the Anne Springs Close Greenway. We're going to talk about digital membership cards in conjunction with Blackbaud altruist. So, if you're a fan of any one of those three things feel free to join us. And lastly, I'm hosting a webinar on Saturday, but none of you likely will get a link. It's my birthday. It's a family Zoom webinar. So anyway, but so everyone thank you so much for being here and to our panelists, amazing insights, great feedback. I appreciate you all. And as always stay safe, stay healthy, and hopefully we'll see you soon. Thanks everybody.
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