The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum is planning a business model changeup to attract more repeat visitors locally and statewide.

The museum, the first City for Champions project to be completed, opened during the early stages of the pandemic in summer 2020, which made attracting visitors to an indoor venue difficult. The venue has struggled with lower-than-expected attendance since its debut.

The $96 million downtown museum houses 12 galleries spread over three floors that include a Hall of Fame for Olympic and Paralympic athletes, displays on the Summer and Winter Olympics, history of the Olympic games and how the games influenced history and culture, a nearly complete collection of Olympic medals and the scoreboard from the “Miracle on Ice” game, in which the U.S. team upset the heavily favored Soviet team in a 1980 Winter Olympics semifinal game.

While museum backers originally forecast the museum would draw 350,000 visitors a year, attendance totaled just 23,211 in the first five months it was open amid state restrictions on crowds and requirements that visitors keep their distance from each other.

Attendance surged to nearly 112,000 in the museum’s first year but fell 25.4% last year to 83,515. Visitors in the first 10 months of this year totaled more than 76,000, or up nearly 10% measured by the monthly average.

The decline in visitor numbers last year contributed to the museum’s revenue falling nearly 24% from a year earlier to $8.59 million in 2022, which museum spokesman Tommy Schield attributed via email to “soft tourism in the Pikes Peak region” that had not fully recovered from the pandemic. The museum’s revenue in 2021 was higher due to “a significant in-kind donation” and substantial federal grants that the facility did not receive again in 2022.

The facility has tried to make up for the lower-than-expected attendance by boosting the number of events it hosts, ranging from nonprofit, corporate and wedding receptions to luncheons, dinners and a wide variety of community events — totaling 174 events last year and 186 events in the first 10 months of this year. The museum also hosted more than 300 school groups in both 2021 and 2022, and 261 in the first eight months of this year.

The museum and its initial CEO Christopher Liedel parted ways less than a year after the facility opened, and the permanent job remained vacant for nearly two years until Marisa Wigglesworth, then CEO and president of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, was hired in April. The nonprofit that operates the museum needed federal pandemic relief aid to make up for losses in 2021, but broke even last year, in part by cutting the size of its staff from 58 when it opened to 34 last year.

Wigglesworth said she is “absolutely” optimistic about the museum’s finances, but “we’re not out of the woods yet. Support from this community has been incredibly generous and is really critical to carrying the museum to the place we are today, as we are struggling through these early years.”

The museum is adjusting its business model to rely less on paid visitors from outside Colorado and instead attract more repeat visitors from the Colorado Springs area and the rest of the state.

The nonprofit is boosting its branding, membership, group sales and programming, hiring a chief revenue officer and building its programming efforts around upcoming Summer and Winter Olympic games as well as promoting the Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame induction held in years without Olympic games.

“We’re going to have to tweak what had been the original vision (for the museum) because it hadn’t been the right thing for the audience we’re serving,” Wigglesworth said. “What we’re coming to understand is that’s not going to be all we are.”

While Wigglesworth believes the museum has “a rightful place on the national stage to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Baseball Hall of Fame and (Pro) Football Hall of Fame,” she said the facility is “refining” programming for local visitors and offering more virtual options for those who live elsewhere.

Jariah Walker, executive director of the Colorado Springs Urban Renewal Authority, told the Colorado Economic Development Commission on last week that the museum and Weidner Field are helping foster private development in the surrounding area, including a 36-story apartment building and proposed Front Range rail station.

The Urban Renewal Authority is the financing entity for the $120.5 million in Regional Tourism Act dollars pledged to Colorado Springs by the state.

He said the museum had “done a good job of moving through the tough operating environment” of the pandemic and said the new CEO has the experience to “drive the museum forward.”