Non-Traditional Revenue Streams for Cultural Attractions

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. Jenny today’s topic, non-traditional revenue streams for cultural attractions. I’m traditional, what does that mean? We talk a lot about traditional streams for driving revenue on the advertising side. We’re constantly focused on how do we place a billboard in a particular area of the market to drive new visitation or how is Tic-Tic going to be a platform that can help us drive ticket revenue or new event or exhibit opening. What do you do when you pretty much max out on driving visitation? Whether it’s a limitation for parking garage or a limitation for how many people you can actually bring through the gates for a special event. What do you do to continue driving revenue? Interesting conversation we’re going to have today. Yeah. Sneak peak, we brought in an expert to help us out with this. We’ll introduce John in just a second, but I’m super interested on his take on, yeah, it’s extra revenue is non-traditional revenue, but how he’s always tying it back to the mission. It’s not just like putting more, you know, part of my French here, putting more crap into the gift store, but is it the right type of thing? Is it the right idea that supports the mission? VR experiences. That’s something we’re going to be talking about. That’s something that can continually growing within the aquarium and zoo space. We’re going to talk about maximizing food and beverage in a mission-focused, mission-first type of way. And then this is something I think John’s going to be pretty unique in bringing to the table is this idea of licensing in some different ways on how to look at licensing to spread that mission, spread that brand and maybe even spread or grow non-traditional revenue. And as we always like to say, no margin, no mission. So these are going to be some outside of just paid advertising ideas to grow that margin and grow that mission. That’s a really good intro to it. I really like that. Let’s bring in John. John Aperimson, he’s been with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He’s been with the Nat Geo Museum, which is going to be opening up in DC. John, welcome to the show. It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. We’ve been trying to get you for a while, so I’m glad we made it happen. That’s true. So why don’t you take a minute and tell us about your journey. Like Monterey Bay, Nat Geo, tell us about you. Yeah. It was an odd tap on the shoulder from a recruiter while I was in the corporate world that was representing the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And I did not have any thoughts of entering the nonprofit realm. But once I went down for a visit and heard what it was that they were doing and realized that I could be doing primarily the same type of work. But for an organization that was doing good in the world, I was absolutely happy. I’ve been in that nonprofit sector ever since. Okay. Let’s jump into some of the non-traditional ways that you’re driving revenue for cultural attractions or you have been. I think a lot of things you talk about today are going to be pretty interesting, but I think one that everyone can get and probably are thinking of is, how were you? How did you introduce some new virtual reality experiences while you were at the Monterey Aquarium? Yeah. You know, this is an opportunity that I saw that was falling in line with the business plan that I had built for the aquarium, which was to do things that were outside of attendance-based models. We had plateaued it around 2 million visitors a year, which is a great number to have. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fabulous number for any organization to be able to boast about. The problem is if you’re wanting to grow earned revenue programs and audiences beyond that, you have to get creative. So, what I did is I built a business plan that focused solely on outside of the walls of the aquarium. It was an interesting afternoon with my son watching TV and we saw the Applevision Pro come on in its first iteration and being advertised. And he leans over to me, a teenager, and said, “Dad, you’ve got to see what this thing can do.” He’d been following it for a while. He’s an engineer tech kid. And so I went out to the Apple Store. They had some demos. I did a demo and I’m like, “Oh my God, this has so much potential.” Now, the argument is there on whether it has adoption rates and so forth. But the point being is that the ability to do spatial video and literally have a diver in a tank doing a feeding with the fish while they’re filming a spatial video and then having someone be able to experience that in their home is just about as immersive an experience as you could at the aquarium looking into a glass tank watching the same event. You can be in that suit feeding that fish, having them come up to you in your living room. The potential for me, what I saw for the aquarium, to inspire, which is our mission, inspire or their mission, I should say, since I’m over there, inspire conservation of the ocean. What better way? And something that could be done in someone’s home? The entry level there was fairly minimal. I was able to purchase top of the line equipment’s phone for the filming, for the spatial filming, because it was the newest phone at the time. The headsets and so forth, oh, seven grand, I think, total. And