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In Chapter 7, the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery were aiming to develop family-friendly natural history events. When they first started planning this they focused on different natural history events, linking the events to their own collection at the museum and creating events that developed the museums partnership with the city. These aspects helped develop their program Wild about Plymouth in 2006. This program has since created an environment for many families to learn about nature through different activities. The different events were all considered based on the goal of getting families to visit the museum and to get involved in the programs.

Overall, it seemed that the events were successful. The museum wanted to bring more family visitors, which they have accomplished by created all of the unique and interactive activities. What also helps the museum's program is how they give out evaluation questionnaires to each attendee at every event. This will help provide the museum ideas on how they might improve upon the program. With this evaluation it helps the museum to improve and therefore increase their success in the future. Now, the approaches the museum used were truly visitor-centered. The reasons are because they included the visitors to interact with outside environments that related to the museums collection but it's indoor programs included the visitors to interact with the museums collection. So, overall I do think they did well at creating a variety of events for families. A take-away that I have is that if you know your intended audience or visitor then you can develop an effective and enjoyable program.

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The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery planned family-friendly natural history events that open to everyone, connect to the museum's collection, have events frequently, and build a partnership with the city. The goal of the project is to attract more audiences by open more collections of the museum to the public and explore the natural environment of Plymouth as a part of nature education. The considerations are what kind of events the museum is trying to host: the family-centered, really could attract all family members; and how to brand fast that the name of the events could be will be known and unique.

I think the events are fairly successful. First, the events achieve their goal: to let more families walk out their door and join the outdoor activity, while they learn something about the nature of Plymouth. Second, host these events is not a huge burden financially to the museum, which means it's sustainable. Third, by reaching out, the museum built its connection with other departments of the city government, such connection potentially could aid future events for the museum. I think the approaches of the museum are visitor-centered, for not only they encourage more family to participate, but they also have the feedback mechanism to allow their participants to express their opinions about the event. The most important thing I've learned is branding is vital to such activity, especially when you live in a huge city with many museums have the similar program, a good project must stand out to gain more attention and opportunity.

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Chapter 6 focuses on the reconstruction of the Stansted Park Historic House.  The Historic House had suffered a financial loss and so had to deal with the cutbacks due to a global financial collapse.  The annual "Prom" that they hosted needed to be reworked in some way that would still be just as enjoyable as the annual tradition was.  Instead of the grand spectacle that the Prom had been, the Historic House chose to host a series of smaller events.  They aimed for smaller audiences instead of larger ones.  They realized that what they could do was draw in a crowd that consisted of families with special events rather than one large event.  The public reacted positively towards this change of programming by the attendance numbers as well as showing interest in the programs.  These programs could be more easily repeated over the years and added upon if need be.

From what I have gathered, it appears that this new approach was considered a success. They had seen the increase in the amount of people that attended the museum and the events that they were hosting. The museum had seen their success in attendance and the feedback they received whether it was positive or negative. Their programs had been visitor-centered in the sense that they were trying to cater to the public like with Mother's Day or Father's Day or the "Teddy Bears Picnic to attract visitors with preschool kids. I think one take-away from this particular example would be that you must always be willing to adapt and not be afraid to try new things. That is certainly what the Historic House was doing and after realizing what worked for them, they could focus more on what made their programs successful.

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Chapter 6 focuses on the reconstruction of events at the Stansted Park Historic House in the United Kingdom. The home traditionally held a large-sized gala that brought in attendance, and well as donations, but after the 2008 global financial crisis, they were unable the have the event. It was around this time that they decided to look at how their operations were set up, and ask if they were properly suiting their needs. They decided to try a new program, with "keep it simple" as their mantra. They initiated a whole line of family programming that kept costs (and risks) low, while bringing money in slowly, instead of all at once. The key to this plan, though, was to create events that were easily repeatable, as the public was used to repition regarding the museum (I.E., thier yearly "proms")

For their needs, they considered the event series a success. They have seen an increase in attendance, and over time, the admissions price has raised to make the events profitable and successful. The key to this approach is to make sure that you are always planning, strategizing, and making sure that the events you are working on are sustainable and will grow in success over time.

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At Stansted Park Historic House, UK, implemented the new approach called Access Balanced by Conservation, Display, and Engagement to respond to the global financial crisis, which caused them the Stansted prom--the biggest events and major source of revenue. The museum focused on low-risk, smaller events that engage specific group of audience--family and family member. Examples of their successful events included father/mother day, teddy bear picnic lunch, and dress-up activities. These activities answered their needs to be money cautious, having a "quiet, personal environment," and safe to the artifact. One thing Stansted Park strived as a participatory museum and historical house is that it balanced between letting visitors actively engage and maintain security of the artifacts by educating its visitors about the conservation process.

The participatory program at Stansted Park has been considered a success by increasing number of ticket sells to families. Actually, the approach mainly discussed by the article is the free kids ticket that balanced out by the parents ticket sells. This can be considered a genius marketing and a visitor-centered approach in the sense that it truly identify its audience as families and making its policies accordingly, but is it a participatory approach? However, the museum made up for in many events in special occasions. One thing that is less discussed in the article but very interesting to me is that the museum purposely communicate about the conservation process with its visitors. This is the biggest tool for historic house like this museum to utilize as an engaging activity while keep visitor cautious about the artifacts without hurting their sense of 'ownership.'

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What kind of participatory or visitor-centered changes, strategies or initiatives did the museum implement? What goals were museums aiming to achieve? What considerations, if any, factored into the design of the approach?

