When to Retire a Program, Part 1: The Long-Standing Event
I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook memories. Most of the time, they make me smile, especially when it’s pictures of my kids. But sometimes, when I least expect it, the memory will be a loaded one. An unrealized dream. An unfinished project. A person I’ll never see again. And lately, I’ve seen a lot of memories of events that were canceled due to Covid.
One particular memory that popped up about a month ago had a caption made me giggle with a fatalistic smile. I had written that the event (a free community outreach production by our local Opera company) “which was originally scheduled for March 15 has been canceled out of an abundance of caution, due to an increased risk of illness in our community. We look forward to hosting this wonderful program again in the spring of 2021. Stay healthy, friends!”
The wording, which was so carefully constructed at the time, makes me laugh now. “An abundance of caution.” “Looking forward.” And best of all, no mention, specifically, of the the target of our fears, a word which is now so much a part of our vocabulary: Covid. At least I can be proud that I didn’t use the words “unprecedented” or “pivot.”
As we all know, so much changed so quickly. I think back to myself, only two years ago, and marvel at how drastically different my education department is now. A complete change of staff. A new line-up of programs. A revision of our target audience. An increased interest in virtual platforms. Oh, and a steady supply of hand sanitizer.
As I’ve been both looking back and looking forward in the last couple of months, I’ve come to the realization that not everything we stopped due to Covid needs to start again. In particular, there are three programs that were paused or modified due to Covid that I have decided to just retire, rather than restart.
And I’m guessing that you might also have some programs that you are considering for the chopping block. To help you walk through the process of determining if now is a good time to retire an old program, I’m going to break down my experience with three different events. (But because I’m going deep with each one, we’ll split up this post and make it a series, ok?)
Retired Program #1: Homeschool Days
In the “before times,” our institution held a regular schedule of Homeschool Day Programs. Many museums run programs like these. At my museum - and likely yours, if you host them - Homeschool Days grew out of the need to offer homeschooling families the ability to get the school group discounted rate without being part of large group.
Over the years, our version of this program grew from being simply a repeated series of our regular field trips, offered one at a time over the course of the school year, to a series of one-time only, intensive programs of short duration (usually only about two hours long). These short, one-shot programs required weeks (sometimes months) to prepare, and because they were such big events, they often required a huge amount of staff to pull off. Some of the most amazing programs I’ve ever planned or facilitated were these huge, special event, Homeschool Days.
However, after having to postpone, then cancel and refund our last “big” Homeschool Day in March of 2020, I paused the program for the 2020-2021 school year. Thankfully, I was able to hire a completely new post-Covid staff last summer and we did attempt some modified Homeschool Day programs this year, in the spirit of our past, larger events. However, they were *less than* successful. Here’s what happened:
Numbers Were Down: In order to social distance the event across multiple locations on our site, we planned for a maximum of 100 total participants. This number was way under our any of our previous Homeschool Day programs, and yet we struggled to sell them out. None of the programs had more than 75 total people registered, and even then only 50 people showed up each time. One of our events had a very small turnout of only 30 people!
Planning Was Still a Time Suck: In the “old days” of this program, we didn’t think much of spending weeks of time collectively researching and planning these big special events, even though they each only last a couple of hours, for two reasons. One, we had enough staff to cover all of our needs, and two, we had huge turnouts of loyal, repeat customers. But, after Covid the opposite was true; I did have a staff, but it was smaller and only part-time. Spending so much time planning events like these meant we were really spread thin. And secondly, our huge, loyal audience had two-year break with us, and many of them didn’t come back.
Our Audience Was New: After the long Covid break, some of our former long-time participants moved away, some of them got involved with other organizations and projects, and some of them just plain grew up. Homeschoolers who were in the 5th grade when we shut down were going into the 7th grade when we started back up; their interests has shifted and their time was taken up in other ways. The result was that many of the people who knew us best were gone, and our participants were all new. And they were frequently confused. At our museum, we run a drop-off program called Homeschool History Club, we now have new Family Tours, and we were also running Homeschool Days. Many of our new families were unsure what was what and which would be the best fit for them.
