During the past several months of coronavirus closures, many museums and cultural organizations have pioneered new digital content to keep their members and visitors engaged during these unprecedented closures. Many members have responded so positively to this new digital access that membership professionals may be considering making digital benefits and virtual access a more permanent fixture of membership, or even adding a “virtual membership” level.
Join Dan Sullivan (Head of Growth and Partnerships @ Cuseum), Sarah Owens (Membership Manager @ Exploratorium), Kara Fikse (Advancement Events Manager @ Carnegie Museums), & Cat Harper (Guest Services & Events Manager @ National Steinbeck Center) for a webinar to discuss digital and virtual memberships and how to offer digital access to your members.
View the video recording here.
Read the full transcript below.
Dan Sullivan:
Hey everybody. First of all, thanks for being here. My name is Dan Sullivan. I'm the head of partnerships at Cuseum. And first of all, just want to start by thanking everybody for being here. All of our first timers, welcome. And for all of our repeat visitors, thank you again for being here.
A couple of quick housekeeping items. For those who are watching, please take a second to introduce yourselves in the chat. We've got Q&A functionality on these webinars, which I'm sure most of you are already familiar with. So you can ask your questions there. Use a little thumbs up button, thumbs up the questions that you're also interested in hearing that will push them up to the top for us to be able to review the most pressing ones. And we're going to try to get to as many as we can, but we're going to have a really interesting panel today.
so glad you're all here. Want to wish you all another safe and healthy week and quick thing before we get started, a lot of us are obviously readily aware of the numerous museum friends we all have that are out of work, but I was sent over a job posting this week and I felt like it might be nice to just share it with this group. The Discovery Place in Charlotte, North Carolina is hiring a membership manager and a little conversation with the folks over there. It sounds like a really cool position and a very, very cool organization.
So I figured I would share it with a friend who might be interested, the listing is on their careers page on their website, but again, that's a membership manager role at the Discovery Place in Charlotte. So I figured you all might appreciate that. All right, so let's get into this.
So after almost two months of Coronavirus closures, many museums and cultural organizations are preparing to welcome back visitors and members as well, but a lot of organizations while they might be reopening, they're doing so in a very graduated way. They're starting to face some new challenges and a lot of uncharted territory here. In particular, a lot of them are realizing that tourism is going to be down for quite some time, which has the potential to profoundly impact admissions and membership revenue.
So at the same time, cultural organizations may have a renewed appeal to local audiences as this world embraces a kind of this stay local or staycation mentality for the foreseeable future. So we've got a great panel lineup today. We've got Sarah Owens, the membership manager at Exploratorium. We've got Kara Fixie at the event, at the Carnegie Museums, and then we have Cat Harper at the National Steinbeck Center.
So we're going to be talking about creating digital benefits and virtual access for your members. So I'm going to start, I'm going to have everybody go around the room really quick. Just introduce yourselves, if you could, quick high level about your organization and Sarah, we'll start with you.
Sarah Owens:
Hi, I'm Sarah Owens, I'm the membership manager of the Exploratorium. We are a hands on science focused museum in San Francisco, California in the Bay area. And we have about 16,000 households right now in our member base. We are on the Embarcadero on Pier 15, kind of sandwiched in the ferry building and fisherman's Wharf, if where that is.
Dan Sullivan:
Great to have you be here. Awesome. And, Kara.
Kara Fikse:
Hi, I'm Kara Fikse, the advancement events manager at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. So we are made up of four museums, the Carnegie museums of natural history and art, the Carnegie Science Center, and then the Andy Warhol Museum. So you hear me reference the museums. Those are the ones I'm talking about. We serve 32,000, I think household, member households. So a large bunch. And then I create programming for all of those members from our $50 a year members, all the way up to some of our high level donors.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Thank you. And Cat.
Cat Harper:
So, at the National Steinbeck Center. We are rebuilding our membership. We have about a thousand members right now and growing and the virtual membership is a brand new component that we actually came up with last October. So, we're kind of ahead of the game.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Well, that's a great segue actually. So let's start, Cat, maybe you can kick us off. Can you talk a little bit about virtual offerings, this virtual mentality and the way that you're approaching that at the Steinbeck Center.
Cat Harper:
So when we first decided to relaunch our membership, we sat down and thought, what can we offer? If we're going to relaunch, it should be new and innovative and we should offer something. And at that point, a virtual membership was offered as an idea because we have over 74 different countries that visit us every single year.
And people were giving us feedback. “I can only get here from Stockholm once every five years. Do you guys have anything online?” And we realized that other than a very short tour, a video tour on our website, we weren't really offering anything. So at that point, our archivist started creating programs. She would highlight different works because we are a literary museum. She would do little videos and we were storing, slowly storing this kind of content up thinking, okay. And in the new year in 2020, we'll actually launch this and little did we know where this was going to be.
Dan Sullivan:
Who would have seen this coming? And Kara, obviously you haven't quite implemented a virtual membership level yet, but can you talk a little bit about your thinking around that and the mentality of the Carnegie Museums?
