For art museums, building bigger is not necessarily better, and offering free admission may actually make the most financial sense. This is according to a new report by Remuseum, an independent research project organised by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The project aims to help museums think outside the institutional box.
The findings are based on publicly available and extrapolated data collected from 153 US art museums—a tiny sample size considering estimates that there are more than 35,000 museums of all kinds across the country—analysing their mission statements, operational funding and visitor figures.
“Art museums are a field about which there are a lot more opinions than data,” Stephen Reily, Remuseum’s founding director, tells The Art Newspaper. By collecting and publishing its findings (although not its raw data), the organisation aims to “help art museums become more effective in serving their missions and serving the public”, he says.
This is the second report released by Remuseum. Its first report found that museums have largely shifted their focus to serving and engaging the visiting public, rather than preserving a collection of objects. But at the same time, it found that many museums are not fully transparent about their operations, including information such as visitor numbers and financial statements.
Remuseum aimed to change that by building an internal “non-proprietary” database of museum operations and missions. It used the database for the new report to analyse how much institutions invest in the public, in the form of an average cost per visitor. This was calculated by dividing a museum’s total operating budget by the number of visitors, which was found on average to come out to $101 per visitor (ignoring the outliers, the median was $82).
“It's really important to point out that this does not mean that museums should reduce their investment in visitors,” Reily says. “It's really about, how do they want to allocate and evaluate those investments? If they want to maximise the quantity and the quality of those visits, how do you move beyond the assumptions, the norms, the anecdotes to the analytical?”
The next step was to directly question some of those assumptions through the data, starting with the age-old idea that bigger is better. For the past few decades, museums have been on an expansionist streak, building bigger and more expensive homes for their collections and programming, with the presumption that having more space would better serve the public. “In fact, in some important ways, the data show that it gets much harder to fulfill your mission the bigger you get.” Reily notes. (Crystal Bridges itself is currently undergoing a major expansion project.)
According to the report, museums with budgets below $12m spend an average of $73 per visitor, and those with larger budgets spend an average of $130. This is because, Reily explains, their expenses grow along with their footprints, and most museums do not get the added visitors to offset those increased costs. Unlike a business, which can benefit from economies of scale by producing things more cheaply by expanding operations, museums are impacted by “dis-economies of scale”, Reily says. “And again, it’s not to say there aren't reasons for museums to expand or grow their budgets or collections, but they should recognise they're imposing a challenge on their own mission by doing so.”
One way museums might overcome these “dis-economies of scale” is by offering free admission, which the Remuseum report finds attracts more visitors without increasing costs to the museum. For most museums, the cost per visitor was lower at institutions that offered free admission compared to those that charged entry fees. For example, at museums in smaller cities with lower budgets, the cost per visitor for those with free admission was $55 versus $77 at those that charged a fee. At institutions in larger cities with bigger budgets, the cost was $99 per visitor with free admission versus $128 for those with an entrance fee.
“It’s possible that free admission might be a path towards not just more mission attainment but sustainability for the field,” says Reily, explaining that since museums on average generate well below 5% of their total revenue from admission fees, it might better serve them to look for new ways to fill the resulting gaps in their budgets by eliminating those charges. “Maybe the next generation of philanthropy is looking for public impact, for inclusivity rather than exclusivity, for these metrics that museums may need to embrace to attract the support they need over the next decades,” Reily says.
Another important piece of the fundraising puzzle is how to grow membership to the museum without charging for admission, since free attendance is usually offered as a perk of becoming a member. “That is the holy grail,” says Reily, drawing on his own experience as a director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, which charges a $15 admission fee. “Membership was, frankly, more important than my admission revenue, not only because it was a bigger number but because it built relationships which could then grow into bigger philanthropic relationships.”
One example Reily says museums could look to is public radio, although he admits that this comes with its own challenges. “Most of us live in communities where anyone can have access to all of the content from public radio for nothing, and yet they managed to attract many of us to become members to support their ability to provide that service for all,” Reily says.
“My personal goal for museums is to ask: ‘What would it take to double attendance?’” Reily says. “If we could do that, we would leave behind many questions of relevance and whether or not museums should get public support, because we would be showing our relevance through the public that we seek to serve.”
