It’s been roughly three and half years since Will Cary and I started the 1stfans Membership program at the Museum; come July, the program will come to a close with a sunset—quite literally.
How do you end a program with personal ties? You throw a party and, in the case of 1stfans, that will be our annual rooftop ice cream social where we watch the sun go down; this was the scene at last year's event.
The program was announced in December of 2008 and was created for the Brooklyn Museum visitor who wanted something a little different than the traditional Membership structure. That very idea was the program’s greatest strength, but also its biggest weakness.
1stfans allowed us to see that most individuals looking to truly support us are interested in a deeper and more personal connection with the Museum and, often, people are looking for a more social experience within the structure of events and their relationship with the institution. It was the deep engagement of the program that was incredibly successful, but 1stfans was its own entity that was never fully integrated into the Membership structure. This separation made it difficult to gain awareness for the program and, as such, the growth rate stalled. Most importantly, this separation made it difficult to move 1stfans up the membership ladder—something that’s incredibly important in development and the lifecycle of membership growth. Simply put the program was too separate for its own good; keeping the program in a silo was the primary reason the program couldn’t succeed. The challenge for us moving forward will be to take what we learned about deep engagement and create new programs that both scale well and will be more a part of the institution as a whole—we’ve got some news on that coming next week.
I’ve already written a lot about our use of various social platforms to run 1stfans. If you remember, we found utilizing Facebook and Twitter to be overwhelmingly time consuming and shifted to Meetup.com in late 2010. The shift to Meetup made the administration of the program much easier for us and solved many issues, but in the end the choice of platform didn’t matter much outside of the administration of it. The growth rate was pretty much consistent from one platform to the other and the personal nature of the program remained as successful no matter which site we used. The age old finding that different people are on different platforms rang true—as we moved from one setup to the other, we saw a lot of new faces while many from the original disappeared. Moving platforms did shift the membership base, but the personal nature remained the same and the growth rate almost parallel.
At conferences, people always ask me how do you end something like this when you’ve got all these personal relationships and strong ties. My response has always been, “with transparency…and then you throw a heck of a party.” As 1stfans comes to a close, we’ve written each Member personally and our final event will be the ice cream social on the roof where we gather to watch the sunset from one of the best views in the borough. This event is the party that 1stfans look forward to all year and we’ll be sunsetting the program with a literal sunset.
For those of you who have supported the Museum by becoming 1stfans at one point in our program’s history, we can’t thank you enough; your support over the years humbles me personally. So many of you have become friends and are faces that I’ve come to look forward to seeing at our monthly meetups. I’m looking forward to sharing the roof with you one last time.
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
Shelley, thanks for blogging about this and, as always, for being transparent and honest.
When we started, one of the things Shelley and I talked a lot about was always the balance between the goals and ideas of the group and the implementation of it as a membership level. Because it was so different, in concept, than any other membership (at the Brooklyn Museum, or elsewhere), I felt like it was important, at the time, to keep it separate from the existing program. I can understand, though, how that would become more cumbersome to maintain over several years. And, as a fellow museum employee, I can appreciate the need to balance how the staff spends its limited time. In a Development office, that prioritization of time and resources is (rightly) measured by the amount of funds that are brought in. And 1stfans was never going to bring in millions! But it did bring deep and meaningful engagement with Museum constituents, which is another important goal of Development work.
As a Membership person, I believed in it because it created a channel for acquiring new members from the First Saturday audience. As a Brooklyn Museum employee, I believed it in because it made something inherently inaccessible—membership—accessible, which fell right in line with the Museum’s mission.
1stfans still looks to me, now from the outside, to be the most diverse—in every sense of the word–membership group at any museum in the country. I was proud of that when I was there, and I’m proud of it now. I follow a ton of former and current 1stfans on twitter, and keep a “1stfans” tag in my GoogleReader for several of their blogs. I had a blast with Shelley working with the group, and remain truly grateful that the Museum believed enough in its mission to let us try it.
Working on this with you has been one of the best experiences of my professional career. Cheers, Will!
I’m so so sad to read this, particularly now that I am a “museum professional.”
I was a big fan of 1st Fans from before it even launched, and enjoyed my time as a member when I lived in Brooklyn immensely. I learned so much about the museum, went to some incredibly unique events, and met lots of cool people. It was a great entry point for me, who was not in a position to become a full member at that time in my life.
All museums around the country share the same concerns and challenges as the BM. So seeing an innovative program like 1st Fans roll up is cause for reflection for many, many museum folk. I appreciate as always your honesty about the challenges and what worked and didn’t work.
Thanks so much Will and Shelly for your energy, creativity and hard work on 1st Fans over the years. The structures and names might change, but the reverberations of the positive energy, ideas and connections you created moves on. Drinks on me when you are next in the Bay Area.
I’ll definitely be taking you up on that, Rik, and it will be great to see you when I do.