from an investment level for R&D work for a small aquarium, and that iPhone can be strapped on, you know, we made sure, waterproof and so forth, to go into the tanks. The exhibits team that was doing the R&D with that were just having a field day with it. And then, the beauty of this is if you do spatial video, it is regular video on all the other platforms. So once you get into that ecosystem, you still have the same video, there’s no loss there, but you have spatial video capacity if you have the headsets. So that was just one form of the VR, but that sparked the interest. So let me back this up. You brought a couple of iPhones. Had a diver wear that on his head, make a video experience, and then I can see that, you know, that Apple vision, the spatial idea, and then are guests getting to experience that? Is that something I can just do at home, like connect the dots back? That was right. So keeping in mind, this is part of an overall program of non-attended space revenue program. So I always like to multipurpose any endeavor that we do. And so it has to have a mission component, it has to have a revenue component, and it has to be able to expand our existing demographics. And so I saw this is an opportunity to do all of those things. And the ability to bring the Mono Rebe Aquarium in an immersive experience to your home, anywhere in the United States, if not internationally, to me was very enticing. And yes, was it early in the process? Absolutely, that’s exactly where I wanted to be. I wanted the Mono Rebe Aquarium to be at the forefront, be the innovator, be the, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, right? You know, the Apple Vision Pro hasn’t had the launch that they may have wanted, that, you know, is in cost being a factor and so forth. But those are the type of risks that you take, but, you know, the amount of investment was so minimal that even if that goes totally bust, and they’re still working at it now, the risk factor is almost negligible, except for the amount of time they were using with R&D, which there again was pretty minimal as well. And you’re still getting that video, right? So you can use it in other ways. Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, if you want to talk about more expansive programs, we were also working on a group VR experience that that was another part of a destination experience. So Mono Rebe Aquarium is part of Canary Row, and Canary Row expands, I don’t know, several blocks, and it’s very historical, and it is a destination in and of itself. Lots of shops, kind of a pure 39 if you’ve ever been in San Francisco, lots of shops, lots of things to do. And what we found was about 45% of the people that we were only getting, either 45% of the people that came to Canary Row. It was a huge opportunity to get an experience in front of those other people that weren’t coming to the aquarium for whatever reason, whether it was a time factor, whether it was a money issue, whatever it was, this was going to be a much quicker, easier, less expensive experience that was in alignment with our mission. It was our IP, it was our intellectual property, and it was a group experience. I mean, one of the things about VR is that it’s an isolated experience. This was a pot of six people that could experience the same thing at the same time, and so they could talk about it. It was a group engagement. The final part of this was to perfect this experience, to then package it, and be able to have it at other organizations of like mission. So other aquariums throughout the nation could have this rather than just an isolated experience that they have, many aquariums have that are VR experiences. This would be a Monoray Bay Aquarium branded science-based, mission-based experience rather than just, there’s anything wrong with this, but swimming with dolphins and so forth. This was much more in alignment with an ocean inspirational experience. It’s something that we had done already. We had created this. It was an exhibit that was called True Cross Cafe. It was like a little cafe where people could come sit down and learn about seafood through our seafood watch program. We made small versions of that exhibit that we have in the aquarium that could travel throughout the nation, and we were doing that for free, and this was before my time, I want to monetize everything. This would have been a VR experience that was a part of six people that could go to various organizations, could be a revenue driver for that organization and get the Monoray Bay Aquarium’s mission out and be a revenue stream for us as well. Yeah, you see them a lot. Zooz and Aquariums are using them more and more now, but they’re inside of the zoo and aquarium, not outside of the zoo and aquarium where you can actually go in and draw more people in new visitors’ ends. That’s really interesting. Seattle, I think the Seattle Aquarium has something that’s off-site that’s either just like a half block down. It is a separate that allows folks to be able to do that as well. