The Toolkit Talks at AASLH in Birmingham

Will you be attending the AASLH annual conference in Birmingham next week?

Meet with five contributors to the Small Museum Toolkit at The Toolkit Talks: Sharing Resources for Small Museums on Thursday, Sept. 19, 4 to 5:15 p.m., chaired by Janice Klein.

After a brief overview of the series, each contributor will share tips or next steps in 5 minute presentations: 

• Collections Management with Pat Miller
• Developing Exhibits with Janice Klein
• Museum Legal Issues with Allyn Lord
• Project Management with Rebecca Martin
• Visitor Studies with Stacy Klingler

After these quick presentations, you'll be able to choose a roundtable discussion lead by a presenters about one of the topics for 25 minutes. Then you can change areas during for the final 25 minutes of the session and interact with a different presenter and group of colleagues.

Through the discussions with the Toolkit contributors and your colleagues, we intend for you to travel home with practical information and further develop your personal  network and resource base.

We hope to see you there!

Sector 1: Developing Your Audience

Do you know what your audience thinks about your organization and what you have to offer?  Do you offer a "product" that they value?

Develop your audience with

long-term relationships 

in mind. 

Exceeding expectations will 

create good will and a positive 

buzz about the museum.

Your audience will support you in the long run (with funding, attendance and word-of-mouth marketing) if they trust that you will meet their needs and wants.

Pursuing your mission only matters if you reach your audience (and so, of course, attendance matters). But, developing your audience is far more than simply increasing attendance. We quantify our relationships with our audience by counting visitors and web hits. However, when we become so focused on growing our numbers, we can lose sight of the quality of our interactions and our long-term relationship.

Let's take a more qualitative look at how your museum interacts with your audience:

• Which of your programs have been the most interesting, engaging and well-attended? Why?
• What aspects of your collection are unique, bear witness to compelling stories, or just have that "wow" factor?
• Do visitors pour over particular exhibits? Why are they so intriguing?
• Is your building a showpiece of the community?
• Is your staff known for its great customer service or engaging public presentations?

Now build on those strengths to take your first step in developing your audience. Your next program, exhibit or publication needs to demonstrate that your museum can exceed your current audience's expectations. Encourage your core supporters to share their positive impressions, whether in traditional word-of-mouth settings (like over the back fence and at the rotary club) or in social media (ever heard the conventional wisdom that Facebook is like a cocktail party?). By working with them to share that the valuable things your museum offers, you build good will and re-establish the museum as a community asset and create a positive buzz.

If you have strong ties with your current audience, consider which new audience you are ready to serve. Learn about what that group wants and how they communicate. Enlist community advisers from your target audience or from those who work closely with your target audience. Then strategically pick a couple of projects at the intersection of their wants and your strengths. Avoid a one-off program or exhibit. To build a relationship with a new audience, offer multiple ways for them to engage with your museum. 

Next week we will turn to building relationships with those who are closest to your organization: your staff, board and volunteers.

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 was chair of the AASLH 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.

Know your Audience, and Yourself

Before embarking on creating an interpretive plan, or as part of the process, it is important to build in audience evaluation. This allows the museum to gain a greater understanding of the sort of themes that interest current visitors and that might potentially interest others.

This can take various forms.  Survey current visitors to assess what aspects of the museum speak to them.  Organizations like AAM and AASLH have audience evaluation programs to help museums, or you can construct your own with the help of a local firm.  Although these programs elicit responses from those who already visit or have an interest in your museum, they can give you a great deal of valuable information as you plan.

Analyzing potential audiences is also worthwhile.  If you do not have much participation from your community, conduct focus groups with local leaders, or one on one interviews asking them what sorts of connection they envision with your museum.  Consider whether some sort of recurring activity or club might suit your mission or interpretation and could meet regularly at and become affiliated with your museum.  Build partnerships with other organizations when possible as this holds the potential to broaden your reach and deepen your impact.

If you have a website (and every museum should), you should utilize this as a way of gathering data.  This might include social networking sites and other vehicles that link your museum with the connected community of cyberspace. Although this chapter does not focus on technology, it is in the best interest of every museum to utilize technology to gather, convey and share information.  

You should not only rely on feedback from audiences about what they want to see your museum talk about and do, but ask them to participate more fully in your process. Familiarize them with your site and what is special about it.  Involve them in your decision-making. Solicit their advice. Better yet, act on and incorporate their ideas.  No one likes it better than when they have a good idea and someone actually makes it a reality.   Although this can be challenging and produce unexpected results it is also a particularly vibrant way to give your museum and its message meaning.

