Here’s how a typical kiwi museum starts.

A highly enthusiastic individual starts fanatically collecting (hoarding) everything around him and becomes a local legend.

Another visionary and enthusiastic group of individuals decides the collection should be seen by the public and needs a big shed to put it all in, so they form a Board and call it a museum in order to qualify for any Government funding that happens to be dripping from the nations coffers that year.

20 years later the visionary collector and the enthusiastic supporters die, followed shortly afterwards by the remainder of the Board, taking with them key institutional knowledge of the museum’s reason for being.

The new Board wanders through the museum scratching their heads at all the rusting displays, whilst becoming involved with the family trustees over ownership of the artifacts. Emotions can run high and feuds can erupt within the museum community and amidst the drama, the original intent of the museum can get completely lost.

Meanwhile the Local Body become aware that the organization is disintegrating and start reducing funding; the Board reacts by cutting back on the wrong staff members and hire a museum fixit pixie at a fraction of their predecessor’s salary.

This is a worst-case scenario. An organization with succession planning helps absorb the shock of change. The loss of a single staff member can often turn a successful business into a mess within one financial month if their institutional knowledge is not shared. Likewise a board with a confused vision risks employing a CEO that will never be able to understand or implement their vision.

Small organizations such as museums need to factor in the career development/ pathway of their staff. It’s a manager’s responsibility to foster staff and move them through their careers. It’s not normal in a small organization to retain the same four core staff for 20 years for example. However with good succession planning any of them could leave without causing a hiccup within the organization.

If you are in a small museum ask yourself some questions:

• Could you cope if your accounts person left suddenly?
• Funding is getting harder and harder to get, and councils are getting tighter. If you lost funding and had to ditch staff and it came down to curator or collections manager who would you chose?

These are big questions that small museums and art galleries are facing around the country right now.

The key to succession planning is ensuring that your organization has really good work processes and systems in place, so that the organization can tick over if there is a change in leadership. However an organization cannot go for too long without a leader. It also involves building capacity within your existing staff, ensuring that they could ‘step up’ and accept additional duties temporarily whilst recruitment is in process, or recruiting internally. In small organizations crucial knowledge can be lost with the departure of one staff member and in lean economic times important roles such as IT and Health & Safety, are often overlooked.

Don’t be surprised if staff decide to leave – expect people to move on, and plan for it.

Image: A static engine that had to be deaccessioned because it had little significance to the Museum or district and had turned into an OSH hazard due to its deterioration.

31 March 2009

Do you have enough “dosh” and “oomph” to keep operating for another year? One of the frustrating things is that it is more difficult to get money to cover the daily running expenses for your museum than it is to raise funds for a project. We all like projects – they have a beginning, middle and end – and the results can be measured. Projects can vary in size and scope – from a new building, to getting new archive boxes – but they invariably involve fundraising. Based on conversations with museum folks and my own detective observations I’ve created a list of fundraising ideas for you to try out.

Open days – vintage machinery museums run ’steam days’ to draw in the crowds. Open days are best when scones are served, and preferably scones that have been baked in a coal range oven and are dripping with butter and berry conserve topped with a dash of clotted cream. I have tasted excellent scones at Ferrymead, Brayshaw Park and the Rockville Machinery & Settlers Museum in Collingwood also do scones. You could get bold and feature scone recipes from the community cookbooks in the museum’s collection, but then I’ve met some rural women who have no qualms using a pre-packaged scone mix either. As long as it brings in the money.

Growing things – whatever the climate there are museum volunteers planting growing, and harvesting turnips, oats, potatoes, barley, and hay to sell to the community. This is labour and machinery intensive, prices of the produce vary from season to season, and you’re often up against competition such as the local rugby club or kindy. Nonetheless all this haymaking brings on that nostalgic memory of folks working in the fields (especially if there is a faint waft of freshly made scones in the air) and it’s a good bonding exercise for the museum committee members too.

Hiring out the museum venue – museums have a long tradition of fundraising and curator, Peter Entwistle, retells a story about Lady McLean’s fundraising endeavours in Treasures of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. By the early 1900s the gallery had outgrown its unglamorous tin shed structure and was in urgent need of a new building. Lady McLean organised cake stalls and art sales. She also ensured that the gallery had revenue generating potential by installing a sprung floor for the new gallery. Why? She believed that hiring out the art gallery for dances and balls was a more reliable source of revenue than government grants.

Community events – on a farm at the foothills of Mt Somers in Canterbury there is a pond that freezes over each year. When the ice is thick enough the Stavely ice-skating rink is opened to the public. You can hire skates and I think there might be a sausage sizzle available too; profits are donated to the Stavely Historical and Geological Centre. You can warm your hands on a freshly made espresso from the dairy just across the road from the museum.

The Nude Calendar – coaxed by local museum volunteer, members from the Woodsdale community, Tasmania, donated their bodies for this popular fund-raising initiative. Calendar proceeds went towards the shearing shed and men’s shed that opened in February 2009. Both sheds are operational. The shearing shed is used for education programmes. The Men’s shed is part of a larger movement, popular in remote and rural areas of Australia. These sheds are working spaces for men to meet, learn a practical skill such as restoring drays and farm machinery, and be educated on men’s health issues (meaning Health Department posters and brochures on mental health and prostate cancer are available).