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I mean, we talk about accessibility to the community. Monoray is one of the most expensive cultural attractions in the United States to get into. Now, here’s a lower price point that can reinforce the brand, spread that mission, get you those fields and maybe next time as they come back to Canary Row, they’re going to pull the trigger on coming and walk through the gates. Right. So, things such as the ability to do VR experiences outside of the aquarium brings new people, hopefully it floats all boats, right? So more people are aware of our mission, which means they could be potential donors or potential members, especially if there’s a digital membership involved. They can act on behalf of the ocean through our seafood watch program, which anybody can access, but many don’t know about. So it’s one of those things where you think in terms of how much more impact can you achieve with an effort such as this, just as an example, to expand audience, expand your mission, engagement with your mission, bring on donors, bring on, and then attendants, of course. Now people will have, I mean, my relatives can’t find Monoraby on a map. So it’s one of those things where you bring more attention, which is also why I was working on something such as a film program as well. All right. So you mentioned seafood. I know we’ve got food and beverage that we want to talk about. You know, I’m going to cheat to the audience here. I’ve got notes and all my notes that says no Coca-Cola. Come on, man. Come on, man. Come on. You know, lived in Atlanta forever. Talk to us about how you brought your food and beverage program a little bit more mission aligned. Absolutely. Well, super selling things, right? Whether it’s retail or in culinary. Problematic just based on what it is. But I wanted to make sure that the programs I was in charge of were absolutely as much an alignment with our mission as possible. One of our strategic goals for the Aquarium at the time I was there was to eliminate plastic pollution in the ocean, right? Lots of what we had in culinary and in retail had plastic, plastic packaging, what have you. So I made it my mission to eliminate as much as possible. Now, not an isolation. I was working hand in glove with our vendor. And I have to do a shout out if I can to our SSA partners where they were enthusiastic about and were also already engaged in that endeavor. They were just taking it upon themselves. It’s just our combination of efforts accelerated that program to which we eliminated all single use plastic, all plastic out of the front of a house and then started working in the back of the house as well. A little bit more problematic when you’re trying to eliminate plastic out of the back of the house culinary because a lot of it revolves around food safety, right? And so there are alternatives for, say, plastic wrap and so forth if you’re doing this is going to get a little in the weeds for those in the culinary world. But if you’re doing portions to ensure that you’re keeping consistency with amounts of food that are on a plate when you’re plating, it also holds down food costs, right? So you don’t have one person ladling on tons of product and the next one just need to do it proper. So portioning often takes plastic as well. There’s a lot of folks that are doing some really great work in terms of research on this front, but it’s not quite there yet. So that was an area of opportunity that we’re still working on. But when somebody comes to the Monoravia Aquarium, when they walk into our cafe, there are no plastic bottles whatsoever. And did you want me to talk about the Big Soda and I can keep it in that realm rather than any name brands? But. I don’t know Big Soda is Coca-Cola, but let’s talk about this Big Soda. Sprite is a Coke to me. Rubber is a Coke to me. Well, so there are research that’s done to identify the largest plastic polluters yearly, Minderoo and other organizations do similar surveys. There are several companies that consistently are in the top five for producing the largest amounts of single use plastic pollution in the world. Procompepsy happened to be on the top of that list. I’m not saying anything that’s not publicly available. And I made it my goal to eliminate all products from those two companies because he hears what I was thinking. I have a conservation science department that’s working so hard to eliminate plastics in the ocean. And here people come and they see those products in our shelves being offered couldn’t do it. So we eliminated all those products, finding alternatives that were organic and really good partners. And yes, they were slightly off brand. They were up and coming companies. And I was told I absolutely couldn’t do this because everybody would be up in arms. They couldn’t get their favorite products in the cafe. I was there for just about seven years now. We had achieved that probably in the last three years that I was there. And as far as I know, the Monorovic Ram was the only cultural institution anywhere in the world that I’m aware of that had zero Coke or Pepsi products anywhere in its culinary program that’s events, everything that events was a hard one, by the way. But when we got to that level, I was told that you can’t do it because everybody you have never heard a single person complain, not a single person and in the other thing about becoming more sustainable from other organizations that I’ve talked to is they’re concerned about profitability, right? How are we going to be profitable if we’re doing all this extra work, but no real. And we were able to increase our culinary sales by 46% over the top year prior to COVID. So that’s kind of the market because the big hit during COVID and then a rebuild. So the best year that we