Coming of Age

A children’s museum seeks to woo youngsters and parents

This summer, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis will open the doors on its $25-million Dinosphere, a huge,

enclosed dome that will house the bones of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex and other young dinosaurs. The permanent exhibit strives to recreate a period 65 million years in the past, complete with sounds, sights, and smells — including decaying vegetation — of the Cretaceous Period.

Yet even after completing the fund-raising campaign for the Dinosphere, the country’s largest children’s museum, like its counterparts, has faced its share of financial challenges in recent years. Such museums have struggled to find ways to hold on to donors over time, particularly parents whose children have outgrown the museum’s exhibits.

The Indianapolis museum in particular has also grappled with how to balance ambitious projects with a budget it can sustain regardless of the state of the economy. In the past decade, the museum went through a period of rapid expansion, adding traveling exhibits and a movie theater. Most of the changes were fueled by the museum’s endowment, which swelled along with the stock market, from $177-million in 1997 to $235-million in 1999, and then remained flat for the next two years.

For many years, investment income from the museum’s endowment covered two-thirds of its operating budget. But as costs grew, the museum’s income was not keeping pace to cover them. By the late 1990s, endowment income was covering only a third of all costs, and the museum was having difficulty coming up with enough in donations and fees to cover the balance.

“Economic times were good, and yet here we were having to watch our expenses,” says James H. Naus, a certified public accountant and chairman of the board of trustees. “We were no different than an undercapitalized business that grows too rapidly.”

Inaccurate Forecasts

Part of the problem stemmed from the museum’s overestimation of the popularity of some new traveling exhibits. “They were built on a kind of Field of Dreams theory,” says the past board chairman, Hans W. Steck, an Indianapolis lawyer. “If you build it, they will come.”

At the same time, the museum faced growing competition from other nonprofit groups. What’s more, the novelty of being a children’s museum was no longer as great as it had been when the Indianapolis museum opened 79 years ago. Some 110 of the estimated 250 children’s museums around the country opened in the 1990s.

But the biggest competition, says Jeffrey H. Patchen, the museum’s president, has come from “popular culture, movies, and television.” The museum’s appeal these days has to outweigh a trip to the shopping mall, he says.

In response to the challenges it has faced, the museum has taken several steps, including closing its movie theater, the CineDome, after only seven years. The museum decided to replace it with the dinosaur exhibit because not enough visitors were interested in paying an extra fee for the movies. The museum also added a requirement that before any project gets the green light, it must first receive enough in donations or pledges to cover not only the project’s creation, but also the cost of keeping it going in the future.

To help oversee the changes, the museum’s board in 1999 hired Mr. Patchen, a former teacher and a senior program officer at the J. Paul Getty Trust, to run the museum after its previous director retired. Under his leadership, the museum has reevaluated its mission and exhibits and tried to broaden its appeal to all members of a family, not just children.

“The biggest problem for children’s museums is that kids grow up,” says Louis B. Casagrande, past chairman of the Association of Children’s Museums. That means children’s museums have a relatively short period in which to persuade parents to support them for a lifetime. “How do you grab folks in that one little window and have them bond with you?” asks Mr. Casagrande, who is currently executive director of the Boston Children’s Museum.

In Indianapolis, museum officials realized that with some of its exhibits, parents and other grown-ups were escorts rather than visitors; they did not experience the museum, except vicariously through their children. So as a first step, the board rewrote its mission statement from a focus on kids to one aimed at creating “extraordinary learning experiences that have the power to transform the lives of children and families.”

The museum then reviewed all of its operations with an eye toward including all members of a family. This change in thinking is now reflected in even the smallest details. For example, when people approach the information desk for recommendations about what to see, rather than being asked, “What are your child’s interests?” staff members now ask, “What are your family’s interests?”

The exhibits have also been designed to appeal to a variety of ages. The new dinosaur exhibit will offer a fossil lab in which teenagers can help prepare actual fossils for display, working with trained researchers. And after viewing dinosaur art, every member of a family will be able to try his or her hand at drawing or sculpting a dinosaur.

The board hopes the shift in focus will also make it easier for donors to relate to the museum and stimulate more gifts, although its members say it is still too early to know what the long-term impact on donations might be.

Other children’s museums are undergoing a similar shift in thinking. A children’s museum in Bettendorf, Iowa, for example, has even changed its name — to the Family Museum of Arts and Science — following a merger with another museum.

Corporate Sponors

While officials at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis decided to close its movie theater, they have kept another project that had been a resource drain: the traveling exhibits.

Before approving a new exhibit, however, museum staff members must line up corporate sponsors to cover the expense of building it. Most proposals have found sponsors. The Eli Lilly Company, for example, paid $400,000 for an exhibit on bones. But a project about the Emmys and the history of television has been postponed because the museum has been unable to find a company willing to pay for it.

Even with corporate sponsorship, the traveling exhibits don’t bring in much income for the museum, Mr. Patchen says, but they keep the museum’s design and construction staff creatively engaged and help enhance the museum’s reputation.

The museum’s most recent major project, the Dinosphere, provides the best example of how the institution hopes to raise money in the future. In less than two years, the museum has raised the $20-million needed to build the exhibit and an additional $5-million for an endowment to pay for the costs of running it. Much of that money — $15-million — has come from the Lilly Endowment, but a handful of wealthy donors have also made big gifts.

Mr. Patchen says he strives to make giving a very personal experience for donors, and has even arranged museum-related trips for a few of the biggest contributors.

