How Excelerate Helped The New Children’s Museum Launch Artopia
Last month (April 2025), The New Children’s Museum (NCM) cut the ribbon on its long-awaited expansion, an 8,600 sq/ft space that includes Artopia: NCM Creative Studios, a classroom, and expanded gallery space. The creative hub and cornerstone of this expansion project, Artopia, has enjoyed great fanfare and enthusiasm since launch, a notable outcome for any museum and children’s space in today’s challenging economic landscape.
Excelerate is proud to have helped deliver this outcome, offering critical Go-to-Market (GTM) support by applying strategic consulting principles to help the Museum maximize its resonance and revenue.
The successful launch demonstrates the benefits different perspectives can bring to a shared goal, and the ways in which strategic consulting—often seen as a for-profit business pursuit—can be applied to the arts and non-profits to achieve that goal.
Go-to-Market (GTM) Isn’t Just for Retailers
The New Children’s Museum brought Excelerate in during the early planning stages of the development of a new creative hub that would become Artopia. They understood the expansion could increase programming availability and attendance, and that they needed a thoughtful, well-considered GTM strategy.
How could the Museum optimize the customer journey, target the correct customer base, and appropriately fix the price point while also remaining true to their goals of inspiring children from across the economic spectrum to think, play, and create?
From Excelerate’s perspective, NCM, while unique in its offerings and its nonprofit structure, nonetheless needed to adhere to the same principles guiding any retailer’s GTM strategy. This included competitor analyses, consumer research and journey mapping, and a communications strategy, all to ensure GTM plans aligned with consumer expectations.
Most importantly, just as brick & mortar retailers learned a decade ago that in-store experiences were key to their long-term viability, Excelerate similarly encouraged the Museum to focus on hands-on experiences that parents and children could share and could not be replicated at home.
By understanding the market and offerings in it, Excelerate helped NCM develop programming that filled competitors’ gaps, which will drive maximum revenue, and crafted messaging that meets consumers where they are in their buyer’s journey.
Where Consulting Principles and Artistic Priorities Intersect
Of course, this calculus can feel cold to nonprofits and artists. No art director wants their work reduced to dollars and cents—they want to ensure art reaches the people who need it most, not figure out how much they are making per square foot.
While this could potentially lead to conflict, instead this marriage of the minds yielded practical and creative solutions to often complex problems.
For example, Excelerate remained focused on the big picture throughout the engagement—generating revenue with broad appeal and appropriate pricing—while at every turn the Museum wanted to ensure that programs remain accessible to all families, regardless of socioeconomic background. This resulted in a unique pricing system: A competitive admission fee to generate revenue paired with significantly reduced cost tickets for eligible low-income families.
Conclusion: Shared Goals with Differing Perspectives
Different approaches enable better results when grounded in a common purpose: to deliver a unique experience for NCM patrons that could drive value to them and to NCM’s goals.
These results include:
A competitively positioned studio space that fills gaps in an already crowded field
Development plans for a unique and engaging programming calendar that will maximize the space and meet the needs of the target audience
A recommended marketing plan to build awareness in San Diego
Recommendations regarding optimal space utilization, particularly which medium garners the most interest
By encouraging the Museum to think like a retailer in terms of market gaps, revenue, and value propositions, Excelerate enabled a viable launch and sustainable future. And by steadfastly insisting that inclusion is a top priority and their non-profit goals remain a focus, The New Children’s Museum stayed true to its mission, sparking curiosity and joy among their communities’ burgeoning young artists and creatives.
Together, they found Artopia.