In the Summer of 2012, I interned in the Public Programs and Special Events departments of the Witte Museum in San Antonio. Established in 1926, it focuses on the history of the area, both anthropological and natural. While some of the exhibits span all of Texas, others highlight San Antonio or South Texas more specifically. The Witte Museum comprises nine buildings, including the main museum, three historic buildings, two log cabins, an art studio, a four-story “treehouse,” and the newly renovated South Texas Heritage Center. The buildings are scattered around the campus of the Witte Museum, which backs onto the upper reaches of the San Antonio River.
The Witte Museum is not a traditional white wall museum. The museum tends to be loud, full of interactive exhibits and displays and numerous school groups running from one to the other. The museum is carpeted and painted in bright colors, mostly greens and yellows, which give it a warm atmosphere. Much of the museum is outside and visitors are encouraged to get hands-on, banging on sheets of tin to learn about sound waves, building a log cabin in a traditional style out of Lincoln logs, or plunging their hands into a small pool to discover the creatures of the San Antonio River. InterActors in period dress bring the history of South Texas to life through demonstrations and plays, as well as simply walking around the buildings and answering questions. The Witte Museum is more focused on doing rather than seeing, on active rather than passive learning.
Special Events occupies the large, main room on the bottom floor of Twohig House. The office is very open and allows ease of communication between the staff. Though this sometimes means that the room can also get distractingly loud, the office fosters the same sense of active communication as the museum itself. Members of the Events staff use each other as resources for any project, bouncing ideas and wording off each other, which is only doable because of the office set up. The office is also largely do-it-yourself; everything from centerpieces to giveaways are created in house and the office space allows for several of these projects to go on at once without conflicting with one another.
The Special Events department focuses primarily on marketing the museum as a venue to outside clients and facilitating the external rentals of museum space. Much of what goes on in the Events office is long term, sometimes extremely so. Clients book the Witte several months and even a year in advance.
I worked two Witte Society events helping with set up and take down with Special Events, then spending the main part of the event with Programs. For both events I was stationed at the kids table. It took me a while to figure out how to speak with children of such diverse ages, from 2 to 12, but I eventually became comfortable explaining the station and asking the children questions. During the second event I was much more comfortable than at the first because I was put in charge of the Oobleck station, which is something I dearly adore, and so was able to match the kids’ enthusiasm. Oobleck is a non-Newtonian liquid made of cornstarch and water which acts as a solid when under pressure and a liquid when released. The kids loved it and many of the parents did, too.
I worked three-day events with Public Programs. Two were Time Travel Saturdays, events held in conjunction with the new South Texas Heritage Center. The first centered on life on the trail for cowboys and vaqueros in the mid 1800s. Some actual cowboys from Bandera, Texas came to show kids how to rope and a cook with a chuck wagon came out to make some mostly authentic trail food. The second was a recreation of a San Antonio market from 1850. Visitors went around the market and could ask how much items cost, in an effort to see what three dollars would buy them. In both cases, I assisted with the food. In the first, I helped serve Dutch oven peach cobbler and beans cooked over a fire. In the second, I rolled out tortillas. Making a round tortilla is still one of my proudest accomplishments.
The other event I worked with Public Programs was called Amazing Skies. This event focuses on outer space and tries to get kids interested in science at a young age. The Witte’s large auditorium was filled with various organizations with hands on activities about different aspects of space, from motor exercises with large gloves on to a simulator for landing a Mars rover. I spent the entire day asking people to complete surveys. Surveys can be difficult because most people do not want to be bothered or do not feel qualified to fill them out. I came up with a standard hook and, along with a little help at various parts of the day, managed to get 45 surveys about the event.
As my main project, I was tasked with coming up with a grassroots marketing campaign for the Cocktails and Culture event series. Cocktails and Culture was only in its second year and so was still becoming established as a regular event. Cocktails and Culture showcases the museum by combining programming and socialization. It is reserved for adults 21 and over and features a cash bar. The theme changes every month, generally highlighting a specific part of the museum. The entertainment is provided at no charge in exchange for free publicity and the hors d’oeuvres are provided by one of the caterers from the Witte’s preferred caterer list, also in exchange for promotion.
