First, Museums Collect Corporate Donors : Lending major contributors paintings or hosting their office parties is small price to pay for company’s $10,000 membership

If you’re among the fortunate few who can afford a $5,000 or $10,000 membership to your favorite art museum, you receive the satisfaction of knowing that you are keeping the flame of art burning brightly, helping enrich the quality of life in your community and fighting the battle against cultural mediocrity.

All well and good, but come on--what do you actually get?

Consider, for instance, holding your company’s annual Christmas party at the bluff-side Laguna Art Museum--the key benefit of a $5,000 membership. Cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and a sit-down dinner for 60 is served amid precious artworks. It’s just not the same as roast beef at the Ritz.

Prefer to stay chez vous? The Newport Harbor Art Museum has a relatively new arrangement in which corporations who join for $5,000 may adorn their walls with works by such contemporary masters as Frank Stella, loaned from the museum’s permanent collection.

If outright ownership of art is more appealing, the Severin Wunderman Museum in Irvine gives Angels--$10,000 contributors--a signed, limited-edition serigraph portrait by Andy Warhol of the artist whose work the museum is devoted to: Jean Cocteau.

Attracting members, no matter how large or small the initiation fee, is critical to most museums. For one thing, granting organizations like to see an outpouring of community support, and, of course, membership fees provide direct fiscal sustenance. These fees account for 31% of the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s $2.6-million annual budget, for example.

Top paying members, predominantly corporations rather than individuals, generally make up a small percentage of museums’ memberships. But their contributions are essential, and not just because the checks are larger, experts in the field say.

“These members provide a good example for others to give at higher levels,” said Lynn Kirst, Laguna Art Museum’s director of development.

And, in an era of increasing competition for public and private donations for the arts, perks designed to entice these donors to part with their cash are crucial, others say.

Offering alluring benefits to big givers “is probably essential, from a marketing standpoint,” said Terry Whitney, president of Whitney Associates, a Santa Monica-based fund-raising and marketing-consulting firm serving nonprofit institutions.

“It might be just the thing that pushes a corporation over the line to a higher (membership) level or that gets them to join in the first place,” said Whitney, who has worked with major visual and performing arts institutions nationwide.

Even the Severin Wunderman Museum, which has the smallest annual budget ($500,000) and fewest members (32) of any county nonprofit art museum, offers the benefit of the Warhol serigraph to its Corporate Angel members. It has eight such members now.

Although galleries at the Bowers Museum are closed and efforts to increase membership are dormant during its renovation and expansion, officials there recently established a program allowing Business Benefactor members paying $1,500 to use the picturesque, Spanish-style facility for receptions.

In so doing, Bowers joined all other county fine art museums offering that perk--a popular and inexpensive one that usually costs little more than the price of electricity used for an event.

“You can’t rent a restaurant (for a corporate affair) that has the exclusivity and elite quality of an art museum,” Whitney said.

Among other benefits currently offered are Newport Harbor Art Museum’s Art in Corporate Places program in which businesses display the museum’s works. Most recently, Coopers & Lybrand, an international accounting firm with new offices in Irvine, joined the $5,000-level President’s Club of the museum’s Business Council and was loaned 19 works on paper by 12 artists, including Stella, Larry Bell and Josef Albers.

Free admission for employees, recognition in newspaper ads, private dinners and receptions with museum directors are also among long lists of top perquisites.

By comparison, top membership benefits at Los Angeles’ two leading museums are somewhat similar to one another--though the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with 88,000 members, has a $25,000 Distinguished Patrons category that allows corporations to offer free admission to every employee plus one guest. Museum of Contemporary Art members who spend $1,000 to belong to its Contemporary Circle get their names emblazoned on the museum’s “Patron Members Wall.” MOCA has 22,000 members.

Still, museum experts and members say that the spoils of ownership are secondary to support for arts institutions when corporations buy museums’ costliest memberships.

The motives of corporate officers may be hard to discern, Whitney said. “It’s like surveys. People will tell you what they think you want to hear or how they’d like you to think of them, when what’s really true is more difficult to get at.”

Purchasing top-level memberships is “good PR,” she said, “because it makes corporations appear to be supporting the quality of life in their community and can be of benefit to employees” who receive free admission tickets, for instance.