Kara Fikse:
Sure. So pre-COVID, we did have a mobile membership card, so that was kind of a virtual offering for our monthly members. Because they don't receive a physical card in the mail like regular members do or annual members. So we did launch that, I think in 2015, I want to say, and then all members can sign up for the mobile account. We do try to encourage it because it comes in handy. Especially when people travel, they forget to pack their CMP card and they can still access it online and utilize their own benefits.
So we did have that pre-COVID, and then now we have a growing menu of virtual events or virtual offerings, so far one or two or three at each of the museums. So we're excited about the launch of those, we've covered content anywhere from our paleontologists, talking about everything that's wrong with Jurassic park to a virtual collection tour last week event about salamanders. We've had a curator from Andy Warhol talk about preparing for an upcoming exhibition.
Tonight we have a talk about the miniature railroad and village. So we're really been exploring lots of different areas of the museums, which has been exciting. But I think what we've been seeing, our response to these virtual events is that the words virtual membership have come up much more often. So it's possible that this could be the foundation for something more long term.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Very, very interesting. And Sarah, how about on your side where, where's the Exploratorium's approach like as far as virtual offerings go?
Sarah Owens:
We are lucky enough to have a really large archive of content on our website that was already created. And we have a lot of different teams that work on that content. As far as members only content, this is the first foray we've made into that. It's the first time we've done gated content on our websites. So we don't have any plans on creating a virtual membership right now. But I do think if we do go that route that we have laid a foundation that is successful in a way.
Yeah. So we have a May is for Members program that's typically on site and we had to move it online when we closed. We sheltered in place on March 13th. So we've tapped into the programming team and also created virtual backgrounds. Like those going asparagus behind me. And we've really tapped into a couple of different areas of the museum to create online content, but it's really the first time we've done anything like this just for members. So I'm excited to see where that goes
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. And I think this is a generally speaking, these days are a time that everybody seems to be kind of getting a little bit out of their comfort zone and pushing the boundaries of what they typically have done.
So let's talk a little bit about the kind of special digital offerings for members. So Cat, do you want to kick us off with that? How are you approaching? What do those offerings look like? How are you serving them? For example, are they, are you doing webinars? Are you doing Facebook live? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kara Fikse:
Absolutely. So eventually we're going to have a special portal on our website where members and virtual members can log in right now on Members Mondays, we actually send out links to different items. We have a private YouTube channel that is invite only. And so they can enjoy videos from our archivist or from our educational team at those, at that place. And then we also include things like reading guides and then there's fun things. There's fun and games like for Memorial day, we sent out a Memorial day word search that was based on the war correspondence books that John Steinbeck wrote when he was over in Europe during world war II.
So that was a fun, little, extra thing. But for instance, we have this virtual festival coming up and all of the performances, all of the lectures, everything will be recorded. So in the upcoming months after that, how our virtual members, no matter where they're logging in from all over the world are going to be able to access those different talks, lectures, performances at their leisure, whether they were able to attend those two days of virtual festival or not, that's going to be a perk that they get to enjoy for months after. So that's the kind of content that we're going to be able to keep building on with every event that we have.
Dan Sullivan:
That's great. And again giving the member the power to pursue when they've got the time to enjoy those benefits. Sarah, how about on your side, when it comes to digital offerings, how are you approaching that? What mediums are you serving those on? What platforms are you utilizing? What's that look like right now?
Sarah Owens:
Right now it's a content portal on our website. We have a Drupal or websites, but with Drupal. So we've got a password protected page that we emailed the passwords to all of our members, if you want to check it out, it's exploratorium.edu/amazeformembers. And then the password is the members for the content portal. And on there, we've got a few different types of offerings. We focused on pre recorded programs for this month because we are still trying to figure out how to do live programming. I think we're experimenting with that and in the public forum right now.
So we've got YouTube live programs going up and Facebook live conversations, and we do some Instagram live stories too. Right now, those are open to the public. But I think we're trying to find a way to either offer those to members first or find a way to have members have questions that they can get prioritized that are answered by the experts first.
So we're trying to think of just all of the different types of content that we have and the resources we have. Thankfully, we have a video department that can produce pre recorded content. That's pretty slick, but also we don't want to lose out on the interactive possibilities of doing online content too.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. For sure. That makes sense. And Kara, how about on your side? What do those digital offerings look like? Are you utilizing similar channels to Cat and Sarah?
Kara Fikse:
Most, if not all of our events have been live so far and we've been using Zoom webinar. So there is a fee associated with that. It's an add-on to the Zoom account I think we all have now. All of them have been live, last time we did show a prerecorded video that we got from one of the museums. It was a behind the scenes video. So we showed that and then we paired it with a live play, but we've been using webinars mostly because it's a little more of a controlled environment like we're using now. It's kind of what people are seeing and hearing we can monitor the Q&A. It's a little bit with the number of members we have out there. it just seems like the best option for us.
