Pondering Mu$eum Finance$, Part 2

If we had a million dollars . . .

This is a continuation of my previous post on museum funding and finances. In my first post, I spoke about how museums ought to move beyond the government dependency, and seek new funding methods. This post considers some of these funding options.

I am compelled to say right here that I have not ever directly been in charge of the finances of an institution — although, silly me, I hope I get to do this in the future, when I KNOW I will learn a lot more about this, right away. And I know these changes listed below wouldn't pay for everything — and that most of them are likely already being done. My point is I think we have to be very proactive pursuing revenue sources other than those provided by government entities.

Museums have made efforts to be creative with how they raise funds above what any public support might bring them, and I would like to recognize that. I know that many museums rent out their space for private events. There are also fundraising events that take a whole lot of effort to pull off, and end up doing an impressive job of making some good coin. I think this extra fundraising effort is part of the new deal, and we need to be cool with that without letting it take over other work we do. It's not a bad idea to diversify revenue streams. We can continue to be creative with what we do to make money, and I think we can do better somehow wrapping it into what the museum does provide, i.e. highlighting our collections in a manner that can generate revenue through licensing and such things as photo reproduction. This last point may be blasphemous to some, but with careful and thoughtful planning, I believe we can figure this out.

I know that it has also come up that museums can/should/have to/and shouldn't pass the expense onto the visitor. Truthfully, it can be said that the visitor wants the experience to be less expensive than a trip to the movies or a professional ball game, and there is sticker shock when admission comes even close to the same cost. Museums are traditionally viewed as educational services and I gotta say, in my heart, I don't think passing a huge expense on to the visitor is the way to go. We have to manage the costs here while being an inclusive and an open organization that serves the entire community. However, I do think we need to consider charging what we are worth and to find that sweet spot where we are open with our visitors the kind of expenses we incur in our institution, and how we get our funding. We also need to be absolutely certain that we remain really awesome and worthy of the visitor's time and expense. 

Just far will we have to go to make money? What about the suggestion that some institutions would like to sell 'just one piece' of the mission-appropriate collections that would pay the bills forever? Ahah. But that breaks one of museum's key ethical tenets: collections are not assets to be liquidated. If we are going to be in charge of caring for the community's collection, we can't use it for collateral when we are in trouble. If we sell out our ethics and turn a blind eye to the public trust we hold because we can't pay the bills, we will lose our credibility as an institution. From the outside this idea does seem like an easy solution — and I am sure many people have considered selling the family silver to cover their own personal costs. Museums simply cannot go down that slippery slope, and it's our job to ensure that our public and supporters understand why.

Perhaps we need to bring back The Museum Patron, to convince the big businessman and woman, the singer, the actor, the top-ranked professional sporting heroes in and from our communities to 'pay it forward' and contribute more to our arts and culture. Maybe we need go after them like polite pit bulls.  And if they already do contribute, let's celebrate them a lot louder, and make sure our stakeholders know about when it happens. When we do, these new funders might end up saying something profound, such as what spoken by Michael Audain about the sponsorship from the Audain Foundation of artist Bill Reid's carving "Bear Mantle" to the Royal BC Museum:

I think museums everywhere just can't depend on government funding. They need support from the community, and art lovers such as ourselves. I think we have an obligation to ensure that our public museums are supported and are able to acquire an important work like this.

What fabulous words, eh!

Another option: some museums have taken an active role in purposefully stepping back from requiring public funding by fundamentally changing the way the institution is organized. The museum the comes first to my mind in this is category the Oakland Museum of California. When I lived in California eight years ago, the OMCa was just beginning to talk of redeveloping the galleries, reworking the site to be more visitor friendly / centric. The museum was already near and dear to my heart (wonderful staff!), and I agreed this was a timely project to take on. Honestly, though, I simply just had no idea how the institution might find the money, and this was before the economic meltdown. Well, the OMCa managed the redevelopment of the institution, and the have been getting great reviews. I think part of this success is that the long-standing Oakland Museum of California Foundation that has stepped up and taken on the task of figuring out the financing of this project as well as the long-term funding the museum. The Foundation is also hopeful that the future will set them completely free of relying on City of Oakland monies, which includes making all the staff Foundation employees, no longer City workers.  I think this is forward-thinking, responsible, and brave. Kudos to the OMCa.

