Museum Attendance Forecaster Calculator

This forecaster builds monthly museum attendance from a baseline visitor count plus five additive drivers, then converts that traffic into admission revenue. Special exhibitions add a boost equal to the baseline times the attendance-lift percentage, scaled by the fraction of the year an exhibit is actually running (each exhibition is assumed to run about 3 months, capped at 12 months of total overlapping coverage). Marketing spend follows a diminishing-returns curve — each $1,000 of monthly budget adds roughly 2% to baseline attendance, but the total marketing boost is capped at 30% no matter how much is spent, reflecting the reality that ad spend eventually saturates a local market. Free admission days add extra visitors at twice the museum's normal daily rate, since discounted or free days reliably draw a crowd beyond the regular baseline.

School group visitors and member visits are added on top as their own separate streams, with member visits computed as active memberships times average visits per year, spread evenly across twelve months. On the revenue side, normal paying visitors are calculated by subtracting out the visitors who came specifically on free days (who don't pay general admission), school groups are billed at a 50% discount off list price, and members are treated as already paid for through their membership and excluded from admission revenue entirely. The result is a revenue-per-visitor figure that reflects real blended yield, not sticker price. Because several of these levers (exhibition lift, marketing elasticity, free-day multiplier) are modeling assumptions rather than measured constants, treat this as a planning tool for testing "what if we ran two more free days" scenarios rather than a guaranteed budget forecast — your institution's actual elasticities will differ based on market size and program mix.