By Elissa K. Miller, M.Ed.
Even though outsiders may think it’s an oxymoron for a nonprofit museum to earn revenue, all nonprofits must bring in money to support their missions. It’s a wise practice for museum education departments to increase revenue and reduce overhead so that more funds are available to support and expand mission-delivering programs.
There are a number of different ways that children’s museums can increase revenue and minimize administration costs while expanding education programs.
These budget-friendly methods leverage museum software and streamline museum operations to create both the funding and staff time to develop new programs that extend your reach and your mission.
Ready to boost your museum’s education revenue? Let’s get started.
If your education department is still relying on paper registration forms and spreadsheets to manage events, camps, classes, field trips, and birthday parties, you could be wasting valuable time and money better spent on enhancing the quality of your program.
The first step toward increasing revenue and reducing paperwork is implementing online registrations and reservations.
Moving registrations online doesn’t mean you’ll lose the personal touch. By eliminating the need to juggle calendars, update spreadsheets, record payments, and send invoices and confirmations, well-designed online registration actually frees your team to spend more time helping people who need assistance.
An online registration system is also more eco-friendly, eliminating printing and postage costs. And, online registration can help you reach a broader audience through online ads, articles and social media posts.
The best registration software will be flexible enough to meet your museum’s unique requirements. To read more information about evaluating museum software solutions, check out Doubleknot’s museum software guide.
Asking for a donation during a purchase is a proven-successful method of raising additional funds. People are already opening their wallets to make a payment, so asking them to add a few more dollars to their existing bill to support your programs is an easier proposition than responding to a standard donation request. Consider updating your registration and payment pages to:
Be sure to coordinate any donation requests with your fundraising and development team to ensure that your plans complement overall fundraising activities instead of competing or interfering with them.
Along with day camps and birthday parties, family events are often the bread-and-butter for children’s museums, offering a range of fun and educational opportunities to learn about different cultures within the communities you serve.
Consider holding these kinds of eye-opening programs to celebrate the countries and cultures in your service area.
You can expand the cultural awareness of your youngest visitors by planning museum events to guide them through multicultural exhibits, create culturally-inspired crafts, or read insightful children’s stories.
Products that support your mission (and incidentally build your brand) are always appropriate and acceptable add-on opportunities.
For example, if your museum software supports mobile sales, you can also sell camp- and event-related products at check-in and check-out for these programs. Families may be more inclined to make an on-site impulse purchase when they see how happy and engaged their children are in your programs.
Birthday parties offer income opportunities that also provide a valuable service for busy families. Your team can reduce parents’ stress and increase revenue by offering add-on options such as:
Check to see whether your registration and reservation system allows you to display upsell options after a purchase is completed. An ideal system will allow you to promote products and events in categories related to the items in the purchase.
Plus, the revenue you make from these upsell opportunities can help provide more money for your mission and educational programming.
With the increased emphasis on STEAM education, children’s museums are uniquely positioned to develop programs that are aligned with important educational standards. If your museum’s group visit programs are primarily unstructured visits under the supervision of teachers and chaperones, you may have an opportunity to offer more tailored programs. These could include teacher- or staff-led lessons and activities that rely on materials and facilities at the museum.
Additionally, scouting badge programs can provide an opportunity to generate more revenue and encourage more learning. Your badge “menu” could include self-guided activities to complete badge requirements; add-on kits and materials for use by leaders; and structured badge achievement activities led by staff.
Most kids who grow up visiting a beloved children’s museum will eventually decide they’re too old to go anymore. While older children will age out of floor activities designed for younger learners, there are many ways that older children and teens can continue enjoying your museum in age-appropriate ways.
For middle school students and younger high school students, after-school and weekend STEAM programs provide important enrichment opportunities and allow youth to continue their relationship with the museum they loved as younger children.
School districts and regional education centers can help identify scope and sequence for themes and topics that complement, strengthen and extend subjects covered in school. Your museum can then use these themes and topics to design programs at your museum.
In most locations, it’s difficult for parents to find summer programs for tweens and young teens who’ve “aged out” of traditional day camps but are too young to be camp leaders or hold other summer jobs. Parents are likely especially happy to enroll older children in summer programs that balance the right amount of supervision and structure with independence and autonomy so important at that age.
Children’s museums are in a unique position to provide formal and informal information about positive youth development to parents and caregivers.
Parents are likely interested in programs that show them to nurture and support their children’s love of experimentation and learning. For example, evening workshops on easy at-home science experiments or “STEAM Power at Home” can generate additional revenue and empower families to carry out your mission in their own homes and neighborhoods.
Another option is creating and offering continuing education (CE) courses for educators, developed with input from districts and education centers to ensure that they meet your district’s and state’s standards. Some event ticketing and registration solutions designed to support museum education will even automatically generate and email a personalized certificate of completion after the workshop is over.
The educational (and revenue-generating) opportunities that children’s museums can provide are almost limitless. We hope that this brief list will spark ideas for events and programs as unique as your museum and the communities you serve.
Elissa K. Miller, M.Ed., is communications director at Doubleknot, an integrated online, on-site, and mobile solutions provider for nonprofits. As the former development director for a regional nonprofit, she’s passionate about helping nonprofits and youth-serving organizations harness new technologies to streamline operations and support their missions.
By David Mimeles
You’ve already got an amazing program in place. Your community shows up in force to learn and have fun. Even better, parents and children alike love to attend your programming!
