Museums of Western Colorado board sought a ‘great’ executive director to rev up revenues

Tim Harty, The Business Times

The Museums of Western Colorado have targeted $1.849 million for total revenues this year, and that’s an ambitious number.

The nonprofit organization’s Internal Revenue Service Form 990s from recent years show why, as the total revenues were as follows:

• $1.423 million in 2018.
• $1.347 million in 2019.
• $947,814 in 2020.
• $1.916 million in 2021.
• $1.369 million in 2022.
• $1.1 million in 2023.
• $1.316 million in 2024.

The 2021 total is an outlier, because it marked the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were getting vaccinated and out of the house, looking for things to do after spending much of 2020 indoors, hence that year’s low total revenue. The museum also benefited from government, COVID-relief money in 2021.

Aside from 2021, no year exceeded 2018’s total revenue of $1,423,533, so expectations have been set high for Museums of Western Colorado Executive Director Shenna Hayden, who will mark one year on the job on March 25.

She welcomes the challenge.

“The museum was doing a great job of just keeping a status quo, but when I came on board, it was very clear we don’t want the status quo,” said Hayden, who came to Museums of Western Colorado from the Children’s Museum in Olympia, WA. “We want the museum to be successful, self-sustaining and able to provide all of these services to the community in an engaging way, in a way that people want to engage with.”

She had the disadvantage of taking the job after it had been vacant for the better part of a year. However, with the onset of 2025, she is ready to tackle ways to increase revenues.

The largest source of revenue annually comes from grants and contributions, such as sponsorships.

For grant money, Hayden said the museum’s goal is to bring in $285,000 this year.

For sponsorships, she’s on a mission to increase them dramatically, because the numbers show they have been in decline, and the museum received only $20,000 in sponsorships in 2024.

For 2025, she said, “We’re going big, we’re going to be looking for $204,000.”

Hayden will be working on finding sponsors throughout the year by reaching out to different organizations and businesses and saying, “Hey, we feel like this matches your mission and vision really well. Would you want to sponsor this part of the exhibit?”

She gave the example of the museum’s gun collection.

“We’re very well known for our gun collection. We have quite an amazing collection of handguns and rifles and shotguns, and they’re beautiful, and we have quite a bit of them on display,” she said. “But we would love to kind of modernize that display, and it’s going to cost a pretty penny. So, something that I’ve wanted to do is reach out to some of the gun ranges and gun stores and stuff and see if we can’t get people to work together to sponsor new exhibits.

“So, that’s kind of the process of figuring out like what can we do, and then who in the community could possibly match with that?”

The Museums of Western Colorado – the three museums are Museum of the West, Dinosaur Journey, and Cross Orchards Historic Site – also is trying something new in the form of an annual fund campaign, “which the museum has never done before,” Hayden said. “We started the annual fund in December, and that is the money that goes toward the field-trip scholarships, so that all students can come to the museum. Our goal is to raise $20,000 a year for field trips, and since December we’ve raised $15,000. So, we’re doing pretty good on that one.”

After donations and sponsorships, another revenue stream that needs to be boosted is the paying customers. For that, Hayden has put several plans into motion.

Chief among them is the traveling exhibits that will be displayed in a gallery that was paid for by a $30,000 grant from the Grand Junction Lions Club. The grant covered the construction to make the gallery, and it now permanently bears the name: The Grand Junction Lions Club Traveling Exhibit Gallery.

Hayden said she expects the Museum of the West will have at least three traveling exhibits per year.

“So there’ll be three chances to come back to Museum of the West and see something new,” she said.

The next thing to do regarding the traveling exhibits is to get sponsors. The first exhibit, A Great Frontier of Sketching the American West, is already on display, but it doesn’t have a sponsor.

“So the museum essentially is sponsoring it,” Hayden said. “We paid for it, brought it in, but we’ll be looking for sponsors for our fall exhibit, which is going to be called Europe, and it’s a STEM exhibit, all about how bicycles work. 