Finally, in this tightening economy, museums might be tempted to consider black market produce, but this is more an observation rather than a recommendation. When visiting theNimbin Museum I was approached by someone selling marijuana infused chocolates. Being a female I pretended to be ‘on a diet’ so declined. Then I scurried off to find a toilet to regain my composure but instead stumbled into the back garden where there was an even busier-looking group of folks mingling and trading their wares. Trading was busier than a Saturday morning farmers market. Once I got over my initial shock of seeing marijuana traded in a museum space I started thinking things through further. Nimbin is actively marketed in the tourism literature as a ‘hippie haven’ so why shouldn’t the museum be supporting the local economy especially if the local laws allow it? The museum was in urgent need of an upgrade: money was needed to hire a custodian to clean the exhibits and a curator to update the museum’s story. If the museum received just a 5% cut on the backyard takings it could generate thousands of dollars each year this is much more than the humble yet honest $1200 gained from last year’s neep sales down South.

4 March 2009

Museums are excellent places for travellers to refresh, revive and refuel. Museums are also places to educate, entertain and enlighten folks. And after two years of recording museum stories for The Museum Detective and eight months on the road for Te Papa I can say that the most important aspect to any form of education or entertainment programme is to know what your underlying message is. But it has been a long time since I had been an actual museum visitor. What follows are some anecdotes about being an accidental museum visitor while on holiday.

Kuranda is a village about an hours drive from Cairns. Here are tourist shops selling clothing imported from Bali, rustic looking art, and jars of country cookery. But it was the mineral, stone and fossil shop that caught my attention. Downstairs was a museum, and it was air-conditioned. Not trivial as it was 38°C outside. Entry was by donation. The permanent display started with a large dinosaur model with a spinning disco ball over head, then along a dark corridor-like space the gems etc were displayed along the darks walls in an opulent jewellery-shop way. The exhibition was tightly focused with just enough interpretation and the tour was completed in a little under 10 minutes. I left the museum feeling much cooler and immediately before me was a cafe, the public toilets were across the road, and I had already visited the museum shop.

On our 5000km drive through the Outback we noticed a number of petrol stations, roadhouses and cafes with museums attached ‘on the side’; it’s viewed as a way to draw in the travellers and something similar would be worth considering in New Zealand.

Croydon is situated in the heart of the Gulf Savannah country. The whole town looks like a heritage site; even the local Police Station has a display of retired agricultural machinery on the lawn. The museum is a collection of heritage buildings. In each building are bite-sized exhibitions evoking stories about settler society, education, agriculture, domestic life etc.

The displays were nice and simple. Each theme was illustrated with just a few objects clustered around an interpretation panel and supplemented with historical photographs displayed on large sheets of corrugated iron (see photo). The sheets also served as dividers between exhibits. I am sure these dividers could be made fairly cheaply. The toilets were very neat and tidy.

But it was in Croydon that I began to appreciate that some museums in Australia are very remote – here Brisbane is a 2-day drive and Darwin is 3-days away – buying in expertise is expensive. The visitor guide told us that the museum relied on funding from the local regional council as well as donations, member subscriptions, and the research computers, now that the local genealogists had completed their family histories, were rented to tourists wanting to check their email and upload their photos to facebook. Later on I read that the guide I had spoken with at the Museum/Visitor Information Centre had recently been crowned as ‘heritage guide of the year’ for the Savannah Region.

Apparently the Rijksmuseum has only 400 artworks on display at the moment. This is because the museum is undergoing a major renovation. In fact the first exhibition room was sufficient. Here, six objects told the story of ‘nationhood’. But it was the confidence in the storytelling that made it work. These objects – a model of a ship, a painting of ships in battle, a gun, armour, a cannon, and a group portrait of 17th Amsterdam traders – were in good condition. Without too much reading I quickly figured that the Dutch built boats, they sailed them, they traded, they accumulated wealth, territorial battles took place, and there was other stuff like mortality and morals to contend with too. Fantastic.

The toilets were 4 star but sadly there was no ‘Night Watch’ tea-towel in the museum shop.

Lastly, is Laura’s Cafe for Fine Dining…it was 7am and the only cafe open in Taihape. I bought all of the freshly made cheese and onion sandwiches and ordered takeaway coffee then proceeded to feast my eyes on the archive photographs displayed along the wall. These photos were supplied by the Taihape Museum. So while that particular museum might only be open in the weekends I had accidentally stumbled into a mini-exhibition about ‘Taihape town life’ throughout the ages. Charming, quaint and easy to take in.

Of all these museum visits I am particularly fond of the Taihape experience, it is a simple example of a museum working with the local business community. While the owner of Laura’s cafe tells me that they’re about to have an image make-over (out with the quaint charm) the museum has successfully extended their exhibitions and opening hours without being dependent on the physical presence of museum staff. Similar exhibits can be found in rural pubs and international airports. But the same principles apply: you must have confidence in your storytelling. Start of with six objects and see what happens.