School field trips account for thousands of museum visitors every year. However, the recession and shaky recovery has led to cuts in school budgets, resulting in putting field trips on the back burner. In response, museums have created scholarship programs and traveling exhibits to make sure the museum experience remains affordable, and accessible.
There are at least 17,500 museums in the United States, according to the American Association of Museums. The NH Division of Travel and Tourism Development lists more than 100 museums here in the Granite State that together attract hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. While there are no statewide statistics available on museum attendance or economic impact, many museums reported a drop in attendance during the recession.
But things are looking up. Van McLeod, commissioner of NH's Department of Cultural Resources, says there are signs that attendance is growing as museums find new ways to meet the public's changing interests. In the North Country, the Mount Washington Observatory Weather Discovery Center expanded its operating hours to seven days a week in 2010 to accommodate growing crowds, drawing more than 130,000 visitors last year.
Two of NH's largest museums-The Currier Museum of Art in Manchester and the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord-physically expanded in recent years, adding not only to their display space, but also to their capabilities to host lucrative events.
After expanding, the Currier rebranded itself to reach a broader audience and it added more educational programs. The 82-year-old museum, known for its eclectic collection that includes works by Picasso, Monet and O'Keeffe, unveiled an additional 33,000 square feet of gallery space in 2008, along with additional classrooms, event areas and a 180-seat auditorium. The museum has an annual budget of about $4 million, of which 40 percent comes from admissions, gift shop revenue, and various fundraising including membership, grants and corporate gifts.
We had collections of significant quality and we did not have the space to exhibit them, says Susan Strickler, director and CEO. Expansion allows for these works to be seen and school groups to have the space they need. It rivals a metropolitan experience and meets our goals of providing the quality art enrichment visitors are looking for.
The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center completed its $15 million expansion in 2009. With approximately four times its original area, the 45,223-square-foot space museum has seen annual attendance, including school visits, climb since the expansion. About 60,000 people visit annually, including nearly 18,000 schoolchildren from across New England. That includes students who attend the center's Portable Planetarium, an outreach program that brings the center's programs to schools and an affordable alternative to field trips for the one-third of New England schools that cannot afford them. Jennifer Jones, marketing coordinator, says while tourists make up a small portion of the Center's visitors, the majority are families and students from the region.
While some museums expanded, others found new homes to meet their needs. The Children's Museum moved from Portsmouth to a larger facility in Dover in 2009. Executive Director Justine Roberts says the move allowed the museum to add programming. Since then, it has started partnering with Children's Hospital at Dartmouth to bring exhibits to the hospital's statewide network of offices. The Children's Museum is also bringing in more visitors by teaming up with Community Partners, which assists families of special needs children, inviting them to use the museum for exclusive social gatherings the second Sunday of each month for a two-hour period.
We are working on initiatives that serve the unmet needs of today's family, Roberts says. We are able to bring in visitors who otherwise would have never been able come. The Children's Museum has about 91,000 visitors annually, and has 1,700 members, an increase from last year's figure of 1,500, Roberts says. Demographically, about 65 percent of the museum's visitors are from NH. The museum has an annual budget of about $900,000 and annual revenue of about $930,000. Of that, 30 percent is contributed income, which includes memberships and grants.
Going High Tech
While many museums in NH are dedicated to preserving history, they are finding they can't be prehistoric in their presentation of it. To attract visitors, NH museums are creating self-guided smartphone tours and robust computer-based interactive exhibits, and putting more information online.
When the NH Historical Society Museum in Concord, keeper of the state's history, saw the number of visitors drop by 10 percent between 2009 and 2010 to 20,000, it reprioritized its resources to invest in technology to make accessing information easier and more interactive, says Executive Director William Dunlap. New Hampshire History Online is a project that will take three years to complete, according to Dunlap, but will make the museum's 30,000 items and numerous photos and documents more accessible to the masses. He adds that the museum will also set up kiosks with laptops to allow visitors to look up information about any item on display.
We are engaged in a digital transformation of taking collections, of which only 20 percent is on display, and creating a digital catalogue of all items to put online, he says. This will allow not only our collection to be fully accessible, but we live in the Internet age, so there is a good chance that will stimulate more interest in personal visits. It may also be a way of spurring more museum memberships, which have held steady at about 4,000 for the past several years.
