Original Message:
Sent: 08-15-2015 12:14 PM
From: Yu-De Lee
Subject: Double counting program participants
Hello Wendy,
When we looked into museum performance in terms of revenue and attendance, ave. $/visitor is primary a revenue measure. If we think about all the visitors in a staged funnel, some of your programs bringing a great number of visitation (or you can call it initial visitor acquisition) might not have immediate positive impact on ave. $/visitor. But as long as you can confirm the initial visitor acquisition being successful, and know how you can convert these newly acquired visitors to be longer-term ones, and how you can increase per capita spending with other programs on these people at later stages, low or even negative ROI at these programs might be acceptable.
Furthermore, except admission ave. $/visitor, earned income from your shop, food services, and parking, should also be part of the analysis in order to model various visitor behaviors in your institution. For example, in a case we did we found family visitors have pretty low ave. $/visitor of admission, but they have higher ave. $/visitor spending on food and shop versus total population. So the institution decided to focus on growing ave. $/visitor of food service instead of admission. What we did was to devise a targeted promotion for families on regular coffee (high margin, does not hurt food service profit much if volume increases a lot) to drive visitor traffic to food services. When families buy coffee at promotional prices, revenue on other food items increased together, and is much more than making up the difference of lower ave. $/visitor.
A lot of these actions depend on your visitor portfolio, your programs, and other external factors, like weather, seasons, external events, making the forecast challenging. But your approach is certainly a great way to start with.
Let me know if you would like to discuss it in detail.
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Yu-De Lee
Co-founder, Viryaa Studio
Ann Arbor MI
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-14-2015 07:48 AM
From: Wendy Lull
Subject: Double counting program participants
I've enjoyed this discussion. We are doing some internal reviews of how we track/count visitors (site visits only). We have tried to find a formula to forecast admissions ($/visitor) and use it to assess ROI when considering future visitor programs, ad buys etc.
Here's what we came up with: total # people/total$ = ave. $/visitor. That takes into consideration discounts, adult/senior/child/military rates, passes etc.
Appreciate any feedback on this approach.
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Wendy Lull
President
Seacoast Science Center
Rye NH
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-07-2015 01:41 PM
From: Brian Johnson
Subject: Double counting program participants
We are looking to hear about other institutions' approaches to "double counting" education program participants. For example, if a teacher brings her class of 30 to your site two times during a year for two different education programs, do you report this as 60 participants in your annual figures, or just 30? We want to accurately represent our participation numbers, without reducing the potential impact of that data.
Many thanks,
Brian Johnson
Brian Johnson, Ph.D.
Director of Educational Research and Program Development
Wildlife Conservation Society 2300 Southern Blvd., Bronx, NY 10460 718.220.6899 bjohnson@wcs.org
Skype: wcs.org_bjohnson