SEPTEMBER 2004

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL ALUMNI TEAM CONSULTS

For six months this year, a volunteer group of five Harvard Business School graduates donated their time and expertise to The Wolfsonian, studying the institution, working closely with staff members, and ultimately developing strategic guidelines for a marketing plan whose goal is to increase the number of museum visitors. The volunteers are members of an outreach program, called the Harvard Business School Community Partners Program of South Florida, in which teams of volunteers commit to work on local projects.

"This has been an unbelievable process and we are really excited about what is going to come out of it," says Glenn Kaufhold, associate director for marketing and development at The Wolfsonian. "As a result of the process we are better able to refine our marketing efforts to increase awareness and visitation."

"We had a wonderful experience working with The Wolfsonian staff members," notes Federico Sanchez, a team member and president of L.I.C. Capital LLC. "They were an ideal client: motivated, engaged, smart, full of energy, and very passionate about their institution. We are confident that the project will contribute to The Wolfsonian's efforts to increase...attendance and its positive impact on the community."

The project focused on four major areas, according to Mr. Sanchez:

• assessing The Wolfsonian's current position through market research and benchmarking with other institutions;

• helping the museum move towards defining a "positioning statement," an articulation of what is unique about the institution that can be used to focus marketing, communications, and institutional identity efforts;

• developing a customer segmentation strategy that could be used as a tool to attract visitors based on their unique characteristics;

• analyzing and proposing key activities that could be implemented to help increase traffic. This included recommendations in the areas of public relations, direct marketing, advertising, and programming.

In addition to Mr. Sanchez, the team members were: Gabriela Carvalho, senior manager of Strategic Planning at American Express; David Hausmann, president of Domore Corporation; Linda Holeman, vice president of Avaya; and Ana Maria Rivera, partner with The Strategy Learning Center.

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