A few years back, I sat in a planning meeting where someone pitched a lantern festival as the fix for a heritage site’s flatlining attendance. Big lights, big crowds, big Instagram moment. Everyone nodded. Nobody asked the question that actually mattered: fix it how, exactly?
That question has been rattling around in my head again after digging through the research on special events — the open/free days, blockbuster exhibitions, seasonal festivals — that museums, zoos, parks, and heritage sites lean on so heavily. I went in expecting the literature to either bless events as a growth engine or trash them as an expensive distraction. Instead it landed somewhere more useful, and more uncomfortable: events are amplifiers, not engines.
The event will get people in the door. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll come back.
Here’s the pattern that shows up again and again in the museum literature. Open days and special events are genuinely good at lowering the barrier to entry — they pull in first-timers, people who’d never otherwise cross your threshold. One of the field’s most-cited studies on this, published in Museum Management and Curatorship, tracked art-museum open-day events specifically to test whether a good time at the event translated into a return visit later on. It found what you’d hope on the front end: open days attract non-visitors and give them a low-risk taste of the place.
Then it found the thing nobody wants to hear: no statistically supported relationship between how satisfied people were with the event and their stated intention to come back on an ordinary day.
Read that twice. The event can be a smash. Five stars, glowing feedback forms, a line out the door. And it can still do nothing whatsoever for your Tuesday-afternoon attendance six months later. (My own suspicion—and there is a bit of evidence for this— is that through open days and special events, we’re just creating a novelty cycle: training a chunk of our public to wait until the next one rather than become a regular paying visitor. I mean, why wouldn’t they?)
I don’t think that means events are worthless. I think it means we’ve been asking them to do a job they were never built for.
And I understand why we keep asking. When I was working in the zoo and aquarium world, I sat through more than one meeting where the marketing team lobbied the programming side for something new: what can you do for Christmas? What’s the spring break offer? We were already maxed out — staff stretched thin across the daily operation — and I finally figured out what was really going on. Special events are easy to promote. Everybody wants to read about the new thing. Selling the daily offer, the thing that’s just… there, quietly excellent, every single day of the year? That’s a much harder pitch to write a press release around. Marketing wasn’t wrong to want novelty. But novelty and strategy aren’t the same thing, and it took me embarrassingly long to say that part out loud.
What actually gets people to come back
If it’s not the event, what is it? The research is almost boringly consistent on this across museums, science centres, zoos, and gardens: service quality, perceived value, satisfaction, relevance. The everyday stuff. The stuff that’s much harder to put on a press release than “we’re organizing five hundred volunteer re-enactors for one day! What a show!”
One case study I keep coming back to is the Montshire-style science-centre research compiled by the Association of Science-Technology Centers: a look at institutions with unusually high repeat-visitation rates, trying to isolate what actually drove people to come back again and again. The answer wasn’t a busy events calendar. It was good exhibit design — multiple entry points, open-ended interaction, exhibits built to reward a visitor differently the fifth time than the first. Not a rotation of exhausting events. A sustainable product that people wanted to come back to on its own merits.
Why some events do work
Not every event fails to convert looky-loos into regulars, and there’s a study that gets at why. Researchers surveyed visitors after an interpretive special event at a nature centre, testing three competing explanations for return intention: how much people learned, how attached they felt to the place, and how the event made them feel in the moment — the “affective” outcomes. The affective outcomes won, and by a wide margin, especially among new visitors.
I think about this constantly now. It suggests the events that work aren’t the ones that cram in the most content. They’re the ones that make someone feel something about the place. A guided hike where you got a little emotional at the summit. A theatre program where a kid teared up at the story. That’s resonance doing its job — and resonance, not reach, is what points people back toward the front door.
A case study worth stealing
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s After Hours program is one of the most positive examples I found in this whole review. 73% of attendees hit the target young-adult demographic. 93% actually went into the galleries. 241 new members recruited. Here’s the tell: it wasn’t a throw-away party with art in the background. It was content based: talks, sketching sessions, volunteer guides — a designed product built to push people toward the collection, not away from it. Think of these events as a kind of product sampler. (“Here, taste this. You know where you can get more, right?”) You don’t offer a taste of apples when you sell oranges for a living, right? So why are we pushing a free event experience (special guests! Re-enactors! Local musicians! Food trucks that you’ll never see again at our site!) that doesn’t resemble our core offer?
