Is event attendance declining? Your observations?

[Mr rt]

- Steam museums seem to be doing well enough ... they have to with very high labor cost
- Diesel museums ... hmmm not sure, as I don't frequent them
- Trolley museums ... most have stabalized their attendance in the past few years by advertizing LOCALY
They are going after the day tripers ... mom & the kids, it's a cheap date ... also birthday parties & special events that have very little to do with learning about/experiencing the history of traction, e.g. Halloween, Christmas, etc.
At the two in CT they have at least a person doing a lot of kissing babys & shaking hands in the area, i.e. local fairs, Chamber of Commerce, etc.

The point is that you can no longer live of railfans.

Wednesday I was operating at The Point, just north of Hartford.
I had a very young man with a engineer's cap on. I asked him if he was expecting to ride a Choo Choo, he said yes.
So I said we don't have any choo choos here, but we have something almost as good. In a minute you'll know what it is, and please don't get scared ... then I blew the whistle ... loud ! ... he smiled

[mxdata]

The point that you cannot live off railfans is quite valid. You need support from the general public to keep the museums going.

However at the same time, the historical and preservation interests seem to be increasingly unable to get the word out to anyone beyond their immediate membership. A look through the websites of groups in my area showed nearly all of them now at least somewhat out of date, several had not updated their listings of events in more than a year and had no 2009 activities posted at all, and one had five year old information still posted until the website was finally taken down.

I fail to see the logic in groups keeping their events a secret. If they don't make any effort to tell anybody about what they are doing, do they really think anyone new will show up? And if they can't be bothered promoting their events, why should they expect volunteers to give their time and effort to help them out with them?

MX

[umtrr-author]

MX, I wonder if the issue is that time devoted to volunteer activities is going down, not up, in the current economic situation. I heard a report to that effect on the local NPR station. If that's true (and I'm not saying it is), then there would be less time available to do website updates and other general publicity.

What may be available-- if there is money of course-- is the ability to advertise on local media at reduced rates. I casually follow the radio business, for example, and I've read that advertising revenues are down significantly in some areas.

This might be an opportunity for a museum to get in with some inexpensive "spot" advertisements-- it would sure beat having to listen to those bulk buys of credit card debt elimination, lose weight fast, get cars with no credit, and Colon Blow ads...

[mxdata]

I used to think it might be time consuming or difficult to keep notices on a website up to date too. That was until an organization where I am a member lost their webmaster on short notice, and I volunteered to try to help keep the website notices up to date. It took an entire half hour after supper to do the tutorial and see how the software worked, and typing and uploading the notices took a couple minutes and was no different that it would have taken to do the same typing in Microsoft Word.

Groups that will not make at least some reasonable effort to promote and describe their events to the general public should not expect very much help from volunteers and non-members. In these bad economic times, nobody should be expected to take a lot of their own time and drive long distances to help out at an event hosted by a group that can't even take a minute to post a description of the event on their website.

MX