So, extending from the work done by the Oakland Museum of California, I do think we need to embrace these challenges instead of fighting them, and this change of strategy will help us find a new way. We need to boldly go into new territory, and to be our own strongest advocate in all that we do and how we present ourselves, and encourage our boards and foundations to laud us publicly and proudly. This is not to say that OMCa has it all figured out with their foundation, or that we all need to lose our government employee benefits to become private/public organizations, but we do have to explore a wide variety of options such as these.

Some of the ways we can organize and plan our options:

1. Museum professionals need to know darn sure what museums are and what they  do. The American Association of Museum provides a impressive list of museum facts that we need to memorize, with statistics appropriate to the country we in.
2. Museums truly have to be more rowdy with economic drivers (government and private businesses) about with how much we contribute to the economy — we are not looking for charity, we're looking to cover our costs for the amazing things we do for the community. Like everyone else. 
3. We must boldly let the public and other funders know that museums are the story recorders and the treasure protectors — these things help communities define themselves for the long-term. We can all lose sight of the value of knowing our identity we are collectively trying to figure out how to care for our basic necessities. If museums are going to be here for the long term, we have to let the public and government entities know that we add unique value to our communities.
   
   

What do you think about this? Am I being naïve here to suggest we just walk away from hoping government funding will ever fully be reinstated? What's your real-world experience with museum finances, and what do you think our future will look like, as a sector? I'd love to know through comments here, or resources you can point out to me. THIS is a critical museum topic that I would really like to explore and figure out . . . got any tips? I'd truly love to hear them.

Pondering Mu$eum Finance$, Part 1

Times, they are a-changin' . . .

Museum people talk a lot about a number of sector issues, such as remaining relevant to our communities, and about the definition of museums. I don't want to say we're too much into navel gazing, but we do regularly ponder whether or not we should be all about:

• presentation or preservation?
• being the community's authority or facilitator?
• creating didactic or interactive exhibitions?
• organizing research opportunities or running educational initiatives?

But the biggest real-world pressure in museums these days, the thing that keeps us up at night and worrying what tomorrow will look like is: Where on earth are we gonna find the money to pay for what we do and what we deliver?

Ya, truth, it's a universal fact that we gotta pay the bills in order to do what we do. Museums have done their best to cut costs for at least the past 15 years, and we are at bare bones in many places. There have been staffing, collections care, and facility cutbacks to the point were institutions are struggling to survive at all — and some just may fail. That's scary.

There has been great discussion and uproar recently over the fact that government entities — local, regional and national — just can't keep paying for museums. It seems we're seen as a luxury when there are 'bigger' issues such as unemployment, housing, health care, homelessness, the economy in general, and on and on. You can just feel the lack of empathy for our budget situation in letters to the editor such as this one questioning a museum's plan to upgrade its site. And we're not alone here in Canada with these struggles: both Great Britain and the U.S. are experiencing a watershed moment regarding the massive cutbacks that are moving forward faster than you can say 'there's only one taxpayer and there's no money for museums in our budget'.  But it is simply not sustainable to think that museums can keep going on like this, with the hopes that museums might get more funding from the government again 'one day' and we just need to ride out these lean times. Somethings gotta give.

Personally, I think the days are close to over where we should even consider money coming from our governments. Museums can state again and again to the powers-that-be that we are caring for the heart of our communities through exhibitions and collections care, but I don't think the politicians have the resources to help us fund this noble cause. And I want to believe it's not because our governments don't care about our heritage and culture, but it's more because they have to deal with the issues that are literally much more in their face. I hate it that museums are considered the gravy of what life has to offer, but discussions about social housing is going to trump funding museums every time. (Caveat: Do trust me that I will call out to those governments who are being wasteful and irresponsible if they have the funds to support museums yet choose to 'forget' them. I am not just going to let them walk away from us, but I do see there's not a lot of wiggle room for governments to support us as much as they once did.)

So what do we do about all this worry about money? Stick our head in the sand and pretend it's not a problem? Cut programs? Cancel plans? Lay off (more) staff? Freeze positions after staff leave or retire? Find a Sugar Daddy? Give up and close the doors (and cry)??
 
My next blog post — I had to divide this topic in two because this one was getting realllly long, go figure — reviews some options that I think could give us other funding options. Stay tuned . . .

