Your museumness is a valuable asset in itself.

Twice per week I meet another designer/developer/dreamer with an expensive great idea.  And nearly that often I meet a museum without one.  (You guys should hang out more often.)

Struggling brilliants would kill for the cachet of a museum in their corner.  Patrons and philanthropists exist to be handed a proper, capital-D Discovery (or innovation or breakthrough.)  See the brilliance of where that leaves you?  You can have no ideas and no money and still get a seat at the table.  Philanthropy grovelling-wise, an undeniably clever idea plus a museum’s clout is greater than the sum of its parts.  You’ve already got the latter, go in search of the former.  If you can’t find it, you’re in the wrong gig.

You squire two (2) first rate concepts from pipe dream to gallery floor and -poof- you’re a world class museum.  Concepts three and four will be cake.

Just say no!

Ok, it is official as of now: zero point zero exceptions.  Stand with me.  Take the museum developers’ pledge.  There is hereby NO exhibit content that can redeem the computer kiosk.  If your exhibit is a computer in a kiosk, your exhibit sucks.  I don’t care if moving the Happ trackball makes it snow real snow in the gallery; find another interface for it.

Now is a good time to cut your expenses.  Now is not a good time to cut your gallery budgets.

Cut your operating expenses.  A lot.  Ruthlessly.  I get it.  Streamlining is evolutionary.  But that’s the easy half.  You can cut and you can cut, but you can’t cut your way out of nobody-wants-to-come-here-because-it’s-boring.  Cutting does not lead to that destination.  What are you saving money for?  It’s a question worth pondering.  You can bail and bail, but if you don’t also paddle, you’re still going to sink.

Now is not the time for modest half-measures in your galleries.  Maybe just keeping your head down and your chinstrap fastened is all it will take for your endowment to eventually rebound.  But take a closer, more honest look at your pie charts.  Attendance declines were trending well ahead of the economy.  Don’t overly conflate the two.  Have you ever been to a penny arcade?  No, you haven’t.  Why?  There aren’t any more penny arcades.  (At the height of their game they were cooler than you.)  Time may be on your endowment’s side, but time is not on your side. Three more milquetoast business-as-usual 1990s hands-on interactive galleries from the same three business-as-usual 1990s hands-on interactive companies could be fatal. You have two crises to manage.  Don’t let the big one slip.

Philanthropy still exists.  But when there are more ideas competing for fewer dollars, it isn’t the cheaper ideas that win.  The better ideas still win.  Just fewer of them.  You’ll have a better time getting $2,500,000 for your bold, innovative idea than you will getting $250,000 for your mediocre one.  And it’s a lot less humiliating to ask for.  Let the financial timidity of rival projects be to your advantage.

Thirty minutes every month every employee works directly with visitors in the museum. A micro shift on the gallery floor.  The marketing intern, the IT director, even (nay, especially) the CEO.

Know your visitors.  Meet your visitors.  Watch your visitors.  Overhear your visitors casually make dismissive jokes to each other about your life’s work.  It’s important for staff, all staff, to remember what the product is.  (Not what the product aspires to be in your membership mailers.  What the product is.)  The most difficult and important step in problem solving is problem identifying.  And the problems that matter are the problems that visitors have with your museum.  (And, sister, there are lots.  Brother, get started.)

The goal of a good museum is to be a good museum.  And if a good museum gives you money by the hour, that is a goal that should be on your personal radar.  It is no use to have cubiclefulls of creative problem solvers if you don’t point them at the right problems.  Does your IT department think about how they can proactively invent tools to enable museum professionals to make a better museum?  Please.  They don’t even wonder what a “museum professional” does all day (besides jam the printer and forget his email password.)

If your employees mutiny, you didn’t implement it right.  Working in a museum is neato; that’s why you’re not making twice as much for the same work at Verizon.  Caring about whether or not you work for a good museum is rewarding.  The pitch is: “Our museum sucks and we want our best minds on the floor figuring out why.”  You may tweak the wording.  And don’t give me “not-a-people-person.”  Your Photoshop guy can put on a clean shirt and be pleasant for half-an-hour a month.

Get good minds and get them museum-oriented.  The first part is useless without the second.

Don’t explain your branding objectives to a motion graphics design firm, explain your branding objectives to your exhibit developers.

Seriously.  Set up a meeting.  It’s amazing how many in-house exhibit developers are “spared” the tawdriness of marketing strategy. Good museums brand themselves. (There’s no “skip flash intro” to click at the Smithsonian.)

WizmoopIdéntity may come up with some great bullet points about what keywords your brand should conjure, but it’s ultimately for naught if there’s no there there.  If you don’t talk about your branding objectives while you design exhibits, the exhibits won’t meet them.  And if the exhibits don’t meet them, they may as well not exist.

Which isn’t to say you should let the bullet points wag the kiosk.  If it requires too much contortion to match your exhibit design to your brand, it’s probably the latter you need to re-think, no?