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Even The Wealthy Met Museum Has Decades Of Serious Deferred Maintenance

July 29, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

I am not sure how I came across it, but Yale University’s School of Management published a series of stories about The Business Behind The Arts. One of the stories briefly profiled Daniel H. Weiss who was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2015 to 2023.

He addresses a number of topics, including balancing the mission and purposes of museums against their need to be sustainable. He gives a number of examples, including how the Met had spent seven years preparing a Michelangelo exhibit that was on display for three months. He says it advanced the mission of the museum, but was not a good financial decision.

It was interesting to get his perspective on this balance. Especially since during his tenure The Met made the controversial decision to eliminate the pay-what-you-wish admission fee for anyone who didn’t live in New York. Weiss talks about how he had enjoyed free admission at the National Gallery when he was an undergraduate in Washington, D.C., and how when he attended Yale, the director of Yale University Art Gallery argued the Met should be free given how wealthy it was.

However, he said once he took the helm of the Met, he discovered the budgets were more constrained than most people imagined. Apparently admission revenue had declined by 67% over the previous decade.

He was also faced with a significant amount of deferred maintenance. Apparently, the skylights over the European Painting Gallery were supposed to have been replaced during President Lydon Johnson’s administration. As you might imagine, deferring repairs was undermining the infrastructure of the building and not just threatening the collection with leaks. It ultimately cost $150 million to replace the six acres of skylights and associated HVAC, roofing, etc. He says there was not much philanthropic support for the project so I infer that the admission revenue is helping to pay down that cost.

The Yale article includes a video they made to accompany a case study on the Met which includes a backstage tour of some areas, including the skylight area.

Arts Facilities, Fundraising, Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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What’s Member/Non-Member Age Gap?

July 28, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Last month Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience provided an analysis of exhibit and performing arts audiences from the perspective of age. (sub required)

It will come as no surprise that older generations (GenX, Boomer, Silent) participate more relative to their representation in the general population than Millennials and Gen Z. Similarly, Boomers and Silent Generation are more likely to be members of an arts and cultural organization relative to their representation in the general population.

What I found interesting was their analysis of the average age of attendees with memberships vs. non-members. For exhibit based entities, botanical gardens had the largest delta with 13 years between the average of 57 for members and 44 for non-members. Members of other exhibit based entities ranged in average age of 38-45. Average age for non-member attendees to art, natural history, science museums was 8-9 years. For history, zoos, aquariums it was 4-6 years.

Children’s museums were the only outlier in that non-members were on average 1 year older than members. That’s understandable given younger people tend to have kids who visit children’s museums.

For live events, symphony members were 57 on average while non-members were 48. Live theater had the biggest delta with members at 48 and non-members at 37. All other live performance had members at 46 and non-members at 36.

While I am really summarizing the data since they don’t permit reprinting their charts, this can begin to give a bit of a baseline against which to compare your organization’s internal data about members and non-members.

As colleagues like Ruth Hartt have pointed out, you can’t build a marketing plan around targeting demographics because you have no idea WHY people are deciding to participate.

The IMPACTS data notes that a sense of belonging and supporting the mission are among the top two responses people given when asked what the primary benefit of being a member/subscriber is. The younger a person is, the more importance they place on these two elements.

Both tend to be more important to members of exhibit based organizations rather than performance based organizations. The IMPACTS folks suggest this may indicate there is benefit for performing arts organizations to remind people they are supporting a unique mission in the community.

It’s not binary – members want to feel like “insiders” at the organization … but they also want to know that their memberships are making a difference. Today’s members may be primarily transaction-motivated or mission-motivated, but members are increasingly identifying as both. Smart cultural organizations provide members with the opportunity to know that they are bettering their communities by helping to support an organization’s mission.

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Audience Relations, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR

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No Refunds, Did You Buy The Insurance?

July 22, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Last week Seth Godin made a post about how companies use technicalities in their terms of service (TOS) to generate more revenue after quoting a low initial price.

