Museum Management

Kevin Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415112796
• eBook ISBN: 9781134830657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

Collecting a selection of essential writings by some of the leading authors in the field, Kevin Moore examines the developments in, and effectiveness of, museum management in a world dominated by new and exciting heritage and leisure attractions.

The selected papers in Museum Management outline the development of museum management to date, the challenges museums currently face, and the key areas of future development in management and marketing practice, and addresses:

• strategic management issues: policy formulation, corporate planning and performance measurement
• human resource management
• financial management
• the importance of marketing.

This volume is an invaluable introduction to the key issues, controversies and debates in the subject. It will be essential reading for all students, museum managers and staff who need to keep up to date with latest developments in this field.

1

A challenge to modern museum management: meshing mission and market

Peter J.Ames

Is marketing in any sense a threat to museums? Peter Ames, in this perceptive paper, considers the conditions in which marketing, despite its invaluable contribution, may come to conflict with a museum’s mission. He concludes by proffering a strategy to ensure that marketing enhances the mission, rather than imposing its own agenda.

Mature museums, in advancing their missions, have often had to reconcile them with some incongruous interests of their most important assets. Staff have often wanted more time to pursue their own interests than employment in a subsidized, public service institution warranted. Large donors have wanted more attention devoted to their particular collection interests than the breadth of the mission would permit. Financial means in general have never measured up to the dreams, and the reconciliation of the ideal with the financially feasible has, as with most endeavours in life, always consumed considerable energy. But it is the interests and forces of the market, the recent arrival of which have benefited museums so much, that are now most to be reckoned with. They can provide almost as much tension with, as support for, the mission, and in the outcome of that tension is many a modern museum’s soul distilled. To understand and manage the mix, we must examine the nature of mission and market strength and how the two relate to each other, in theory and in recent practice.

In theory, a museum’s mission emanates from its charter (usually quite broad), its role as a museum (to collect, preserve and educate), and its tax exemption (based entirely, in the United States of America, on its educational function). It falls in theory to trustees, some of whom are expected to be philosopher-kings, and senior staff to determine the current needs of their community in their institution’s field; to articulate the best focus for its mission in their time; and to limit its scope sufficiently to give the resources available to advance it a fair chance of being used effectively. In addition, as stewards of an institution required to benefit the public, the trustees are expected to monitor such issues as reasonable access, the concerns of future generations, non-discrimination, and general integrity of purpose and practice. While sources of the mission are relatively few, its interpretation over time is difficult, and its qualified and committed supporters relatively scarce.

The workings of the market’s forces are complex and increasingly more forceful. In a healthy museum, there are two primary rationales for its influence. First, in order to educate effectively, particularly in short stints, it is critical to know the age, education level, motivations and interests of the audience. Second, in order to attract the largest possible audience, and thereby increase operating support, one must have profiles of one’s current and potential audiences. That second rationale is the stronger in practice in most museums, and its strength is dependent on at least four factors—the absolute size of the audience, the degree to which the museum’s budget is covered by admissionsbased operating income, the museum’s overall financial health and prospects, and how clearly the current and potential audience’s desires are perceived or interpreted. Marketing departments, almost non-existent in museums fifteen years ago, have today in many large museums become divisions, and media budgets that approach five per cent of their museum’s total budget are not uncommon.

Even in theory, conflicts between a museum’s mission and its marketing seem inevitable. In determining when it should be open to the public, a staff-driven museum might opt for week-days, so that nobody has to work on weekends or in the evening. A market-driven one might choose evenings and weekends, when most of the public has its leisure time. A mission-driven one would have both but would insist on whatever measures were necessary to ensure that attendance was spread out and large crowds did not interfere with the educational experience. These measures might include the imposition of peak period surcharges and the limitation of free passes to off-peak periods. The ideal mission-driven plan incorporates studies of the museum’s actual and potential audience’s desires and interests, but is based primarily on the concerns of future generations and on what its experts in the field believe its current audience needs to, or should, know. A market-driven museum will focus most sharply on what its contemporary market wants and, to a lesser extent, what that market, as opposed to education experts, thinks it needs. From a market point of view, the more the merrier; from a mission perspective, when an audience becomes a crowd, educational potential declines. Marketing staff will want a well-known personality with a recognizable voice as the narrator for a popular exhibition; programme staff will want someone with expertise and credibility in the field. A mission-oriented exhibition respects the dignity of its objects and speaks at a fairly professional level, assuming its audience is highly motivated. A market-oriented exhibition may be more concerned with attracting an audience than with the quality of the message they will receive from it. While each has elements of the other, mission is concerned primarily with education; market, given human nature, leans toward entertainment, stimulation and making learning fun. Striking the proper balance between education and entertainment is extremely difficult, and while the latter can be very useful to the former, some believe that, when the two are combined, entertainment will usually prevail.¹ So, in summary, while fulfilment of its mission’s and market’s needs are essential to a museum’s well-being, doing both reasonably well, if not to the satisfaction of all, is a constant challenge. How are museums faring and what are the risks that the new order is bringing?

