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.

Developing Interpretive Plans

Thoughtful planning is essential in the creation of effective interpretation.  Once your organization has accepted root and branch that interpretation is your primary focus, you are ready to move on to planning what that interpretation will be. Having done the hard background work to position your institution to interpret its collection, it is time to decide on the best ways to do that. 

A good interpretive plan offers key concepts and a structure that is designed to spin a web of connections for the visitor between what they are seeing in the museum and their own experiences and lives.  Strong connections strongly will capture the visitor’s imagination on a deep level.  Although we cannot in every instance do this explicitly, the more connections that visitors can make to the story of your museum, the more often they will want to visit and become engaged.

Interpretive Planning is a process that takes time.  First, all in the organization must be on board knowing that the plan will ultimately generate new ideas and approaches.  It can be helpful to emphasize that the plan may only codify messages that are already part of the museum’s current offerings. 

While an Interpretive Plan can be a wholesale change in how a museum approaches itself, it does not have to be.  If you do not want to lose existing stakeholders while you consider strategies for building relationships with new ones, it is helpful to think of the plan as one that will include existing messages or aspects of your interpretation you already do well.

All interpretation must rest on bedrock of good scholarship, so do involve scholars and other experts early and often.  Engage actively with scholarship, reading new material in your field regularly.  When developing interpretive planning documents, staff and volunteers should conduct their own research and build their own knowledge foundations.

At the same time, remember that you have an obligation to convey scholarship to a wide public.  Academic research should support what you do, but do not let it take over.  Although the post-modern discourse related to the “liminal space of the dining room table’s social topography” (as one scholar opaquely commented in a planning session) may sound impressive and contain some really good nuggets of academic research, you need to play the translator. 

This does not mean “dumbing down.”  Just the opposite.  You want to challenge your audience, engaging fully with difficult topics and complex ideas.  As discussed in the chapter on “Interpreting Difficult Issues,” topics related to race, ethnicity, war, violence, immigration, enslavement and class all belong in museums.  Complicated issues or problems can have great resonance for visitors.  These topics are made more tangible and meaningful when you can rely on solid, up-to-date research in crafting your interpretation. 

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.

An Introduction to The Small Museum Toolkit: Book 5, Interpretation: Education, Programs, and Exhibits

Carol Bolton Betts, editor for the Illinois Heritage Association, wrote an overview of The Small Museum Toolkit as part of the IHA’s Technical Insert series.  The IHA has graciously allowed The Small Museum Toolkit to share this introduction in seven blog posts during July and August. The posts will help you to get to know about the content of the Toolkit from an outside perspective.

As visitors are drawn into a museum, it is the job of that museum to interpret the artifacts in its collections, telling their stories, revealing their meaning, and clarifying their relevance to its audi­ence. Book 5 of The Small Museum Toolkit explores ways of doing this that will truly engage and challenge the visitor.

In chapter 1, Stephen G. Hague and Laura C. Keim discuss the im­portance of committing to “audience-centered interpretation” (1) and then drawing upon the expertise of scholars, staff members, and many segments of the community to formulate an interpretive plan based on the museum’s best resources. Hague and Keim stress the importance of selecting clear interpretive themes. They emphasize that whereas tour guides were once the sole interpret­ers dealing with the public, other staff members and volunteers now have roles to play, as do new technologies. All interpreters must be well versed in the interpretive plan and able to execute it. Periodic evaluation helps. The authors use often amusing texts to illustrate their points.

Madeline C. Flagler writes in chapter 2 about the task of interpret­ing difficult issues. She describes her own experiences working at the Bellamy Mansion Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. These museums presented opportunities to deal with subjects like slavery and marginalization in an ethical, honest, and effective manner. Flagler details each museum’s methods. Each had a goal to become inclusive in regard to staff, subject, and community. A related aspect of interpretation is covered by Teresa Goforth in chapter 3. She provides guidance in conducting research that will help find the truth about artifacts—what they are, how they were made, how they were used, and what they meant to the individu­als who created them. She urges using primary and secondary sources—diaries and letters, photos, county histories, public documents, and oral histories—to establish and understand the context of objects.

Chapter 4, by Eugene Dillenburg and Janice Klein, presents a blueprint for creating exhibits, from planning to building. After defining what an exhibit is, the authors tell how to pick an exhibit topic, a target audience, and a main message. They offer tips for developing content, organizing the exhibit, preparing labels, and mounting the exhibit. The final chapter of book 5 addresses program management. Rebecca Martin gives important details to consider in program planning, audience identification, goal setting, scheduling, and site selection. She provides samples of a confirmation letter and a contract that can be used when engag­ing presenters. She includes a list of supplies needed to run a program and advises on setting a budget and identifying fund­ing sources. Martin’s program management checklist hits all the important points covered in her chapter.

Adapted from Carol Bolton Betts, “An Introduction to The Small Museum Toolkit,” Illinois Heritage Association, Technical Insert 177 (May-June 2012). As a volunteer, Ms. Betts has done editorial work for the Illinois Heritage Association (illinoisheritage.org) since 1982. She was an editor at the University of Illinois Press for twenty years, working primarily on books about art and architecture, film, women’s history, and subjects related to the history of Illinois. Earlier she served on the staff of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and taught art history at Villanova University and at California State University–Los Angeles.