And we found that or got several comments that people like the feeling of curators speaking directly to them because no one can see anyone else. So it feels like the presenter is talking directly to that person.
Dan Sullivan:
And the value of feeling like you're having that one-on-one conversation is so powerful, as a member of that really kind of adds to that stickiness and your willingness to support the institution. So, that's great to hear.
Now I think the question a lot of folks are wondering is like, how do we actually create that content? Like, is it, are you personally the ones that are creating that content or do you have an education or a marketing team or some army of interns? How does that content get created? Kara, do you want to start us off?
Kara Fikse:
Sure. So I think, once we knew that, this was going to be a little bit longer than a couple of days and that we were going to, need to have any different strategy while, while the doors were closed, we decided to pivot what we were doing onsite with our onsite into the virtual world. So I was looking up over the years to build a network of contacts with curators, scientists, marketing team, education, to build programming, at least for physical events.
So I just met with groups that each of the museum with some of the contexts, like I mentioned, and we brainstormed what we thought might transfer over well into the Zoom form because it is a little bit of a different environment. So talking with marketing a lot just in terms of implementing, but also just staff members. And in terms of what curators do you think would be comfortable doing something virtually, and then we might have a project or something that they're doing at home that they're just dying to get out in front of the public.
So it really was kind of a small collaboration. And now I'm really excited to say that I have curators emailing me and asking if they can do a virtual event for members. So they're coming at times, just individual curators with content ideas. So it's definitely a team effort and I'm working with some people that I never worked with before with onsite events, which is really exciting.
Dan Sullivan:
That's awesome. Sarah, how about on your side? How are you? Are you kind of this wizard that's just whipping all this content together or how does that look?
Sarah Owens:
I think a lot like Kara, I built on relationships that were already creative with onsite events for members and onsite programming that was not just for public, but also for members. And so I started by tapping those resources and the people I knew and started by focusing on programs that I knew were popular onsite for members, and then seeing how we could adapt something similar to an online platform. But then also, like Kara said, people have started approaching me with content that they were already thinking about creating, because I think there's a lot of excitement from those teams about what they can do and what they have already built.
So it was a combination of those two things and just getting the word out there that I was interested, I think helped and talking to as many people around the museum helped. I got word out by asking for love letters from different areas of the museum that we then packaged up and sent to members every week.
So in that way, I also kind of got the word out that, "Hey, we're looking for content. We need to have your voice out there in front of members, because they might miss interacting with your exhibits. They miss your special experience of going to the biology lab." So we had someone who gave a biology lab force, write a letter for members. And then we had a visitor services representative write a letter asking, saying that she misses greeting them every day at the front door. So it was a nice way to bring in all the different areas of the muse, create a little bit of buzz from member programming and then get the project started in a way that got more people involved.
Dan Sullivan:
That's awesome. Thank you for sharing it. And Cat, how about on your side? What, obviously being a smaller organization, maybe your staff kind of visiting as robust as Carnegie Museums or Exploratorium. What does that look like for a smaller organization?
Cat Harper: So for us, we started out really quickly with the whole idea of everybody's going to have to throw their hat in the ring in some way or another. And so everybody from me to our marketing person, to our educational team, to our curator, even our incredible director has created content of some sort. But then we also have a wonderful supporting public out there who have done things like videos for us. They've read parts of a Steinbeck novel for us. We've even had a couple of celebrities. Josh Brolin came out for us to help. I thought it was a big deal to help us.
Dan Sullivan: That's awesome.
Cat Harper:
And so we've had a lot of support in creating this content to send out every single day. I mean, that's been the pressure of this time is that you have to have something every day that goes out online. So when it came to creating the pieces that only our members get to see, especially these new virtual members, we really had to pull together as a team and come up with what we thought would be interesting for these members to see. And we came up with an idea that is of a backstage pass.
We're going to show you parts of the museum and parts of our archives, that you would not have an opportunity to see in any other way. So in working with our curator and with our archivist, we have been able to explore all these different avenues to create this content that's interesting and inviting for our virtual members. And right now our regular members get that virtual membership too, because we're closed. So they get to benefit from all these extra backstage views.
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it's incredible that you were able to pull an A-list celebrity like a Josh Brolin into the mix, shows that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be mighty. So we've got a great question from the audience and I'm just going to put this out to all of our panelists. Are any of you creating gated content? And if you are, now what technology are you using? Obviously Kara with the webinars, that's gated in a certain way, but are any of you creating any type of form fill or, or some type of gate for your members to access that. I'm going to leave this open to all of you?
Kara Fikse:
I know we started out with at least the web page that we were posting all the events on as a non public facing web page. So you had to have the link to access it, but we found pretty quickly that it was actually, we were shooting ourselves in the foot, essentially because not only were internal staff having trouble, finding the site and we're losing the link and whatnot, members were having some trouble accessing it.
