Off the 'Cuff

Our 2009 Business Plan

I love working for a small organization, like ours, because you get to see the direct effects of your ideas; a decision made on Monday can have an effect on the attendance by Friday. Although there are always great opportunities coming our way, we can’t possibly take advantage of all of them, so every year we devote significant time to writing our business plan. Not only does it help us keep us focused on our goals, it also gives us a way to measure our progress.

In our 2009 Business Plan, we come up with some pretty ambitious goals; for example:

• Increase our walk-in visitor numbers by 20% compared to 2008. (We hit 22%, actually. In a recession.)
• Increase public program attendance by 20% (We saw an increase of 28%.)
• Increase gift shop sales by 20%. (Blew that away with a 39% increase, thanks in part to our new store stock.)

We also managed to make big strides in organizing our collection of artifacts, we built all of the new exhibits we had planned, we expanded our artifact collection, and we significantly increased our membership. We even managed to accomplish some things that weren’t part of our plan, such as winning a big technology sponsorship from Zero One Design, getting a sizable grant to digitize our artifact collection and building a ton of great relationships in the social media world. Yup, we feel pretty good.

So now, we’re writing our plan for 2010. The Olympics will dominate the next two months, but after that we want to keep taking little risks, try new things, and keep having fun. We have a ton of our own ideas, but we’d love yours.

What would you like to see the Police Museum do in 2010? Is there an event we could run? A group we should host? A partnership we can build? A resource we should create? Share your ideas with us and they might end up in our official plan.

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