As a professional, though, you know that no matter how successful your program is, it’s useful to periodically take a step back and look for places where your program can improve performance.
In this blog post, we’ll address these common pain points for children’s museum programming teams:
For each of these questions, we’ll provide some administrative tips to consider. Read on and ensure that your innovative and popular programs run even more smoothly!
Though there’s not exactly a downside to putting on popular programming, popularity often leads to issues with capacity.
Even outdoor programs without enforced fire codes have to consider the logistics of too many people — especially children — trying to participate at the same time.
If your free programs are so popular that they’re consistently over capacity, you’ll need to revisit your ticketing policies.
There are two conventional solutions for the capacity problem:
Instead of choosing between these two undesirable options, try a third. Require visitors to register online or stop by the museum to reserve their free ticket in advance. Then, ask them to check in a certain amount of time before the program or forfeit their seat for day-of arrivals.
With this solution, you can keep the cost of your popular programming free while also limiting capacity. A first-come, first-serve system is fair, and a system that allows for last-minute flexibility will ensure that all seats are filled even if someone who reserved a ticket doesn’t show up.
Coordinating this kind of ticketing solution is possible without specialized software, but the right museum software solution will take the administrative burden off your team. Let the software do the routine work, and leave your team free for the more important or creative aspects of your programming.
Membership programs and museum programming have a truly reciprocal relationship. Amazing programs can incentivize participants to join your membership program, and members will turn out in force for great programs.
To grow both your membership program and museum programming at the same time, take advantage of opportunities to integrate the two.
The most effective integration techniques center around exclusive member benefits, a cornerstone of a strong member engagement strategy as well as a great program marketing opportunity.
Consider offering the following low- or no-cost benefits to members who participate in your programs:
You can also host member-only programs or member-only hours for your longer programs!
These members-only program benefits can increase member participation in programming as well as program participant enrollment in your membership program.
Members are more likely to attend events that offer them special benefits, and participant who experience those benefits firsthand are more likely to join the membership program than casual museum visitors. It’s a win-win situation!
You know how important it is to keep admission lines short and fast, especially when a majority of your visitors are families with small children.
For everyday admissions, the best way to keep lines moving is to use mobile ticket scanning devices for linebusting.
On your busiest days, you can also use mobile devices to set up ad hoc ticketing or membership sales. Just make sure you’re able to scan mobile tickets and mobile membership cards so visitors can use their ticket or member benefits right away after they purchase them.
Of course, to take full advantage of mobile linebusting across your museum, you’ll need a mobile system that can integrate with your reservations records and event management software.
When it comes to group reservations, such as field trips and birthday parties, you need a ticketing solution that can compress admission for an entire group into one barcode or QR code.
The last thing you want to do is scan individual tickets for every student on a school bus. Your visitors don’t want to wait around either — they want to head straight to the exhibits or the party room. When you can scan one ticket for the entire group, everyone can get right to their field trip or party experience.
You should look for a solution that’s also flexible enough to invoice for the number of visitors who actually arrive for the program if it’s a different number than the initial reservation.
When you integrate these ticketing and check-in strategies, you’re sure to get those lines moving quickly!
Speaking of group reservations, many museums use an online reservation process that’s nothing more than a form to fill out with their contact information and dates they want to reserve for the program they want.
This system can quickly turn inefficient on the administrative side. Your team will end up having to call a parent or teacher to tell them that they can’t come because the time slot they requested was already reserved.
The solution is to invest in an online reservations calendar that can accept reservations 24/7 and automatically block out slots that have been claimed. Even if your staff has to manually approve the request later, at least your visitors know that the time they’re signing up for is available.
Make sure your online calendar can also:
That last feature is particularly important for your museum to consider. If you offer priority registration for your members, you don’t force them to call your office for you to manually override your reservations calendar every time they want to redeem that benefit.
Instead, make sure you implement a reservations calendar that makes member benefits so seamless that your members won’t think twice about returning when the time comes to send out membership renewal letters.
The best museum programs have sustainability and flexibility built into them. Just because a program works well once doesn’t mean it will be as successful the next month, season, or year. Continuous improvement is a hallmark of successful and sustainable museum programming.
Incorporate sustainability and continuous improvement into your programming by soliciting a wide range of feedback. Continuous innovation supported by decisions based on real feedback make great museum programming sustainable.
You’ll get the best feedback on your program surveys if you consider:
You don’t have to send the same survey to every participant. You might find it more useful to send short surveys to most of your program participants and staff and offer more comprehensive surveys to a smaller segment.
Longer surveys can be sent to people who are most likely to spend time on them, such as members, frequent program participants, donors and other constituents who are more deeply involved with your museum.
Survey feedback helps ensure that your museum programs are sustainable by keeping them relevant. Your programs can also be used to promote overall sustainability by increasing participation and building stronger bonds with your members and visitors. For example, you can consider:
No matter how popular your programs are, they’re not guaranteed to be popular forever. Emphasizing sustainability can help ensure your long-term success!
As you continue creating incredible programs at your museum, these strategies can help ease your administrative burden and ensure that your program deliver the best experience for your participants.
And if you’re looking for a museum software solution to help make these strategies possible, head over to Double the Donation’s reviews of top museum software to get you started down the right path.
David Mimeles is vice president of sales and marketing at Doubleknot, an integrated online, on-site, and mobile solutions provider for nonprofits. Check out Doubleknot’s ultimate guide to museum software.
