Museum Data and What To Do With It – Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh Part Two

As a part of the “Museum Data and What to Do with It” series, AMT Lab contributor Kate Lin takes a look at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh’s journey of adapting to technology trends, and how Big Data is changing the museum’s operations. This post focuses on the visitor experience and development at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. More on how data influences the Museum's marketing efforts can be found here.

Unique Audience Structure and Visitor Experience For Children’s Museums

George Brzezinski, the Director of Visitor Services at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, oversees all aspects of visitor services at the museum from admission, cafes, to rental events. Brzezinski brought his previous experience in the sports management field into the non-profit world 12 years ago. When asked about the most significant difference is in terms of visitor service at the Children’s Museum compared to other organizations, Brzezinski said, “the age of our visitors, obviously.”

Many visitors at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh are below the age of ten, which makes customer service especially important. To serve its audience’s needs, the museum is constantly working on enhancing visitor experience by finding ways to speed up the admission process. “When the most common visitors are young parents with small children, there’s not much room for patience at the admission desk. Data and technology changed every part of our operations, especially in terms of admissions and membership,” said Brzezinski.

Qualitative data collected through surveys and social media channels is informative in providing the museum with customer feedback.  Parking fee collection is one great example of how the museum responded to customer feedback using technology. Instead of having people pay the parking fees at the admissions desk, visitors can now pay at the machines in the parking lot. This seemingly modest change has made the admissions process much quicker and more convenient for the museum members. Now members can pass through the desk quickly and start enjoying the museum without taking out their wallet and waiting for the payment to be processed. There’s also an app for people to download that remembers their car’s license plate number and credit card information, making the payment process as simple as hitting a button on their device on each visit.

Efforts and Challenges in Data Collection at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh

The unique composition of its audience also makes collecting data at the admissions desk a difficult task. As of now, the museum only collects zip codes from their patrons, unless they make a purchase at the museum. The target audience of the children’s museum are families with children. This audience group values efficiency and convenience more than others. If patrons purchase a membership, other data such as name, age, address and phone number can be collected. For regular visitors or non-members, it is almost impossible for the children’s museum to collect more data without sacrificing the quality of visitor experience.

However, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh has a department of learning and research that conducts audience surveys separately from the admissions process, attempting to make up for the information that is hard to collect at the front desk. The department utilizes special events such as birthday parties, reunions, and field trips, to gather feedback and shape profiles for different audience segments based on the results.

Data Integration: From Point-of-Sale E-Commerce Data to CRM Database

The implementation of Siriusware, an on-site ticketing and point-of-sale software, has significantly improved the data integration at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Siriusware delivers essential features required at every point-of-sale from online shopping, e-gift cards to admissions. Prior to Siriusware, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh had TicketMaster Vista, which did not automatically integrate e-commerce data with the museum database. Whenever a customer bought a membership online, the museum staff would have to manually enter the data into their database. With Siriusware, all point-of-sale data is integrated in real-time. An additional add-on connects Siriursware to Raisers’ Edge, the primary donor database at Children’s Museum, and allows the membership data to flow into the donor database and vice versa.

However, there are still some limitations of the current system to fit all the needs for Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Unlike some museums that outsource their café operations to a third-party provider, the Children’s Museum runs its own café service – the Big Red Room Café. Compared to other software packages that are designed for the food industries, Siriusware currently has limited functionality when it comes to managing food inventory.

Data Provides Insights for Development at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh

Gina Evans, the Director of Development, oversees the museum’s development efforts to raise two million dollars to support their annual operational budget, plus another one million to support other special projects and campaigns. Evans leads a four-person team, covering areas including corporate giving, individual giving, grant writing and special events.

Donor data is stored in the Raiser’s Edge database. The team tracks and analyzes the data to support the museum’s fundraising efforts. The team pays attention to trends over time, looking at the type of giving and how people give from year to year. Raiser’s Edge helps the development team tremendously for its ability to target each specific donor group differently based on the reports that it generates.

Examining data from Siriusware and MailChimp also provides the museum additional insights to detect potential future donors. It allows the museum to track people who make donations online or at the front desk and members’ activities in the museum. Mailchimp makes it easier to track the changes of the open rates and for the museum to test the effectiveness of different targeting strategies to those potential donors.

Mobile Bidding App Streamlined Fundraising Events

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh was one of the first cultural organizations to use GiveSmart, a mobile bidding app for its fundraising events. The app handles the guest registration and helps with the auction and bidding process. The customers can register on site or pre-register online in advance. It is a high functional tool to collect visitor data and streamline the event process by providing real-time data reports such as which items are more attractive to the audience or which ones are neglected. The real-time reports allow the museum to take immediate actions to further promote those neglected items on-site. The data collected by the app also provides the development team with valuable insights into the audience’s preferences and bidding habits when planning for future events.