had, which was 2019, when we were able to, the year prior to me leaving, we are 46% over that. And that was in a much higher level of sustainability than any of those other programs. How can you attribute that like people, a lot of people drink Diet Coke? Well, you know, keep in mind, that’s not the only thing we did a lot of things to expand our culinary program, right? So we built out more satellite programs within the, we had just one cafe and you know, it got a huge choke right at noon and people gave up the lines were crazy. So we built first one satellite location where people could just get basic drinks, grab and go real quick. So they didn’t have to stand line to get if all they wanted was a water or you know, lemonade or something to that effect. And it took great pressure off of our cafe. The lines were shorter. So we didn’t have the loss and people were able to get, you know, quick drinks and quick grab and go in areas that were, you know, especially towards them were exhibits that were designed for children. You know, we had areas that were designed for that. And so it was looking for those additional areas of opportunity. Yes, that came with some change management though. This was outside the norm of what that organization did at the time. They wanted to minimize food and beverage throughout the, but this really was a guest satisfaction situation. People were hungry, their kids were, you know, crying. They just wanted to be able to either sit down or just grab something quick and they didn’t have the option to do that because they had to stand this line. You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions Podcast. Conversations on how non-profit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. Attend media is a media planning and buying agency, specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information, please visit attend.media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny. All right, John, let’s wrap up this conversation around food and beverage with some chocolate. We just kept back from the Association of Zezine Aquariums annual conference, Florida Aquarium hosted the big icebreaker, great event. And yeah, they handed out the kind of co-branded chocolate bars that they had worked on with another company. I know the chocolate bar was really good and you kind of started this program, right? So tell us about how you did this at Monterrey. Sure, absolutely. We had a new, thank you. We had a new exhibit that was going to be opening up called Into the Deep, which was an exhibit around the trench that goes out into the Monterrey Bay. There’s a whole ecosystem down there that we wanted to showcase the Monterrey Bay Aquarium showcase all aspects of the Bay except for that. So this was an addition to that. So we were brainstorming in terms of what can we do to help promote this? And I thought, well, food is always a great hook. And I would like to have, you know, there to be a local hook to it too. Brainstormed around a little bit. And I think it was my chief marketing officer that recommended show chocolate as a potential partner. This local San Francisco vegan chocolate, you know, does a fabulous job. I mean, the quality of their products are outstanding. And I know they kind of think outside of the box as well. So I contacted them and they first were like, sounds fun? How? And so I had a fabulous executive chef, chef, chef Matthew Bowden, who is with the innovation chef for SSA now, got him and the the chocolate, the chief chocolate, over at a show together to start brainstorming and what they came up with was a dark chocolate with seaweed with big sir salt. Now we had utilized culinary seaweed in our program and also big sir salt, which is an interesting story. If anybody wants to look up big sir salt, it’s got a great story of which we don’t have time for right now. But when we were finished, we came up with a product that had Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey Bay seaweed that was produced by one of the scientists from Monterey Bay Aquarium that went off to start this culinary seaweed program in Monterey. We used big sir sea salt along with show chocolate. And we called it deep dark and salty and it was produced in a limited quantity for the opening of Into the Deep. Right? It’s fabulous. It was met with such success. We gave it away as well as you know for favors and so forth. Utilized it in our events program all the time for add on you know buys for event planners for their guests. That’s it was such a success that SSA recommended it for the Oakland Museum I think or Oakland Zoo rather and they produced one and I thought that was fabulous. The idea that other zoos and aquariums could utilize that same type of a partnership to produce something like that was awesome. So they started producing them for other organizations and I contacted Shell and I said great job. They have books of chocolate. I thought there would be a great idea to have a zoo and aquarium book of chocolate from all the different zoos and aquariums that they’ve done partnerships with the Florida being one and what a great combination orange and chocolate is such a great great combo. But that’s how that started. Yeah. It was just a crazy idea that two chefs got together and said yeah let’s go let’s do this. There’s a YouTube video that tells the whole story which I’m happy to send. Yeah. That’d be cool. I am. I like