Dunlap also hopes the online resources will let people view the museum at their own rate and in their own way. People don't want wall labels any more. They want more information, he says of the national trend to make displays interactive. The key is to let people control the tour and the amount of information they receive.
The historic neighborhood preserved by Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth is also using technology to bring history to life for visitors, says President Lawrence J. Yerdon. Listen to the Landscape, a smartphone virtual tour of the grounds and historic streets of the city allows people to hear voices from the past that guide and educate them along the tour.
The Mount Washington Observatory Weather Discovery Center uses its technology to reach students in states as far away as Texas and California with a video connection that creates a virtual classroom on weather and extreme mountain conditions.
The Event Equation
Creating bigger and better spaces in which to host events has been a money generator for some museums. Yerdon says Strawbery Banke holds five annual events, which last year attracted 15,000 people and accounted for about a quarter of the museum's annual visitors. The Candlelight Stroll attracted 7,950 people, among the best attendance in the event's 31-year history, drawing about 2,300 more people than in each of the past three years.
The Currier also brings in 4,000 visitors a year through private events. Events Manager Susan Leidy says the museum was able to grow its private event business by 50 percent after the expansion. Events now generate $60,000 to $100,000 annually and are held in the Winter Garden, which is also home to monthly social gatherings, hosted by the museum, that include concerts and lectures. The monthly events bring in about 100 people about $1,000 a month.
Events bring in both money and people, which after all is our focus ... getting more people involved, Leidy says. And our expansion allows for events that bring in those added people on a regular basis and utilizes our caf for food and refreshments, yet keeps it separate from the protected exhibit space. None of that was possible before we expanded.
Event space has been a boon for the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. Prior to the expansion, it was limited to 12 to 14 private rentals a year when the Discovery Center was closed to the general public, says Jeanne Gerulskis, executive director of the museum. Now it hosts 45 events per year, which has more than tripled event revenue to $39,148. A big factor, she says, is that the Discovery Center can rent out space any time while remaining open.
That extra space-and the potential for extra revenue-is a good thing, given that the museum receives 45 percent of its funding from state grants. The operating budget dropped from $1.9 million in fiscal year 2010 to $1.7 million in fiscal year 2011. Revenue also dropped slightly, from $1.04 million FY2010 to $923,000 in FY2011. We have come to realize that events are a key way to affect our bottom line and bring in revenue. So much so that we are looking at shifting our public hours after Labor Day this year, Gerulskis says. During non-peak times of the year, we have very few visitors on weekdays and we think we could rent out to private events more if we focused solely on doing rentals during the first three days of the week.
From weddings at Canterbury Shaker Village to camps and overnight visits for kids at the Children's Museum of NH, events are increasingly an important revenue stream for museums. A huge revenue source for us is the overnights we now offer for the scouting groups, says Roberts of the Children's Museum. We found for every overnight event we schedule, 100 kids sign up, and along with paid admission, the scouting groups tend to spend money in the gift shop. It is significant enough for us to assess this and decide to offer more in the coming year.
Keeping Schools Coming
The lifeblood for many museums is school visits, which account for a third or more of visitors to some Granite State museums. The American Independence Museum in Exeter alone has 2,000 schoolchildren visit a year.
Museums are going to great lengths to insure children continue to get the museum experience-whether they visit directly or have the museum visit them. The Discovery Center started bringing its traveling exhibit to schools in 2006. Last year it made 92 trips to classrooms. Gerulskis says the cost of bringing the exhibit to schools is far less than schools pay to bring kids to the museum.
Field trips are something we are trying to increase, but with the tight economy we have had to come up with innovative ideas, says Michelle Cruz of the Mount Washington Weather Center. We now offer programs tailored directly to the curriculum that a school has in place to make it really a valued learning experience.
With school budgets shrinking, schools have less money to spare, so private industry has stepped up to help fund these trips. At the Children's Museum, Roberts says its Museum In Reach program makes the museum available free of charge for school field trips for Title I schools in NH, or those with a large low-income students population. The museum absorbs all of the cost, whether or not it has special donation funding, because this is one of its priorities. She says many of the kids who visit through the program would otherwise not have access because of distance or expense.
Bus companies have donated transportation valued at $6,000 and $12,000 during the past three years. In addition, the Children's Museum receives other funding for the program of approximately $8,000 from private foundations to support staff and material costs.
