When to Retire a Program, Part 3: The Big Revenue Generator
This post is the third in a 3-part series on retiring old programs. The first post in the series walks you through how to evaluate a long-standing program and the second post is all about ending a community outreach program.
As I post this, it’s Memorial Day weekend, which means that many of my colleagues are gearing up for their summer museum programs, which for many include summer camp. I started working my museum’s summer camps in 2008 and planned, worked, and/or ran our camp program every year through 2019.
After eleven years of museum summer camp, I have a lot of experience with all the ins and outs of camp programming. It is hands down the hardest thing - physically - I’ve ever done as a museum educator. It’s exhausting. It’s dirty. I’ve fallen into the creek on our property more times than I can count.
It’s also so rewarding and so fun.
But, what I didn’t fully realize until I became the director of the education department, was that camp is EXPENSIVE. It might even be more expensive than it is exhausting, which is something I would have never have believed until I was the one computing the expense report.
Expenses for camp include:
Craft supplies
Snacks and Water cups
Staff hours to develop curriculum
Staff hours to facilitate the program
Extra, seasonal staff (i.e., camp counselors)
CPR training for staff
Website to host sign ups and/or release waivers
Naturally of course, all of this was more than balanced by the fees involved. Of all our programs, camp had, by far, the highest ticket price.
Retired Program #3: Summer Camp
Which meant that when everything came to a grinding halt in the spring of 2020, I was terrified that we might have to cancel our camps. For weeks, I nervously considered our options and watched what camps across the country were doing. And each day, I became more afraid that we would end up refunding tens of thousands of dollars in camp fees.
As you already know, of course, that is exactly what happened. Some camps - maybe yours - choose to not refund canceled 2020 camps, and instead held camp fees until 2021. In fact, my own children were enrolled in a camp that did just that. But for me, at my institution, I didn’t feel comfortable with that. In those early Covid months, many people across the country (myself included) were furloughed and, as the months drew on, many people were laid off. I just couldn’t justify holding back a refund from a family who might really need it in that uncertain moment.
Moreover, by the time I had to make the choice - do I refund or do I hold the money for Summer 2021 Camps - I had already lost my entire education team, some of whom were uncomfortable returning to a public-facing job at that time or who used the disruption as a catalyst to make some big life changes. Regardless of why they all left, the end result was the same. Without a staff of educators coming back whenever we reopened, I had no idea what to expect. In April of 2020, it was clear I wouldn’t be running camps in 2020, and for all I knew, the summer of 2021 would be worse. So, I did what I always recommend: I made the best choice I could, with the information I had. And that choice was to refund all camp fees.
That was brutal. We refunded the money over the course of the whole summer, and my education bottom-line was in the red for the rest of the fiscal year.
In the fall of 2020, right about the time we processed the very last of the refunds, it was time to consider whether we would be able to bring summer camps back in 2021. If you’ve been in museum education for any length of time, you know that January/February is the time to put camp tickets on sale, so the fall was the time to decide what we were going to do. At that time, I was still alone in my department, cranking out small programs, for one family group at a time, and still eyeing that deep red budget line.
So, I started crunching numbers, and thinking critically about summer camps and my institution, just as I would later do with our Homeschool Days and our Library Outreach programs. I had to decide if camps were a good use of my resources, not just in 2021, but for the future post Covid, as well. To make my decision I had to evaluate our camp program’s return on investment.
Steps for Critically Evaluating a Program’s Return on Investment
It should be noted that in these particular instances, I did not make use of any formal evaluation of the audience’s engagement when deciding about the effectiveness of a program. The reason being that, at this time, in the midst of the Covid crisis, my most important concern was the smart and careful use of my institution’s resources, namely time, money, and staffing. As we are now restarting, revamping, and in some cases, completely replacing our former lineup of programs, I am now building in better audience evaluation methods from the ground up, which I plan to write about more later this year.
Step 1: Detach Your Emotions
Summer camp is itself an institution. At my museum, the education department had been running camps for over two decades and camps generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue each year. Because of this, many people simply assumed we would always do camp, even as our camp registration numbers were slightly trending downward in the 2018 and 2019. To even consider permanently stopping our camp program felt irresponsible and like I would be disappointing people, not to mention that I would be breaking a tradition that began when I myself was still a child.
Before I could seriously examine such a massive shift in our summer programming, I had release any emotional pull I felt about breaking with tradition or disappointing long-time patrons. Of course, this is easier said than done, but at the end of the day, I have to be content with the knowledge that the museum (and by extension the Board, who serve as community representatives) hired me to make informed and careful choices about not only the subject and nature of our programs, but also the responsible use of our resources.
