Stores, members and donors: the same people

What a beanie showed one nonprofit

In spring 2025, The Urbanist, a Seattle news nonprofit funded by its readers, ran a member drive with one reward: a custom beanie, for anyone who started or raised a monthly gift. The drive beat its goal. The hat was a thank-you built into the ask, and it worked in part because The Urbanist had asked its readers first. In its reader survey, 30 percent of respondents said they were interested in branded apparel, and the publication was not offering any. It brought the beanie back as the headline reward for its fall drive and as a prize at events.

We should say who is writing. One of us, Jesse Swingle, sits on The Urbanist’s board, and Addiss Enterprises handled the order. Addiss Enterprises designs and runs merchandise programs for theaters, museums and other nonprofits, and our sister company, Cedar Collaborative, is a marketing consulting company, so we have a stake in the answer. That is the reason we are putting the evidence in front of you, including the parts that do not help us, and asking the people who run these programs to tell us where we are wrong. Our research and outreach director, Mitchell Kennedy-Stillman, is leading those conversations, and he comes from two generations of the promotional products business.

Our thesis is that the same people appear across a cultural institution’s store, membership program, development office and marketing, and that these can reinforce one another. They don’t always. In our marketing work at Cedar Collaborative we see nonprofits that are intensely siloed, and organizations that do things because they feel they should and not because it serves the mission. When the parts work as one brand, the brand serves the mission: it supports profit, community and members, and it helps the institution do what it does efficiently. That is our view from client work, and this research is how we are testing it. In most institutions the parts run on separate systems, budgets and goals, and we think four things keep them apart: data, money, governance and the legal structure.

Think about how the pieces connect. Someone buys a tote at the store to show support. Someone gives when they buy a ticket. A new member gets a small gift of thanks, even just a badge. Each is a way of saying you are part of this, and each is brand work, whichever office pays for it.

Get the draft report

A draft of the full research report is ready to read, and we expect the final report in November. Enter your email below to download a copy of the draft. If you would rather answer as you read, the questions are near the end of this page.

What each seat at the table gets from this

This is written for everyone with a hand in the work, and each of you gets something different from it.

• Executive directors and CEOs: a way to ask whether the people who buy, join, attend and give are the same people, and who is close to the institution and has not been asked.
• Development: merchandise as a way to recruit and thank supporters, and a warning about when a gift offered in exchange for giving backfires.
• Membership: evidence that belonging and mission keep members more than discounts do, and a way to think about what a member gift says.
• Marketing and communications: a test for whether what you hand out connects to what people experienced inside, and to how they feel about the place.
• Retail and store leaders: what stores earn, what the public filings show, and what customers say makes an item worth buying.

What you already buy for supporters

Thank-you gifts, member and monthly-donor premiums, event items, donor recognition, board and volunteer gifts, and the shelves in the store: institutions spend real money on all of them, often through different offices on different calendars, and don’t always ask what each is for. If it is for profit, the question is how much it makes, and the store sections below show how little most public filings reveal. If it is for the brand, the test is whether it connects to what supporters experienced and how they feel about the place, and in our experience much of what we see on shelves does not. If it is there to fill a space, the space can do more. Each answer calls for something different, and membership, development and marketing all have a stake in it.

In our client work, the item a development office orders for supporters is often one the store would stock, bought by a different office on a different calendar. That is an observation and not a measured finding.

Merchandise people want says something about them

When people ask for your merchandise, they are saying something about themselves. For many people, younger ones especially, what they wear and carry stands for their passions and principles. A PPAI survey of more than 500 U.S. consumers aged 18 to 26, reported in March 2024, found that 51 percent follow brands for their promotional products or giveaways and 85 percent say trendiness and cultural relevance matter. PPAI is the trade association for the promotional products industry, so read it as the industry’s own data. Fan culture shows the pattern at scale. Pollstar estimated that Eras Tour attendees spent about $40 each on merchandise in the tour’s first 60 shows, and a UserTesting survey found that scarcity drove about 28 percent of Gen Z respondents’ first Labubu purchases, against about 20 percent overall (the survey does not say how many Gen Z respondents there were). In IMPACTS’s 2024 analysis, shoppers named merchandise available only at the location among the best things about museum retail, well ahead of supporting the organization.

Public radio is the closest cultural comparison, and it cuts both ways. At New Hampshire Public Radio, 75 percent of donors who asked for a thank-you gift in one year asked for socks, and donors posted photos of them without being asked, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2018. But offering a gift in exchange for giving can backfire. In a 2014 field experiment with 3,641 renewing donors at a public radio station, offering a tumbler for a gift of $180 or more cut the share who gave from 6.9 percent to 4.0 percent (Chao, 2017). The study does not describe the tumbler, so it cannot tell us whether an item donors wanted would have done better, and these were renewing donors, not new members. A gift with no condition attached did the opposite in a mailing to 139,747 university alumni: donors were about twice as likely to give, 0.97 percent against 0.47 percent, though each solicitation lost nearly $3 once the gift was paid for. Yale researchers found a similar effect for conditional gifts in 2012 experiments.