I’m thinking in particular of a national park client of mine, years ago, that ran a big classic-rock concert once a year. Big-name acts, big crowds. When I asked what the strategic outcome was supposed to be, the honest answer amounted to: get people into the park. And they did come. But they didn’t experience the park. They didn’t encounter the brand, learn anything about the resource, or do anything especially park-like at all — they came for the band, sat on a blanket, and left. Telling detail: the park didn’t even charge gate admission for it. There was no ask, no conversion mechanism, no design for depth. Just reach, and not even monetized reach. And you know how about I feel about that. It was the purest version of an event with no job to do.
Nobody wants to talk about what events cost
Here’s the part of the research that made me sit back in my chair. The sector is in a staffing crisis, and it’s not subtle. Museums Moving Forward’s recent workplace-culture research surveyed art-museum workers across the U.S. and found burnout affecting 43% of them, alongside meaningful turnover and health impacts. The UK Museums Association’s own annual member survey tells the same story from the other side of the Atlantic: continued budget cuts, low morale, and rising pressure on the staff who remain.
None of that proves special events cause burnout on their own. But I’ve lived the mechanism from the inside, as a program coordinator: special events burn out your staff like almost nothing else does. It’s not the event day itself — it’s the weeks of setup stealing evenings and weekends beforehand, and the depleted, foggy week of catch-up after, while the regular programming still has to run on top of it. Multiply that by three or four “signature” events a year and it’s not hard to see how event-heavy programming contributes to burnout
And the true cost of an event — staff overtime, planning time, the exhibition work that gets deprioritized to make room, that recovery period afterward — almost never shows up in the business case. What gets published instead is attendance and regional tourism spend. The Met’s Leonardo show generated $220 million in New York visitor spending. Impressive! It tells you almost nothing about whether the museum itself came out ahead after paying for it.
If your board is citing regional economic impact numbers as proof your event program works, ask them for the institution’s own net return. In most of the literature I reviewed, that number simply doesn’t exist.
So what do we actually do with this?
I keep landing on the same conclusion, which is annoyingly simple and also the one nobody wants at the planning table: fund the core experience first. If the everyday visit isn’t already good, no amount of festival programming will fix that — it’ll just teach your audience to wait for the next special thing, which is its own kind of trap.
Beyond that:
- Don’t program an event without a named job for it to do. A specific audience segment, a first-visit conversion goal, a stewardship outcome, a proven seasonal gap. Not just “lotsa people.”
- Design for conversion, not atmosphere. The events that work route people into the collection, the landscape, the story — not just onto the lawn for a good time.
- Cost it honestly. Staff time, planning load, opportunity cost, recovery time. If your business case is only ticket revenue against direct expenses, it isn’t a business case.
- Be assertive about conversion if that’s your goal. By that I mean, if your event is intended to build a long-term audience, get out there and hustle: smiling staff selling memberships; personable volunteers getting sign-ups to your email list. Not just a “hey thanks for coming.”
- Push back at the endless demand for novelty. Remember, your marketing people getting you to run a special event costs them less and you more. Make sure your leadership understands this.
Special events aren’t the enemy here. But they’re not the strategy either. They’re the amplifier you switch on once you’ve got something worth amplifying — and if you don’t, no amount of lantern festival is going to cover for it.
Read more
Barbosa, M. L., & Brito, P. Q. (2012). Do open day events develop art museum audiences? Museum Management and Curatorship, 27(1). The study behind the “great event, no return-visit link” finding — still the clearest caution against assuming event satisfaction converts to attendance.
McPherson, G. (2020). After-hours events at the National Museum of Scotland: a product for attracting, engaging and retaining new museum audiences? Current Issues in Tourism, 23(11). One of the field’s few clean positive results, and useful for seeing exactly what made it work.
Barrett, A. G., Mowen, A. J., & Graefe, A. R. (2017). Predicting intentions to return to a nature center after an interpretive special event. Journal of Park and Recreation Administration, 22(1). The source of the “affective outcomes beat learning outcomes” finding I can’t stop thinking about.
Association of Science-Technology Centers. Repeat Engagement for Visitors. A practice-based look at how exhibit design, not event volume, sustains a high repeat-visitation rate.
Wallace Foundation case studies: More Than Just a Party (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and The Contemporary Jewish Museum Is Now (Also) a Family Destination.
Museums Moving Forward, Workplace Culture report, and the UK Museums Association’s annual workforce survey. The staffing-and-burnout data behind the “nobody wants to talk about what events cost” section.
Psst.
My name is Don Enright. I have spent several decades figuring out how to create a sustainable, memorable, meaningful daily offer at heritage sites. We should talk.
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