The subtlety of shepherding an audience toward collection visitation.

I often write about solving big challenges — how to launch things or fully rework things, etc., but what about the times when you want to take something from good to great? That was exactly the situation we were in almost two years ago with a popular event held at the Barnes called “Young Professionals Night.”

The YP event is one of our most successful — consistently sold out almost since the day it started back in 2012. It has become the go to event for young Philadelphians — our collection is open, there’s a bar, there’s often live music and/or a DJ spinning and other programming throughout the night. Each event has a theme and everyone dresses the part — it’s a see and be seen kind of event.

In 2016, we were in the middle of a review process. Staff had been thinking about their own goals for the event and had been reviewing feedback from participants. It was clear that staff wanted participants to both enjoy the party, but also see the collection. Yet, our tracking was showing that only 30% of attendees were taking advantage of those open collection doors. At the same time, we were hearing that attendees wanted to go into the collection, but sort of “never got around to it” during the night. Our own goals seemed aligned with our event attendees, so we started to ask ourselves if there was anything we could be doing to encourage collection visitation.

Almost immediately we headed to an obvious place — if people were not going in the collection then they must need a reason to go to do so — games, activities, etc. We tested that idea by creating an activation with the Amazon Alexa and we handed out cards throughout the event telling people this activity was going on. Interestingly, the needle didn’t move much at all, so an activity wasn’t necessarily the answer. Of course it could be that this particular activity wasn’t the answer, but before putting more effort into alternatives we wondered if there were other things we could address first.

Turns out the small changes are what made a big difference.

One change involved taking a holistic look at the environment through the eyes of participants. As plain as day, we were not exactly making it easy for people to enter the collection. Take a look at the photo here — you’ll notice the door to the collection is not lit well from the outside, staff are blocking the entrance, and there’s a giant sign telling you all the things you can’t do in the space that’s actually blocking the viewshed. As practical as it was to have the sign there and staff helping with the entry — this didn’t look like a place you were allowed to go. So we started by adding a little outside light to entrance to help attract people over, we asked staff to move to the sides of the door, and we moved that sign to inside the vestibule. You can see the difference almost immediately.

But physical changes were not the only adjustments we made — we also decided to keep the collection open a little later because our wifi enabled people counters were showing us that visitation to the collection during these events tended to happen later in the evenings just as we were closing the collection doors. By extending the hours the collection was open and adjusting later in the evening, it better aligned with this late night crowd.

Lastly, we worked on our messaging and communications. In pre-visit “know before you go” emails we started to mention the availability of the collection and the slightly extended hours. As participants would arrive, our visitor experience team would give a warm welcome along with a “don’t forget the collection is open this evening.” Almost immediately we started to see big jumps in collection visitation — doubling the numbers in less than a year and still holding steady today.

To me, this is a powerful story because it shows that small tweaks can be incredibly effective. Another lesson here: sometimes you need to design for the behavior you want to see — in our case collection visitation was that very thing. Tracking existing behavior, taking a fresh look at the experience, and making slight adjustments helped us get there.

Special thanks are in order going to the folks who keep this event running three times a year: Emily Goldsleger, Matt Brogan, Joanne Perez, and our partners at Mole Street.

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