“And it’s got tons of interactives. It’s super fun, but we’re going to Colorado-ize it and talk about our Grand Valley cycling history, which was a very rich history. We’ve got lots of really fun information about bicycling here in the Grand Valley.

“So, we’re hoping to get some engagement from local bike shops and stuff like that as well.”

More renovation is in store, too, as Hayden said some galleries will be modified to be able to display items that are in storage. She said most museums have only 5 percent of their collection on display, meaning there’s opportunity to rotate some displays in and out to keep things fresh.

And Hayden plans to put her stamp on displays by doing something she excelled at in previous jobs: making them interactive.

Case in point is the “A Great Frontier of Sketching the American West” exhibit. It’s about art, displaying sketches from two Frenchmen who explored The West. They were from the East Coast and traveled west in a stagecoach, drawing what they saw along the way.

That led to Museum of the West adding a real stagecoach to the exhibit, bringing a fun element into view and play.

Hayden said they wanted “to kind of reinforce the story of what would it have been like to travel west in a wagon, so we’ve got our stagecoach in there and you can get in the stagecoach and check it out, and we’ve got a saddle that kids can get on. And adults, too, adults can get on it as well, and just imagine what would it be like to travel west for months on end and sitting in a saddle or sitting in a stagecoach and or a wagon.”

The museum also put out “a beautiful riding dress that belonged to a woman, and you can see it looks like a skirt, but it’s really pants … to preserve her modesty,” Hayden said.

Still to come, she hopes, will be a sketching element, “so people can sketch what they see in the gallery or sketch what they imagine it might have looked like coming through Grand Junction at the time. We’re working on creating a very specific sketching bench for people to sit on with an easel connected to it, and so we’re building that.”

If you’re getting the picture, then Hayden’s succeeding.

And that’s what the Museums of Western Colorado board members saw in Hayden and why they hired her.

One of the reasons the museum went nine to 10 months without an executive director is because the board deliberately took its time to do “a very comprehensive search for a great executive director,” Board Chair Christina Harney said.

Hayden was it.

“We really wanted somebody that was gonna do some good things for the museum, and we were very lucky to get Shenna,” Harney said. “She’s amazing.”

Harney added, “One of the things I really liked about her is she really pushed the idea of more interactive exhibits, so that kids when they come to the museum can enjoy touching things and having that kind of experience versus just reading stuff up on the wall.”

Hayden credited her children’s museum experience for the hands-on elements she likes to incorporate.

“I think when they looked at me what they were really wanting was somebody who could understand engagement and how to bring some of that liveliness of a children’s museum,” she said. “Museums shouldn’t all be, ‘Don’t touch,’ and, ‘Look only,’ and, ‘Be quiet,’ and, ‘No speaking.’ Museums are places of education, and they’re places of fun. And there’s ways, even if you have stuff that people can’t touch, there’s ways of creating exhibits to make them hands-on.

“And so when I came on board, that was what they expressed to me was that they really loved that about me, and they wanted to see more of that in the museums. They wanted to see more engaging exhibits and more opportunities to do things and more programming. And so that’s definitely something I’m working toward.”

Fun is more likely to bring the kids back, often with parents in tow, and that means dollars.

Hayden acknowledged her plans are not things that can be done overnight.

“They take time, and they take a lot of money,” she said, which goes again to the need to increase revenues.

She believes what she’s doing will slowly but surely bring in more money, and the museum will become more and more vibrant and keep bringing people and their dollars back.

“The fact that we haven’t been able to just snap our fingers and now we’ve got 20 interactive exhibits, that’s been very frustrating for me, because I really want to snap my fingers and have it all done,” she said. “But again, it takes time, and it takes planning, and it takes keeping your team together and working towards the same goals and then finding those sponsorship dollars or grant dollars where they are available.”

In time, Hayden hopes the $1.8 million of revenue the museum is targeting this year will look small compared with future revenues.