My Definition of a Museum

But . . . but what about the . . .

Once upon a time, I was a student in the Master of Arts Museum Studies program at John F. Kennedy University in California.  In my cohort, there were two main specializations in the program — collections management and public programming — and they ran side by side. All the students were together for the core foundation courses, then we broke out into the respective groups for in-depth specialization classes. We also wrote our master's thesis on a topic to add to the literature / learning of our specialization.

Being in collections management, I honestly thought that I would see far more registrar-types than those interested in public programming. Boy, was I wrong! It turns out that in a class of (I believe) 12, there were only FOUR in collections management. I was shocked, really, and so the first lesson of this amazing program was that I was never to be sure what is going to happen in my own personal definition of the museum world.

The core courses were so interesting and so very challenging. These classes, often led by the phenomenal Gail Anderson, emphasized the community, and the educational mandate of museums. It was repeatedly stated that, without people, museums are not worth a whole lot with their packed-full rooms of collections. This was a bit of a shocker to me at the time, for I had always loosely defined museums as places that collect things that tell a story - it was about The Object. Yet we discussed that museums can exist without collections, but not without people.

WHAT? Wait a minute.

Museums without collections? This thought shocked me. The conversation kept being pushed — museums are first and foremost places of learning for people, not Mausoleums of Stuff. (Ouch.) Museums can keep things forever but if no one sees the collections, what's the point? Why spend all that money and energy putting things on those pedestals, and keeping them carefully tucked away in storage? Again and again it was stressed that if we, as museum professionals, were not serving our audience and community, we were in fact engaged in organizations that simply idolized and interpreted material goods. And so what about that? This seemingly endless discussion actually got my back up a little - hey, if there are no collections needed in museums, there are no collections MANAGERS. Are 'they' trying to get rid of me and my profession? And curators? And conservators? With the majority of the class being education-centric, it certainly seemed like my voice from the registrars' section was getting a little over-run. And so I kept rebuking, over and over again:

But — What about The Collections?

How DO collections fit into this museum definition of education and people first, things second?  This was the central question of my museum studies, and it was the heart of master's project in collections management, when I designed a form that documented the object donor's story at the time the object was given to the museum. From a collections manager point of view, I saw that having the community document their own donations as an important step in sharing the task of interpreting the collection in the museum.

And then I went back into the museum world . . .

. . . where the work often comes before the conversations of why we do what we do . . .

. . . and where the education side of museum professionals rarely out-number the object-centric museum specialists.

There I discovered that, somewhat to my initial relief, history, art and natural history museums were still, in my opinion, focussed on the object. Some exhibitions were practically alters. Some curators were the experts, and they owned the story that visitors heard and learned from. And accessibility, welcoming visitors? Sharing authority? Pretty much back burner. Educational programs seemed to be afterthoughts to the exhibitions. Mission statements started with 'To collect, preserve the stuff of the community'. It seemed to me that objects were the centre; my side of museum work seemed rather protected. But I didn't feel smug. In fact, I felt worried and a little sick at this realization of the museum sector in action.

Then, of course, it hit me. 

But — What about The Community?

All the discussions from my time at JFKU rang in my ears. Despite my rants to protect the object's role in the definition of a museum, this adoration of collections without thinking about the community is, well, not a sustainable way to gather supporters, whether they be visitors or funders or fans. Only in a few cases will the object come before the interest of the visitor, so the collections should not be the only focus of what we do. If the museum values and welcomes its visitors, makes people the first priority, our communities just might see all these museums belong to them. And then maybe, just maybe, they will stay and play and participate in this ever-so-cool learning environment, for it will be for the visitor, and about the visitor. It truly is not just about the collection, or for those who adore the museum objects.

In coming full circle of my unique learning situation and professional experience, I have become aware of a few things. Museums to me are defined as places of education that hold collections in trust for the community. I personally need to keep collections as one of the central tennets that define a museum for I am and always will be passionate about the things that tell the stories of the world around us. But I also know this: I absolutely, without a doubt, cannot leave out the community in this definition: PEOPLE are the reason why museums do what museums do. Always. The collection and the community's experience — including educational — are together for me, and I use these fundamentals equally when I define what is a museum. No buts about it.