So we really were limiting ourselves and driving traffic to the webpage. So we ended up deciding to transfer all of the virtual events content onto our regular member event, webpage, which is public facing. So sacrificing a tiny bit of exclusivity, but in, in the hopes that we would serve our ultimate goal, which is to get as many members as possible into these webinars. So right now it is public facing when you register for an event, you do have to type in your member ID.
So that acts as a little bit of a barrier to folks. But so we decided against kind of putting up too many Gates into signing up for now, if we did have a permanent virtual membership level or something of that nature, it might be a different discussion in terms of how we limit or don't limit access to that.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. And Sarah, obviously you're getting content in some way through your website. Are there any other ways that you're doing that?
Sarah Owens:
That right now is the only way we have any member exclusive content. We have sent out things via email like I think we're soon going to send out coloring sheets that will only be available to download for a link through an email, but as far as gated content, that's the only thing we've done so far, but I'd like to build on that and maybe build on the member event section of our website and make that a gated content portal as well, but we'll see how it all unfolds
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. Yeah. Thanks, and Cat, are you guys getting content in any way?
Cat Harper:
We are. So with that member's Monday email, we send out the link to our private YouTube channel. So it is not public facing, you absolutely have to have the link or you're not getting in. And then all of our other links are direct links to private files. So once again, if you don't have that link, you're not going to be able to see it. In the future once we add this to our website, it will be completely gated. They will have to put it in member number and a particular password that is assigned just to them to allow them to come in. And that will be for our virtual membership as well as our members.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. And by the way, this, I see some comments, this session will be recorded and we will have the recording posted on the Cuseum website a little bit later today. So, and by the way, this is technically membership Mondays, even though it's Thursday, we had a bank holiday on Monday. So it's membership Mondays on Thursday today. And we also have membership Mondays this Monday and the topic is going to be the onsite member experience after Coronavirus closures. We're going to be talking all about what that looks like? How do you interact with your members? Like how does that experience different from a regular visitor? We're going to dig all into that. That's this Monday, I think there'll be a link posted in the chat.
So I think that brings on another interesting question. So how do you decide what is good content for members versus what is just good content for the general public? How do you differentiate those two? Cat do you want to start us off with that?
Cat Harper:
Absolutely. So like I said, for us, it was really the conscious decision of the backstage pass. We definitely want to give the public in general, the idea of who we are and what we do, our outreach programs, especially our educational outreach programs, but we wanted to save all that backstage pass kind of things for our members, so that they will be able to get to view pieces from the archives or companion pieces to the books and his writing that nobody else could do without scheduling a private archives tour or a private curatorial tour. And so that made it rather easy for us to separate the two.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. And Sarah, how about on your side?
Sarah Owens:
It happened pretty organically. We had content already coming out from our education department that is called our learning toolbox that is open to the public. And that is focused usually on teachers, but since everyone is homeschooling these days, we open it up to the public and now it's a resource for parents as well. So we've been sending weekly content emails to not just members, but also our general audience that include that content. And when I approached the public programs team to get something specific for members, our conversation was based on, one, what are the resources we have available right now?
And then also two what was popular with members when we were open and how do we adapt that to an online platform? So we took it from those two different directions and we ended up with two weekly programs. So we've got 10 pre recorded programs now for the month of May, which is huge for us.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. And Kara, how about on your side?
Kara Fikse:
I'm going to say that all content is better for members and just training-
Dan Sullivan:
Not that you're biased.
Kara Fikse:
...for the past three years, but luckily I don't have to worry too much about making those decisions because there are teams at each of the museum that deal more with public programming or educational programming, but we did have an instance where the, or we will have an instance where those audiences collide with an upcoming virtual tour. We had one last month and it was very successful, great feedback, great numbers for it. And the museum wanted to try out inviting the public or non-members to join in on the next one for a small ticket price.
So members will keep it branded as a member event and members will sign up, and join for free, like they always do. But then we will hopefully have an audience of nonmembers that can essentially be members for the afternoon and tune in just for that event. And then the hope is to also leverage that for acquisition and say, "Hey, you can pay $10 and join the tour, be a member for the afternoon, or you can become a member for the year and join in on four museums worth of virtual content." So an example of those two groups combining, but for the most part, I don't have to worry about deciding what content goes with what group.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. and let's jump into one question from the audience here. this is from Michael Goodchild and yes, "I'm interested to hear some insights on how digital benefits can be offered to members in an interpretive center that primarily offers tactile interactive experiences." So Sarah, Kara, this might be more focused on your set of being fairly hands on organizations. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like from a digital perspective? How do you still deliver value? How do we still keep people's attention even though they don't get that hands on experience?
Sarah Owens:
Thankfully we've been able to have a lot of our experts interact with via Facebook live events and things like that. So it is still interactive in that way where it's a conversation, but we've also, I think like Cat mentioned, tried to tap into having our audience, help us create content as well and do more crowdsourcing. We're launching a tinkering at home initiative soon. And that website will feature a grid of crowdsource content that we use using a platform called CrowdRiff, which you can easily request user permissions and bring in different images from Instagram and Facebook.
