WHAT’S UP WITH NWMOCA?!

WE’RE ALREADY PLANNING OUR REOPENING!

As most of you know by now, we’ve closed our doors at the end of June. Since then, I’ve been thinking about what’s next. My thinking focussed on the assets we’ve accumulated over the past 5 years of planning and implementation. So here you go:

When we started this venture, 5 years ago, we always saw the first major step to be to run a  6 month Pop-Up museum. However, because the lease deal we obtained was so affordable, we attempted to operate under a long term lease.

As a Pop-Up we intended to show 3 things:

1. We could raise initial operating funds through crowd-funding,
2. We could effectively operate a museum, and
3. We could show demand through attendance.

I believe we achieved all three goals.

Here are some of our accomplishments during our 8 months of operation:

1. Over 125 paid memberships.
2. Average attendance of 30 visitors/day and over 8 months a visitor total of approximately 5,000.
3. Sold almost $40,000 in admission, membership and merchandise sales.
4. Successfully presented 2 exhibits.
5. Hosted 12 artist panel discussions, presentations, and signings.
6. Received a $40,000 grant for teaching cartoon arts to under-represented communities.
7. Amassed a mailing list of over 700.
8. Over 3500 Instagram followers and almost 800 Facebook followers.
9. Developed a volunteer pool of over 200.
10. Have been operating as a 501 c 3 nonprofit for 5 years.

However we found that we could not meet our operating costs on admission and merchandising alone so I decided to cease operating for now.

We are scheduled for a board retreat on 11/21 and 22 and will discuss how to leverage these assets over a 2 year period to open a permanent brick and mortar museum with a full time director and grant writer. Our goal is to secure operating grants and private investors to cover 2 years of rent, utilities and other operating costs (~$800,000).

What’s coming up…

On Sunday, December 6th, at Gigantic Brewing in Sellwod, we will host what is to be our first annual auction and movie night (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)!

Please SAVE THE DATE. There will be much more information to follow!

Our goal is to raise $4000. We are raising these funds to cover our operating costs:

1. board insurance ($1200/year)
2. social media maintenance ($500/yr)
3. grant writing services ($2500).

That’s it for now.

Happy end of Summer and all the best,

Mike Rosen, Board Chair

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