At the beginning, attendees found out about the event mostly through the Witte newsletter and flyers at the Witte itself. After the first few months, the Witte began running a Groupon promotion for Cocktails and Cultures. Groupon is a website which runs a promotion for a few days for a specific city. In this case, San Antonio subscribers were alerted that they could buy two Cocktails and Cultures tickets for 10 or so dollars. The normal entry price is 20 dollars, with a special discount for Witte members that allows them to buy a ticket for 15 dollars. The problem with Groupon is that, while it does not charge a fee to run the promotion, it requires a percentage of the profits, which, when already cut by the promotion, means that the Witte was making a very small profit off of these events. Besides which, the Groupon promotion would bring attendance up to 350 or 400 people at some of these events, which was far too many to handle well in the space used.
My supervisor asked me to come up with an alternative marketing strategy. If I could come up with a strategy or strategies to attract locals to Cocktails and Cultures, it could help improve profits while keeping the number of attendees at a more reasonable level. Grassroots is typically word of mouth marketing and done largely in house, which keeps the marketing low budget and helps improve profits. My supervisor and I brainstormed a few areas and came up with three groups to focus on. The first was local residents who would already be familiar with the Witte. The second was professional groups and large businesses in San Antonio, which might also be interested in booking the Witte as a venue for their own events. The last group was young adults, particularly young professionals and older college students. I had to come up with a marketing plan that would include outreach to all of these groups.
The first step of my project involved a Powerpoint presentation to Witte staff. The presentation began with a summary of grassroots marketing and how it was particularly applicable to the Cocktails and Culture event series. I then detailed the three approaches I had envisioned and finished with a timeline. My three approaches were flyers in local businesses and apartments, postings on various websites which catered specifically to young professionals, and a letter sent out to appropriate businesses and professional organizations with a promotional offer which would allow them use of the museum as a venue free of charge for the hour before Cocktails and Culture with the purchase of a number of tickets. I worked on the project a bit before giving my presentation, doing much of the leg work of gathering appropriate businesses and professional organizations. This was made much easier by The Book of Lists, which is published by the San Antonio Journal each year and includes many of the businesses and organizations in San Antonio, organized by different criteria.
After I gave my presentation, we discussed which parts of the project I would be able to complete before I finished my internship in the next couple of weeks. We settled on a draft of the promotional letter, a write up for the flyer, and a list of businesses for both of these approaches. After I had created a list of possible places to post flyers, I called each one to see if they had a posting board. For each that did, I sectioned off a stack of flyers and marked them with an address, to be delivered later by one of the event specialists. For the promotional letter list, I called each business and asked who planned their meetings and events so that the letter could be directed to a specific person. This makes it a lot less likely that the letter would get lost in the mail or disregarded. Cold calling can be nerve wracking and it took me several calls before I knew how to phrase the questions so I would be given the information I needed.
I had one major disadvantage going into this project: to work efficiently, grassroots requires an insider’s knowledge of the market, and I am not a San Antonio native. Luckily, I was able to use the Internet and my coworkers to work around this problem and focus on the specific parts of San Antonio that would be most receptive to the various approaches. Besides that, this project required me to think in a very different way than I usually do. Wording a promotional letter uses a very different tone and lexicon than writing an academic essay. The tone is neither formal nor informal, but rather, the language largely reminds me of an infomercial. The only things missing are the exclamation points and “But wait, there’s more!” Call now is included.
As museums are hit by the difficult economy, they must find new ways to make ends meet. Departments such as the Witte’s Special Events bring in revenue that can equal or exceed general admission. However, these departments can also be expensive to run, needing their own specially tailored advertisements and the various accoutrements required for hosting events. Through my grassroots marketing project, I helped create a strategy to minimize costs while bringing new people to experience the Witte, as both a museum and a potential event venue.
I love museums. I always have. In a way, I am surprised that it took me so long to hit upon museums as a career opportunity. I knew that I wanted to do an internship before I ever started college, and when I finally realized how much I would love to work in museums, I knew this was the perfect opportunity to figure out where I would fit within one. I knew I did not necessarily want to be in Collections or Archives, the natural choice for an anthropology major, but I did not know exactly what I did want to do.
I’ve learned a lot through my internship at the Witte. Many of those things are small: how to make a round tortilla, how to cold call without getting completely flustered, how to walk up to a random stranger and ask them to fill out a survey, but I am proud of those skills. I learned that what entertains adults and what entertains children are not necessarily the same things, but that both are equally important when designing a museum for families. I also learned more about what I want to do with my career. I love all museums, but I have realized after my internship that the strongest memories upon which that love is founded all center around doing something at a museum. One of my favorite museum memories involves a picture, taken by the museum staff, but then developed through a solution bath by my brother and me. I have learned that what I love about museums is that they teach, not simply display, and that I want to be involved in that teaching for the rest of my life.