Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron
Photo by Iwan Baan ©
The Barnes Foundation | Calder Gardens
MUSEUM AND GARDEN
PHILADELPHIA, PA
2020, 2019, and 2013
Assessment of Operating Scenarios, Shared Services, Business Planning
After The Barnes Foundation moved to a new purpose-built home in downtown Philadelphia, Amy analyzed the timed ticketing and visitor circulation through all its spaces, including the highly constrained permanent collection galleries. She made a series of recommendations to enhance traffic flow, earned revenue, and the overall visitor experience. This work was completed in 2013 while Amy was Managing Director at Lord Cultural Resources.
In 2019, The Barnes hired AK Cultural Planning to assess the market opportunity and develop a business plan for a confidential project which did not advance. However, in 2020, AK Cultural Planning was invited back to support Foundation staff in evaluating a potential role in programming and operating a new institution: Calder Gardens. This included assessing and adjusting operating scenarios developed by Barnes senior staff, as well as business modeling to provide comparative analysis of a series of variables, including education programming and changing exhibitions. The project scope included:
Technical review of annual operating budgets and assessment of draft operating assumptions, attendance projections, implications of the draft space list, and other key assumptions.
Senior staff workshops to discuss key budget drivers such as staffing, endowment, scale of public/back of house and outdoor spaces, exhibitions, public programs, education, marketing, operating hours, and pricing. These workshops resulted in the development of critical operating scenarios such as frequency and scale of changing exhibitions, different management structures, and programming levels.
Order-of-magnitude pro forma budgets for each operating scenario which included sensitivity analyses for programming and/or space variables.
This work informed the operating agreement between The Barnes Foundation and Calder Gardens in which The Barnes supplies visitor services, marketing, and facility management to Calder Gardens while expanding its reach to new audiences.