And it helps not only you with your content stream, but it also, I think, helps the member feel special because they're being featured on a website. And so it's a good way to not only populate your website, but also kind of interact with people in a different way. So that's something we've been working on and it includes a Rube Goldberg type of call to action. And there's a few different activities that were leading people along online too. So we're doing our best.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. And I think that you hit on a really important point, which is, all everybody just wants us to feel special, so feel recognized. Kara how about on your side, what are your thoughts on that?
Kara Fikse:
I would say it might be a good time to focus on staff. We're finding that part of what members are enjoying the most is just seeing staff in their natural habitat, if you will. So there's value in just kind of basing your staff. What they're working on from home has been a lot of interest to our members. And then we did an event about how this, it's called a flip clock, but apparently we have the largest binary flip clock in the world. It looks more like an art piece on the wall of one of our cafes.
And we had our mechatronics engineer. So an example of someone I hadn't worked with on onsite events, talk about how he created, designed and built a clock, which it doesn't sound super glamorous, but it was fascinating. So I think they're teasing out stories like that about maybe how you built some of the exhibits or the displays, at least for our members there's a lot of interest in, in how exhibits are built and how certain collections come together. So maybe looking kind of at the behind the scenes activities and seeing what you can tease out from that area of the museum.
Dan Sullivan:
Definitely. Cat, anything you want to throw in there?
Cat Harper:
Absolutely. We do have several hands on parts of our exhibition and that's where our curatorial tours really work because she's able to literally physically walk through those and talk about them. And we found out that especially teachers have really enjoyed that.
Dan Sullivan:
That's great to hear. So moving back to the, this virtual membership offering, what is the goal of a virtual membership offering? Are we trying to engage visitors remotely? Are we trying to add in-person access or augment that, are we trying to reach new dispersed audiences, maybe people that are not really coming on site? Can you all talk a little bit about the goals of what a virtual offering would look like? Cat, can you start us off?
Cat Harper:
Absolutely. So when we started talking about this last October, it started out as a way for somebody in Istanbul to be able to enjoy John Steinbeck and all of those things that maybe they can't hop a plane and come over and see. And then as everything started developing with COVID, it became more of a way for compromised audiences, people who are not going to be able to go out as freely for the next year or even two years, won't be able to attend the events that we're going to have virtually or in person, will not be able to come and enjoy us at the museum really at any time, because there, feel compromised or they don't feel comfortable or safe in some way.
That was an extra way for them to keep in touch with us, get benefits from a membership, an affordable membership and still get the quality. And so that's where we really started to tailor it, not just to our foreign visitors, but to maybe somebody who's in our own backyard who can't come out and see whatever we have going on at that time.
Dan Sullivan:
That's great. Thank you for sharing that. Kara and Sarah, how have you approached this? Like what are the goals? and while you may not be offering a fully virtual membership level right now, what are your goals around those as you start to move in a direction like that, Sarah, do you want to start?
Sarah Owens:
Sure. Our goal was to keep in touch with our current members. We know that we sheltered in place pretty early. We were in mid March, March 13th. I think it was the first day we were closed. And since we are a very interactive musewe knew that we'd probably be closed longer than a lot of other institutions in the Bay Area. So it would be very important for us to still somehow provide something for our members, even though we're closed. So that was the priority and to engage members in a new way and keeping the Exploratorium top of mind, especially since we've got some fundraising efforts going out now and we need our renewal rates to stay up. So that was our primary vehicle for creating this online content.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. And Kara, how about that?
Kara Fikse:
Yeah. Like they both said our primary goal was to just keep people connected to the museum because our, I would say our general members, they value the free admission, probably most out of the benefits that they get as part of their membership. So we definitely wanted to keep the value of membership going in their minds and keep them engaged. so that was probably our primary goal, but I think if we continue these long term, like I'm hoping that they will definitely be sort of a supplementary engagement tool that we use alongside of our onsite events, because we are seeing a lot of pros to virtual events that onsite events just can't replicate.
So hopefully there'll be in the mix for the long term. And then in terms of reaching new audiences, I think that's been just a lucky side effect. We have seen probably more folks without Pittsburgh zip codes tune in to two events. And then I've enjoyed just being able to invite the family and friends and colleagues of our speakers and presenters. For example, last night, we probably saw some registered attendees from Idaho for the first time, and that was the family of one of our speakers.
So that's just been a small way for me to say thank you for your time. but also I think expand a little bit to sort of our outreach and our brand, if you will. So it's just sort of a side effect, like I said to what we're doing.
Dan Sullivan:
Well, I think you're making a really important point, which is the idea of a virtual membership level transcends the boundaries, the physical boundaries of the museum. So that's an opportunity for you to extend your reach. I mean, that's, and at Cuseum we talk a lot about this kind of museum 2.0, a lot of cultural organizations as they seek to expand their audiences outside of the immediate communities that surround them, what are some great creative ways to do that? And using a virtual membership level is one way of being able to say, "Hey, if you like the cause and you want to support the institution, but you're never going to physically visit, this is a great way to be able to do that." So I think that's very much an interesting point.
