What's behind the wall?

We are 18 days into the transformation of our old Red Party Room into a snacking nook off our coatroom. Here are some photos of the work in progress.


First, we worked out the floor plan - we always start with outlining our ideas in chalk or masking tape right on the floor - then we walk around in it and try to imagine how it will flow with our visitors. Next we move to cardboard. In this case, we knew we wanted to keep the crazy colorful forest theme of the coatroom, so it was just a matter of figuring out how to incorporate some seating and coat storage amid the spines.


We know there won't be enough seating for all our visitors at one time, but we are trying to create a variety of options. In the end, there should be some kind of space for every kind of family.

Next we cut the shapes out of birch ply and sand and prep them.

Next step....colors! Coming soon.

Just what you've been asking for!

The number one suggestion that we get at Kidcity goes something like this:

Please! Make a place where I can sit and give my kids a snack!

I'm happy to announce that we have finally begun construction on a snack area. The coatroom will grow a new wing (the red party room is rapidly being demolished as I write) and we'll have some extra coat storage, along with some seating areas that are perfect for serving snack. Plus a drinking fountain and place to wash up.

Things will be a little crowded (and occasionally noisy) over the next several weeks as we do our construction. Hopefully, by the time the Holidays are here, it should be a little easier to give your kids some crackers and cheese and a juice box before heading back into the museum to play.

Here are some photos of the work in progress...but they look a little like Before and After shots in reverse. We had to take down a really sweet bench to make room for the new space:

Here's what it looked like Wednesday morning:



Here's what it looked like Thursday morning:



By the way, we always welcome any suggestions at Kidcity! In fact, we just built a new suggestion box in the lobby area. Can you guess what the very first suggestion in the new box was?

Gone Fishin'

Since early May, we've had the Clipper Ship section of the Fishery room closed as we repaired some old murals and added some new fish play. Last week I took a few pictures to show you what's been done, and what we're still working on.

For many years we've been planning to do a tiny mural that could be seen through the telescope on the ship's deck (actually, it's the nozzle from an old firehose, not a telescope at all, but we thought it served our purpose!) Scott Kessel created this mermaid and swordfish dance that is just the right size. At the same time, we repaired the old walls and refinished the floors where our visitors "walk the plank".

One of our goals was to create new ways to move fish around, and the "Crank n Chum" does just that - you can toss back some fish and feed them to the sharks!



This area under the captain's deck used to hold a treasure chest - which looked cool but didn't do much. In the photo below, you can see our exhibit builder Matt Niland thinking through some ideas about how to get the fish down to the "brig" and then back out again. It involves a new treasure chest with a secret compartment.






Speaking of secrets, I'm not giving them all away in this blog post! But here's a hint: when the room opens, you'll have a new way to be seen and not heard, and visa versa.

Not just bowling alone

At Interactivity, I loved hearing Jane Werner from the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh stand up and say:

“Things have been going pretty well at our museum, so we started thinking how we could leverage our strength to improve our neighborhood.”

For me, that was a big WOW. Maybe I need to get out more, but that’s the first time I’ve heard that kind of talk from any other children’s museum (other than using educational programs as outreach and social service). She mentioned interesting ideas like covering the local highway underpass with art, and stimulating connections between the various parks and cultural attractions in her area through the Charm Bracelet project. Since my motivations for starting Kidcity were more about quality of life in our community than about education, this was right up my alley.

As Kidcity’s director, I spend a significant amount of time working on Middletown. Although I can’t say I planned it this way, I find that my focus on the community helps the museum in two ways: first, there is a direct relationship between Kidcity’s appeal and the quality of our town – as Middletown goes up or down, so goes our draw as a destination. Second, my work builds social capital for Kidcity, and I know that we owe our existence and growth more to social capital than to financial capital. Social capital builds when you contribute to the life of the community (I love Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” for a very persuasive argument on this topic). Briefly put, having social capital means that when you want to get things done, the credibility and friendships you have developed are just like money in the bank. As an additional bonus, it’s fun.

