In an effort to raise their individual profiles, 10 area museums banded together to become what’s known as Museums10. While biannual joint exhibitions bring visitors from far outside the region, the group hopes to be an everyday destination for local visitors as well as an economic engine for the region.

Americans took to the highways this past Memorial Day weekend, in numbers higher than last year. Remember 2008’s summer of the $4 gallon of gas?

According to the AAA of Southern New England, this region showed the highest-percentage increase across the nation in motor-vehicle travel for the start of this summer. And while there is always the seasonal lure of the shore, Western Mass. has its share of top-quality driving destinations.

A collaborative of museums in the Pioneer Valley has been striving for more than five years to be a cultural hub for daytrippers and overnight visitors alike. The funny thing is, these venues might have been in your backyard all along without your even knowing they were there.

Museums10 is an outreach organized by the Five Colleges Inc., a non-profit educational consortium comprised of UMass Amherst and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith colleges. Ten member museums brand themselves together, joint-market each other, and every other year or so launch a common-themed exhibit.

Members of the M10 include the Amherst College Museum of Natural History, the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Historic Deerfield, the National Yiddish Book Center, and the art museums at each of the five colleges.

Jane Gronau, education coordinator with the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, has been one of the primary architects since the beginning, and believes the concept is living up to its vast potential. “People sometimes think of museums as limited to a very narrow scope of what they exhibit,” she explained. “To understand that there are linkages to the wider world, and finding new and interesting ways of thinking of things, that’s what makes this collaborative exciting.”

BusinessWest sat down recently with representatives, and a dinosaur or two, from five of the museums in the soaring new space at the Natural History Museum at Amherst College to talk about how M10 is greater than the sum of its parts.

Dutch Treat

Kevin Kennedy, Five College Inc.’s director of communications, said the Museums10 collaboration, like many good ideas, started small.

“Something that happens within the Five College consortium,” he explained, “is that people from each of the campuses get together and just talk. Sometimes there are informal conversations, sometimes specific projects, sometimes ongoing conversations with colleagues. I think that’s how things really got going with museum directors back in the late ’80s, early ’90s.”

As those conversations continued, he said, participants realized that there was potential for larger projects that they could work on together. In the late ’90s, the first thing they did as a group was to create a rack card, to promote the museums of the five colleges. At that time, there weren’t 10 members yet.

Gronau said that the organization as it exists today began in 2006, when the Eric Carle Museum featured the work of 14 different Dutch children’s book artists. From that exhibit spawned the idea of GoDutch!, the M10’s first foray into a larger group show.

“To varying degrees,” she explained, “the idea was that everybody, each museum, would be involved, and a sort of synergy developed; each would come up with something Dutch-related. And it would be a way to increase visitorship and market the different museums. I remember looking at statistics, and there was quite a good turnout. It was quite remarkable.”

At the time, it was the area’s first thematic cultural collaboration with a wide-ranging appeal. Groups and organizations from the M10 to local bookstores, restaurants, hotels, chambers of commerce, even garden centers were involved. Kennedy said that the collaborative expected to see a boost in attendance from the program, but no one could have predicted the 15% increase that was recorded as more than 100,000 people got their Dutch on.

Kennedy said that the impact to the area was, and continues to be, tangible.

“With GoDutch!, all the people affiliated with the museums, from the directors on down, really understood the potential that M10 had, not only to impact the museums themselves, but to impact the area economy. We received a $50,000 grant from the Mass. Cultural Council that year, and part of what they wanted us to do was to survey attendees. We’ve been doing that since.

“Not only are we seeing increasing visitorship,” he continued, “but we’re also asking them how much they are spending when they are in the area. While some of them are just walking across the street from home to go to the museums, a significant number of people — the latest survey from last year showed the number was 30% — were going to be spending the night at an area hotel. Close to 50% were going to be dining in the area as part of their stay. So the average amount of money for this group of visitors is somewhere in the $100 to $125 range. When you consider that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 180,000 visitors to all the museums over the course of the year, I think the math shows that it’s pretty clear how much of an economic impact there is.”

It’s become a winning formula, and others are taking note, said Gronau.

“It’s a really exciting model,” she continued, “and there were inquiries from other areas. People from the northwest quadrant of the state were starting to look at what was happening here. Since they have arts tourism up in that area as well, they took a good look at what we were doing to make this happen.”

