Museums Advocacy Day

Today (Feb. 28) and tomorrow (Mar. 1) constitute Museums Advocacy Day 2011, when those who believe in the power and necessity of museums converge on Washington, D.C., to let congress folk hear their voices. Here's how the American Association of Museums describes it:

* Museums Advocacy Day is your chance to stand side by side with fellow advocates from your state and congressional district.
* Museums Advocacy Day is your chance to get valuable training and information about how to effectively engage with your representatives and make the case for museums.
* Museums Advocacy Day is your chance to share a powerful message with your Members of Congress and their staff members on Capitol Hill about policy issues affecting the museum field, and the ways your museum impacts your community.

Now, we know it's probably too late for you to go if you haven't already registered, but this economic impact form is a good thing to know about regardless. Yes, museums affect their communities in a multitude of intangible ways, but not everyone is won over by that kind of argument. AAM provides these figures:

On a national scale, museums are economic engines:

* Museums employ 400,000 Americans, according to the American Association of Museums.
* U.S. museums contribute $21 billion to the American economy each year (2008 estimate), encouraging economic growth in their communities.
* Museums rank among the top three family vacation destinations.
* Trips including cultural and heritage activities comprise one of the most popular and significant segments of the travel industry, accounting for over 23% of all domestic trips.
* Visitors to historic sites and cultural attractions, including museums, stay 53% longer and spend 36% more money than other kinds of tourists.
* Quality of life issues contribute significantly to decisions businesses make in choosing to relocate, including access to cultural resources that includes a dynamic museum community. In fact, according to research by the National Governors Association, “It has been shown that the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates over $166 billion in economic activity annually, supports over 5.7 million full time jobs, and returns over $12 billion in federal income taxes annually. Governments which support the arts on average see a return on investment of over $7 in taxes for every $1 that the government appropriates."

Here's hoping MAD '11 is a tremendous success!

Voices of the Future

The Center for the Future of Museums has launched a program called “Voices of the Future” to encourage a discussion about the future of museums. CFM is asking for “creative, innovative thinkers” from diverse backgrounds and fields to “capture and share their hopes and dreams” in five-minute videos or interviews. These segments will be uploaded to YouTube, and if you don’t have access to a camera, CFM will mail you an interview kit or you can submit written testimonials.

If you are having trouble organizing your thoughts or just need a push to get the talk rolling, CFM has provided a list of suggested interview questions. You can also get an idea of how to structure an interview by checking out the videos already posted on the CFM YouTube channel.

CFM is an initiative of the American Association of Museums (AAM) created to help museums grow beyond traditional boundaries so that they can serve a changing society; it takes the form of a think tank and research and design lab meant to produce creative solutions to growing concerns in the museum community. Members of AAM identified the top four challenges facing the future of museums as: the need to increase public funding, staying informed on changes in technology as well as securing funding to implement new technology in museums, finding qualified and interested individuals to take up the mantle of leadership among museum professionals, and maintaining relevance within the community during times of rapid social and cultural change.

AAM Strategic Plan: The Spark

The American Association of Museums (AAM) has just released its strategic plan for 2010-2015, titled "The Spark" (you can download it at that link) and consisting of four goals: excellence, advocacy, sustainability and alignment. The plan is brief (a four-page pdf) and outlines beliefs and values as well as goals. AAM says these will guide "decision making and will drive the Association’s behavior and activities into the future [as well as articulating] a vision for museums, the field, and AAM. We have reworked our mission to highlight our strong commitment to leadership, advocacy, collaboration and service." Those goals may sound pretty abstract, but they're focused more in the document itself.

Excellence = "Develop clearly defined levels of excellence accessible to the entire museum field and recognized by the public."

Advocacy = "Promote the value of museums."

Sustainability = "Build a financially stable and sustainable association in order to provide the best possible service and leadership to the field."

Alignment = "Align internal and external resources, culture, and structures with our strategic plan, vision, values and beliefs."

Each of these is then further broken down into even more concrete steps, such as "Communicate museum standards to the field and to the general public" under "Excellence."

Take a look at the plan and let us know 1) whether you think these are the right goals to pursue and beliefs to espouse, and 2) any ideas you have for making those goals reality and those beliefs more visible. We'd love to hear from you.

Letter from AAM

We got the following update from American Association of Museums (AAM) president Ford Bell late last week:

United We Serve

AAM is staunchly behind “United We Serve,” the White House initiative to be launched June 22 [future tense reflecting our lateness, not Bell's] and slated to run through September 11th, urging Americans to volunteer their time, energy and ingenuity to solve problems in their communities. Museums of all types and sizes and in every state are urged to upload their volunteer opportunities at www.serve.gov, the Web clearinghouse for volunteer opportunities across the nation.

