This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. In this fast-paced and dynamic session, four small museum professionals showcase how small museums – which face unique challenges but are also hubs of innovation, creativity, and community engagement – are thriving in today’s ever-changing landscape. Watch for an exhilarating exchange of 60 actionable ideas in just 60 minutes, all centered on the theme of small and mid-size museums thriving within their communities. Viewers will leave with a treasure trove of ideas to implement in their own institutions, showcasing the resilience and creativity that small museums bring to the cultural landscape.

Transcript

Ann Bennett:

Good afternoon, everybody and welcome to Balmer, hun. How is everyone liking Charm City so far? So, thank you for coming down to Baltimore. Thank you for coming to our session. the ideas in 60 Minutes, the Small Museum Edition. My name is Ann Bennett. I am the executive director of the Laurel Historical Society, right down the road, about 20 miles from here in Baltimore. And I am joined by the Small Museum Dream Team.

So, in addition to myself, we have Sue Goganian, Kenny Libben, and Allie Schell. And our museums range from here in the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest to New England. And a lot of our examples come from our own institutions, so you know that they are proven ideas, they are tried and true. And we had a lot of fun with this session, I just have to say. And we had a lot of fun putting the ideas together, But we do want to hear from you. So, there should be time at the end for lots of crowd input if you are willing to share and to learn from everyone here in the audience.

So just a few brief announcements. First of all, this session is being recorded. So, thank you to AAM for recognizing small museums. And thank you to our answer for sowing your support for small institutions.

If you do have ideas that you are willing to share with us, we ask you to please use the center microphone. So please come up and share with us later in our session. Second, there was a handout of all of our ideas. So, if you did not get a copy, please do not be anxious. I am happy to send them to you along with the presentation after the session today.

So please ask me or any of my awesome co-panelists and we will get that information to you after the session. We are really excited to bring these 60 ideas, actually 63 ideas. Again, we were really excited. And we hope that they represent a great mix of ideas for you, things that you can implement right away at your institutions, things that you might need to tailor a little bit, or simply just be inspired by what your small museum co -workers and colleagues are doing in the field.

And if you’re not ready to implement any of these ideas now, that’s fine too. Just be with us and get inspired and be with your community. Also, these ideas are for institutions of any size, but hopefully you will find that they are the perfect fit for your organization where you are right now, so you won’t have to scale them down too much, which is sometimes the case at conferences of this size.

Lastly, while we want you to be inspired by all the ideas that you hear from us and from the audience today, if you can really only take away one thing from this session, let it be this. Find your people. Find the group of people that you can talk to as a small museum professional.

Because you might be a volunteer-run organization, you might be a one-stop shop, you might be a micro museum. but find someone to talk to, to listen to, and even to vent to. I am happy to do that for you. I am offering the services of my coworkers and my panelists here as well, especially Allie. She is a consultant and will help you listen and vent to you. But I also want to just offer two other resources just real quick before we begin.

Look up the Small Museum Network on Facebook. It is an open group. Just answer two quick questions, and I will approve it after the session is over. I am one of the administrators. And the other one is the Small Museums Association. They are an up-and-coming on the RISE National Organization. And they also have an annual conference next year.

It’ll be in February in Gaithersburg, Maryland, so this is another excuse to come back to Maryland to the old line states. It’s actually not too far away from here, but with traffic it’s terrible, it’ll take you at least an hour.

So, with that being said, again, thank you so much for being here. I hope you learn a lot. Please feel free to stay afterward and talk to all of us.

And now I will pass it over to Ali to get us started. Thank you, everyone.

Allison Schell:

Can I just get a round of applause for small museums to get us started?

All right, here we go. Are you all ready? We’re starting off with education and a lot of times small museums have a budget of zero for education programs. So here are some ideas to implement that are scrappy and innovative on programs and activities.

Coming in at number one on your list of 60 is repurposing traditional games. So, I’m going to give you a very specific example because I love it. So, this organization actually repurposed Cornhole Boards to tell about the War of 1812 from a bombardment that happened on their town. So, one side it was British, one side was American, and each side of the Cornhole Boards has different rules based on what happened during the bombardment. But this is just something to rethink about traditional games like Jenga and other things that you can throw at the rules and do something new.