chocolate. Also like beer and the potato gardens. We’ve seen a lot more of those kind of partnerships with the local brewery bringing in some kind of botanicals to incorporate the beer. If we can get aquariums, he’s all chocolate and garden beer together. Now we’re talking. All right. You know, Cho does do nibbs for beer making. That’s like one of their larger partnerships. Huh. All right. I want to get on. You can figure that out. All right. Monterrey, you’ve guys have done some interesting stuff in terms of licensing. Now, you’ve got a national brand. Your institution is very well attended. Talk to me about some of the extra cool stuff you’ve been able to do in terms of licensing when you’re kind of working with the powerhouse cultural attraction. Yeah. So we had a partnership with our vendor on site. I saw an opportunity to have a licensing program outside of the aquarium. Again, outside of the walls of the aquarium was always the main thrust from our sales program. That particular situation took a lot of negotiating because you had a very trusted partner that was already doing licensing inside of the aquarium. But the idea that I had was that those are two very separate audiences. We’re going to a store and aquarium to have a memento of their experience at the aquarium itself, which will play out in our online store. That’s another discussion altogether. But in so the audience outside of the aquarium is completely different animal. They may or may not have heard of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium or have been there, but there is messaging around ocean conservation. It is very much in line with our mission. But our logo is kind of cool. We decided that being able to get merchandise out into the world in like targets and so forth and be able to have an end cap with our mission statement. Why is this merchandise here? What it means when you’re wearing our mission and being able to have a portion of that sale go towards the Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s mission of inspiring conservation of the ocean at a real hook. And what this did was to be able to get the Monterrey Bay Aquarium who yes, it’s national at some degree, but it is very specific to education conservation, science-based demographics. And then people that have been to the aquarium or are in the Bay area. Those are our demographics at the aquarium. I wanted to get Monterrey Bay Aquarium logo, merchandise, and so forth in mission in front of folks in Idaho or Ohio or anywhere else who may, much like my relatives, not be able to pinpoint where Monterrey is in a map, let alone the aquarium and yet still be inspired by our mission and where their support for that mission. All right, John. So there’s a lot of big ideas, right, that you’ve shared, which I think the audience that listens to this podcast probably appreciates, but they’re also probably sitting back with their team saying, “Okay, I trust some of these additional revenue streams beyond ticketed admission for my team. Maybe it’s a really small team. Sometimes it’s a team of one, right? We see that very, very often in this space. So what’s your advice for people listening for maybe how to go about developing these non-traditional revenue streams within cultural institutions? Yeah, it’s a great question, especially right now. We’re in a much different landscape than we were prior to it, which happens all the time now, apparently, from COVID to other things. So traditional models will be stressed and you have to think in terms, and I do mean you have to think in terms of what can you do outside of the traditional funding models for any cultural institution that takes a high level of creativity that can either be in-house or can have someone come in to help facilitate. But I think it’s an absolute necessity right now for us to collectively think in terms of what can we do? And part of my own personal mission is to share as much of that information as possible for free. It’s not a pay thing, but it’s to ensure that we’re thinking of every possible means of diversifying your revenue stream so that you’re not ultra-dependent upon one specific revenue stream, whether it’s donations or it’s admissions. Obviously, any cultural organization, the majority of your earned revenue, your unrestricted earned revenue comes from admissions. Pure and simple, but you’re going to have probably a dip in that over the next year or two. People are going to have a little bit less pocket money to spend and so forth. So we have to think in terms of ways to achieve a diversified portfolio. And my recommendation, which is if you can’t do it in-house, if you don’t have the personnel, just the sheer number of people to be able to do this, or it’s hard to break out of traditional legacy mindsets, bringing a facilitator that on a temporary basis to just get the ball rolling and get the juices flowing in terms of being able to identify the full portfolio of potential intellectual property that can be leveraged for a multitude of purposes. But you start with identifying what is it that we have that we can offer outside of what we traditionally do? Education are there specifics in terms of sustainability. Anything that we do that’s either unique or is our forte or that we’re known for, but it’s not, you know, it’s something that we’re proud of perhaps, but we don’t really do much with it outside of doing because it’s the