In addition, tax deductions may certainly make membership contributions attractive. Though the Internal Revenue Service specifies that such corporations may deduct only the portion of a membership for which they receive no perks in return, Whitney said most “are still putting down (entire) membership (fees) as tax-deductible contributions when technically the entire fee is not. In some cases almost all of it may be; in others, only part of it may.”

Deductible amounts would vary with the benefits a corporation utilizes and the onus of determining the fair market value of each benefit is on the donor, she added.

Nonetheless, Whitney said, “corporations’ support of an art institution has more to do with their social responsibility,” expressed through the large donations, than a quest for benefits.

Leslie Corea, an audit manager at Coopers & Lybrand who represents the firm as a Business Council member of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, said she wasn’t even aware of the museum’s new Art in Corporate Places program when she joined the council. Coopers & Lybrand also makes large donations to such organizations as the Orange County Performing Arts Center, South Coast Repertory and the planned Irvine Theatre.

“The whole decision to join was made to support the community and the museum,” she said during an elaborate cocktail reception to inaugurate the company’s new offices recently.

Stewart Woodard, president of the Costa Mesa architectural firm that bears his name and a Life Member of the Modern Museum of Art, echoed the idea. The $5,000 membership entitles holders to use museum facilities for receptions. “We joined the museum because we’ve always been very strong supporters of the arts in Orange County and we felt that its goals” were worthy of support, he said. Woodard is past board president of the Pacific Symphony and South Coast Repertory and a former board member of other leading Southern California arts institutions.

Even so, no one denies that perks sweeten the pot.

“The benefit of using the space was very appealing,” said Woodard, whose firm held two cocktail receptions at the Modern Museum of Art last year.

Similarly, there have been instances at Laguna Art Museum where “people joined at the top membership level specifically because they wanted to use the museum,” said development director Kirst.

One way or another, it seems that Orange County museums would do well to continue using these marketing strategies.

“This next decade is going to be scary for arts institutions,” Whitney said. “The money is just not there from the government and there’s more and more competition for private dollars as charities proliferate. The answer is to become a better marketer. It may sound crass, but unfortunately, it’s the reality of the ‘90s and what’s really going to make or break a lot of institutions is how they package themselves for this kind of consumption.”

MEMBERSHIPS IN ORANGE COUNTY ART MUSEUMS

Bowers Museum, Santa Ana

Current membership: 1,000 *

Annual operating budget: $1.5 million

Percentage of budget generated through membership dues: Costliest membership category: 2-3%

Costliest membership category: Business Benefactor, $1,500

Top benefit to members in this category: Use of museum for private reception.

Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach

Current membership: 3,000

Annual operating budget: $933,000

Percentage of budget generated through membership dues: Costliest membership category: 14%

Costliest membership category: Benefactor/ Corporate Council, $5,000

Top benefit to members in this category: Use of museum for reception.

Severin Wunderman Museum, Irvine

Current membership: 32 **

Annual operating budget: $500,000

Percentage of budget generated through membership dues: Costliest membership category: 5%

Costliest membership category: Corporate Angel, $10,000

Top benefit to members in this category: A limited-edition, signed serigraph portrait of Jean Cocteau by Andy Warhol.

Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach

Current membership: 5,032

Annual operating budget: $2.6 million

Percentage of budget generated through membership dues: Costliest membership category: 31%

Costliest membership category: President’s Club of the Business Council, $5,000.

Top benefit to members in this category: Art in Corporate Places program in which business may display works from museum’s permanent collection.

Modern Museum of Art, Santa Ana

Current membership: 1,200

Annual operating budget: $600,000

Percentage of budget generated through membership dues: Costliest membership category: 15%

Costliest membership category: Life Member, $5,000

Top benefit to members in this category: Use of museum for reception.

*Campaign to increase membership inactive while museum galleries are closed for $12-million expansion and renovation. Campaign expected to resume about one year before reopening, scheduled for late 1991 or early 1992.

**The relatively small museum, which opened in 1985, recently accelerated its effort to increase membership after increasing its staff from two to four.

Source: Orange County museums