There was one statement he made that started me pondering its applicability to refund policies many arts organizations have.

The metric is simple: every time you have to tell people they should have read the TOS, then either your marketers or your legal team has made a mistake. You’ll need a TOS, sure, but you don’t want to rely on it to communicate.

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In the last decade or two I have tried to be relatively forgiving about refunding for death, injury, and illness–which was especially important during the Covid pandemic.

Recently, the requests for refunds are tending to be a result of inattentiveness during the online purchase process. It makes me wonder how often people are paying far too much for things they didn’t intend to buy.

Recently we had someone purchase tickets for an event she thought was the same week rather than three months hence. The most frequent issue we run into is people who purchase tickets together in the orchestra of the venue and then an errant single seat in the balcony. My theory is that they are buying tickets on their phones and are brushing the screen and selecting another seat. But apparently they are not checking the shopping cart before completing the transaction and not noticing they are purchasing more ticketing than they intended.

We have a new ticketing system which offers insurance against any unforeseen circumstances that may arise. I am not sure if being inattentive during the purchase is covered. The fact the insurance is available to purchase does provide ticket office staff with an out and an ability to say “we have a no refund policy, did you purchase the insurance?”

But like Godin’s comment about the TOS, that feels more like a way to generate revenue rather than a way to create relationships and trust.

Audience Relations, Marketing/PR

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Do High Levels Of Creative Activity Help People Feel They Have The Capacity To Be Creative?

July 21, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

This is definitely anecdotal rather than backed by any data, but based upon observations across a few decades and working at three-four different organizations, there seems to be a degree of “a rising tide raises all ships” in regard to ticket sales. While audiences certainly have a limited amount of time and money to spend on participating in different arts and cultural experiences, it seems like more activity may be better than less when it comes to stimulating interest.

Last week we went on sale with tickets for our upcoming season and I was generally pleased with the rate of ticket sales for upcoming events. One thing I noticed though was that there was also a surge of sale for some of the rental events coming up between now and the end of the year. In some cases, shows that had been on sale for weeks but hadn’t had anyone purchase started to see purchases.

I have seen the same thing occur in other communities in which I have worked. There is also something of a reciprocal effect when rental partners are selling well or have a series of events occurring in the course of a weekend, my organization will see sales increases for our events.

I have observed something similar on the creative side which has convinced me that a vibrant arts and culture scene requires a lot of competing activity. I have worked for organizations where the administrative and creative staff have been highly degreed and credentialed and found myself wondering why less interesting and innovative work was happening despite having little competition that might require them to be cautious versus organizations where the participants were less credentialed and there was a lot of competition.

I came to realize these less credentialed people were participating in a lot of opportunities around the community. They were in improv troupes, Shakespearean plays, newly written/workshopped plays and musicals, singing cabaret, attending/performing in drag shows. When these folks created works of their own, it didn’t take much to see how these experiences informed their new creative endeavors. Not everything was brilliant, but you could see a lot of thought and work had been put into the storytelling.

I am sure some researcher can come up with a calculation that shows the sweet spot between where too little activity provides no incentive to do better and too much activity stifles innovation and chokes resources.

I have recently begun to generate a theory that a lot of creative and cultural activity in a community can help people feel they have the capacity to be creative. If there are only one or two prominent entities with highly credentialed creators, the general public can end up pointing to those organizations as the place where the people with special abilities and talent make art.

But if there are a lot of arts and cultural organizations providing different types of ways for people to express themselves creatively then there will be a greater chance for them to feel they have the capacity to be creative. This may manifest as opportunities to view or participate in performances and recitals , creating sidewalk chalk art, and contributing to pie and chili cook-offs. Where there are organizations that teach people to build bikes in impractical, but visually interesting ways and then parade around town while dressed in funny costumes. Or maybe hold soap box derbies with similar aesthetics.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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