So what does "Building Social Capital" mean on a daily basis? That would be different for everyone, but here are some of the things that I've been working on in the past year or so in our little town of 42,000 souls (other than my administrative and design work at the museum):
•helping establish "Creative Juice", a council for people in the arts and creative industries at our local chamber of commerce, co-chairing the first year;
•chairing the Downtown Business District (now 8 years old). The DBD is a group of 140 Main Street businesses that agreed to tax ourselves. I helped write our operating plan, which starts with the principle that Middletown has to be "clean, safe, and civil" before businesses can thrive -- we run a variety of maintenance, beautification projects, as well as providing strolling downtown guides.
•writing about city meetings and other stuff for a new hyper-local news blog, www.middletowneyenews.blogspot.com, which began in response to the decline of our local newspapers.
•being active on a 15-month study of the parking in our downtown, and lobbying for a new municipal department to manage it all.
•trying - and mostly failing - to find a resolution to the onslaught of graffiti around town, hopefully including a managable system for reporting and quick clean-up.
•helping various local non-profits with fundraising (sometimes at Kidcity and sometimes independently) and being active in the PTA of the Title 1 school in our neighborhood, where my 1st grader is a student.
•going to stuff! Supporting the dances, performances, meetings, potlucks and instigations of my neighbors.

Over the next few months I expect to be working on the design of a grant-funded wayfinding system (our downtown signage is truly awful - here's a photo of the excellent wayfinding system I saw in Philadelphia) and starting a dialogue with other arts/entertainment venues to talk about a possible joint branding and promotion campaign. I'd love to hear more people in the children's museum field talk about ways that they are connecting to others throughout the community, not just in direct partnerships, but in ways that "leverage the strength" of the children's museum to help the community in diverse ways.

What's your brand?

I love it when Interactivity brings people from outside the children's museum field to give us a fresh perspective on our business practices. Wednesday's session with a company called “Brand Champs” was a great learning opportunity for any children’s museum that wants to have more clarity about who they are and how they communicate that to the world.

Fran and Bill Lytle, the married couple that is Brand Champs, started with the message that your children’s museum has an identity and you can analyze first what that identity is, and then understand whether you are sending the right message about it to the public.

What follows is the first part of their step-by-step process, which they peppered with examples both from the children’s museum field and national brands that we all know. If you work at a children's museum (or you are trying to start one), you should get a pen and paper and treat this like a quiz.

1. Determine your brand personality. Fran and Bill believe that all brands fall into one of these five categories. (The words in italics are just examples of that main quality – it’s not a complete definition, but it can help you figure out where you fit.)

a. Sincerity (down to earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful)
b. Excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date)
c. Competence (reliable, intelligent, successful)
d. Sophistication (upper class, cosmopolitan)
e. Ruggedness (outdoorsy, rough)

Of course, if you’re like me, you’ll be saying that you can’t fit in just one box – I’d say that Kidcity has a little bit A, B, and D, and none of C or E. But when really pressed, I come down to words like “authentic” and “quirky” which (I think) fall into the Sincerity category. I think of us as something like the World’s Largest Ball of Twine – you’d have to be crazy to collect that much string, but hey, you gotta hand it to them for commitment.

2. Next, identify what kind of Brand/Visitor relationship you have. Again, you can only pick one.

a. Passion (expectation, powerful, full of anticipation and satisfaction)
b. Intimacy (when a company says: We know something about you – if it is a good thing, you will be more of it if you use us, if it is a bad thing, we can help.)
c. Nostalgia (based on a longing for something that happened in the past. Mixed feelings of happiness and longing evoked by past experiences)
d. Partnership (if your museum can say to the visitor: I ‘m working with you toward one single goal.)

These were easier to understand when Fran gave us examples: Curves understands that women want to get in shape, but they don’t want to feel self-conscious while they are exercising – that relationship is Intimacy. Dove understands that we want to live in a world where women have a healthy body image, and their campaign about real beauty helps us do that – that’s Partnership. The Holocaust Museum covers a topic that people feel passionate about and you know you will see and feel something intense when you go there – that’s Passion.

In my case, Kidcity’s brand/visitor relationship is definitely Intimacy. I know that my customers -- in other words, parents -- have certain beliefs about parenting and childhood (and I happen to agree with them!) We give them a place where they can be closer to their ideal.

3. Identify your Brand Dimension. For someone who isn’t familiar with your museum, this is the shorthand that tells them what to expect. It manages their expectation. You'll be happy to know that you can pick more than one.

a. Continuity (they can expect to find the same type of thing each time)
b. Distinctive Recipe (really different from all of its peers)
c. Quality (I may not know how to choose gems, but when I see that little blue box, I know all I need to know – it’s from Tiffany’s)
d. Signaling (Bill gave examples of Harley Davidson and Apple, but I’m not sure I get this concept yet. Perhaps it’s when the brand signals a whole lifestyle, that you either belong to or you don’t)
e. Incumbency (when your brand is so dominant that it becomes synonymous with the product – Kleenex, google, xerox.)

