The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is one of the country’s leading museums, both in terms of programming and in terms of donor relations. I sat down with Jessica Hall-Cummings, Director of Donor Circles and Annual Giving for the ROM, to discuss getting people involved in Patrons Circles at the ROM, and maintaining their interest in these groups once they have joined them.
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| The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, illuminated by night. Source. |
That’s always an interesting topic of conversation. We’re always playing with it. We’re always tinkering. It’s important to be really responsive to the donors, you can’t just say, “Here’s the program.” They’re living organisms, as it were. Especially over time. The Young Patrons Circle is very easy to make adjustments to, because young people tend to be very open to change. The Royal Patrons Circle, for a long time, when you surveyed them said, “Everything’s great, never change.” But it will continue to grow, and there’s a large group of the boomer generation which will move into that circle, and their needs and preferences are wildly different than people who are in the program now.
Obviously young people are a sought-after demographic in cultural and heritage institutions, presumably because one day we’re going to have money and invest it in these organizations. How do you court young people? How do you set up those relationships and then maintain them?
Specifically from the foundation side, the Young Patrons Circle is our channel to do that. Not to say that other people don’t end up working with younger donors, but that is our main way in which we engage young people. It was created almost fifteen years ago, and the idea was that we wanted a younger generation to join our Patrons Circle, but all the research said that the benefits that drove success in that group were not going to be of interest to a younger generation. They launched a fully separate program. It has changed a lot over time, but the idea remains the same: What is an attractive offer to young people to get them engaged with the ROM, and then hopefully turn them into the future major gift donors of tomorrow?
What kind of stuff is offered [to the Young Patrons Circle]?
The program is very socially-motivated. Our hope is to have one event a month. They’re of varying sizes. Sometimes they’re quite small and have limited capacity, sometimes they’re massive like an exhibit opening and shared with other donor groups, so they’re not always exclusive to that group. It’s important to have enough that are exclusive to that group for them to feel happy. I would say that’s different from when the program started, when it was very, very socially-motivated and it wasn’t as much about the museum. There were lots of events like Supper Clubs, where it was around social opportunity and the program was making those opportunities possible, but it wasn’t necessarily reinforcing what it is we do at the ROM.
Making these events more tailored to the museum makes a lot of sense.
Specifically from the foundation side, the Young Patrons Circle is our channel to do that. Not to say that other people don’t end up working with younger donors, but that is our main way in which we engage young people. It was created almost fifteen years ago, and the idea was that we wanted a younger generation to join our Patrons Circle, but all the research said that the benefits that drove success in that group were not going to be of interest to a younger generation. They launched a fully separate program. It has changed a lot over time, but the idea remains the same: What is an attractive offer to young people to get them engaged with the ROM, and then hopefully turn them into the future major gift donors of tomorrow?
What kind of stuff is offered [to the Young Patrons Circle]?
The program is very socially-motivated. Our hope is to have one event a month. They’re of varying sizes. Sometimes they’re quite small and have limited capacity, sometimes they’re massive like an exhibit opening and shared with other donor groups, so they’re not always exclusive to that group. It’s important to have enough that are exclusive to that group for them to feel happy. I would say that’s different from when the program started, when it was very, very socially-motivated and it wasn’t as much about the museum. There were lots of events like Supper Clubs, where it was around social opportunity and the program was making those opportunities possible, but it wasn’t necessarily reinforcing what it is we do at the ROM.
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| Friday Night Live, an event hosted at the ROM in which the museum becomes a club. Drink and dance with your favourite dinos! Source. |
Making these events more tailored to the museum makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, and we do share a number of events with the Royal Patrons Circle every year. With that change in our benefits that I mentioned before, we now have a healthy number of younger people at those events. The hope is that by the time they’re ready to leave the Young Patrons Circle, it isn’t like they won’t know anybody. But essentially programs like that are a long-term experiment that I don’t know if anyone in Canada has seen the long-term results of. I feel like there are institutions in Canada which are in this middle place like us where they’re starting to see better integration, but it will be a long time before we see if these people become major gift donors to the ROM in their fifties and sixties.
When you have all these funds coming in from Patrons Circles, memberships, and major gift donors, how does all of that get allotted?
The ROM has a strategic plan that our office looks at. Priorities are identified with the ROM, and then through various channels we would be going out and raising money. The annual giving program funds the highest priorities: our operations. There are opportunities within that to do some directed giving, but it’s always our priority that people give to highest priorities because that is a crucial need. Operations is always a crucial need, it just isn’t a very sexy need. That’s part of why the donor circles work, because you have all these great experiences to engage in all these facets of the ROM, without needing to say, “I funded this specific thing.”
It’s obviously really nice for the ROM to get those super big donations, but it sounds like membership, Patrons Circles, they’re the funding that’s keeping the ROM afloat.
Our Board chair would say that the money that gets raised through those programs and the money that comes in to operations is an investment in our office to then make those other things happen. That’s the money to create the launchpad for everything else.
What is the most exciting thing for you personally that has been achieved at the ROM through fundraising since you joined nine years ago?
There are lots of exciting things. I think the thing that springs to mind is that finally this year we secured all the funding we need to build our new Dawn of Life gallery. [It will] start the story, as it were, and it will also be a gallery of the twenty-first century. A gallery planned in this age, where there will be lots of digital activations and ways of thinking about how people interact with museum spaces today when technology is such a prevalent part of everyone’s life. In our Instagram this week they did a great story about a bunch of kids who got really excited about the Dawn of Life gallery, and they ended up doing their own little fundraising campaign to raise money. So they brought them all in to meet the lead curator, go behind the scenes, and hear about how the gallery will look.
Did they approve?
I think they did. There were lots of happy faces.
Check out upcoming Young Patron Circle events, and take a look at the ROM’s current major exhibition Zuul: Life of an Armoured Dinosaur.
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