At the IAAPA tradeshow last week I had the pleasure of listening to several speakers. One session “What You Can Measure, You Can Manage” discussed various metrics museums and other venues can use to measure success. I was in heaven to hear words like metrics, process, efficiency, measured success, etc. Working in a creative field I’m sometimes an odd ball with my love of measuring and numbers. I love graphs and charts too. Any of my people know how to make them pretty!

I recognized the quote they used to name the session. The one I often refer to is by Tom Peters, “What gets measured, gets done.” Supposedly the original quote referring to this was by Lord Kelvin, “If you can measure that of which you speak and can express it by a number, you know something of your subject; but if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.”

Here are four areas one professional suggested measuring:

Geographic included studying your demographics and psychographics by zip code. You can use GIS mapping to discover where your visitors are coming from and who they are. Then create programming in the areas where you may not be drawing visitors. Many struggled with the Hispanic market and created specific programming to appeal to them and increased their visitation because of it. You can also do membership mapping to see the donation spread.

Investment is what you get for your money. There was a lot of talk of reinvesting in expansion, renovation and upgrades. Many statistics showed that is how you will keep your visitation level and/or rising. If you don’t reinvest there is usually a decline in attendance that follows a product life cycle. A measurement to consider is the investment per square foot.

Attendance is dependent on the quality of the site, concepts, vision and characteristics of the market. You can compare your performance to the local market and like attractions. Some other measurements to consider are visitation per square foot, number of visits per population and the aggregate institutional investment (all your investments compared to your peers). You can put all these numbers together in a dashboard with graphs and comparisons to show stakeholders and potential investors.

Financial included many realms like operating and facility costs, admission price, retail performance and earned income. They said the national average for earned income is 35% of total revenue. Once again you can look at things by square feet. The average operating costs per square feet are between $80 and $100. They said most museums are under priced on admissions. Generally, a higher price will not lower attendance by much. Museums often under utilize retail opportunities and can do better with the location of retail, merchandising selection and food and beverage. Once again look at sales per square foot and compare it to your peers.

What measurements do you use?