There's a question from the audience, and this is a tough one, but I think everybody's wondering this, and I'm going to start with you on this one. Cat, but how do you even go about pricing a virtual membership? Where do you even start? What do you have to think about? Can you talk a little bit about?
Cat Harper:
Absolutely. So like I said, we have the benefit of the fact that we've been talking about this for six, seven months now. Whereas a lot of people are like just catching up and we started talking and doing some research and there are lots of museums around the world who are already doing this, who already have it in place. So we did kind of piggyback on their ideas and figure out, what do we want to do with this? How do we want to present it? What kind of format? And eventually what we want to do is we want to have a very robust page that people can log into and choose which category they would like to explore, whether it's artwork or artifacts or lectures or performances, and be able to tap into all of these different levels of information and entertainment.
And so we decided that we were going to try to make it affordable. So our virtual membership is $30 per year. And right now it is totally available to our regular members. They get there, we'd use constant contact and we send out every Monday, we send out that extra information and it's an add-on that they can add on to their regular membership after this period, after we reopened, we will offer it as an, as an add-on.
I've had a lot of people ask me if they thought regular people around would stop coming. I don't see that happening. People really still do want to see museums in person and to see those items and to talk to those people and find out more information, but it is going to help those who may not be able to get out to a museum who do live in our area for the next couple of years, still have that connection. So I think that's a really good thing.
Dan Sullivan: Absolutely. And the affordability perspective is huge. So you're talking about under $3 a month to be able to still support the cause, support the mission, be a part of something. That community component is a really big one of this definition of these are people that I really aligned with who are the other members of this institution. And then we are, we're kind of united by our common interest, common support of that specific organization. So that's huge.
And we've also seen the San Antonio Zoo has done a similar type of thing where they had a membership level that was about $3 a month. So similar type of price point, but again, trying to find ways to make it as accessible as possible for as many folks as you can possibly reach. Kara, Sara, either one of you started to give some thought into how you'd price a virtual membership level?
Kara Fikse: I was taking notes. So not quite yet. I don't think we're quite there yet. It would be largely dependent on what all would be included in that virtual membership and how many virtual events would be packaged in there and what, how else we expand maybe this virtual content, and then also the costs, there is a cost to the webinar add-on, it's about $1,400 a year, obviously staff time and things like that would need to be factored in.
We are doing a roundup option to free registration. So people can make an additional gift when they register. I think we make a few suggestions, but it's just a blank field that people can give through. And we in a month and a half, I think we've already covered our webinar costs just through that, having that, be available. And it's been nice for us to see a lot of members who aren't typically thinking philanthropically to kind of show a little extra support and finally make some money from events instead of just spending it. But so we have covered the webinar fee, which has been great costs and then also what the offerings would factor into the price, but not quite there yet.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. And Sarah, how about on your side?
Sarah Owens:
Yeah, I think similar to Kara, it would depend on what we put into it and what was offered. We haven't discussed the specifics of whether or not we're going to go with a virtual membership yet. So I think it would just depend on a lot of that. I would start looking at other local organizations that are offering digital content as a gated priced thing. I think there's a few in the Bay Area already, so I'd probably start by doing my local research. I know there's a foundation called Gray Area that is doing some online programs and charging for those just to see what was out there and what we would be working with.
Dan Sullivan:
Yeah, for sure. And it is such an interesting idea and obviously a virtual membership level is going to be most likely to be priced at the lowest out of all of your membership offerings in almost all situations. The whole point is that it's the most accessible membership level that you can offer. But I think that Kara hit on a really important point, which is a great way to get people in the door and then we'll figure out a way to convert them later.
Personally, I'm a victim of this. I support all these different organizations and my MO is I like to do small monthly donations to a whole bunch of different places. And then every once in a while, you'll get some type of campaign or something that really kind of, strikes at your heart strings or, or pulls your heartstrings. And you're like, "Oh, that's amazing. I'm going to do that."
And then all of a sudden you've made a donation. So I really think that the virtual membership level is a great opportunity to expand reach, but also get attention, get new eyes on your cause and then figure out ways to convert them later on. So I've got a question for Cat, being a relatively small institution, we get a lot of questions from organizations of similar size. Do you have any advice for launching a virtual membership initiative as a small organization, specifically related to resources, time allocation, getting things off the ground? What does that look like for a smaller organization?
Cat Harper:
Well, we found out that over the years, I mean, we've been around for a long time that over the years we had already a lot of items stored, at least files or images, things in our archives or from past smaller exhibitions that we have put together that we already had this stuff in our files to begin with. So that gave us a nice pool to start pulling from. And then we started talking to each other and having these great, like brainstorming sessions on what we're going to do. How are we going to make this interesting? And of course for a small nonprofit, so how can we do this for cheaper free?
