I recently spoke with a zoo director who said that their admission is ~$20.00 for an adult but the average price they receive per an adult is closer to $8.00, due to coupons, free days, and frequent visits from members.

One of the main reasons I think museums (ZAMs) offer discounts is because attendance is an measure of “success.” We are always asked how many people did you see last year but never asked how many artifacts did you acquire.

What is your take on selling memberships under the “if you visit twice a year, it pays for itself” statement?

While I generally believe that it is a bad practice to promote a broad discounting strategy, I agree that there may be appropriate opportunities to selectively deploy coupons based on a number of considerations. Even in these instances, I still think it’s important to keep in mind that if an organization uses a discounting strategy to measure the ROI of its social media, then it still risks devaluing its own content. It is hard to target a discount with surgical precision – and the very connected nature of social media invites sharing and pass-along that may creep beyond the intended recipients (folks will “like” you for the discount, though they aren’t evangelists for your cause).

Instead of coupons, I tend to favor “value adds” or other premiums that reward loyal social media followers with unique engagement opportunities and/or experiences. Much like coupons, these are easily trackable and serve the positive function of engendering additional storytelling opportunities for key evangelists (but don’t devalue admission). In the end, I think that a lot of the outcome depends on positioning. If you frame the coupon as a reward for engagement, then it may be perceived differently than as a pure discount – especially if it’s a one-time experiment to measure ROI.

In response to especially the title I’d like to stress though that offering coupons might occasionally be Good Business, especially if you want to check on the ROI of your online marketing strategies. Do people visit more often if they get a tiny discount on Facebook for a special event? So, can we get people to visit us because of our Facebook efforts? Coupons can answer these very important questions.

(A “free” alternative is telling different entrances or starting hours to people at different platforms, although this might confuse some people.)

The average person visits a museum once every 19 months (this cycle is longer or shorter depending on the individual person and museum – but that’s the US average). This average holds true whether visitors pay for the special exhibit or not. In other words, people will consider themselves visitors if they interact with free exhibits just as much as if they interact with paid exhibits…but the museum doesn’t derive the same level of financial support. In other words, these museums may not be maximizing their paid visitation. (Of course, several museums have developed appropriations, endowments and sponsorships to subsidize this loss of earned income – and these contributed revenues may or may not effectively offset the earned revenue from ticket sales. However, we often find evidence of price inelasticity in museum admission policies. In other words, the volume of visitation to a museum may not be correspondingly responsive to a change in admission price…including free. The implication of this finding for several museums has been that “free” does not necessarily equate to “significantly more people.”)

The bottom line of this post still holds true for “free” museums, and, more importantly, data suggests that social interaction is a far more critical component of visitor satisfaction than WHAT folks come to see (with>what). Regardless of their respective admission policies, museums must strive to develop and maintain a reputation as a facilitator of high-quality interactions to remain relevant and viable.

Your position that these museums might be better off if they depended on regular museum admission works for museums that incorporate general admission. However, there has also been a trend amongst some museums to do away with general admission. Those museums, in particular, depend on ticketed exhibitions.

Have you done any research on free admission museums? Do you know what is the impact for free museums?