Leading The Way: Delta Pick Mello

What COVID gave us was the gift of time to stop and reflect on what we’ve been doing and what we need to do going forward …

Delta Pick Mello, the Executive Director/CEO of the Sacramento History Alliance was attending a California Association of Museums conference in Los Angeles two weeks before Governor Newsom issued the shelter-in-place order. When several international speakers didn’t come because of COVID-19, the museum directors began wondering about the impact of the virus …

When you think back to earlier this year, at what point did you realize you were going to have to do something different?

At the California Association of Museums conference, the attendees began speculating about COVID-19 and whether we would have to close our museums. At one event, I sat with a manager from the Getty Museum who told me that they had just bought laptops and licenses for their staff so they could work at home.

After I got back, everything escalated rapidly. First, there was talk about limiting crowds to 20 people. We were fine with that. We’re not a large museum. We don’t see big crowds. We have the space to keep people distant. We can sell tickets in advance and manage timed admissions. My concern was whether people would want to come to the museum. Then, the governor announced the shutdown.

Before we talk about your pandemic pivot, tell me about the Sacramento History Alliance.

In partnership with the city and county of Sacramento, the Sacramento History Alliance manages the Sacramento History Museum, the Old Sacramento Visitor Center and Sacramento Living History, a group of volunteers who engage with the public in historical costume and reenact events from Sacramento’s early history and the California Gold Rush. One difference between us and other museums is that we are not a collecting museum; we work with the Center for Sacramento History to provide exhibits, education programs, public programs and special events. What we’re best known for is our underground tours. Although the museum is the main part of what we do, we see the Old Sacramento Historic District, a national landmark, as our museum. So we do whatever we can to interpret and bring to life the historical aspect of Old Sacramento.

Does the City of Sacramento fund the History Alliance?

We do receive funding from both the city and county of Sacramento, but it’s only about 25-30% of our operating budget. We raise the rest of the Museum’s income through admissions, school programs, events and visitor programs like the underground tours as well as through memberships, donations and fundraisers. We have to do all of those things to survive, and right now, it’s difficult or impossible to do any of them.

What was your initial response to the shelter-in-place order?

The shutdown couldn’t have come at a worse time for us with respect to school groups, as the revenue from our school programs make up a huge part of our earned income. Initially, the schools postponed their visits, but eventually, we had to refund their payments which totaled 90% of our school program income. Not only we were not getting any income, we had to return all of those pre-paid field trips. That was a huge hit.

We’re a small museum. Here’s what happens when you ask someone if they’ve been to our museum. You’ll say, have you been to the Sacramento History Museum? “Yeah, 10th and O, right?” Nope, that’s the California Museum. The Sacramento History Museum. “Where’s that?” Old Sacramento. “Hmmm .. Old Sacramento .. where?” Right next to the Railroad Museum. “Really? Next door?” But ask about the underground tours, and the person will say “Oh, yes!” Or, “I’ve heard about it or I’ve been wanting to go or my sister went, and she loved it.”

When the museum closed, we realized we wanted people to remember us. We had an app called “Anytime Tours” already in the can. Twenty to twenty-five stories, each 2-3 minutes long, put on by our costumed character guides. Each video tell the story of a building or person in Old Sacramento. We created them a year and a half ago for people to watch when they were in Old Sac. What we discovered is that when people are here, they don’t care about watching videos. But when COVID-19 hit, we got a lot of attention because we had these high-quality films ready to go.

Next, we brainstormed other ways we could be remembered. We created “This Day In History” which focus on different events in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s and began sharing those on the Museum’s social media.

Prior to the pandemic, we had been rehearsing a murder mystery melodrama. One day at practice, we heard Tom Hanks had COVID-19. People were saying, “Oh, that’s serious.” Somebody said, “Well, when Disneyland closes, I’ll worry about it.” A few days later Disneyland closed. We kept rehearsing on Zoom, hoping we could reopen in a month or two. Finally, I said, “Why don’t we do this as a Zoom event?”

We just kept trying different things to see what worked, and we learned something from every effort. One thing we learned is that there are big advantages to digital. We can accommodate and reach more people. We had people watch our melodrama from the East Coast, the Midwest, etc. We can only accommodate 50-60 people in the theater, but we had 85 screens viewing our performance on Zoom.

How did you pivot next?

As the shutdown continued, we realized our next phase had to be the creation of paid programming. We started with our “After Hours” underground tour which focuses on the more salacious aspects of Old Sac’s history – prostitution, violence, gambling and created an online tour. We figured out how to safely offer our Gold Fever tours by limiting them to family groups. Our sound equipment allows us to remain at a distance from people, and each person can have their own headset. Then the temperature went to 112 degrees and then the wildfires started.

Next up were summer camps. We hoped to hold those in person but wound up holding them virtually. They turned out well. They weren’t as financially lucrative because they weren’t as expensive but we got a good response from the kids and their families. We learned some formulas like going on Zoom for an hour, going off for an hour, going on for an hour of social time, going off for an hour, going on for an hour for a craft project. That seemed to work well and address the kids’ Zoom fatigue.

Once the school year ended, we went through all of our education programs, focused on the most popular ones and turned them into virtual content. Even after schools are able to hold in person classes, most won’t be taking field trips. We’ve already had schools that would not have come here sign up for our digital content. Our scholarship fund allows us to offer our education programs for free to low income and Title 1 schools, and we will do more fundraising so we can continue to do that. The challenge is we can’t charge the same amount for our online programming. On the other hand, as long as our programs appeal to teachers, we can accommodate a greater number of schools. I do think that if we had to stay virtual forever, within a couple of years, we could develop a solid income stream from the school program. It could even become international.