Fran suggested that there probably aren’t any museums that could claim Incumbency, but I think the Exploratorium in San Francisco might come close, since they are virtually synonymous with a certain kind of hands-on science experience. As for Kidcity, our Brand Dimension would have to be our Distinctive Recipe of creating our own eccentric exhibits with local artists (which is a good thing, since we have five other children’s/science museums within 30 minutes drive.)

4. Define your True Product Explain the core of what your customers get from you in 20 words or less. They gave the pithy example of Ellis Island, which defines its true product as being “the symbol of American immigration and the immigrant experience.” I’d say they got that right.

So far, here’s what I’ve come up with for my museum: At Kidcity, families exercise their imagination, playing pretend together in inventive and whimsical theme rooms created by local artists. That’s only 19 words! It's not perfect, but I don’t think I could have gotten so much of our character into one sentence if I hadn’t done the other three steps first!

----

After taking us through these four steps, Fran and Bill finished the session by sharing a few ways that you can evaluate your logo and your website to see if they truly express your identity – but since I can’t do it justice, I’ll just direct you to their website: Brand Champs.

Hope you learned something new & useful!

Earned Income (or "How to make a buck")

As everyone at the ACM conference bemoaned the decline in fundraising income, they also traded ideas on how to improve earned income at their children’s museums. There were plenty of good ideas that came up during the session on “Improving Performance in a Challenging Economic Environment” at Wednesday’s Interactivity. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Please Touch did a “Free Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream for Taxi Drivers” day as a way to be sure that the drivers knew where to find the museum.
2. During the holiday season, the Portland Children’s Museum offers members who renew a chance to buy a special 3-month membership for just $20 that people can give as gifts. Sarah Orleans, the director, told us that about 50% are upgraded to full memberships after the gift expires.
3. Host a “museum playdate” for followers of any popular local mommy blogs.
4. Sort your mailing list and invite target groups for special bagel/coffee mornings just for those families. Target families from a certain town, or families with twins, or any group that would see exclusive social time as a real draw. Moms want to make friends with other moms! (We did this at Kidcity by sending a postcard, but it could also be done by email if your data is good)
5. Identify nearby towns with a favorable demographic and offer their library a free kids ticket for any child who completes their summer reading program. The point was made that the reading program kids are exactly our market. It sounded like this idea could also work with the local Suzuki violin school or the local scout troups. A free kids pass would require an adult’s paid admission.
6. “Love your concierge” was an idea that focused on the hospitality staff at area hotels by throwing a special night event at your museum for all their workers. My little town in Connecticut doesn’t have a lot of hotels, but it is a restaurant town, and I sometimes distribute passes to the waitstaff at the local eateries. In other words, figure out who interacts with your potential visitors, and make sure they are familiar with your museum.
7. If you offer favor bags for sale for your birthday parties, give families the option to buy $5 worth of Birthday Bucks for each guest instead – it’s a gift certificate to your museum store.
8. Put a popcorn machine at your exit. One museum (I didn’t catch which one) mentioned that they had $10,000 worth of sales in 6 months at $2 a bag. I did hear some grumbling in the room, though, about finding popcorn scattered all over the place.
9. The Children’s Discovery Museum in Normal, Illinois loves the Fetch programming from PBS as a way to drive repeat visits. People keep coming back for each new activity related to the show.

This session was moderated by the always entertaining and slightly outrageous Lesly Attarian from Please Touch. She liked some of the suggestions, but her ultimate advice was this: Don’t Do Free. Charge a dollar if you can’t bring yourself to do regular rates, but don’t do free. And she also said don’t hesitate to Just Say No to the person who calls and offers your museum an opportunity to provide the entertainment at their event without compensation – on the other hand, maybe you can find a creative trade so that it benefits your museum as well.

The session wrapped up with a topic that I would have liked to see us explore a little more: there has to be a fit between any new income ideas and your brand and your mission. Anyone who knows me understands that I am All About Earned Income, but I hate to see museums do things which cheapen their integrity, just to make a buck. Paul Orselli discusses just that on his recent blog entry about having to run the gauntlet of the Blue Slushee while exiting a museum recently. So let's try to keep it clean folks!

Get on the bus

I had a blast at the Interactivity session entitled “How to get the right people on the bus”. Ingrid Anderson and Peter Buonincontro from the Portland Children’s Museum had us all climbing across our chairs, drawing on the walls and generally having a great time. There was a power point, but I promise you that no one looked at it.

The core of the message was that you need to understand that it takes all kinds of people to run an organization – some who are visionary, some who are task oriented, some who are social, and so on. The problem is that most people hire people who are like them instead of people who fill the gaps in their museum staff.

Ingrid taught us a few games that can help – I’ll share the one that we had the most fun with.

