Field notes
The organizations we work with have spent years developing a particular kind of expertise about their audiences, their collections, and what their communities value. We’ve spent years inside those same worlds: museum openings, board meetings, development conferences, botanical gardens on a Tuesday afternoon, symphony lobbies before curtain, and always the gift shop on the way out. Field Notes is where we publish articles and research on what we notice. Some of it is specific to one sector. Some of it cuts across all of them. Most of it starts with something we actually saw.
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Stores, members and donors: the same people
A Seattle news nonprofit’s beanie, a public radio tumbler and what store filings show: why a cultural institution’s store, membership and development reach the same people.
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The four calendars
Fifteen cultural institutions whose public filings we examined close their fiscal years in five different months. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and the Seattle Art Museum close theirs in June. Mount Vernon, Crystal Bridges and the Corning Museum of Glass close in December. Longwood Gardens and Desert Botanical Garden close in September, the Oregon…
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The second order
A quote describes one order. For an institution that will need merchandise again next year, and the year after, the more useful thing to evaluate is what working together will look like by the second order and the fifth. That shows up early: in the first conversation, before any price is on the table. Addiss…
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Does donor recognition actually work?
More than half of the people who gave to a US nonprofit in 2024 did not give again in 2025. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, run by the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday, put full-year donor retention for 2025 at 43.3 percent, up slightly from 43.1 percent. Repeat donors held on a little better. Retention…
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Sending one thing to one person
Send a ground parcel to a home in one of the ZIP codes UPS designates as a delivery area, and two surcharges apply before the base rate: $6.50 for delivering to a residence and $6.55 for the delivery area. That is about $13 before the shipping itself is priced and before anything goes in the…
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Why the date you were given is not the date
Museums have been raising prices, and some of them name tariffs as part of the reason. The American Alliance of Museums’ 2025 National Snapshot of United States Museums surveyed 511 museum directors in July and August 2025. It found that 58 percent of museums had raised prices in at least one category over the previous…
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When the lobby becomes part of the performance
At the North American premiere of Coco Chanel: The Life of a Fashion Icon at Atlanta Ballet in February 2024, the audience arrived in black and white. This was not planned. Atlanta Ballet did not put a dress code in the program. But the production’s identity had telegraphed itself clearly enough in advance marketing that…
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The seasonal problem
A botanical garden in April is a different place than the same garden in October, and not just in the obvious sense that different things are blooming. The visitor’s emotional register changes. What they are looking for changes. The pace of a walk through a garden in spring, when everything is opening, carries a different…
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The object after the object
There is a specific quality of attention that settles over people in a well-designed museum gallery. It is not the same as reading, or watching, or listening to music. It is something closer to sustained looking, the kind that accumulates slowly and leaves a particular residue when it is over. The museum store sits at…
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The tiered donor gift
Most regional symphony orchestras offer something at the $250 or $500 annual giving level that is some version of a branded tote bag, a travel mug, or a scarf with the organization’s name on it. The item is usually fine. It is often reasonably well-made. It is also, in most cases, almost completely interchangeable with…
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