Building museum attendance with non-traditional opening hours

Let's talk about "non-standard" hours as an attendance-building strategy for smaller museums.

As the previous director of marketing at the Jewish Museum in New York, I was involved in the decision to open the museum on Saturdays. The Jewish Sabbath is definitely a non-standard day for any Jewish organization to be open. It took a lot of deliberation, community input and operational changes to make this work. In order to honor Jewish religious practice, admission was free. We hoped to capture more and different visitors and tourists for whom Saturdays is a major museum visiting day.

Within the first year of Saturday openings, Saturday admissions outpaced admissions on any other day, coming close to eclipsing Sundays - usually the strongest admission day. The audience profile on Saturdays differed widely from visitors on other days. Saturday visitors were younger, more diverse and more skewed towards first time visitors.

This initiative became so popular that a generous donor stepped in to fund the costs of opening the additional day, also covering the cost of free admission.

A success by any measure for an effort to "think outside the box," by offering non-standard hours to diversify and build museum audiences.