Members say something similar about why they stay. In an AAM and Wilkening Consulting survey of museum-goers, over 80 percent of members said they join or renew because of the museum’s mission, and fewer than half gave transactional reasons such as free admission, member benefits or discounts. IMPACTS data points the same way: members whose main benefit is a discount are the least likely to renew, and those who name belonging, supporting or impact are the most likely (IMPACTS, 2025).

Our reading is that the difference is whether the object is theirs: tied to a place or a cause, something a person would choose to wear and be seen in, not a premium picked for its price. A badge for a new member is small, and it tells them they are inside. That is a view and not a finding, and the draft report sets out the evidence on both sides.

Ask your supporters what they want

The Urbanist’s first step was to ask. Its reader survey found that 30 percent of respondents were interested in branded apparel, and that became the beanie. The same step works anywhere. Add one question to the next member, donor or audience survey about what people would wear or use that carries your name. Offer the answer first to a small group, such as a monthly-giving tier or an event, and count what happens before you order for everyone. A survey answer is interest and not a purchase, so test it small.

Who is close to you and has not been asked

The question for a development office is who is close to the institution and has not been asked yet, and how it would know. A store purchase is one of the few records of a person choosing the institution and spending their own money on it. One institution that joined its store, membership and giving records found that people who had bought in the store were more likely to become members or donors afterward. It is anonymous in the draft report, and the figures are theirs. We think the store is an early sign of who is close, and we are looking at how that works: which way the effect runs, and which purchases matter.

The question is urgent for a reason. Baby boomers hold 52.5 percent of US household wealth, according to the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, but the “great wealth transfer” looks smaller than its headline. Visa’s model leaves about $36 trillion of boomers’ $93 trillion to pass to Gen X and millennial households, and it leaves out the richest 1 percent. A Washington Post analysis found that the share of people left with nothing after paying for elder care rose from 6 percent to nearly 11 percent between deaths in 2006 to 2010 and deaths in 2017 to 2022.

If you run a store

This part is for retail leaders, and for executive directors and finance leads who have to defend the store’s numbers. If you do not run a store, you can skip to what we are working out.

Where the money goes

The Minnesota Historical Society’s store sold $2.53 million in the year to June 2025, and its cost of goods was $1.27 million, so about half of every dollar was left before anyone was paid (audited statements). Missouri Botanical Garden’s audit lists $2.51 million of retail shop revenue and $1.08 million of cost of goods sold, which would leave about 57 percent if all of that cost belongs to the shops (audit). Payroll, rent, card fees and any overhead charged to the store come out of what remains, and most public filings do not show them.

The Portland Museum of Art in Maine shows what happens when they do. Its statements for the year to January 2025 list $0.38 million in store revenue and $0.56 million in store expense, which leaves the store about $0.18 million behind, even though cost of goods was only $0.16 million.

Discounts take a further cut. Say an item costs $50 and sells for $100. A 20 percent discount brings the sale to $80 and the dollars left over from $50 to $30, a 40 percent drop. In a 2022 thread on AAM’s member forum, seven institutions reported staff discounts of 15 to 40 percent, and the member discounts mentioned were 10 and 15 percent. That is a small, informal sample, and we found no survey of how often discounts stack.

Price is the other lever. Here we can report something we have seen directly. Some institutions order a custom version of a product that is already sold blank at retail. They add their usual margin to what they paid, without checking what the plain item sells for. The price lands below the retail price of the product without the logo, yet high enough to leave some margin, so the store earns less than it could on an item that carries its name. We found no published research on how common this is, so we treat it as an observation to test. AAM’s 2025 national snapshot found that 19 percent of museums raised retail prices in the year before the survey, so the question is live, though the survey does not say what the increases earned.

Each of these is a problem a store can work on alone. We start there because a store that cannot cover its own costs has little to offer membership or development.

What the public filings show

Tax-exempt organizations report gross sales of inventory, the cost of those goods and the net on Form 990, their annual federal tax return, which makes it the nearest thing to a public store ledger. We compared fiscal 2023 returns for eleven institutions that report store sales. Gross store sales ranged from 0.4 percent of the institution’s total expenses, meaning everything it spends and not only the store’s costs, at the Seattle Symphony to 18.6 percent at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. A store can be a rounding error or a large part of an operating budget, and an average across both tells a reader very little.

Gross store sales ranged from 0.4 percent to 18.6 percent of expenses at eleven institutions

Gross sales of inventory as a share of total expenses, Form 990, fiscal 2023. Dotted line: median, 3.7 percent.

• Atlanta Botanical Garden18.6%
• Museum of Flight13.2%
• Atlanta History Center11.3%
• OMSI5.4%
• Portland Art Museum4.4%
• Minnesota Historical Society3.7%
• Portland Museum of Art, Maine2.5%
• Oregon Historical Society2.0%
• Pacific Science Center2.0%
• Seattle Symphony0.4%
• Mystic Seaport0.4%

The tax line and the audit can tell the same story. The Portland Art Museum’s audited statements for the year to June 2025 show $990,912 of museum store sales. Its Form 990 for the same year reports the same sales, less $498,397 of cost of goods, for a net of $492,515. A tax return splits sales from cost, which the audited statements do not.

