With a beautiful campus, impressive aeronautic exhibits and airplane displays—including the Spruce Goose—plus a gorgeous, wood-paneled, state-of-the art theater with a 70-foot screen, the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, has something for just about everyone. But while theater programming during museum hours honors space, aviation, and military service, Evergreen Aviation saw potential for new audiences, new opportunities for learning and education, and new revenue possibilities.
Evergreen Aviation had dabbled in programming first-run Hollywood films after museum hours, but they really wanted to offer something
more family oriented and educational. “If we’re going to do something after hours—we’re an educational institution,” says Mike Videll, IT & Operations Director. The team decided to go beyond their core mission of aviation and offer different educational experiences with a new program called Movies After Hours.
Movies After Hours offers compelling, 3D, family-friendly films after the museum has closed, at an attractive price point. Ticket prices are $3, compared to the $6 walk-up fee charged during museum hours. The program launched in late December 2018 with Tiny Giants and Walking With Dinosaurs.
During the winter season, there’s one film scheduled on
Fridays at 5:15 and a different film on Saturdays at 5:15, but during spring
break and the summer season, they’ll be adding an additional screening each
night for an old-fashioned double feature. They’ll also be expanding it to four
nights every week.
“The whole idea is that you don’t have a theater this spectacular and not use it more,” says CEO John Rasmussen. “The public is looking for this, for something that’s not a 2 ½-hour movie. It’s a great venue, good family entertainment, but it’s not so long that your children get bored or aren’t interested in it, or there are parts they don’t like. It’s not space-related, but it’s still good educational entertainment.”
To enhance the lifelong learning experience and extend it beyond the screening in the theater, Evergreen Aviation customizes the educational materials provided by the film distributors to give kids a take-home item. For Walking With Dinosaurs, they created a book that included coloring pages, dinosaur facts, connect-the-dot puzzles, and word searches.
When Evergreen Aviation launched the program, they were hoping to offer a family friendly, educational, end-of-the-school-week event for young families and their kids, as well as seniors and their grandkids, which is often an untapped audience. This type of audience does visit during the day too, but the Movies After Hours visitors are families that are there specifically because they want this type of programming for their children. They’re also finding that people who didn’t have time to see films during their museum visit are coming back for the Movies After Hours screenings.
During one Friday screening of Walking With Dinosaurs, a 5-year-old boy was excitedly running around in his dinosaur pajamas. “He was all into this,” Videll recalls. “It was everything for him to be able to come in and see a dinosaur movie. The benefit I see is I’m reaching out to new audience that I want to see—families and kids. Families have thanked us for having a low-cost, educational movie that is good family programming. And it makes good memories. One staff member brought her grandchildren in, and a week later they were still talking about it.”
During the first month, staff noticed one senior couple that was coming back every week with different people. “When I talked to them,” says Allie Rutter, Theater Supervisor, “they said they wanted to come back every week and bring in a new couple because they’re members and think it’s a great program. They want to bring more friends. It’s an opportunity for them to have a social hour.”
In addition to the regular channels of social media, newspaper, and online, Evergreen Aviation is marketing the program to the school groups that visit the museum and reaching new audiences with some guerilla marketing by handing out flyers and posting them on bulletin boards at apartment complexes, RV parks, and at local businesses. They also show the trailers for the Movies After Hours films on the lobby screens during museum hours.
Evergreen Aviation is considering inviting speakers and hosting events in conjunction with Movies After Hours in the future. The museum also hosts Red-Eye Night one Friday a month, which is a chance for adults to socialize among the exhibits, and they’re considering adding a film screening to this event as well.
Evergreen Aviation is really pleased with the results so far. “We’re seeing exactly what we wanted to see,” says Rasmussen.