right thing to do. There are ways to be able to expand your audience and if you take education, for an example, which I think most cultural organizations have some type of an educational program, right? Especially for children. Now, they’re, you know, I’m not advocating for monetizing everything, right? I understand that accessibility is a huge issue, but there are ways to balance that. Right? Accessibility, along with developing new monetary streams. And this can be done by committee, but I would recommend bringing in as many people as possible at the levels, not that number of people, but number of departments that can be involved in this. You guest services, absolutely. They have their hand on the pulse of what people are inspired by, right? You have your advancement or development departments, which oftentimes are isolated, not by any default. You know, it’s just kind of, it’s because of just the nature of that business model, but bringing them in because any new program you build should have some kind of overlap with development to be able to leverage that for their needs as well to develop members to develop new donors and so forth. Marketing team, absolute. Other than ones that have all of the inter-intellectual property, they know the audiences, either how to get them in, so they know the audiences outside of the walls of the organization. And I would say, you know, if it’s a cultural institution that is animal-based, whether it’s zoo or aquarium, absolutely have them. Or if it’s an art museum, you have curators, wonderful opportunity to have a curator talk about what they’re excited about in terms of either historic or up-and-coming artists and so forth. There’s just so much that is potential that’s not being leveraged because we oftentimes think in terms of what we’ve done in the past, what’s traditional. Great book on this if I can plug it. I didn’t write it. It really was a turning point in the way I looked at business when it came to cultural attractions. That was blue ocean strategy. It’s the author’s escape me right now, but if you look at blue ocean strategy, the basic premise is rethink what you think has to be, right? In my case, when I went to the Minority of the Aquarium, it was all a tentative space. You came into the aquarium, what was in the aquarium is what inspired people and then you left inspired and I was like, why? In a digital era, why can’t we extend that to millions of people that may never be able to come to the Minority of the Aquarium in the first place? Expand our mission, expand our audience and perhaps develop new revenue streams. The book I’d recommend is that. The other thing is too is if you’re going to fail properly. In other words, do your homework, do the market research, any program that we launched, I made sure we did as much research as possible on the appetite for it. I had some assumptions that were blown out of the water by the surveys that we sent out on particular programs. You pivoted and you move forward in a way that was much more market ready than what I had initially thought. I don’t know everything. Getting back to your basic question, building a committee which I don’t normally recommend, but in this case, I would, of Department leads that understand the boots on the ground aspect of the business that from each and every division, the need to bring in those perspectives in the development of new programs is imperative because that’s the whole problem in the first place is that everybody stays in their own silos oftentimes. Animal care has wonderful stories that they’re just dying to get out about what they know about the animals and how that can inspire people. A lot of institutions do leverage that when it comes to tours and having speaking engagements on the food. But those same people, some of the best speakers I had to speak on virtual events, especially during COVID when we were going almost all virtual, we were all virtual. We found some of our animal care people were just fabulous speakers. They were so passionate. They spoke so well about what it was that people were just fascinated and we had so many repeats just because of the passion which they were speaking. You can’t identify that to get everybody in the room, you start brainstorming and if you can’t do it on your own, bring in a facilitator, you do it for strategic planning. Why not in this room as well? John, this has been a fascinating conversation. Just in case if nobody is not connected to you on LinkedIn in this space or wants to get some more of your thinking, what’s the best way of the audience can touch with you? Absolutely. If you look me up on LinkedIn or we just launched a sub-stack and all of what I’ve been doing is curating a lot of this type of information of posts that I had done throughout the years on LinkedIn. I’m trying to scrape all those up and put them into a sub-stack along with new information, especially in light of this new era where we’re having to get even more creative with the way we go about our business to stay both relevant, financially sustainable and continue to expand our audiences. That information is not paid, but that information can be found on sub-stack and on LinkedIn. You cannot connect with me directly but just throw me a message or a comment in one of my posts and I’ll connect with you that way. John, thanks so much for the time. Good to have you. It’s so my pleasure. (upbeat music)