And so reaching out, as you were saying, you have a lot of connections around you who can help you do these sorts of things. For instance, we are talking right now with a historian who wants to do kind of a walking tour of Monterey and Salinas and talking about where John was, where Ed Ricketts was, how this whole history pulls together. And that doesn't just help us, that helps our entire community because it makes this a wonderful place to look like they want to come visit. I know that I've been checking out a lot of different content from museums and wildlife centers all over the UK recently, that's been my guilty pleasure and I've now got a list of places I want to go in person. So, that's the advantage of this. We're creating content, not just to inform and entertain right now, but to invite people to our corner of the world.
Dan Sullivan:
Absolutely. So let's carve a question here from the audience. So this is from Jennifer Pecora. And the question is, Are you polling your memberships to find out what kinds of benefits are the most valuable? How do you adapt to the majority of memberships you want to see versus what you're able to do? Again, there comes up that question of resources versus, what's practical. Anyone of you can jump in on this one.
Kara Fikse:
We did do a conjoint test I know right before all of this, or we were going to roll out based on that. So I don't know exactly what the results were, but we did, do a deep dive into what kind... Potentially restructuring our levels based off of what people found the most valuable and even maybe striking a few benefits and different categories. So we definitely have looked at that recently, but obviously plans have changed. So I don't know exactly when we'll kind of revisit that.
Dan Sullivan:
Definitely. Sarah, have you done any polling of your members at all?
Sarah Owens:
We do every couple of years, we do a more a group number survey that tells us about which benefits are ranked higher than others, obviously free admission always is at the top, but in this new landscape, we are going to launch a survey monkey survey to some of our members pretty soon, and that will be focused on online programs and what people want to see. So we're proactively asking them if we created these types of programs, would you be interested? And I hope that will help inform your programming in the future.
Dan Sullivan:
And Cat, before you jumped into this, did you do some surveys?
Cat Harper:
We did. We started the first of last year and just started doing questions of all the visitors who would come in and our members and asking them what they were looking for. And then in October, we kind of threw out the idea of the virtual membership. Would you be interested? Would this be something that would be a value to you? And while we got back a lot of feedback of, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. we had no idea it was going to be as popular as it has been. We're very proud to say that this is really working and people are really enjoying it. ithink for such a small museum the hardest thing to do is get visibility. And I think any way that you can come up with a new way of getting visibility and getting your name out there and having anybody stop by, I think it's a good thing.
Dan Sullivan:
Absolutely. So let's grab at another question from the audience, we've got about 10 minutes left. First one is our virtual offerings different for virtual members or are they the same for all members? So I think this idea of differentiating between a totally virtual member versus a physical member, Cat, do you want to start us off there?
Cat Harper:
Like I said, right now, they're both getting the same thing. Virtual members are going to get the same thing that our walk through the door members are getting, are getting, because we're closed. Once we reopen again, regular members will not get those emails anymore. Only virtual memberships will get those emails and then our regular members can choose at that point to make that an add-on to their membership. So, yeah, right now everybody gets everything so to speak and we're having really good feedback about that.
Dan Sullivan:
That's great to hear. And Sarah, Kara, anything you want to throw in there?
Kara Fikse:
I would imagine for us, it would probably be added value to general members and then have it be a membership level option for people as well, unless the science center figures out how to clone me, but I think we wouldn't necessarily want to create all that virtual content and have it just be for a select group or a segment of our membership. I think we would want it to be more widely available than that. I'm speaking off the cusp here, but so it could turn out differently, but I would imagine that it would just be rolled into sort of what we're offering our members now. And then if we had a fan out in California that wanted to be a Carnegie museum member, they could become a virtual member and just have access to that virtual content.
Sarah Owens:
I think what we would do would probably be similar to Kara. It would be an addition because if you're going through all of the work of creating this content, then opening it up to as many people as possible in different ways makes sense. And if there are supporters that are not local, then it makes sense for them to be a digital member. And it's a way to support where they don't count on the pre-admission as a benefit.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure.
Kara Fikse:
But you also have a lot of donors that travel for the winter or snowbirds and have expressed interest in even just for part of the year having a virtual membership. so there's definitely even in our regular members, some value in the offerings.
Dan Sullivan:
Absolutely. Here's another good one. This one is from Marina. And her question is I work at an art museum that does a lot of free programming and barely has a membership base. However, we need it. Tips about how to start creating it? What kind of offerings would be recommended that don't put too much economic strain on the organization until the program can generate enough funds. Anybody can jump in on this, Cat you probably know best though.
Cat Harper:
Well, we're not a free museum. We do charge admission fees. But I do know in talking to a couple of other free museums, one of the things that they have started is they do offer a membership. They offered membership that includes narm and or roam. So it's at that level. So they're supporting that museum but they're also getting the benefits of the reciprocal. So, that might be a way of marketing a membership to your small free museum that they get into all these other museums for free and being able to way of building your own membership. I think that's the only thing that comes to mind.