On these trips, Mr. Patchen puts donors to work, whether it’s negotiating the acquisition of a dinosaur skeleton or taking a look at similar exhibits at other museums to see how they compare. He’s taken four different groups of donors, all of whom paid their own way, on trips to South Dakota, where many of the museum’s fossils have been excavated by the Black Hills Institute, a nonprofit organization with a small museum of its own in Hill City, S.D.

On one of these trips last fall, Susie Sogard, an Indianapolis resident and donor, and her 11-year-old granddaughter spent time scraping at a steep dirt hill pocked with pebbles and tumbleweed, looking for dinosaur fossils. Ms. Sogard says the trip helped make her more committed to the museum’s success. “It was amazing,” she says. “Indiana doesn’t even have dinosaur bones. Out there, we were in their world. It made me want to believe in magic.”

Another donor says he increased his gift — from $1-million to $3-million — after taking three of his children to South Dakota to help excavate the centerpiece of the dinosaur exhibit, a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex that is one of the most complete skeletons ever found.

“This was something we could see, touch, and feel,” says Scott Jones, who helped unearth the dinosaur’s sacrum. “It’s not just a business transaction. It’s become very personal, very emotional.” Mr. Jones, a high-tech multimillionaire who co-founded the telecommunications company Boston Technology (now known as Comverse Technologies) and sold it in the 1990s, says he also was involved with negotiations over the fossil. And he provided technological advice for the Dinosphere, including developing computers with touch screens that will be used throughout the exhibit to help visitors understand the latest theories on dinosaurs.

Mr. Patchen says his previous jobs helped teach him the power of such trips. In the 1980s, as an arts consultant for the Indiana Department of Education, he took teachers on trips to encourage them to travel.

As a senior program officer for national programs at the J. Paul Getty Trust in the late 1990s, he took officials from other foundations on tours of the programs the trust was supporting, in an effort to involve them in the foundation’s goal of improving the quality of arts education.

Money isn’t the only kind of donation Mr. Patchen has helped secure with a trip. He persuaded John Lanzendorf — a Chicago hairdresser who has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of dinosaur art — to donate some of the items to the Indianapolis museum after taking him to China to meet with the country’s leading paleontologist, Dong Zheming. Mr. Patchen learned of Mr. Lanzendorf’s collection when he was doing a search on Amazon’s Web site for books on dinosaurs and stumbled on one written by Mr. Lanzendorf.

As another fund-raising strategy, the museum offers events for adults, including those with and without children of their own.

As part of its biennial “finders keepers” ball, donors pursue clues to find objects in the museum that are tied to exhibits. Museum volunteers also put on an annual Halloween haunted house that raised more than $300,000 last year. And it held a 1960s party tied to its Andy Warhol exhibit, which featured the artist’s renditions of childhood icons like Superman and Mickey Mouse. Mr. Patchen says the museum has noticed that even donors whose children have grown continue to attend the special events.

Naming Dinosaurs

Donors who give $10,000 to $900,000 are offered the chance to name a dinosaur skeleton. One donor, Fran Julian, has had a Leptoceratops named “Frannie” in her honor.

Mr. Patchen hopes the naming offer will stimulate further gifts to a capital campaign the museum is about to begin. The museum has named its fossil lab after another donor, Polly Horton Hicks, who donated $1-million to the dinosaur exhibit.

The museum’s energetic approach to fund raising, however, has attracted some criticism.

Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, a consumer group that opposes commercialism in government and charity, says the museum needs to be careful that youthful visitors aren’t confused. “If, instead of a brontosaurus, they call it the Exxon brontosaurus, that might be a problem, because kids might think that’s the real name,” Mr. Ruskin says.

Mr. Patchen says children won’t have trouble distinguishing between the scientific name of the dinosaur and any nickname it might receive in honor of a donor. The museum will make sure the signs are very clear, he says.

Arnita A. Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association, a Washington organization that had criticized the Smithsonian Institution several years ago for giving a donor too much control over an exhibit’s design, says that Mr. Patchen appears to be striking the right balance between engaging donors and maintaining control.

The exhibits and projects “need to be carefully thought through as part of a long-range plan, and then you go and find sponsors for what you have decided to do,” she says. Ms. Jones says historians who help museums craft exhibits don’t mind working with donors, so long as the donors aren’t running the show.

Mr. Patchen acknowledges the “two tensions” of securing gifts and advancing the museum’s educational mission. He says in many cases he is able to reason with donors who have ideas about an exhibit that would not fit with the museum’s goals. For example, Dow Chemical had wanted to pay for an exhibit on genetic engineering, but Mr. Patchen says he persuaded the company to give money instead for a much more basic exhibit that explains DNA and genes.

On several occasions, the museum has reached an impasse with corporations. Mr. Patchen declines to provide any specific examples, but he says, “We end up saying no a good bit to corporations who are more interested in the marketing than in the mission.”

Seeking More Visitors

With the addition of the Dinosphere, the museum hopes to increase its attendance by about 20 percent, to roughly 1.2 million visitors a year.

But equally important to officials is finding ways to measure what kind of long-term impact the museum’s work is having on those visitors.

The children’s museum recently started calling some people who had visited three or six months previously to ask what they remembered and whether the experience prompted them to take any actions.

“We’ve got to go beyond what people learned and enjoyed at the time they were here,” says Mr. Patchen. “We’ve got to figure out how we, as an informal learning institution, can link to schools, homes, television. We’re taking a long view.”