How to Honestly Evaluate Programs
After some honest reflection on whether Homeschool Day programs were still a good fit for my department, I’ve had to conclude that they are not. At least, not in their current iteration. Perhaps this is ringing a bell for you. It seems likely that you have programs languishing in your department; we all do. If this is feeling familiar, let me walk you though my thought process on how I “pivoted” away from this clearly failing program. (See what I did there?)
1. Consider what this program accomplishes that no other program does
For us, this program represented a chance to do programming outside the normal boundaries of our interpretation. While our museum interprets 19th century Southern history, we’ve held Homeschool Day programs on everything from the Ancient World to the Post-Modern World. Planning Homeschool Days gave the education staff a chance to dive a little deeper into some of our personal interests, and we were able to stretch ourselves creatively. Also, due to the nature of such large-scale events, we were able to showcase parts of our site that were rarely used. And lastly, this program was a great opportunity for families to learn together, as parents and younger siblings participated in the learning with their school-age kids.
2. Question what’s not working anymore
When I thought longer and harder about Homeschool Day programming, I realized that over the years, and particularly over the Covid years, many things had shifted for my museum. For one thing, since Homeschool Days originally began, our site has undergone a lot of building and growing, physically. There are less “under-used” areas of our property that we can fully take over with large events. Increasingly, these frequent, but short, programs felt squished into overcrowded areas. Since the programs were only a couple of hours long, it wasn’t feasible to reroute other programs for the whole day. But when you consider the set-up and clean-up, it always felt like we were a little in the way of other visitors. Secondly, and most importantly, Homeschool Days are no longer our only family programming option. Coming out of Covid, I began a whole new line-up of tours, specifically for families. These smaller tours run daily, so they are much less of a pull on our resources. They are not special events, but just a regular part of our work flow. Nor do they require any “extra” work to plan, prepare, set-up, or facilitate. Clearly, the unique family-learning opportunity of Homeschool Days was no longer unique on our site.
3. Decide what is missing
I had to admit that in this last year, the audience was definitely the missing element. It was obvious that we needed to change something about how we were marketing and branding this program, not only because of the low numbers, but also because of the many confused phone calls I fielded about what Homeschool Days were all about. But more than that, the EVENT feeling was missing. Homeschool Days had devolved into just another program, like a regular ol’ field trip, but with more fuss and less reward. If we were going to go to the trouble of planning a new and special program, I wanted to give it the time and space to really be special.
4. Be Bold Enough to Replace Long-Standing Programs
With the exception of the 2020-2021 school year, there have been Homeschool Day programs at my museum since long before I started working there - and that was 15 years ago! So, intentionally putting a stop to this long-running program feels a little scary. But nothing good ever grows in depleted soil. And it’s clear from the numbers that this particular program is depleted. I’m no gardener, but even I know the value of pruning.
So, what will we do instead?
We took this evaluation and started brainstorming a program that would keep what we love, loose what we didn’t, and meet our unmet needs. Our new plan is to replace Homeschool Days with Community Days. Because we don’t want to give up the opportunity to periodically expand the horizons of our educational scope, we will continue to plan all-new, immersive, special event programming for homeschoolers (and others, as well!). But, in order to make the program more worth the investment of our time and resources, for the next year at least, we will keep the themes a little closer to our site’s normal interpretive boundaries. This way we are not spending any more time than necessary on additional research. Additionally, we plan to run each program for two full days (as opposed to only two hours, as before). Expanding our program hours will allow us the chance to reach more people, effectively increasing our ability to meet our educational mission, but also increasing our education revenue. Likewise, expanding the program to a full-on event is a better use of our time, because while it will still take weeks to plan and implement these new programs, we will get a better ROI, since the audience will increase. And lastly, I’m hopeful that this change will alleviate some of the marketing confusion that our newer homeschooling families have experienced these past few months.
All in all, I’m excited about this change and I’ll be sure to update you on how it goes over the course of the next year!
As if this wasn’t enough, I have two more big programs I’m retiring this year and one of them may surprise you! I’ll be wrapping up the writing and editing on posts detailing those programs and their replacements soon, so stay tuned!
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