The store is also small next to the budget decisions around it. At the Minnesota Historical Society, store sales fell $0.16 million in the year to June 2025, while total revenue fell $9.8 million to $86.0 million as the state appropriation dropped from $34.9 million to $26.5 million. Total revenue moved about sixty times as many dollars as the store did.

The Seattle Aquarium does not run its own gift store. An outside operator does, and the aquarium receives a commission, which its 2025 audited statements put at $1.56 million, up 12.3 percent from $1.39 million. The same statements say the agreement runs through June 30, 2032. That is real income and it grew. It also means the aquarium’s Form 990 reports no inventory sales at all, and it raises a question we cannot answer from outside: who holds the record of what visitors buy, and can that record sit next to the aquarium’s member and donor files? The agreement may say. We have not seen it.

What others are doing

We went looking for institutions that treat the store as part of a wider program, and for evidence of what it earns them. Perks for members and donors are easy to find. The Henry Ford holds a Member Shopping Night on November 16 with a double member discount of 20 percent, and its Museum Store opens an hour before the event begins. The Bechtler Museum lists a 20 percent store discount at every giving level from $1,000 to $10,000 and up, so the discount does not rise as the gift does. We did not find a museum that publishes limited editions released first to members or donors. We saw one nonprofit that pairs a member discount with first access to new releases, and we saw it only once. That may mean the practice is rare, or only that few institutions write about it.

Several stores work with local artists on consignment and publish their terms. The Suquamish Museum Store pays artists 60 percent of the sale price, pays monthly, and takes any discount out of the museum’s 40 percent. Gadsden Arts uses the same 60 and 40 split. Where an institution commissions a design instead, a 2018 trade article quoted the head of copyright licensing at the artists’ rights organization DACS saying artists typically receive 5 to 10 percent of retail price. That is an industry estimate, not any one museum’s terms. A 2022 Inquirer story put local artists at about a quarter of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s retail mix, based on an estimate given to the paper.

None of these sources reports what those programs earn. We also found no independent evidence that linking shop purchases to membership and donor records raises giving; what we found on the subject came mostly from software companies, and none of it reports a result. The nearest thing to data on asking at the register is a 2022 thread on AAM’s member forum. Science Central in Fort Wayne reported no negative reactions at admissions and no drop in gift shop sales with donation boxes and a round-up option in place. Stepping Stones in Katonah, New York, found that some visitors who had already given at the start of a tour gave again when asked after a purchase, typically about $10. Those are self-reports from two small museums.

What we are working out

We think merchandise people want, joined to what membership, development and marketing know, does more than any of them alone. That is a thesis, and the second round is where we test it. These are the questions we are working through:

• Whether stores that work closely with membership and development earn more than stores that do not. The filings cannot tell us, because they do not show who a store coordinates with.
• Whether merchandise people want to own raises membership or giving, and for which supporters. The nearest comparables come from fan culture and public radio gifts, and neither measures it directly.
• Whether the items development and membership give supporters are often the ones the store would stock, and what happens to cost and giving when one office buys them.
• How many stores price logo goods near or below comparable retail, what moving those prices would do to sales, and how much overhead institutions charge their stores.
• Whether the four things we think keep the store, membership and development apart (data, money, governance and the legal structure) hold up against more institutions. They are our framework, built from filings and conversations.

The evidence has limits we should name. The institutions in the chart were chosen, not sampled, and several are in the Pacific Northwest. Most figures come from fiscal 2023 tax returns, and the newer ones come from audited statements, which are a different basis, so they show direction and not dollars. Fiscal years end in different months. The donor figures cover all causes and not only culture, and several of the merchandise cases come from large institutions that are not typical. The first round included conversations with practitioners, and the second round adds more of them and checks every figure against its source.

We would change our minds if we found any of these:

• Stores that combined their records with development’s and saw no change in profit, membership or giving.
• Evidence that raising prices on logo goods costs more in lost sales than it adds in margin.
• Evidence that shop buyers join and give no more often than comparable visitors who do not buy.
• Evidence that goods people want to own draw buyers who never become members or donors, at a cost to the store’s margin.
• Evidence that limited or member-only items do not interest younger supporters, or that they buy them and never give.

We would also like to hear from any institution that kept its store separate on purpose and did better for it.

Answer as you read

Answer any of these in a sentence, in any order, in the form below. We will not quote you or name your institution without asking first, and the final report credits contributors by name, title and institution, or anonymously if you prefer. A rough answer is worth more to us than none, because it is what lets us compare institutions.

Read the draft and tell us where it is wrong

A longer draft of this research is ready to read. It sets out how a store can be run as an operation or as a program, four places where we think stores and development get separated, the numbers with their definitions problems, what the wealth transfer and care costs mean for the donor file, and what we are working out. We would rather have your corrections than your agreement.

If your institution’s numbers look different from the ones above, if we have misread a filing, or if your store works closely with development and it did not help, we want to know. Enter your email below to download a copy of the draft report. We expect the final report in November, and your corrections will shape it.