At the Currier, Lincoln Financial donated $10,000 to offset the cost of Manchester fifth-graders visiting the museum. At Strawbery Banke, the past year's contributions totaled $26,600 from several sources including Bank of America, BAE Systems, and People's United Community Foundation. That money supports History within Reach, which helps to fund admission and/or transportation for schools with a majority of low-income students.
Outreach efforts at the Historical Society Museum include museum staff going into classrooms. That program reached 15,400 children in the school year ending in June of this year, up from 13,000 last year. A total of 7,000 students received classroom education in the 2010-2011 school year because of funding through foundations.
Community Outreach
Museums spend a lot of time, money and effort to attract visitors. Community outreach at the Currier includes Family Saturdays, which offers a themed tour and a family art project free of charge. The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center has a free program called SkyWatch in coordination with the NH Astronomical Society. The first Friday of each month visitors can gaze through telescopes as they discuss the planets and stars with volunteer amateur astronomers.
Dunlop says that state's museum community is devoted to creating quality programming and finding new ways to get people involved with museums. He cites participation in the Blue Star Museums program, which offers free admission to active military service members and their families.
The Children's Museum hosts an Alzheimer's caf program, which Roberts says is basically a coffee klatch for seniors with the disease and their caretakers, who come to the museum to network and gain support from their peers.
The Portsmouth Museum of Art, which opened two years ago, is literally taking its outreach to the streets. Director Cathy Sununu says that since the museum is small, it can engage the people who visit in personal conversations and learn what they desire in an exhibit. The museum's focus is to reach visitors under 40 years old, and it is doing it in unique ways. Its most recent exhibit, and success story, was Art in the Street, a display of street art that covers several buildings around Portsmouth and runs through September 11.
We sought out the best of today's artists to create this presentation and it really gave viewers a sense of what street art is all about, Sununu says. And people completely connected with the process because the opening was the biggest we ever had. Artists were working in full view around town and word quickly spread about it on Facebook.
Outreach is especially important for new museums like the Portsmouth Museum of Art. With a $25,000 budget and $30,000 in revenue in 2010, the museum depends entirely on volunteers-two of whom are full time-for its operations. And it is too new to apply for grants.
We all have to think outside the box about how to engage not only young people, but even the older, distracted audience who have become lost to electronic noise, Sununu says. Museums have to be mindful of how to stay relevant, think about who receives our publications and seek collaborations within the community.
Future Ticket Sales
While museum attendance is mostly up this year, according to museum directors, they are not certain that trend will continue. About 30,000 visitors toured America's Stonehenge in Salem last year. A family-owned historic site that offers self-guided tours of manmade chambers, walls and ceremonial meeting places, it has seen the number of visitors fluctuate year to year.
Pat Stone, one of the owners, says Stonehenge saw a spike in visitors in 2010, but she attributes that to good weather because the outdoor attraction offers a good hike. Unfortunately, this year's wet spring brought a decline in visitors. Overall, we definitely saw a drop-off since the recession. After 9/11 the volume of people never really came back, Stone says. Last year was the biggest in many years, but this season we had unfavorable weather and gas prices. It's hard to judge, but I do hope we level off and end at an increase this year.
Gift shop sales have also changed in recent years. Heidi Norton, shop manager for the last decade at the Currier Museum, says people are still making purchases but in different ways. I think the more popular the current exhibit, the greater volume of customers we have and therefore the larger our sales are. But the spending trend has changed, Norton says. People used to come in and drop $100 for one item. Now they will spend $100, but it is for five items.
Sales are also down at the Children's Museum gift shop. With a toy store located across the street, Roberts says the museum simply cannot compete. The one exception, she notes, is sales during scouting group overnight trips. Scouts bring a bit of the museum home because they have been given the time and the cash to pick out a souvenir.
Museums across the state are striving to remain relevant in an age of technology and financial challenges. New Hampshire has an advantage in that its historic sites and museums are not recreations of the past but preserved legacies. According to McLeod, there is an immense appeal in offering visitors this real deal, as opposed to a sanitized corporate version of art and history.
There is no one answer on how to remain relevant, McLeod says. Staying focused on the mission and purpose and being ready to use any of the new ways, and those yet to come, to connect to people and communities is key. Getting those new visitors to connect to their friends and tell them of their experience is what will send the messages out on the viral highway.
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