What do Frisbee games, art exhibitions in restaurants and wine tasting have in common?These seemingly unrelated activities are all part of a marketing effort to attract more visitors to the Rose Art Museum. Last year, museum director Michael Rush collaborated with students in Prof. Xin Wang's (BUS) course, "Functions of the Capitalist Enterprise," to find new marketing ideas to recruit visitors, especially students who have never set foot in Brandeis' museum.

According to Roy Dawes, the museum's director of operations, there are between 4 and 6 thousand general admissions visitors a year. But, over half of these visitors are graduates, administrators, faculty and outside visitors.

"It's a low-awareness problem," said Nicholas Kwan '10, one of the group members who thought of promoting the museum in restaurants. "I think the students are generally disinterested."

The Rose's lack of extensive advertising over the past few years may result from the fact that the museum does not rely on ticket sales to support itself and can offer free admission.

Funds from a variety of sources support the Rose Art, including the Henry and Lois Foster Endowment, Mortimer Hays Acquisition Fund and Perlmutter Residence Endowment.

When asked whether the Rose Art Museum has reached out to the Brandeis campus, students from Wang's business class said the museum's previous attempts have been insufficient to encourage students to visit the museum.

"I don't think they try very hard," said Alan Walker Tso '10, who visits the museum once or twice a semester. "I only went because I had an art class that told us to check out the exhibits."

Bruce Strong '10, a student in Wang's class, agreed. "I didn't know the art museum existed until we [started work] on the proposal," he said. "We surveyed a lot of people, and many have never been to the museum."

Two teams of students were assigned to promote the museum for their final project, specifically "to raise student and community awareness," said Kwan.

Among the innovative marketing ideas they came up with were restaurant cross-promotion and increased Web exposure.

"We wanted to create a Facebook group and a YouTube video, [as well as] a panorama of the Rose Art Museum that could be uploaded to the Web site," said Daniel Baron '09, who participated in an initiative to improve the museum's publicity efforts on the Internet.

Baron, Strong and Dan Gillman '10 were part of a group that introduced a marketing plan called "Nurturing the Rose," which used a multimedia approach to create awareness. The group updated the Wikipedia page and created a Facebook group for the Rose, and modified the Rose's Web site, according to Strong.

The Rose's Wikipedia page now advertises the museum's wide variety of art exhibits from renowned artists, as well as the upcoming construction of a new building to house the museum's permanent collection.

Strong said he was collaborating with BTV to make a video tour of the Rose that he would put on YouTube and BTV in the coming weeks. Strong continues to meet with BTV officers, but the business group has been meeting less frequently since the project was started last year.

A second group of museum promoters, which included Susan Byali '09, Wesley Ho '10, Nicholas Kwan '10 and Matthew Saban '10, worked to improve the cramped parking spaces in front of the museum, promote the museum during Fall Fest and advertise the museum in restaurants to tie art with food.

"I think it was a great way of getting professional experience, and it was the first time I had a chance to work on marketing," said Kwan.

In general, museums rely on endowments, federal funds and ticket sales to maintain inventory, facilities and staff. However, some art museums are not funded adequately. This year, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art ran a deficit of $2 million. The Rose Art Museum is fortunate to have the necessary endowments to keep facilities running and concentrate on the quality of its artwork.

When asked about Rose attendance rates, Michael Rush explained, "We're not driven by numbers.Some places depend on money from admissions tickets that leads them to do exhibitions that they feel might be more appealing to people. We have the freedom to create exhibitions that are more important because of the art. By doing so, we can attract more people."

Just last week, the museum received several new works of art collectively valued at more than $1 million from a variety of private donors. Artists included Mike Kelley, Jessica Stockholder and David Reed.

"We get tremendous support from the University,especially for the day-to-day operations," said Dawes.

Yet Dawes explained that despite the Rose's loyal community of donors and financial supporters, some projects require additional financial assistance.

"For some of the larger-scale expansions, we need to find that support elsewhere," he said.

Some students used cross-promotional strategies to market the museum. Kwan said he drew inspiration from art that was hung in an Italian restaurant in Waltham.

"We wanted to do some sort of promotion that would attract [restaurant] customers to the Rose Art," he says. "I remembered I was at one of those fancy Italian restaurants in Waltham . with my mother when she saw some paintings on the wall. She asked one of the waiters where the painting was from. The waiter said it came from a museum, and that was when I brainstormed tying art with restaurants."

Kwan was ultimately unable to fulfill his plan to advertise the Rose through artwork in restaurants and focused instead on other publicity strategies.

While some of the ideas for promoting the museum, such as Web design, were promising, others clashed with the museum's image.

"Our first idea was to do some sort of performance that was art-related," Kwan said. "We wanted to erect a stage, but the space was not good for that sort of thing,"

Instead, Kwan suggested a fashion show, but Rush said fashion did not mesh with the Rose Art's commitment to contemporary art.

Some of the Rose Art's more technical problems were beyond the scope of marketing.

"[Rush] emphasized parking as a problem at open house events, which is important because the main attendees are art collectors who didn't want to deal with the mess of finding parking," said Kwan.

Rush agreed that physical space was also one of the museum's primary concerns. Rush said that he has been endeavoring for two years now to make sure the museum has room to exhibit all its impressive artwork.

"We have the finest collection of modern and contemporary art in New England," Rush said. "Our collection of 6,000 [works] is locked up and not being seen right now. It's been my interest, a little over two years, to get the collection out there," he added.

"We are always looking for new ways to attract more students to the Rose," he said. "We have a group called SCRAM [Student Committee at the Rose Art Museum] and hope that through springtime activities we are planning to get more students involved."

Herold praised the current partnership with the business class. "The students from BUS 10A are amazing [and] full of great ideas. They are a great resource for us and their ongoing interest in the Rose is amazing.