Dan Sullivan:
Absolutely. So here's another question. How does fulfillment work for a virtual membership? Do members get a card? Do they get a credential? Do they get a digital card? What does that look like, for you?
Cat Harper:
So right now, like I said, they're just added to our constant contact list. But at the time when we do change over to a gated portal on our website, at that point they will be getting a digital membership and they will have their membership number and their own particular password to use.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. And Kara or Sara, how about on your side, have you thought through fulfillment at all about how this might look?
Kara Fikse:
We do have a mobile card currently. So I imagine just the portal for that. We might have to beef up a little bit or maybe reimagine, but we do have a mobile card that exists. Like I mentioned, all of our monthly members or auto renewals as we call them only have the mobile card. So I think if we went the virtual membership route, we would definitely utilize the mobile card that we already have currently.
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. So here's another, go on Sarah.
Sarah Owens:
We're thinking about moving to a virtual card for all of our memberships, not just if we do create a virtual membership, it would be just purely a digital card and stop printing cards unless people request. So I think that would probably carry over.
Dan Sullivan:
Definitely. So this question is from Hannah Barber. And can anyone speak about using a platform like Patreon for online membership subscribers? Would love to hear opinions on subscription services for membership, and those that are listening that aren't familiar with Patreon, it's a pay platform where you can access gated content. So are any of you doing any type of online paid content right now? I don't think so.
Kara Fikse:
No of course for our ticketed programming, but-
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. Yeah. Personally from my side, there is so much amazing content available out there through so many platforms. It might be challenging to get folks just specifically on that side or that level of quality of the content would need to be very high and consistently stay that way for attention, just from my opinion. So I have one more question for our panelists. What is one big takeaway, we've got a couple minutes left. What's one big takeaway that you would want each person watching to be able to consider and kind of bring back to their organizations, after watching this? Cat, do you want to start us off?
Cat Harper:
Absolutely. I would say don't rush into anything. Take your time as a group, especially if you're a very small museum and figure out what you do want to offer and figure out what you already have in your files that you can pull up immediately to use conveniently because that's going to be your most cost effective way of kickstarting a virtual membership and kind of forecast where you think you want it to go and then start working on it slowly.
Dan Sullivan:
Awesome. Sarah.
Sarah Owens:
I think now is a good time to be nimble and to be bold because I think there's a lot of forgiveness out there because everyone is new to this new weird world. So if you try something and it fails, I don't think you should feel bad about that. I think it's a good time to just see what you can accomplish, see how it works, see if it sticks on the wall and go for it because people out there are hungry for stuff to do. And I think they're hungry to interact with our institutions and to hear from us. So any way that we can do that and then build on that and iterate to make the programming better will be good.
Dan Sullivan:
So key. There's so little to lose. It's just an experiment. If it doesn't work, you just go back to what you were doing before and Kara, how about you? Take us home.
Kara Fikse:
Yeah, I would reiterate the idea of being flexible and experimenting. And this has been one grand experiment for us. And I think really embracing that as an organization has been really helpful towards us being able to launch all these offerings so quickly. And I think also just think a little bit outside the box in terms of what staff you're bringing into the picture. There could be a great public speaker amongst your organization that would just love to host or be put in a more public facing capacity. You could have mentioned our mechatronics engineer or just staff that may not have the opportunity to get out in front of people and share what they do.
I, this is a great opportunity to kind of tease out all of those little hidden gems in your institution, I think, or it has been for us. So I say in terms of virtual events, virtual offerings, just go for it and kind of embrace the adventure because as Sarah said, it's a new frontier for all of us and members just love the opportunity to stay engaged. It's a distraction, it's entertainment, people are learning. So they have been very forgiving in terms of any technology hiccups or, or a little glitches and things like that. They just are excited that we're making the attempt or in my mind more than an attempt to keep them connected to the museum. So go for it
Dan Sullivan:
For sure. Once again, so little loss, if it doesn't work, whatever, at least you tried. Okay. A couple of quick things before you go, we will have a recording of this webinar, posted on the Cuseum website later today. And we also have it linked to our shared Google doc with Coronavirus resources, tons of people in there like hundreds or thousands of posts, feel free to go in there, share your ideas, contribute. We'd love for that.
This is membership Mondays, even though it's Thursday, we have another membership Mondays actually on Monday. And that's the onsite member experience after Coronavirus closures. We're going to be talking all about, how do you even interact with these members? Now there's a registration link. It's floating away, but it's in the chat. And then last but not least, we've got another new resource. We did a collaboration ebook with Blackbaud. It's called the Ultimate Guide to Surviving and Thriving as a Cultural Organization in the 21st Century.
It's available for download. It's on the Cuseum website. There might be a link in the chat. I'm not sure it's going to be so fast, but anyway, thank you so much to our panelists. Cat, Kara, Sarah, gold, amazing insights. Thank you so much for being here and everyone who's tuned in. Thanks so much. Have another safe and have a great weekend. I don't usually get to see that. Have a great weekend and I will see you all on Monday. Thanks y'all.
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