In 2019, Hamilton Civic Museums (4 historic houses, a children's museum and a historic technology museum) set up a trial program with the Hamilton Public Library. Upon presentation of a public library card, the bearer received free regular admission (excluding special events, workshops &c) to any of Hamilton's museums. Over the first 12 months, we saw teenagers showing up on their own (ie, without parents!) to visit museums, saw a modest shift in visitor demographics towards those who might not otherwise have visited and/or been reached by our conventional marketing channels and incurred a great deal of goodwill from our library partner, as they saw library card registration increase more than 40% during the pilot program. As soon as we're open, we will be renewing the agreement for an additional two years. We're also intending to work with the library to capture demographic data about library users (barcodes collected by us and transferred to the library, which will provide anonymized statistics back to us) to better understand what types of visitation the program is attracting, and to see if there are ancillary benefits (i.e., parents and children visit for free and then sign up for a fee-based workshop or camp experience prompted by their exposure to the museum during the free visit). NB that this program self-selects for resident as opposed to tourist audiences because library cards are only available to those with a Hamilton mailing address, and also avoids the difficulty of defining "family" because each library user presents their own card.
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John Summers
Manager, Heritage Resource Management
City of Hamilton (Ontario, Canada)
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-04-2020 08:31 AM
From: Vivian Zoë
Subject: Org/Library Membership
For $100 annually, we offer libraries two membership cards which they can circulate as they see fit. The cards allow the holder entry free of charge. Children under 12 are allowed in free of charge normally. Our "nut" does not depend upon admission fees, though, and we are much more eager to have people visit than have their money. ... Hopefully that will begin again soon...
Vivian F. Zoë, Director
Slater Memorial Museum
108 Crescent Street, Norwich CT 06360
860-425-5560 vox
860-885-0379 fax
"Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work," Chuck Close, 2003
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Original Message:
Sent: 6/3/2020 3:44:00 PM
From: Keshia Mejia
Subject: Org/Library Membership
Does anyone have experience with offering a Library Membership or organization Membership? What is your process?
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Keshia Mejia
Membership & Individual Giving Assistant
Storm King Art Center
New Windsor NY
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