In light of the failure of a high profile, massive event, the museum changed their approach completely. The museum aimed to increase profit and attendance through lots of small simple and easy to repeat events. These events were tweaked or extended (such as the teddy bears picnic) or dropped (such as the arboretum walks) as audience feedback came in. The museum took into consideration financial risk, simplicity of design, target audience, previous feedback from other events and more as they planned their events.

Was it successful (how did the museum measure success)?  Do you feel that they increased engagement and participation? Were the approaches used by the museum truly visitor-centered?  What is something you can take-away from this case?

It was successful in that the museum found steadily rising attendance and profits. The approaches were visitor centered. Programs were designed with the audience in mind within the museum’s means and were then tailored and sharpened via user feedback to create an experience that worked well for visitors. I think this case illustrates how important it is for a museum to be willing to be flexible. When their strategy was not working, they switched approaches and when those were not perfect the museum was willing to further tweak and refine their programs. They did not give up and were always willing to change what they were doing which I think helped lead to success.

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Chapter 7:

The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery (PCMAG) hosted family friendly events that linked the museum to the local community. The PCMAG hoped to make a connection between their natural history collections and their community. These events were biology, botany and geology themed events that were child friendly.

The PCMAG believes that the community events have been successful. The museum measured the success of these events through turnout numbers and evaluation questionnaires given to attendees of the events. Since the beginning of these events the turnout has doubled from 783 to 1,964 attendees. The cost of these events have also gone down as the community had become more aware of these events. These event are visitor-centered because they give the visitors additional opportunities to connect to the museums collection.

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Chapter 6:

The visitor-centered strategies implemented by the staff of Stansted Park were to do a number of small, family-centered events throughout each year to minimize financial risk for promoters and attract new and repeat visitors, with the historic house as a resource to the local community. The goals of the museum by initiating this strategy were to increase their audience beyond the “steady but not increasing number” of visitors they received each year. The considerations put into the yearly project were to spread out their financial outlay, recruiting volunteers, and creating a training program to familiarize newcomers with the historic house.

The implementation of the family events was a success for the historic house, given that family ticket sales increased dramatically and their “figures were notably up on all previous recorded years.” I think they did increase engagement and participation by choosing to use their house as a venue, not just as a historical center: basically, they forced it into a new light that worked very well. The approaches used were visitor-centered: after the cancellation of the large 2009 event, the house went to the public as to the smaller events they would enjoy and visitor evaluations led to extensions or cancellations of newer events. Something that can be taken away from the case is that museums shouldn’t just be looked at as containers of history; they can also be used to create a wonderful and unique environment for different events that bring audiences together in an innovative way.

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Chapter 7:  A Natural Solution to Increasing Engagement with Our Local Environment and Museum Collection.

Some changes The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery implemented were having events that bring the collection out of storage to the audience. They teamed up with Plymouth University and other organizations in the town to have public events indoors and outdoors in the area's parks. Each event had a different theme or topic in various locations. The mains goals of the project were to create different natural history events that are family-friendly, link events to the natural history collection, organize events once a month at various locations around Plymouth, and develop partnerships within the city. Some considerations factored into the approach where if the events were located inside and out, which staff member would be in charge of the event, and if the event would be free or paid for to cover expenses.

The events have been successful with the visitor count rising from 2006 to 2017. They also asked guests to fill out evaluations after every event to gain insight into what worked and what did not. The museum also measured the total expenditure for the duration of the events, which helped keep costs to the events lower because of planning that took place in the beginning stages of the project. I think the museum did increase engagement and participation and the events do show a strong visitor-centered role. A big take away from this case is objects locked in the collection will always be just an object to a visitor, but when the object is used in an event that is hands-on with the visitor, it becomes so much more.

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Chapter 7: Natural History

The Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery implemented a variety of new events in the museum as well as in city parks, such as bug hunts, star-gazing, and geology walks. The museum connected the events to their collection as often as possible, for example, bringing out bug specimens on bug hunt days. The museum also partnered with a variety of organizations including Plymouth University. The overall focus was to create family-friendly natural history events, where children and adults could learn together. In the creation of the event, the planning group focused on branding to be recognizable across the city and to have enthusiastic museum and university staff at each event to engage the visitors.
The museum measured success through number of participants as well as participant evaluations.The evaluations have been used to make improvements to the programs, including more detailed directions to meeting places in parks. I believe the museum approaches were visitor-centered as they first ran a pilot program to see the public response before launching a larger program, assuring that they were moving in a direction the public would support. The takeaway in this case for the me is the emphasis on variety. The museum appealed to a wider range of visitors as well as encouraged repeat visitors by having a pool of activities families could choose to come and do, rather than repeating one over and over.

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Stansted Park is a historic House museum in the U.K., it’ Chief aim with the new engagement program was to reduce the cost of the old ‘proms’ Program which while a major source of revenue for the Museums was too costly to continue with in light of the economic uncertainties following the Great Recession. So they set out to create smaller less costly programs to engage with the public, perhaps in an even deeper way then they had previously as research suggested that most people who visited historic homes like Stansted enjoyed these places most when they weren’t overly busy. So that need to avoid making Stansted Park too busy played a role in how they chose to implement their new programs.
By their own estimates the new programs were a massive success, as on one hand they brought in even more revenue for the Museum in the long term than the old program had, and they also brought in more visitors and got them even more engaged in the program than ever before.  In all I would say the programs seem to have been visitor centered with the Museum choosing programs that had been more popular with visitors to be maintained, and consulting visitors and the public about what they wanted to see at Stansted. I think the main lesson of this program is the need for Museums to be willing to try new programs to draw in visitors even if it comes at the expense of an old program, and to make sure that such a process involves the public as much as possible so that the Museum can better understand what kind of programs they should pursue in place of an older one, and so they know which new programs work and which don’t.