The point of this game is to figure out who you already have on your team, and then to help everyone see the positives and negatives about the various personalities you work with.

Here’s what you do:
•tape 5 giant sheets to the wall, each one labeled with an animal (ants, turtles, lions, puppies, owls).
•ask each person to go to the animal they feel they are most like, writing any words that describe that animal.
•then go to the other animals and write words that describe those animals.

That’s it.

(Now I feel kind of bad giving away all the details, since you really should try this for yourselves, so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs.)

I was in agony trying to decide which animal to choose (ok, so I knew I wasn’t an ant or a puppy) when Joanne Morell from Topeka (already in the lion group) said “Oh Jen, you’re an owl.” So off I went.

Here’s what we came up with:

Ants
The ants wrote that they were hardworking, diligent, goal-oriented, instinctive workers, and organized socially and they can always find a picnic. After the ants moved onto the second part of the task (in a line, I might add, and after clarifying whether they should go as a group to each one of the other animals or individually on their own) the rest of us came along and wrote this: narrow-minded, followers, lack of creativity, can’t see the big picture, hard to change, NO big picture. Peter circled the words “hard to change” and noted you have to consider that before you hire an ant. He said ants always say yes, but the question is whether they are saying yes to the right thing.

Puppies
The puppies wrote that they are approachable, playful, friendly, full of surprise, out of control, eager to learn, loyal, curious, talkative, wanderers. And the rest of us wrote that they are unfocused, inexperienced and if you ask them to do something they don’t know how to do, they get all anxious and then they pee on the carpet.

Owls
Owls think of themselves as wise, patient, nocturnal, focused, territorial, vicious, independent, stealthy, and stubborn. In their wisdom, the other owls rejected my suggestion of “loner”, deciding that it was adequately covered by “independent”, which is not at all the same thing, but then I knew that I had the power of the blog, so I just didn’t argue with them. The others in the room came along and wrote that owls are know-it-alls, hard to read and that they are not morning people.

Turtles
Across the top of the page, the turtles had written “Slow and Steady Wins the Race”. They also wrote predictable, long-lived, dependable, and the world rests on their backs. Others saw turtles as slow, they hide from problems and they don’t go outside the box

Lions
The lions: direct, take-charge, respected, solitary, roar, big bite, protective, providers. But others see them as judgemental, loud, they scare people, have big sharp teeth, are not respectful of others opinions and think too much about their hair.

Ingrid (a lion) and Peter (a puppy) talked us through some of the pros and cons of each personality type.
•Puppies are fabulous for helping new people feel welcome (front desk!) but don’t put them on budget analysis.
•Ants are great workers, staying till the job is done, but beware of burnout.
•Owls are great observers, and are insightful, but they need a little support in getting engaged.
•Ingrid noted that you shouldn’t pair a puppy and an owl – but an owl and ant will get along, because they can see the big and small picture simultaneously. She also noted that if you put a puppy with the ants, they will scatter.
•Turtles are completely dependable, but really stubborn. If you try to rush them, you can knock for days, but they will never come out of their shell. Get them on projects where they can work at their own pace.
•Lions are either already in a leadership role or trying to take one, which can be intimidating to turtles and puppies and even ants, although they usually just go around them.

Finally, Ingrid suggested taking this game home and using it as a party trick with your spouse! That got a big laugh.

So that was the message, folks. Figure out who is on your staff already and then fill the gaps (and don't hesitate to get the wrong people off the bus before they ruin the whole ride.)

P.S. I can’t resist a nod to the person who chose the title for this session: last year, Interactivity’s keynote speaker was Jim Collins, whose terrific book “Good to Great” has been a real inspiration for me. One of his principles on how to run a business is that you shouldn’t hire people you have to supervise – and the key is in the hiring (or the transferring) until you have all the right people on the bus and in the right seats. Then, and only then, should you decide where the bus is going. At the risk of making my co-workers blush, I’ll say that part of the reason that working at Kidcity is so much fun is because (at least from my viewpoint) all the right people are in the right seats, and we all have a similar tolerance for joy riding.

P.P.S: One of the keys to having a successful time at Interactivity is knowing when YOU are on the wrong bus. I actually went to a different session at the start of the afternoon – the title sounded good but it was clear from the introductions that the presenters were going to be talking about something else entirely. In my early ACM years I would have sat there and fumed – but this time I just quietly gathered my stuff and slipped out before it really got going.

P.P.P.S: Here's a photo from another game we played called "Draw the Perfect Employee". I'll note that the earmuffs were not so they wouldn't listen to their boss but so that they wouldn't be bothered by the sounds of children having fun!