Martha's Vineyard Museum

The Martha’s Vineyard Museum grew from a small, local, historical society to a voice for the unique history and way of life on the island. With that growth came the need for a new location, and in 2019, the museum restored the Marine Hospital overlooking the harbor. A year to the day of opening, the COVID-19 Pandemic shut down operations. Faced with millions of dollars in debt from renovating the building and changing visitation patterns, Museum Insights helped the museum explore multiple alternatives to best serve the museum’s visitors and address the museum’s debt with the board’s Planning Task Force.

A key discovery of the planning work was that the museum’s most devoted constituents were “islanders”—whether they lived on the island year-round or visited for only a week each year. Shifting the museum’s programming focus to serve islanders first, rather than tourists, allowed the museum to also change its operating model from earned to donated revenue. In addition to this program and operating model adjustment, the final long-range plan included small, but significant, changes to the building to support new directions in programming and preliminary plans for future growth.