HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

Wishing you the happiest of holidays and thank you for all the good work you did in 2012!  Now it's time to rest, catch up with friends and family, and re-charge your batteries for an even better 2013.

And thank you for reading this blog and for buying the Small Museum Toolkit!  It's our hope it will find its way on a shelf in every small museum in America.  Yep, we're big dreamers, but we want the Toolkit to help you make your job a bit easier.  We designed it with you in mind! 

Interested in writing for the Small Museum Toolkit blog?  We need authors who work in the small museum trenches each week and are willing to share helpful hints and solutions with your colleagues.  If interested, email us cclegutko [at] yahoo.com or stacy.klingler [at] gmail.com.

For now, we're signing off for 2012...look for more posts in January 2013 and more conference appearances throughout the year.

Warm wishes,
Cinnamon and Stacy


*The brackets are a subsitute for the @ sign to prevent spammers, so please use the correct email convention if you email us!

Budgets and Funding Interpretive Planning

Let's face it:  planning is an area where small museums are apt to skimp on the budget.  There is always something seemingly more important to be done with vital and scarce resources. All museums worry about money, and in an era of tightened belts smaller museums may worry more than others.  

This does not diminish the importance of interpretive planning.  Rather, it forces us to be creative with how we do it.  

Before setting out on this process, compile a budget. This should factor in money that will likely be spent (and there will be some of this) but perhaps even more importantly be clear about the time and energy that will be expended.  Remember to include costs of your staff and volunteers; good planning and training will take their time as well as money, and this should be quantified in some way.  

For budgets the following may apply to your list of possible expenditures:
-Staff
-Consultants
-Travel
-Meals/Subsistence
-Telecommunications (telephone, website, blogs)
-Marketing/Publicity
-Related programming (i.e. pilot programs)
-Printing
-Supplies and Materials
-Administrative overhead 

As with all things the range of costs are variable. Interpretive planning projects, especially when well-conceived, are compelling and can attract outside funding. If grants or other funding are available that is great, but the process does not need to be costly. More elaborate processes can cost tens of thousands.  With creativity they can be done for far less, and excellent projects can be undertaken for a few hundred dollars.

For many small museums, an expenditure of time and energy on the part of a committed group of volunteers may be easier than spending cash. Find ways to recruit volunteers: perhaps local teachers or an art historian from a local college.  Secure donations for printing.  Few organizations are as imaginative in this regard as small museums.   

If you are committed to this process and willing to be creative to see it through, then the budget can be scaled accordingly. A community concert done on a shoestring budget can be just as rewarding and enjoyable as a big-city symphony orchestra. 

Stephen G. Hague is currently the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Ernest Cook Trust Research Student at Linacre College, University of Oxford, England. His research interests center on architecture, material culture, and social history in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. Previously he worked as executive director of Stenton, a historic house museum in Phila- delphia administered by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He holds a master’s in history from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s from Binghamton University.

Laura C. Keim is curator of Stenton and Wyck, two house museums located in historic Germantown, as well as a lecturer in historic interiors at Philadelphia University. A graduate of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, she holds a preservation degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s in art history from Smith College. She has published widely on early American material culture and coauthored Stenton’s interpretive plan.

Evaluation Seems Scary

Evaluation can be intimidating. It is feedback on what you are doing, and who wants to find out that they’re doing a bad job? Evaluation might remind you of being graded in school or performance evaluations at work that affect your job security. If you depend largely on volunteers, you may be afraid that evaluating your activities may scare your valuable human resources away. And this may be true if the people in your group are unwilling or unable to change. There is no point to evaluating what you do if you aren’t willing to act on what you find.

But take heart! Most people who care about what they do would like to do it better. Most people would like to see more people spending more time enjoying your museum and all it has to offer. And although we can frequently make improvement through internal conversations about what worked and what didn’t, ultimately everything we do – from caring for collections to raising money and from researching a newsletter article to hosting a visiting speaker – we do for the public, for our audience. What they think must matter if we are going to do a good job of serving them. Finding out what they think shouldn’t be an afterthought.

If you take the time to explain your plans for evaluation to paid and unpaid staff and the board in this way, you are more likely to get their cooperation in collecting information and their willingness to implement change based on what you learn from that information.

You might introduce your evaluation plans to those who will be affected in a small group and make the following items part of your meeting:

·      Ask people to share past evaluation experiences – either positive or negative.

·      Acknowledge that evaluation can feel a little scary or like a waste of time.

·      Explain how you intend to report on and use the information (to make global

      changes, not to pick on anyone in particular).

·      Remind them that this is a learning process for you, too, and that the first

      attempts won’t be perfect and that you’ll need their feedback.

·      Most important, let them know it is not a performance appraisal.

Conny Graft is a consultant in interpretive planning and evaluation for museums, parks, and other nonprofit organizations. Conny retired from The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in 2010 where she worked for 27 years as Director of Interpretive Planning, Director of Interpretive Education and Manager of Research and Evaluation. Before coming to Colonial Williamsburg, Conny worked for the Division of Historic Preservation in Fairfax, Virginia and was in charge of planning programs for four historic sites.

Stacy Klingler currently serves local history organizations as the Assistant Director of Local History Services at the Indiana Historical Society. She began her career in museums as the assistant director of two small museums, before becoming director of the Putnam County Museum in Greencastle, Ind. She chairs the AASLH's Small Museums Committee (2008-2012) and attended the Seminar for Historical Administration in 2006. While she lives in the history field, her passion is encouraging a love of learning in any environment.

How to Be a Facilitator

Leading the strategic planning process as the director of a small museum is challenging enough, but if there are no funds available for hiring an outside facilitator, the director has an even greater role in the process.  Keeping in mind what the role of a facilitator truly is, the director can comfortably wear the hat of plan coordinator AND facilitator. 

What is Facilitation?

Very simply put, facilitation is helping a group accomplish its goals. There are a wide range of perspectives about the ideal nature and values of facilitation, much as there are a wide range of perspectives about the ideal nature and values of leadership. For example, some facilitators may believe that facilitation should always be highly democratic in nature and that anything other than democratic is not facilitation at all. Others believe that facilitation can be quite directive, particularly depending on the particular stage of development of the group.

Whatever your belief about the best type of facilitation, the practice usually is best carried out by someone who has strong knowledge and skills regarding group dynamics and processes -- these are often referred to as process skills. Effective facilitation might also involve strong knowledge and skills about the particular topic or content that the group is addressing in order to reach its goals -- these are often referred to as content skills. The argument about how much "process versus content" skills are required by facilitators in certain applications is a very constructive argument that has gone on for years.

A Facilitator Will:

-Control the meeting

-Set rules and enforce them

-Ensure participation

-Allow for flow of thought

-Keep the ball rolling

-Keep meeting on topic

-Act generally as a “non-participant”

-Be a subject matter expert

-Accurately sum up discussion

-Smile as much as possible

Hopefully this check list will help you lead your board and stakeholders toward a shared vision for your museum.  Good luck!

Working in museums for nearly 20 years, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko has been a museum director since 2001. Cinnamon became CEO of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine in 2009. Before that, she was the director of the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where she led the organization to the National Medal for Museum Service in 2008.  Cinnamon is the co-editor of the Small Museum Toolkit from AltaMira Press.