It took the museum more time to set up the mobile app, it has made it much easier to manage the auction data and financials for the fundraising events.  Other Pittsburgh non-profit organizations, such as Society of Contemporary Craft, have just begun to use this app after consulting with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

Challenges to Utilize Data For Development Efforts At the Children’s Museum

Budget is always a concern in terms of acquiring other technologies or talents in helping the museum to interpret data. Aside from looking into possibilities to purchase more advanced software packages, the staff is continuously looking into maximizing the functionalities of their current resources. The development team is also looking to take more advantage of the crystal reports function, a reporting tool within Raiser’s Edge database that takes the reporting to a much more detailed level. 

According to Evans, the average members of the Children’s Museum remain for about four years and leave when their children are about eight years old, moving on to other organizations such as the Science Centers or the zoo. Those members might return to the museum when they have new children or even grandchildren. One of the things that the museum is trying to achieve is to establish the donor profile over his or her life time to establish patterns of behaviors and better understand its donors. “Currently we don’t have those data profile because our museum has only been around for 36 years, which is only a generation long,” said Evans.

Like many other non-profit organizations, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is challenged by not always having the ability to collect the data it needs or the capacity to digest and analyze the data it has. However, the museum has continued to demonstrate growth and a strong dedication to providing high quality content and service for its visitors. With standardizing data analysis being one focus for the upcoming 3-year strategic plan process, we will certainly look forward to the progress that the museum can achieve.

Banner Image "Lion Dance by Josh Gates" provided by Children's Museum of Pittsburgh

Cross-Sector Partnerships in the Arts: Fendi and the Trevi Fountain

At a press conference on Monday, Fendi designers announced the fashion house will finance the restoration of two fountains in Rome, the Quattro Fontane and the iconic Fontana di Trevi, or Trevi Fountain (built between 1732 and 1762). The US$2.9 million (€2.18 million), 20-month project will be completed in phases, as explained by Fendi designers Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi. These phases will include the re-waterproofing of the main basin, the cleaning of the façade and marble statues, and restoration of the gilded inscriptions. The Trevi Fountain will remain open to tourists throughout the restoration process (fear not tourists, fear not). This announcement comes at a time when the funding for and preservation of cultural heritage sites in Italy is uncertain. Fendi, however, is not the first big-brand fashion name to take action in the preservation of Italy’s cultural heritage. Tod’s, an Italian company producing leather shoes and bags, is currently financing the restoration of the Coliseum for US$34 million (€25 million). Further north in Venice, Diesel, an Italian fashion company, is funding the restoration of the Rialto Bridge for US$6.7 million (€5 million).

Of course, these generous donations do not go without recognition. For Tod’s, the funding agreement provides the company the rights to the Coliseum’s logo for 15 years, as well as branding Coliseum tickets with the company logo. Fendi’s sponsorship of Rome’s grandest fountain will be recognized by a small plaque to be placed near the fountain for four years.

The city council and Mayor Gianni Alemanno of Rome are hopeful these interventions will continue, as the preservation of the country’s past is in peril. Alemanno said, “Without similar initiatives, we won’t be able to save the cultural memory of our country.” Though council members are supportive of the private sector’s involvement in the preservation of Italy’s cultural heritage, some conservators are wary. They fear private-public partnerships will commercialize monuments of national pride, turning sites of inherent meaning and cultural significance into fashion advertisements.

The private-public partnership between Fendi and the Trevi Fountain is just one of many examples of a paradigm shift in the cultural sector regarding what Alemanno says is, “a new system of cultural patronage.”

Did Black Friday Shopping Kill Social Media Advertising?

“Marketers looking to get more the most bang for their buck with […] advertising might skip social media altogether” – Lauren Gores (Mashable)

The words stopped my social media manager heart cold – Facebook barely contributed anything to Black Friday sales and I can already hear the complaints now: Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. Everyone goes shopping on Black Friday. Everyone advertises on Facebook. If Everyone didn’t use Facebook to make purchasing decisions on Black Friday THEY NEVER WILL and we might as well give up now.

I could hear hypothetical red buttons being pushed as non-profits all over the country shut down their social media outreach. I was panicking. But were my fears entirely founded? Could non-profit organizations have a profit-driven relationship with social media, or is it strictly for community engagement?

This matter is irrelevant if non-profits are not using social media. Fortunately, the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report indicates that nonprofits are extremely present on social media. Ninety-eight percent of the nonprofits surveyed reported they had a presence on Facebook, and 72% maintained a presence on Twitter. This is especially impressive when you consider only 66% of American adults online use Facebook (Brenner) and only 15% of online adults utilize Twitter (Smith). Additionally, nonprofits manage an average of 2.9 pages on Facebook and 1.43 accounts on Twitter (“2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report”).

