What to do when your Millennial-age membership coordinator proposes scrapping your museum’s $8 admission fee — some 8 percent of total annual revenue?
“I want to see the research,” Deborah Klochko, executive director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, told colleague Angela Venuti in 2014.
Ms. Venuti invested six months building her case. And in March 2015, armed with a $35,000 grant to offset possible lost revenue, MOPA, as the museum is known, implemented a pay-what-you-wish admissions policy: It was up to visitors to decide what to contribute.
Initially, the policy applied just to Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. And it was meant as a six-month experiment.
One year later, pay-what-you-wish at MOPA has been extended twice and expanded. It is slated to run through May, and it now applies to Tuesdays through Sundays. (The museum is closed on Mondays.)
That’s because from March 18 to December 31, 2015, the number of visitors increased by 69 percent compared with the same time period a year prior. And admissions revenue climbed 20 percent.
Ms. Klochko and Ms. Venuti declined to provide raw attendance numbers, but MOPA’s most recently available Form 990 shows it took in nearly $200,000 in admissions revenue in its 2013-14 fiscal year. The museum had total revenue of $2.6 million that year.
Ms. Klochko and her colleagues will assess the new policy again this spring, she said.
“I’m confident it will be successful” and it will become the permanent model.
Turning Away
Ms. Venuti, 28, was motivated to research alternative admissions policies, in part, after seeing would-be visitors at the museum’s entrance look at the $8 ticket price, count their money, and turn away.
There was already a staffwide discussion under way about how to make the museum more inclusive. And Ms. Klochko was part of a broader conversation among local nonprofit executives about the shifting landscape for art and culture groups.
MOPA is located in San Diego’s Balboa Park, which is home to 17 museums and cultural institutions and is popular with locals and tourists alike. Still, she and her peers at other organizations were seeing changes in visitor and donor demographics, among other things, and worrying about the erosion of traditional membership programs. According to MOPA’s Form 990, revenue from membership dues in 2013-14 dipped about 25 percent compared to the year prior.
“We began to think about what that meant for us and how we look at the future,” Ms. Klochko said.
One of Balboa Park’s museums and institutions was already free. None had a pay-what-you-wish policy.
Ms. Venuti’s six months of legwork took her to places like the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Dallas Museum of Art, which have alternative membership programs.
She studied the pay-what-you-wish policy at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is perhaps the best known and for years included a "$25 suggested donation.”
Some of what she saw at other institutions was not relevant to MOPA. In Dallas, for example, the museum had paid for and installed special kiosks where visitors would check in and report basic information, including email addresses. Such hardware would be cost prohibitive for the San Diego museum.
But there was lots that was useful, including insights into what sorts of data other museums were gathering from visitors.
Support for an Experiment
By early 2015, the plan to implement a pay-what-you-wish policy at MOPA was in motion. Staff secured a $35,000 grant from the Parker Foundation, a longtime San Diego grant maker.
“The proposal described everything that we determined we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it based off our research and interviews,” Ms. Venuti, who has since been promoted to membership officer, said. “The foundation was wonderful because they understood that it was an experiment.”
Now visitors are greeted by iPad-toting staff members at the museum entrance. They are asked to fill out a five-question survey on the iPad, sharing information including an email address and the programming that interests them.
The suggested donation is $5. Visitors are told they can tour the museum and then decide what to contribute. This created a new role for the front-of-house staff — they are now, in fact, fundraisers, which required training and an adjustment in attitudes.
Happy Guests
Many guests are visibly delighted that they can decide what to give, according to Ms. Venuti. One fifth have opted to provide their email addresses.
By August, the policy proved so successful that museum officials decided to extend it through January. The second phase coincided with a change in exhibits, an important variable, they thought. Perhaps the uptick in guests was tied to the content of a popular summer show? But even with the change, attendance and front-door contributions continued to outpace those pre-implementation.
Last month, museum officials announced that they would extend the policy again, this time through May, and expand it from three days to six.
Before the launch, they worried about a myriad of details. Would people think that the museum and its exhibits were not valuable because there was no admissions price? Would donors be turned off? Would they be flooded with visitors and be unable to manage the crowds?
Those fears proved largely unfounded. Even the $35,000 grant was more of a security blanket, not a necessity.
More than anything, Ms. Klochko and Ms. Venuti are enthused that the museum is attracting a broader audience, their primary goal.
And the largest donation they have received from a visitor under the pay-what-you-wish policy? A cool $500.