Having said all this, museums must be wary of overextending.  Although organizations in this day and age need to be much more responsive to a public with wide-ranging interests, small museums must play to their strengths.  If you are a small science museum, collecting and interpreting works by local artists may never be on your agenda. A suggestion like this, however, might be just the sort of prompt you need to develop a program or exhibition that links these local artists with scientific themes.  It could be an innovative collaboration in the making.   Then again, it might not.  But, whatever your choice your decision-making process will be better informed knowing who you are talking to and what they want to hear.

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. 

Train Everyone! Even the Janitor!?!

In many small institutions, the staff and volunteers who are installing exhibits, working with collections, etc. also function as the front-line staff. Individuals trained for specific jobs within an institution are catapulted into visitor service and should feel prepared to help visitors. Small museum staff and volunteers learn to multitask; their focus can rarely be on just one thing happening at their sites. Projects are in progress and a visitor needs help in the museum shop. The doorbell or the telephone rings in the middle of a tour and there is not always a second person on site to handle the interruption. The seemingly constant interruptions can lead to frustration and annoyance especially when the staff and volunteers already feel as if they are spread too thin.

In spite of any frustration at being interrupted, the staff and volunteers should make the visitor feel welcome and important. Staff and volunteer perceptions of visitors will shape the way visitors are treated. Encourage staff and volunteers to think of the visitors not as interruptions but as opportunities to share information with others. Also, encourage them to openly communicate with each other about their experiences with visitors and to talk about what is going well and what may need to be improved. Improving visitor service is an ongoing process and involves dialogue and discussion among staff and volunteers.

Visitor service training should take place with all museum staff and volunteers regardless of time in the institution, staff or volunteer tasks, or physical location within the museum. It is essential for even back-of-house personnel to be able to interact meaningfully with any visitor they might encounter, not just on site but via e-mail or telephone. Visitors want to be treated with respect and care; they want to feel acknowledged even if they are just asking for the location of the museum shop or directions to the next site they are visiting. Providing all staff and volunteers with good visitor service training will help to ensure a good experience for everyone including the staff and volunteers.

Tamara Hemmerlein was the director of the Montgomery County Cultural Foundation for thirteen years and the Montgomery County Historical Society for eight years. She is now the Hoosier Heritage Alliance coordinator at the Indiana Historical Society. She serves on the American Association of Muse- ums Small Museum Administrators Committee and the American Association for State and Local History Professional Development Committee. She is a Museum Assessment Program peer reviewer and a graduate of the Seminar for Historical Administration. 

Committing to Good Interpretation

A major shift in accepted interpretive practice has taken place over the last decade or so.  Museums have increasingly moved from being collections-centered to audience-centered. Although museums have a great responsibility for buildings and collections, what we do with those objects matters a great deal. Or, to put it another way, we must provide a forum that allows people to experience and engage with museums in a way that is comfortable for them.

Nothing connects with people better than a story they can relate to.  Committing to offer good interpretation is the first major step in doing this effectively.  Interpretation thus needs to be the primary focus stated by the museum. This seems to be intuitive – of course we want to tell people about all the great stuff we have. But too often this focus has not been central for all museums.

The goal of good interpretation is to see that your interpretive focus is reflected in every aspect of your museum operations. The idea of reaching various audiences needs to underpin every facet of a museum’s operations. 

This can be done formally through a policy document or strategic plan that clearly states the importance of interpretation, a Board-approved Interpretive Plan that guides the staff in developing content, and in training staff and volunteers to understand the critical importance of this part of the museum’s work. It can be done informally by instituting and insisting upon an organizational culture that values high-quality interpretation and places extraordinary emphasis on accurate, open communication and interaction.

Each member of the board, staff and volunteer corps needs to be aware of and committed to the overall goal of interpreting your museum.  What is more, this approach can no longer only be restricted to tour guides. A highly-trained guide delivering extensive information in a structured, highly-controlled format the norm is only one way to interpret your museum. 

The commitment to interpretation and public education should be made clear in policy documents, training materials, and in daily operations. There should also be periodic reviews of interpretive goals; at least every five years but more frequently as needed.

A tour begins long before your visitors enter the first gallery or period room.  As fewer visitors experience museums and historic sites through the mechanism of the guided tour, the definition of interpretation has been stretched, as has the sense of who is responsible for it. Visitor experiences will be improved dramatically if commitment to interpretation runs through the entire organization.

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.