No new program is going to be profitable right away. We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing and keep pivoting to the new reality. We’re putting our in-person programs and tours on hold until the smoke clears, and the fires are contained. Hopefully, we can go back to them before the weather gets inclement.

What have you learned so far?

We’ve learned to just try new things, to take chances, to be creative. We’ve learned about the attention span of certain products. We watch other museums and nonprofits and learn from them. Rather than spending a lot of time figuring out how to do something, we’ve just try it. People are very forgiving about technology issues. Everyone knows that it’s all new. When you try something, people give you credit for it. Summer camps taught me to stop talking about an idea and just try it, if you think it’s a good idea.

We’re learning to experiment and look to our community to see what they want. That’s one thing we haven’t done as much. We’ve been experimenting, but I’d like to see us take a moment to ask, “What would you like from us? What would you like the museum to do?”

What other impact has COVID-19 had on the museum?

A study done before COVID-19 found that museums, especially history museums, are one of the most trusted resources for information. After the findings came out, there were some articles written questioning why history museums in particular and whether they are simply reinforcing the narrative we want to hear.

This gets into the next phase of the pandemic which is the social justice protests. At the conference I attended just before COVID, we had a lot of discussions about diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion in the museum world. History museums in particular have been challenged over what they’re doing to promote diversity and equity and the need to shine a light on social justice and inclusion.

In light of our new reality, since museums are trusted resources, we’re being called to task about our diversity. We don’t do as a good of a job as we’d like to do. What COVID gave us was the gift of time to stop and reflect on what we’ve been doing and what we need to do going forward.

The path we chose was to create a community advisory committee made up of representatives from different communities – African American, Asian American, Latinx, LGBTQ. In Sacramento, at the time of the Gold Rush, we were truly an international city. There were people coming here from all over the world. That’s in our history. We have writings from the miners talking about the different languages and forms of dress they saw. Then there are the Native Americans, the story that California doesn’t tell as well. We learn about the Trail of Tears and what happened to the Midwestern Indian populations but what we did to California Indians was horrific and not as well known.

We’re asking our advisory committee to help us shape our exhibits and programs as well as introduce us to communities we might not be able to access otherwise. We need to bring those voices in and welcome them to our board of directors, our volunteers, our staff. We’re not doing anything wrong necessarily. It’s just that our windows are narrow and need to be broadened.

This will be a lifelong endeavor .. to tell a broader story of history and not just the story of the white men who came here and persevered through flood, famine, disease to establish the city here.

One of the problems with digital programming is that there are so many areas of our city that don’t have access to broadband. The city is working on that, but it’s a big nut to tackle. It affects inclusion so we’re discussing that and looking at how to be more of a resource and an asset than simply a tourist museum in a tourist district. We’ve been doing more than people realize but it’s even more crucial to look inside ourselves and be the best we can at sharing stories about all the people from this region and their contributions.

COVID is a gift. It can be devastating but there are things COVID has allowed us to do that we would not have done had we just forged ahead on the path we were on.

How have you handled fundraising for the museum?

I was pessimistic about Big Day of Giving (BDOG) in May. People were losing jobs or tightening their belts yet BDOG was extraordinary, both overall and for the museum. We received a great deal of support which told me that people will still give.

We only hold one large fundraiser per year. Most of our revenue comes to us through programming. We postponed the fundraiser from October to May, which is still in the same fiscal year for us. We’ve been pushing membership as a way to support the museum but we haven’t really done much fundraising outside of that. We remind people that we’re providing content for free and that they can support our scholarship program so we can deliver our programming to Title 1 and other schools that serve low-income students. Our scholarships also paid for a quarter of the kids who attended our summer camps.

What have been the biggest surprises so far?

The biggest surprise was when we started the Anytime Tours. How much attention, praise and gratitude we got. People continue to tell us, “I look forward to This Day In History.” “I love those tours. They take me out of my day for a little bit.”

I was surprised when we got asked to speak about what we were doing. We’re just trying things, throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

We were fortunate to have some reserves so we didn’t have to clamp down and lay people off immediately. We had time to reflect, to pivot, to respond to everything that happened. The pandemic, the protests, the wildfires. Lay it on us. We’ll figure out how to get through it.

I’m really proud of what we’ve done and how we’ve tried new things. I’ve got an incredible staff. They’re young and smart, and they’ve got a lot of enthusiasm and optimism. I listen to their ideas, and we try some things. Maybe they don’t work, but we learn from them, and we’re glad we tried them.

When the country reopens and returns to some kind of normal, what will you continue doing?

We can be national now through our digital offerings and content. We want to make everything we do more accessible, whether it’s digital or making the museum free. How much money do I need to get to that place? A lot of this is about digital but it’s also about broadening our stories so that when people visit or access the museum, they see stories about people who look like them.

When museums open back up, we’re not going to be the same. We may look the same for a while, but we won’t be the same. We have to do that introspection, that work to broaden our focus and the lens we look through. We want as many people as possible to have access to this information, these stories, this history.

Delta Pick Mello is the Executive Director/CEO of the Sacramento History Alliance which manages the Sacramento History Museum, Sacramento Living History, Old Sacramento Visitors Center and the popular Old Sacramento Underground Tours and provides support for the preservation and collections care at the Center for Sacramento History. Delta has been in the nonprofit management field for nearly 30 years. Before coming to the History Alliance, she was the Executive Director of the California Automobile Museum. Delta is the Chair of Sacramento Area Museums and serves on the board of the California Association of Museums.