This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
A service to help small museums and art galleries with social media. That's what we're gonna talk about today. Welcome back to Side Hustle School. I love hearing your ideas, what you're working on, what you're thinking about working on, what's going well, what's not. We talk about all of it here in these short daily action-packed episodes.
Today's question comes from Patty in Duluth, Minnesota. Patty has an affinity. She really likes, she just enjoys, I guess let's just say she enjoys art and history and sees a gap in how smaller museums and galleries are using social media and perhaps other new platforms and such emerging platforms to engage with their audience. She's wondering how she can offer her services to these institutions to not only increase their online presence but also boost visitor numbers. So those are important goals for museums, exhibits, galleries, any institutions or exhibits that want people to come, any institutions that are looking for increased attention, which is pretty much every institution in that world.
So let's see what we can do here to give her a couple of tips. Her question is coming up along with my answer right after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Patty from Duluth, Minnesota. I'm a big fan of your books. I also have a deep appreciation for art and history and think that smaller local museums and galleries are missing out on the benefits of social media.
I'd love to offer my services to help them with online engagement and visitor numbers. How could I structure this into a viable side hustle? [Music]
All right, Patty, I love the question. Thank you so much for calling in and also for being creative. Well, I could say thank you for being creative, but really it's in your benefit and your best interest to be creative.
So maybe I should just say well done. Now, as for this idea, I think it is a little bit tricky just because museums and galleries, they tend to make decisions by committee. They're also nonprofits. So that comes with a bit more bureaucracy, thus the committees and such. Sometimes it can be hard to reach a decision maker and sometimes there's some communication issues in dealing with groups like that.
So maybe that's just something to be aware of going into it. But in terms of the business idea, I think packaging the service is really important, creating a tiered package, different levels of engagement and service. One package could be simply improving the museum's Instagram account, promising daily posts, increased engagement interaction with a goal of increasing number of followers, X number of followers in three months. Well, a more premium package could include multi-platform strategies, perhaps some live streams or at least facilitating that, maybe even managing paid ads. So I think packages, tiers are important.
And then I also think a pilot program, one to three months at maybe a discounted rate, but at least getting people to lock in and commit to not just a one-off little project, but something that goes a few months is better. And in terms of the payment structure, some kind of monthly retainer or a performance-based fee that depends on hitting key performance indicators, that's kind of what you wanna think about. So I don't know that it's gonna be a big hit right away. I think it is very niche, but it could work, right? It could work for the right institutions and you know that world better than me, it sounds like.
So I definitely wish you the best. Let us know if it does work or if it doesn't. It's always nice to have updates. And I do wanna support these kinds of institutions in having increased relevance and engagement on social media. So definitely we're aligned on that.
So that's what I think. Listeners, if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll continue to feature them each week, along with updates from listeners as they launch and grow their projects. Thanks so much for being out there. Be back again tomorrow.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