Your Table Is Ready

The logistics involving these cross-referenced exhibits at all 10 museums is a daunting task, and for the practical realities of running each facility, they happen only every other year. Kennedy said that one of the benefits of the M10 partnership is that the museums keep in regular communication with each other in those off-years.

“The curators meet fairly regularly to talk about issues in curating, the marketing folks meet to talk about joint awareness, and the directors meet to sort of steer everything along,” he said. “By having these regular meetings, it keeps the momentum going in the interim years between initiatives.”

Besides GoDutch!, M10 has mounted one other group exhibit, which took place last year. Called Bookmarks, the focus was on books in all forms. This year does not feature a group show, and Kennedy said the time off provides some breathing room to regroup, reassess, and refocus on what’s next.

“Something that we came to focus on,” he said, “and we really did some soul-searching, is what does M10 want to be, what does it want to look like, in the non-collaboration years?

“On a marketing level, there’s an interest in using M10 as a tool to promote its individual members, whether there’s an exhibit or not,” he continued. “So, to that end, what we’re doing this year is a rebranding of sorts. There’s a new logo, we’ve overhauled our Web site, and the marketers are now promoting M10 to a much smaller region than what we have in the past. We’re looking at an area from Hartford to Brattleboro, from Pittsfield to the western suburbs of Boston.”

Those collaboration years have a natural draw, but the idea is to promote the museums not just as special-event destinations, but attractions that offer something year-round.

“The idea is to really raise the profile of M10 to those people who are going to be our potential visitors in January, when the weather is bad,” said Kennedy, “not just in the fall when the area has a natural influx of visitors, to create a strong local base of attendees. Then there would still be these joint exhibitions, with advertising in the New York Times to really try to grab the super-region. But right now, that’s what we’re focused on — close-to-home promotion.”

Next up for the M10 members is Table for 10, a celebration of art, food, culture, and science in a very broad definition, scheduled for next year. “We’ll be working with organic farms, wineries, cookbook authors,” Kennedy said. “The museums are talking about some interesting interpretations of the subject. The Natural History Museum will have dinosaur poop.”

From the perspective of local businesses, the appeal of food as a focus is clear. “We’ll have no shortage of business people in the community wanting to be on board with that project,” Kennedy noted.

At Historic Deerfield, perhaps best known for its impressive array of Colonial house museums, Table For 10 allows them to showcase an area of their collection that will hit close to home for many visitors. Michael Busack, assistant publicist with Historic Deerfield, said that “we’re very excited about Table For 10, because food happens to be something we specialize in. We have a great open-hearth cooking program, and they are going to be gearing up. In recent years, we’ve evolved our program with the study of historical chocolate.

“It has evolved to us studying more about the history of chocolate in Colonial America,” he went on. “With that, along with our collection of chocolate pots and coffee pots, as well as the open-hearth cooking program, we’re thrilled to jump on board.”

Making a Masterpiece

In order to reach out to that local population that need to know about these world-class museums in their backyard, Kennedy said one idea is to advertise with ‘bus wraps’ on the PVTA in Hampshire County. Rebecca Goggins, director of Development with the Eric Carle Museum, thinks that’s a banner idea.

“The resources of M10 have been enormously helpful for the Carle, especially for these past six months as we have been without a marketing manager,” she said. “Also, the Carle alone could never afford to sponsor a bus. The level of advertising we can do is so much more thorough.”

The great benefit of collaboration was echoed by all. “From our perspective at Deerfield, it has been awesome for me to be able to use this as a tool,” said Busack. “I find that more and more people are looking toward the ‘staycation’ marketing, the idea that you can get the added value of being in your own backyard.”

Teddy O’Connor, an assistant with the Amherst College Mead Art Museum, said that, because of the size of many of these offerings, it’s perfectly feasible for a visitor to see two or more venues in one day. “Being part of the collaboration is a great way to get on people’s larger tour groups, or to open up to people who came to the area for only one of the museums.”

Ultimately, finding a common ground for museums as diverse as these leads to pushing the boundaries, said Gronau, “to find entrées through the particularity of their museums. It’s exciting, a whole new way of looking at the world, for both the people viewing the exhibitions as well as those who are making them. We’re branching out to the community, but those branches are really linking in.”

And this fact, ultimately, is the power of 10.