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All,

I know this is a common thread but we are interested in how your attendance has been this past fall.  We are an aviation museum in CT that offers the traditional aviation artifacts and exhibits with lots of science and aviation demonstrations, programs, workshops, etc driven by a very solid floor staff.  Usually we track pretty well year by year with only 5% variations either way.  Our member base is very strong and we have great community/corporate support.  However this fall we have noticed a 30% drop.  As you can imagine this is quite alarming.   And to be honest we are not too sure why.   A colleague of mine was alarmed to find that attendance on a recent Sunday at a major museum was scary low.   This got us thinking (which usually gets us into trouble).

Is it the weather, the economy, the recent elections, our near death experience with the end of the Mayan calendar, all of these, none of these?  None of this made sense to us.  Maybe this is a temporary but unusual blip for us.  We didn't feel that was right either.

We did discuss this - With the ever increasing access to media and entertainment, we were wondering if more and more people are selecting to stay at home.  That the idea of going out and engaging in an activity outside the home is not as attractive or common as it use to be.  To put it another way, we are wondering if there has been a societal change in people's use of and attendance at museums.  We were wondering if we are seeing the beginning of declining attendance or flat attendance at museums.  I know, scary.  Like I said we are usual pretty well attended and will commonly track better than other museums in our community.

We wanted to see what others thought.  I hope I explained this correctly and am happy to provide clarification on our thoughts.

Clear skies,

Jason

Jason T. Archer
Director of Floor Programs
NEW ENGLAND AIR MUSEUM<http://www.neam.org/>
Bradley International Airport
36 Perimeter Rd
Windsor Locks, CT 06096
860.623.3305 ext 316

Facebook   https://www.facebook.com/NewEnglandAirMuseum#!/NewEnglandAirMuseum

Visit www.neam.org<http://www.neam.org/> for details on these and other activities for the whole family!



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