Sustainable and Relevant Community Museums

Bill Peters, President, Bill Peters Consulting

At the Alberta Museums Association (AMA)'s 2014 Conference, the panel discussion, "Imagining Possibilities: Building Governance Capacity for Sustainable and Relevant Community Museums" saw four members of the AMA Board of Directors discuss how to bring the wisdom of the Sustainability Working Group Report to Alberta's institutions. The panellists, Laura Gloor, Blane Hogue, Lorraine MacKay, and Bill Peters, discussed how museums can:  

1. Be seen as vital, necessary, and active contributors to our communities;

2. Understand and respond to the pressing needs of our communities through our numerous connections and networks where expertise, information, and resources are shared;

3. Organize and govern courageously in order to embrace new, efficient, and sustainable behaviours and practices; and

4. Understand how to successfully integrate all dimensions of sustainability - social, cultural, health, environmental and financial - into a vibrant expression of community.

 

In this piece, Bill has gathered the reflections of his colleagues as they look back on the session and consider the relevance of these lessons today.

 

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

- George Bernard Shaw

 

Vital Contributors

Museums are all about communication - in a sense it is all we do. Even when we preserve an artifact for hundreds of years, it is so that artifact can be used to tell a story, to communicate across the generations.

Communication is not one way, and we've long known that the listening part of communications is vastly more important than the telling part.

In order to be a vital, necessary, and active contributor, it is essential for a museum to understand what the community considers to be vital and necessary. Only when a museum listens, deeply and truly, can it know and articulate community wants and needs. Only in this knowledge can it be a vital contributor.

How might a museum listen? Often this is done via a community needs and opportunities assessment. The means to do this may include interviews, surveys, forums, social media discussions, polls, and focus groups. Of course, the means employed depend on the resources and capabilities of the museum. What is most important is that the assessment be done by people who can listen in a truly unbiased and uncoloured way, a way that will hear the unfiltered voice of the community.

How often should a museum listen? There is only one answer to that - all the time! At times the listening may be casual and informal, but at others formal and thorough.

As listening progresses, checking back with the community to make sure what has been heard really rings true is essential.

Understanding and responding to the pressing needs of our communities

When the needs (and opportunities) are understood, then a museum needs to decide what to do about them. It needs to craft a programmatic response. In its portfolio of various means - exhibits, programs, activities, and media - the decision needs to be taken about what it is going to deliver to whom. Equally, it needs to decide where to focus. Not being able to do everything for everyone, where might the museum have the greatest positive impact upon people's lives? Often, the decision about on whom to focus is the toughest one to make, yet the one most vital for success.

Is the task just as simple as listening and responding? It should go beyond a simple one-to-one identification of a need and a response to that need. Beyond responding, museums need to truly create not just basic responses but visionary creative ones that exceed the community's expectations and engender delight, deep engagement, and inspired learning. Crafting a visionary response elevates the museum experience out of the mundane and is the true mark of inspired museum leadership.

Organizing and governing courageously

The results an organization achieves are strongly proportional to the quality of its governance. The governance, be it a board of directors, a level of government, or some other entity, has several essential duties:

1. To ensure that the purpose of the museum is clearly articulated.
2. To hire and manage staff (or engage volunteers) who have the capability to advance the purpose.
3. To acquire resources to advance the purpose.
4. To continue to strengthen the governance of the organization.

Recent advances in governance have given new meaning to the "purpose" of an organization. The old approach of stating a Mission, Vision, and Values has proven ineffective as a standard to measure performance and is being replaced by the concept of Ends. An Ends statement articulates for whom the organization exists, how those individuals will be impacted by the organization, and why that impact is valuable - why would someone invest time, money, and effort in getting that result.

Understanding the purpose, the Ends of an organization are so vital that a governing entity should take all the paper necessary to craft those statements - rather than trying for a brief mission as in the past. Once the fuller statements are in place, more compact versions for communications purposes can be crafted.

If the Ends are to be important to the community it is essential that they be crafted after deep listening and research.

Integrate all dimensions of sustainability - social, cultural, health, environmental and financial - into a vibrant expression of community.

Beyond listening and responding, a museum today has the opportunity to wrap its communications processes into a continuous dialogue or conversations and become a truly participatory museum - so there is continuous two-way interaction among the museum and its larger community.

Relevance:

Today as museums are struggling to stay open and financially viable, the big challenge is to be seen as still relevant and as having a significant place in the hierarchy of priorities for individuals and for their communities.

The model that worked in pre-COVID Canada, and in pre-oil price collapse Alberta, mostly worked because grants, government support, and donations were much more available than they are now. While it is true that museums needed to be seen then as "vital, necessary and active contributors to our community" as stated in the document, today we should add "and be seen as still relevant and important in the changed circumstances that all not-for-profits, including museums, face."

To remain relevant, museums need to:

a) In the short term, create different and innovative programming, events, and pricing that make them an attractive destination when COVID rules permit them to be open. In terms of programming, one solution Resurgo and other smaller museums have devised is to collaborate with other facilities (e.g., historic groups, music groups, other small and nearby museums) to broaden their reach and attract new audiences. Another program Resurgo has created is "family Sundays" where there is a range of activities for different age groups and attractive pricing that means a family can have interesting and entertaining activities for a reasonable and competitive price.

b) For the long term, make the case with government, corporate, and individual donors that museums are important and need to still be here when the pandemic is over and the economy is recovering. The case for museums' relevance and survival also needs to be made with various levels of government, particularly civic councils, with the media, and with community opinion leaders. This could mean bringing media and community leaders to the museum to see firsthand what the museum is doing to remain relevant.

I would add that museum boards need to be more than stewards who provide governance, and should include members who understand entrepreneurship, marketing, and community profile raising.