Step 2: Crunch the Numbers
At my institution, our CFO is more concerned with education revenue and expense across the department, as a whole, and does not usually look at each program individually. This is mostly because many programs are deeply discounted (or free), and therefore the numbers look like a mess. It’s usually easier and neater to just lump it all together, or at the very least, divide it up by month or quarter.
But, in this case, due to the high ticket price of a camp registration, it was often assumed that camp revenue sustained our more deeply discounted student programming, like field trips and outreach. And while it was true that camp registration brought in revenue in our “slow” months of January and February, I wanted to know what the real impact of camp was, over the course of multiple years. Which meant it was time to get the calculator out and do some math.
Using data from the last five years, I wrote down exactly how much money I had spent on supplies. Then I calculated how many working staff hours went into planning and running camps, and how much, on average, we were therefore spending on payroll for camp. Next I wrote down the total number amount of revenue generated and calculated the profit margin for camps over the last five years. Obviously, as a non-profit, educationally focused organization, turning a profit on summer camps was not our aim, but again, I wanted to know the overall financial impact of camps.
Turns out, especially when you calculate the payroll costs, camp wasn’t supporting us at all. Now, in our situation, payroll is covered by a different line item in our operations budget, so - lucky for me - program revenue is never intended to cover payroll; I rarely worry if our revenue is sustaining the cost of paying staff. But, when determining if a program’s ROI is sustainable over the long haul, and through a crisis (like Covid), I needed know the impact this program had on our budget overall. And the numbers don’t lie - camp was costing us a lot of money.
But finances aren’t the only numbers we’re looking at when determining the effectiveness of a program. I also considered the size of our audience over time, . The truth was, even when I didn’t want to face it, that our camp numbers had been slipping slowly for several years. There are several market reasons as to why this was happening, but the point was I needed to make a choice: double-down on boosting camp numbers in order to make it sustainable, or switch to a new program model.
Step 3: Examine Your Mission
The truth of the matter is that camps were not only a pull on the financial bottom line. They are an absolute drain on our education department’s staff’s energy level and morale. It took a lot to keep camp staff motivated through the whole of the camp season, and even when we shortened the program by two weeks many years ago, it was still just plain hard. But hard work and a low profit margin are acceptable, when the program meets your mission and vision statements.
So, did camp meet ours? To answer this, I considered the themes of both our site’s mission and vision statements and our education department’s mission and vision statements. When I considered all four of these statements together, three main themes emerged as important to the work we do: offering quality education and experiences for our visitors, the sustainable use of the resources we’ve been entrusted with, and creating a safe and enjoyable work environment.
Although our camps were certainly educational in nature, when it came right down to it, camps weren’t sustainable and they did not really contribute to an enjoyable work environment for the staff. It was clear that in order to bring camps more in alignment with the themes of our mission and vision statements, I would need to completely overhaul the program, and I wasn’t sure that was the best use of my time anyway.
Step 4: Name Your Wins and Losses
So, I took a deep breath, and I asked myself, if I end our summer camp program completely, what do I gain? For me, the answer was:
The opportunity to establish new summer programming that didn’t exhaust my staff or our bottom line
The opportunity to establish new summer programming that was closer in alignment to our core interpretive themes
The opportunity to establish new summer programming that met the needs of our site’s largest summer audience - tourists - who weren’t being well served by the education department.
Naturally, the next question, of course, is what do I lose? In this case, the answer was:
A program that supports our closest neighbors (who were our primary camp audience)
When I started looking closely, it became painfully obvious, that because of our high camp fees and our site’s location, our camp programs were not supporting the community at large, but were mostly serving an upper-middle class audience, who although they might miss our camps, would be able to find substitute programming. In the end, I determined that for our site, camps were not a responsible use of resources.
What We’re Doing Instead
Although I still get a little guilty pang every time I answer an email with “no, we no longer offer camps,” and I do have fond memories of our camp years, the truth is, I didn’t miss running camps last summer and I’m not sad about the fact that we’re not bringing them back.
Instead, I’m super excited to launching a much more sustainable and scalable series of programs for families on our site. In fact, family programs have become my department’s post-Covid signature program, and has spurred my renewed interest in how people learn in museums. In fact, I have much to say on the topic of family programs, so I’ll leave that for later.
In the meantime, I’d encourage you to take a hard look at your own programming, using my examples of retiring long-standing programs, community outreach programs, and big revenue-generating programs.
P.S. — If summer camps are still a good use of your time and resources, I have an eBook filled with my best tried and true tips for surviving summer camp! You can download it for free in the Educator Resource Library!