Ultimate goal? There’s a lot to that

The question put to Museums of Western Colorado Executive Director Shenna Hayden seemed pretty simple: What ultimately do you want to accomplish as executive director?

“A great question,” she said. “So, there’s a lot to that.”

Hayden proceeded to explain, and there’s no need for a reporter to wordsmith it. She did great on her own, so here’s the long answer:

“I was really excited to take this position because I really wanted to be a part of creating something that was going to be a big part of the community and providing a place where everyone, no matter who they were politically or economically or any of that, everyone was welcome to come under one roof and learn together and be side by side and really make something that’s amazing for the community. That’s kind of my overarching goal.

“And I’ve been working in museums for over 13 years, and while that sounds like a short amount of time, it was a lot of time to be able to have a chance to learn from a lot of really successful people in their field. And that was something that I kept coming back to. 

“It was like, I want the chance to try this for myself, and I want to be able to bring a team together with all of these people who have just the right to skills to be successful and create a place where not only does my staff feel safe and excited about coming to work every day and are having fun – because if you’re not having fun, then why are you doing it? – and so that’s a big thing, too.

“And I felt like sometimes the fun gets left out, and that can be an important part because when we’re having fun and we’re enjoying it and we feel safe and we feel heard, then that’s when we do our best to work. 

“And I think so far since I’ve been here, I really see that coming together. Like, I see our team working together to accomplish things, and people are excited about it, and I’ve said this a thousand times to people: We are a small but mighty team.

“And it is kind of unbelievable to think about we’re running three different sites. It’s not like we have just one museum, and we’re all here together every day. We are spread across three different places across the county, and we’re only 19 people, and it’s a lot of work to keep all three of them going.

“And so that was a challenge that when I was looking at the position, I was like, that’s an extra layer on top of it: How do you manage three sites and make something that is not only sustainable, but creating a service for the community, and the community sees it as something of value that they can utilize and go to and be part of for education, educational purposes and entertainment purposes?

“Because, you know, we like to make learning fun. It’s sneaky learning. I say that a lot, too. We want to be sneaky with our learning here without them realizing that’s what you’re doing.”

MORE ABOUT MUSEUMS OF WESTERN COLORADO

Grants, donations and sponsorships are the largest funding source for the nonprofit Museums of Western Colorado.

Find out more about its three museums by going online to museumsofwesternco.org or call 970-242-0971. And if you’re inspired to make a donation or want to be a sponsor, ask them about that, too.

You also can always visit the museums:

Museum of the West, 462 Ute Ave., Grand Junction.

Dinosaur Journey, 550 Jurassic Court, Fruita.

Cross Orchards Historic Site, 3073 Patterson Road, Fruitvale.

Go to museumsofwesternco.org for hours of operation and ticket prices.

GETTING CREATIVE FOR FUNDING

To fund some changes and improvements to the Museums of Western Colorado, Board Chair Christina Harney said the board “decided to free up some of our savings, so that we can start the process of making the museum more vibrant to get community interest so that we can build more revenue.”

She added, “We’re still trying to be fiscally responsible,” but the board believes several new positions needed to be added: a director of development and communications to strengthen the museums’ connection to the local community and beyond; a second paleontologist at Dinosaur Journey to help boost the exhibits there; and it’s bringing back the librarian position.

Harney said Museums of Western Colorado also sold some of its property at Cross Orchards, “so we can do some improvements at Cross Orchards” to the exhibits and the experience for people who visit.

“We’re actually going to be doing that soon,” she said. “We have a some great plans for that museum.”

THE MUSEUM’S GOT THE TOUCH

Asked about the challenge of marketing museums to today’s youth, who tend to have smartphones to entertain them constantly, Harney’s passion for museums showed in her reply:

“Well, you can’t touch a real dinosaur bone on your phone, can you? You know, you can’t sit in a stagecoach at home. Cross Orchards has a bunch of exhibits that are interactive. And so it’s all about experiencing the history, not just reading about it, and that’s what the museums that we have do for people.”