Colleen Dilenschneider, The surprising reasons why organisations underestimate attendance loss during closures (DATA), colleendilen.com, 27 January 2016
When cultural organizations experience unforeseen facility closures, they lose more visitors than simply those who were planning to visit that day. Here’s why.
While the following data may be particularly timely after Winter Storm Jonas, cultural organizations (museums, zoos, historic sites, performing arts organizations, etc.) are consistently way off when adjusting annual attendance projections due to closures. This includes closures due to weather, irregular operations, storm damage, fire, utility failure, criminal activity, or anything else.
No matter the reason for the closure, we dramatically underestimate the overall impact on annual attendance. It’s generally a huge bummer when we have to close for unforeseen circumstances and take the attendance (and, for many organizations, revenue) hit. But knowing why we are so frequently wrong in quantifying the total impact of these closures may help us better understand visitors and develop more realistic contingency plans for lost revenue and attendance.
We are often wrong about the impacts of an unforeseen closure for two, big reasons that are important to understand beyond the framework of attendance and revenue projections. When an organization is closed at a time that it might otherwise be open, visitation generally is NOT displaced to other times of the year. And, to top it off, we lose more people than simply those who had planned to attend the organization that day. The reasons for this happening are important for organizations to understand.
Take a look at the math and see just how much we underestimate the lost annual attendance due to unplanned, short-term facility closings. This chart illustrates data from 13 organizations over a three-year analysis and includes a range of cultural, visitor-serving organizations – each represented by letter.