Why are these organizations so aggressively creating spaces for themselves in these realms? The organizations themselves identified marketing and fundraising as the top two purposes for maintaining a social media presence (“2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report”). These purposes are separate and not equal, however, as 93% identified marketing as a purpose while only 55% identified fundraising. Most reported that the responsibility for their social media pages fell to the Marketing department in 2012. This was a departure from every previous year, when the task fell to Communications. It is pretty clear that nonprofits feel their social media presences are vital marketing tools in a digital age.

Of course, I should return to the original question – should we panic at the concept of using social media to hawk one’s wares because mega retailers couldn’t hack it on Black Friday? Maybe. IBM reported that Facebook generated only 0.68% of online sales on Black Friday – less than last year’s Black Friday and actually much less than the sales generated on the Friday the week before (a whooping 0.82%) (“IBM 2012 Holiday Benchmark Reports”). Twitter contributed a grand total of 0% of the revenue – that’s not rounding down. That’s just a 0. Additionally, the IBM report also notes that the conversion rate of shoppers was only 4.58%, meaning that less than 5% of Americans who visited a webpage actually purchased anything on Black Friday.

Before anyone actually gives up hope for internet commerce, let’s consider these mysterious Black Friday shoppers. Marketers would have you believe it is Everyone who shops on Black Friday, as a matter of American tradition. This falls a bit short of the truth. A Gallup poll conducted before the actual day shows that only 18% of respondents planned to do any shopping on Black Friday (Newport). The majority of these respondents, 95%, listed the good sales/cheap prices as an “important reason” for their decision to shop on Black Friday. This is consistent with such a low conversion rate – potential shoppers visited webpages to search for deals and if they could not find them, simply left. So the idea of social media advertising being a failure is less true than it first appears: only a small percentage of Americans shop on Black Friday, most who visit a webpage do not purchase anything, so social media could not play a huge role in these sales because there was no huge role for it to fill. Additionally, as a Mashable article on the story pointed out, social ads “are a part of a larger strategy” that move people off their computer and into stores (Mashable).

Which brings me back to the question of whether or not social media should be used to sell things. The non-profits arts community has been considering this question recently as well. The past National Arts Marketing Project Conference (NAMPC) featured a panel on the subject. “Meet Your Customers Where They Live: How to Harness the Sales Power of Facebook” generated a lot of buzz on Twitter as attendees livetweeted the core messages of the panel. Twitter user Katy Peace (@katymatic) suggested the panel “has finally made a compelling case for this FB ticketing app.” Nella Vera (@spinstripes) quoted panelist Lisa Middleton in her tweet, “Lisa Middleton: FB sales for arts will succeed for same reason it failed for other retailers. Buying tix to cultural event is SOCIAL. #NAMPC”. Reinforcing the social element, Facebook profile pictures appear in the seat the user has purchased, creating a holistic, engaging experience.

“Tickets purchased on Facebook show Facebook profile pics in the seats purchased by that person. Brilliant. #NAMPC” - @ASC_CathyB

For me, that’s the rub. Social networks are called “social” for a reason. Social media marketing creates engaged online communities, and engaged communities will support a nonprofit. Only one third of the nonprofits who use Facebook to fundraise utilize individual giving (“2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report”). I think there is a real missed opportunity for non-profits to use social media as something more than marketing, and it lies with the few people who are willing to shop on Black Friday.

There is an interesting correlation between the users of social media and Black Friday shoppers. The largest group of respondents (34%) who indicated they would go shopping was ages 18 to 29 (Newport).  Social media usage tends to skew towards younger users as well; half of Facebook and Twitter users fall between the ages of 18 and 35 (49% and 60% respectively) (Hampton). These users fall within the age range of the Millennial generation. Millennials know what they want and are interested in advancing a nonprofit’s mission. The majority (55%) prefer to learn about a non-profit organization through social media and even more (67%) have interacted with a non-profit on Facebook (“The Millennial Impact Report 2012”). Millennials prefer to give donations to non-profits, and an incredible 75% of them gave a financial gift to an organization in 2011.

In theory, this seems like a perfect recipe for success. We have a large population (the Millennials), who likes giving to organizations, and we know how/where they would like to send their contribution. And yet, only about half of non-profits actually fundraise on social media and these efforts are coming from Marketing, not the Development department (“2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report”). Where’s the disconnect happening?

Perhaps it correlates to the size of the gifts: Millennials tend to give less than $100 to any single organization (“The Millennial Impact Report 2012”). Many small non-profits may not have the time or resources to invest in cultivating such small gifts. These organizations have to consider the future investment of these individuals, however. Seventy percent of Millennials did give online last year, they prefer to give online, and that probably won’t change any time soon.

At this time, a profit-driven approach to social media is still a fringe idea within the non-profit world. There are options for organizations who want to be on the cutting edge, like ticket sales and fundraising through social media platforms. These ideas, while nascent, have been used to a degree of success by the organizations brave enough to adopt them. For the rest of the non-profit community, utilizing social media as a marketing tool is still a good strategy. And, while it’s disheartening that social media contributed so very little to Black Friday sales, it probably is not relevant.