Large museums that have had marketing departments or divisions for a few years or more usually experience many, if not most, of the following developments. Based on marketing studies which find that the public perceives the institution as static, considerable emphasis is put on increasing the pace and size of temporary exhibitions. An effort is made at least every few years to stage a very large exhibition that will appeal to a broad audience. New wings have a larger percentage of space devoted to auxiliary activities than the rest of the museum. Marketing budgets, rising to between 5 and 8 per cent of total institutional budgets, are used to profile, target and reach audiences, and often result in large increases in attendance. Physical capacity, i.e. the number of visitors the museum can effectively accommodate at a given time, becomes an issue. Hitherto relatively unrepresented audiences are in evidence. The revenue and usually the surpluses of ancillary activities such as restaurants, shops and the sale of space for functions grow dramatically. What would appeal most to the public becomes a major factor in a wide variety of decisions. Significantly, market-driven income—that generated by admission and ancillary income—also almost always increases substantially as a percentage of the overall operating budget.

Those developments, and the resultant wonderful unrestricted income, have usually led to greater vitality and visibility and better economic health for the institution, but often at some cost, the immeasurability of which delays recognition of their impact, to the mission and the integrity of the institution. Many small risks are encountered. A reasonably contemplative environment may be compromised either by temporary shops or food services in the middle of galleries, or crowds so thick that any sense of communion with an exhibition or a particular object is impossible. Public access during normal hours may be limited by private functions that require closing part of the museum. Walk-up access to ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions may be denied because cash flow and crowd-control considerations limit admission to those who have purchased tickets in advance. Educational quantity may be reduced by the displacement of educational facilities to provide space for large exhibitions or the crowds they attract. Educational quality mav suffer when the drive to stimulate the audience’s senses loses sight of the educational purpose, or a programme’s medium is either inappropriate for its message or so overwhelms it that the memory of the ‘experience’ overshadows that of the message.

A museum’s integrity may be eroded by advertising that hypes an exhibition so much that disappointment is almost inevitable, or by advertising, not reviewed by a subject matter expert, that gives inaccurate information, or even a message contrary to that which the exhibition it supports intends to convey. The emphasis on temporary exhibitions may result in the serious neglect of the permanent collection or permanent exhibits, either physically or in terms of scholarly publications or programmes. The content parameters of a museum’s mission, to the extent it has them, may be frequently breached by the content of exhibitions or special events chosen more for their popular appeal than their relevance to the presumed, but often unarticulated, mission. Integrity may be questioned if corporate sponsorships constitute bartering rather than philanthropy, with cash exchanged for publicity and, in some cases, editorial influence.² The same can be said of corporate and individual memberships when the value of benefits offered equals or, in some cases, exceeds the cash provided. The ever-changing logistics of frequent turnover of large exhibitions, combined with the sheer mass of ancillary activities and the increasing number of means and marketing issues, may effectively pre-empt the informal, even leisurely, discussion of mission and programmes so vital to their health. There is hardly a museum that has built up a large marketing effort that has not experienced a culture clash with the programme staff.

If mission and market forces are not meshed well, a goodly number of those compromises and corrosions occur, and are not mitigated. The entire tone and culture of the museum may become unbalanced, with decidedly deleterious consequences. Psychic income—the sense of institutional pride, of advancing a meaningful mission, of making a difference—so important to attract the best people and so necessary to make most of the salaries supportable, may diminish to such an extent that turnover becomes excessive, productivity declines, and the quality of staff suffers. Education can be seen as a process that starts with having one’s curiosity stimulated, then receiving and digesting relevant information, and finally, sometimes, achieving understanding (the aha! effect). If museum programmes, as a whole, are intended to work to some degree at all three levels, then exhibits and exhibitions that do almost nothing but stimulate are not, unless they are supplemented by programmes that advance the process at least to the second level doing the job. But if many of the ‘new’ audiences, as opposed to the committed ‘hard core’ audience of earlier days, are quite ambivalent about the subject matter, the temptation to choose exhibitions for their stimulating subject matter, and to present them in a way that emphasizes stimulation, is overwhelming. Engaged in frequently enough, blockbusters and ‘entry-level’ exhibitions may result in people leaving with little more than a sense that ‘I was there’. While there are few studies on the subject,³ and education and entertainment have both been present to some degree in most people’s motivation in visiting a museum, the central thrust of most motivations may shift in favour of entertainment and an experience. With those changes, the museum may lose one of its foremost educational tools—an expectation of learning and a contemplative environment. The percentage of the actual audience that is receptive or can be motivated⁴ may decline. Marketing, rather than serving as an important means to a museum’s mission, may become its master.

