The National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Mo., must be doing something right.

Perhaps Kansas City’s Union Station and even Lawrence’s Watkins Community Museum of History should take some notes.

Numbers released earlier this month indicate the World War I Museum is running well ahead of the number of visitors its business plan projected for the museum’s first two years of operation. The museum business is tough, however, and even with about $925,000 in ticket sales, the WWI museum would have been in the hole this year without a $1 million donation from the Kauffman Legacy Fund.

Still, the museum is in a strong enough position to be able to use half of that donation to create an endowment for ongoing programs. Along with funds from a National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grant, the museum will have a $1.8 million fund for education programs, as well as $200,000 for museum acquisitions. Hopefully, that endowment will grow and ease the scheduled end in 2014 of an annual $625,000 subsidy from the city.

By contrast, despite huge influxes of tax money, Kansas City’s Union Station, home of Science City, continues to struggle. Union Station reopened in 1999 following a $250 million renovation, about half of which was funded by a bistate cultural sales tax. The years since then have been marked by continuing deficits and requests for more tax money.

When announcing the hiring of a new director earlier this month, the Union Station board of directors estimated they would see a deficit this year of between $443,000 and $971,000. In an interview about his hiring, the new director said he would start his tenure by asking some important questions: “Who do we want our customers to be? What do they want? When do they want it? And at what cost?”

One of the strengths of the World War I Museum seems to be that it knows what it wants to be. It already has been designated the nation’s official museum about “The Great War” and is seeking to anchor the nation’s observance of the World War I centennial. It knows the story it is trying to tell and is focused on that goal.

Union Station is a beautiful building, but the exhibits and events it schedules lack a central focus and, therefore, a central audience.

It’s the same kind of challenge facing the local Watkins Museum. It has a beautiful building and some interesting exhibits, but it has been unable to clearly focus on the story it wants to tell about Lawrence and Douglas County and how best to tell that story. Perhaps not coincidentally, Watkins Museum, like Union Station, continues to face financial struggles.

Maybe the correlation between focus and finances isn’t that direct, but it’s hard to look at the success of the National World War I Museum and not think it has some lessons to offer.