4 Years of Positive Transitions Pt 2/4

Part 2 of 4: Practice Makes Perfect!

December, 2016 I sat down with my museum’s President for my annual review. It was fine. That’s not what I’m writing about. But, something that came from that meeting that is pertinent was the goal he wrote for me to accomplish for the year: Improve academic quality and revenue for all programs. A year and 6 months prior to this directive, when I started my position, my assignment was to: “Bring us into the 21st Century.” (Okay, that wasn’t the official directive); however, he did say this upon hiring me: “I look forward to you bringing our programming into the 21st Century.” I remember it well because I felt that it was a huge request considering the current lecture heavy structure of the institution’s programming and my general lack of experience in bringing institutions into the 21st Century. With deep roots in the arts education community and particularly arts integration education in informal settings such as museums and performing arts organizations, stand alone, one-off lecture programs presented to a calm, seated audience by highly educated, well-degreed academic professionals via a lecture format was not what I identified as effective education nor 21st Century programming. During that first year and 6 months before the before-mentioned annual review, I had put my neck out on a few “risky” programs that encouraged a more experienced based method relying more on having fun at the museum and less on bringing in high level academic experts to speak to our exhibit themes.

I failed in that first year and a half in three main ways:

1. Under valuing the success of the past lecture-heavy template as something that was important to our current audience and effective and necessary in its own right

2. Under valuing the necessary place of academic rigor as a true basis on which to curate programming at a museum (This was a big “duh!” for me)

3. An under evaluation of financial support for new efforts that led to overspending with underwhelming profit margins

From those initial missteps I was able to:

1. Identify the boundaries and new opportunities within the museums current structure of operations in which I could work in to create actual and effective change

2. Find a way, (through mostly trial and error,) to reach a broader audience while still serving the needs of our base-audience/membership by providing elements valued across demographics

3. Learn to work within budget restraints while building long term sponsorship opportunities and leveraging current financial resources

The turning point happened when I took his directive to heart and moved forward to indeed, improve academic quality and revenue for all programs. I also shifted my focus from change to integration, from fighting against overly scholarly programs to offering scholarly experiences. This shift (along with having an amazingly collaborative and like-minded leadership counterpart in the collections department) enabled a bridge to be built between my department, the curatorial/collections department and the President. It allowed for productive conversation and collaborative efforts while demonstrating respect and defining a mutual, mission driven goal towards providing programming that both my progressive self and my less progressive-than-me leadership could feel confident in marketing to our audience as a branded museum experience.

We had two seemingly extreme audiences we wanted to reach and serve. One audience’s ticket purchasing tendencies was highly influenced by the academic resume of our speakers and the scholarly content of their presentations. This audience tended to include our most loyal program attendees, donors, high level members, general members. The other was highly influenced by the quality of the overall experience they expected and received at the museum, the ability to interact and be a part of the art making and also the scholarly quality and influence of the speaker/presenter. What we found when we stopped holding these two audiences apart as two extremes and instead, looked at them as a single audience sharing a common “psychographic” rather than demographic, it became evident that we could create programming that made it so that each defined audience was there for the same thing: a Scholarly experience.

I’d like to say that we began looking at the past years programs, reviewing survey results, and identifying lists of audience overlap where we could clearly see an elegant means of integration, but we didn’t. Instead we failed miserably at a Thursday after hours program which I loved, “Thirsty Thursday.” We realized that Thursdays, though a popular night out in more densely populated, urban areas, wasn’t a good night for us and we couldn’t quite get the right partnership going with our on-site restaurant to make the evenings financially sustainable for either of us, among a sea of other issues. So as not to kill the idea of after-hours programming, which I firmly believed was going to be our bridge to a more broad and diverse audience, I insisted that we take advantage of the opportunity of an upcoming Frida Kahlo exhibit and retry a playful, alliterative title with “Frida Fiesta Fridays” and, instead of focusing on happy hour appetizers, we would highlight the restaurant chef’s creativity and make it a full 3 course themed meal with live music, art making and an actress (with a deep knowledge of Frida Khalo's life and work) playing Frida to host the evening and lead tours through the galleries. Because of popularity (thanks a lot to the celebrity of Frida Khalo) we were compelled to recreate the program 4 separate times, once a month through the run of the exhibition, each building in popularity and quality of execution. I'm super proud of how this turned out and how the whole staff jumped in with support and ideas.

I'm not really sure if this was what the directive I received at my review was referring to, but with a new collaborative approach across departments, a deeper understanding of our immediate audience needs and greater understanding of financial boundaries, we continue to create these cross-demographic experiences where guests leave with both a joyful spirit and at least a little more knowledge than before. We still ebb and flow in our successes, but growth requires practice and we all know that practice makes perfect!