Museums have long been beacons for Americans’ spirit of generosity and engagement. The latest Museum Financial Information survey (available from the AAM Bookstore in July), revealed the following startling nuggets:
--95% of responding museums said they rely on volunteers;
--The median number of volunteers at each museum is 65, or six for each full-time staffer;
--We estimate that volunteers contribute at least one million hours a week to U.S. museums.
--And we estimate that those one million hours a week are equivalent to $1 billion a year. Let’s marshal this spirit in support of the president’s “United We Serve” initiative.

The Essentials

We encourage your staff to sign up for our latest Webinar series, Museum Essentials, beginning July 1. Covering the basic tenets of museum operations, the series content was inspired by feedback we received from members. These Webinars are a productive staff activity - all for one $25 admission fee. Details are on the AAM site at www.aam-us.org.

Ford W. Bell
President, AAM

We certainly receive amazing amounts of time and input from our volunteers, from library volunteers to interns (both high school and college), docents, Friends and many, many more, and we know what they can do for us. We encourage you, even if you're not in the Athens area or interested in art (although we'd be sad about the latter) to check out www.serve.gov and either volunteer your time or provide an opportunity for someone else to.

The Webinar series from AAM is equally useful, a valuable resource for learning about collections care, making visitor experiences as good as possible, strategic planning and much more. Here's how AAM describes the current series:

Museum Essentials is based on the standards and practices of the Museum Assessment Program (MAP) which is designed to ensure the highest museum performance in governance, administration, responsibility and accountability to both museum collections and museum audiences. Administered by AAM in conjunction with the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), MAP has for 25 years empowered museums to excel in all aspects of operations, collections management, public programs and strategic planning. Participants in the Museum Essentials series will benefit from the experiences of MAP leaders and practitioners.

More News from AAM: ICOM

What else happened at AAM? Our director, William U. Eiland, passed along the following note about his activities there:

I have been elected to the board of ICOM-USA, which is in a period of transition to what appears to be more independence from AAM but without cutting any ties. The meeting of the board that I intended was primarily about administrative matters, including meeting the new secretariat general, who is French and who has an office in Paris. The next meeting for university affiliates of ICOM is in Berkeley this fall and the next general meeting in Shanghai in 2010, I think.

ICOM is the International Council of Museums, and was founded in 1946. A nonprofit, non-governmental organization, it is dedicated to the improvement and advancement of the world's museums and the museum profession as well as the preservation of cultural heritage. ICOM has more than 21,000 members in 140 countries working through national and international committees and affiliated and regional organizations and embraces museums of every size and discipline in every corner of the world. Eiland has been heavily involved in many professional organizations of the kind and is recognized as a leader in the field. We congratulate him on his election and know that ICOM-USA could not have a better board member!

AAM 2009

Tricia Miller, our head registrar, was kind enough to share with us the photographs that she took while attending the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting in Philadelphia a few days ago, and you'll find a slideshow of them below.

Tricia says, "the Perelman building is a historic building acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art that is newly renovated with an addition on the back designed by Gluckman Mayner [the design architects on the GMOA expansion and renovation]. So it was great to see another museum project completed by our design architects. Richard Gluckman gave a great tour of the building on Thursday. He is in the first picture labeled Perelman Building. You can see their addition in photos 3-6. Most of the others are of the main building at the PMA and some of my favorite works shown inside."

AAM Conference

Several of our staff members left today or yesterday to attend the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting in Philadelphia, one of the most important of professional conferences to the field. This year's annual meeting has a blog and some other associated social media, and its theme is "The Museum Experiment," explained at this link. Keynote speakers are Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of several New York Times nonfiction bestsellers, including "Blink" and "The Tipping Point." We're excited to hear what our staff members bring back, as well as what they contribute through their attendance.

Design Award

We got some great news yesterday. The American Association of Museums (AAM) runs a publications design competition every year, and while we always enter, we rarely come away with anything (2004 honorable mentions for Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz and Armin Landeck and another in 2001 for Essence of Place, most recently). This year, however, we've snagged an honorable mention in the category of "Supplementary materials" (e.g., brochures) for our booklet that accompanied the exhibition Devotional Prints from Germany and the Netherlands, the cover for which is pictured above. AAM hasn't yet posted the full list of winners, but will soon. We thank Giancarlo Fiorenza, our former Pierre Daura Curator of European Art, for organizing the exhibition and writing wonderful text; Scott Sosebee, our graphic designer (and a former Athenian), for doing such a fabulous job, especially with that cover, which really captured the intimacy of the show; and University Printing, for making our vision reality. We don't have many copies left of the booklet, but if we can get a pdf up on Issuu, we'll post it here.