By BRIAN RUDMAN
Auckland Museum's voluntary admission charging regime -"compelling giving" to use the industry jargon - has proved to be a good little earner.
The $660,568 in clear profit collected from visitors in the year to June 30, 2000, has put a real twinkle in the eye of museum director Dr Rodney Wilson.
Just what the cost of the "arms-up-your-back" donation scheme has been in terms of customer numbers is much less clear. In the good, old days before the cash registers were installed, the museum's official attendance notebook recorded annual visitor numbers averaging 1.1 million. In the year to June 30, with the $5 voluntary charge in place, this figure plummeted to just 428,688. The million-plus figure, which in the past was used to promote the museum's proud boast of being the most-visited institution in Australasia, was calculated by counting arrivals with the aid of a manual counting device.
Dr Wilson now says such counting methods are "notoriously unreliable" and "grossly overstated" visitor numbers. Overseas research would back him up on that. But only partly. Reports from Britain and Australia suggest that over-exuberant clicking by attendants can exaggerate attendance figures by 25 per cent to 40 per cent.
Auckland Museum's own experiments show a similar picture. The new automated charging regime electronically generates a numbered ticket for every visitor whether they donate or not. It also provides an accurate count of customers. For the first months of this system, the old-style manual counting went on as well. A comparison of the two systems revealed that the "clickers" had overstated attendances by 46 per cent.
However, the apparent decline in numbers we are trying to explain here is not 46 per cent, but more than 60 per cent. The obvious conclusion is that hundreds of thousands of potential visitors have been turned off by the charging and have stayed away. Dr Wilson rejects this. "My hunch, and that is all it can be, is that we probably haven't dropped many at all."
In explanation, he would have us believe that Auckland's clickers are the most vigorous over-clickers the world has seen, more inaccurate than their counterparts in Australia and Britain as they merrily clicked in visitors.
By claiming the numbers from the era of free entry were stupendously bodgy, Dr Wilson makes it impossible for us to discover the true impact of the new charging regime.
Looking overseas is not that helpful either. The introduction of fees in places like the Australian Museum, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and the British Museum (Natural History) resulted in apparent visitor number collapses of around 50 per cent. But in each case, the pre-fee visitor numbers were estimates only.
However, there are two examples from across the Tasman which challenge Dr Wilson's hunch. In both cases they involve fee-charging institutions which turned. The Newcastle Regional Museum went free in July 1996. In the financial year that followed, visitor numbers increased 335 per cent on the average annual visitation since opening in 1988. The loss in ticket income was more than made up by increased turnover in the carpark, museum shop and cafe and donation boxes. Sponsorships also increased.
The National Gallery of Victoria went free on July 1, 1996, and visitor numbers increased from a historical monthly average of 47,242 to a monthly average over the first six free months of 120,125.
The only conclusion you can draw from these examples is that entry fees do keep people away.
Auckland Museum's board and their director are not buying this argument. They are bravely predicting visitor numbers will rise 91,000 over the next year, and net revenue lift more than 50 per cent to $1,075,969.
We will see. On past record, arithmetic has not been the institution's strong point. Their visitor target for the year just ended was 739,789 - based somehow, it seems, on the now rejected 1.1 million count. The actual number of customers was 428,688. Now they are aiming for a more modest 520,610.
We'll have to wait a while to see if they've got their sums right this time.
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