There is a growing number of museums—they tend to be relatively large ones—where those developments prevail. Combined with the number of museums where the pendulum is swinging quite far in the market-dominated direction, the order of magnitude warrants an analysis of the roots of these growths wherein the remedies may lie. Two factors—the absence of which characterizes institutions at the extreme of the marketing pendulum, and are conditions to be guarded against for those which want to keep a shorter swing on theirs—are vital to the successful meshing of mission and market in a museum. They are clarity of, and commitment to, a meaningful mission statement, and a relative balance of mission and market financing.

A museum, in order to be true to its mission, must have a strong sense of what that mission is. But writing a meaningful mission statement, one that focuses a museum’s purpose and gives some sense of its priorities and primary methodologies, is difficult and time-consuming. Developing one that has the support of the community, the respect of the board, and the commitment of the staff, is even harder. More challenging still is the forging of mission-driven criteria to guide an art museum in ensuring that the subjects covered in ten years of temporary exhibitions are not haphazard, or a science centre in ensuring that the subjects represented in its permanent displays are based on criteria more meaningful than that as a whole they represent the field. Equally difficult is the development of mission-based criteria for selecting the specific subject matter, size and media of temporary exhibitions, and the measuring of their educational effectiveness. These difficulties are compounded, if not caused, by senior staff members who often have no prior museum experience, programme committees composed more of advisory members than trustees, programme committees that meet infrequently and/or do not report regularly to the full board, and boards less than ten to twenty per cent of the members of which have any expertise in the mission.

Yet the only governmental office charged with monitoring the board’s compliance with the public trust, the charities office of each state’s attorney general, does not have the resources to investigate anything but clearly criminal activities. Given, among other factors, human nature and the uncompensated nature of board membership, self-regulation of adherence to the mission is often lacking. Mission guardianship often falls to staff and, depending on the values of the executive director not always senior staff. The result, understandably yet too often, is a mission vacuum, a situation where, despite insufficient resources for the almost insurmountable challenge of a focused mission, the mission statement, usually only in the form of the language of an unpublished charter, provides little guidance and vague boundaries. Resources are dissipated in all sorts of activities by an institution willing or trying to be all things to all people. The vacuum, particularly where the marketing function is well developed and in strong hands, is easily filled by the measurable (and readily understood and appreciated by the board), needs of, and criteria for, marketing success. What the well-crafted marketing studies show the public wants influences more and more what the institution ends up providing.

A recent, thoughtful and popular, if somewhat densely written, book, which attributes a large number of the failures it perceives in higher education to unwillingness or inability to determine what its graduates should have learned there, ascribes a similar strength and impact to market forces. Would someone, it asks, reading just the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid be ‘really worse off than those who try to find their way through the technical smorgasbord of the current school system, with its utter inability to distinguish between important and unimportant in any way other than by the demands of the market?’⁵ Later it states ‘the value crisis made the university prey to whatever intense passion moved the masses’.⁶ The author of another best-seller, believing that our current citizenry is more culturally illiterate than the previous generation, attributes a good deal of the problem to his perception that school curricula have been based largely on what interested the students and not enough on what their teacher thought they should know, with the result that the amount and level of knowledge transmitted has often sunk to the lowest common denominator.⁷ The informally educational purpose on which the tax exemption of museums is largely based certainly does not require the rigour of institutions of more formal learning, but the impact of market forces on mission vacuums has been almost as significant in some museums.

While mission vacuums may have existed for some time without much detrimental effect, the increasing imbalance in some museums in market/mission financing in favour of the former has occurred in the last ten years and had significant effect. It could be argued that the financial strength of a mission derives from endowment income, governmental subsidies, donations, and individual and corporate memberships (if the memberships are primarily gifts and not bartering). Although it would take considerabl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: museum management
• 1 A challenge to modern museum management: meshing mission and market
• 2 Measuring museums’ merits
• 3 The problem and promise of museum goals
• 4 A new framework for museum marketing
• 5 Strategic planning in local authority museums
• 6 Museum Wharf
• 7 Museum brainstorming: a creative approach to exhibit planning
• 8 An inquiry into the relationship between museum boards and management
• 9 The economics of museum admission charges
• 10 The university art museum: defining purpose and mission
• 11 Museum people. The special problems of personnel management in museums and historical agencies
• 12 Some more equal than others
• 13 Money changers in the temple? Museums and the financial mission
• 14 Museum planning and museum plans
• 15 Current issues in museum training in the United Kingdom
• 16 Performance indicators: promises and pitfalls
• 17 The development of Beamish: an assessment
• 18 Job attitudes and occupational stress in the United Kingdom museum sector: a pilot study
• 19 Image and self-image
• 20 Museums and marketing
• 21 Marketing in museums: a contextual analysis
• 22 Irresistible demand forces
• 23 Exhibitions: management, for a change
• 24 Museums as organizations
• 25 Risking it: women as museum leaders
• 26 The more effective director: specialist or generalist?
• 27 MGR: a conspectus of museum management
• 28 The well-managed museum
• Annotated bibliography
• Index