Another game I wanted to share, you can totally steal this idea, is it’s an actual game out there called Timeline and I kind of repurposed it for my museum. So really quickly what you do is basically you get a world event, a historic events on one side of the card and on the back is the date of that event and then you have other people play and try to fill out the timeline so each person is adding something to the timeline trying to guess where it is can only know the answer when they flip the card over. This works really great to teach about your site’s history if you have a special exhibit. I do expansion packs based on special exhibits at our site and different things like that that if you want to kind of teach people about the timeline or things that are going on in relation to your site’s context. This is a really great game. I have some examples up here if you want to see it.

I love lamination.

Native plants programming can be accessible to any site, even if you don’t have a garden, even if you’re not interested in botanical studies at your site. This is something that’s really important that all museums should really advocate for, and you don’t even have to have a garden. You can use this in pots, in potted plants, and this can be accessible to kids. You can do some scavenger hunt sea programs, virtual programs, any sort of thing that kind of advocates for people to plant native plants in their garden and maybe team up with someone in your community that can talk about it.

I’m just going to like briefly cover summer camps in general. So just a reminder that summer camps don’t have to be a whole week. They can be a single day. They can be twice a week. They can be once a week every day for that or once a week for that month. People forget that. And I only have the capacity of my site to do it once, one session for our camps. And along that, you can also use these like kind of one day experiences or twice a week experiences to test out different topics that might resonate with campers.

This is really low hanging fruit if you’re looking to grow your outreach programs or you know add a little something in the summer time. Most libraries across the country buy into the library summer reading program. There’s different themes every year, and I think a lot of libraries also get funding so that they can host programs at their site. So, we do this every summer. I create a new program, a repurposed one, and we book about 20 of these, which is really big for a small museum like mine across the state of Delaware.

So really great way. I love low tech. I will always advocate for low tech. I love things like felt boards. You can’t really see it too well in the picture here, but on this felt board is an activity called like a building a coin. So, think about old school color forms.

So, I am at a full-time staff of two in my museum and then we have about 100 volunteers that I manage. So, I am very well aware of all the different challenges that come from recruiting and sustaining volunteers.

So, here are some ideas to help. All right. So, this one actually came from one of our board members who put this challenge out. It is he gave away $100 gift cards to any volunteer that recruited another volunteer and got that volunteer to stay on for at least 25 hours in their first year. This really helps, and so the person that gets the $100 is actually the recruiter. So, it’s up to them if they want to share it with the volunteer that they nearly recruited. So, I don’t know if they tell them that that’s why they’re doing it and being on top of them, but this really helps with the problem that sometimes you have with a volunteer that comes on for a session or two and then leaves just because life happens. So having someone on there to advocate for them and to keep them involved because there’s money on the line or whatever it is you wanna put out there has been a really great challenge for us and has worked absolutely.

Volunteers still love traditional things like a potluck, and you can certainly rethink maybe some parameters of a potluck. Maybe there is a fun challenge like a cookoff. Maybe you do them quarterly, maybe there’s different themes. So, and this is a really great thing too if you don’t have money for catering for special things People get nosy. They love to see what other people bring. So don’t overlook potlucks.

Now if you don’t have a volunteer manager at your site, this is a really great tool. I know you all have heard about volunteer application forms, but just a reminder that this is something you should absolutely have. It’s a great way to screen volunteers also to let them know, hey, this is kind of our parameters, here’s what you can get involved with. So, it’s right up front for them. And if you don’t have a volunteer manager, this just helps get all that information aggregated for you.

But my favorite idea from this with the appreciation form is, which comes from Kenny’s Museum, is you ask your volunteers, your staff, or your board members what their favorite things are. So, it could be your favorite dessert, it could be your favorite ice cream flavor, color, shirt size, and then if you need to reward them or if you need to send them something forget well, you have that information on hand or like with his one board member, loved mashed potatoes instead of a dessert. So, they got him mashed potatoes…

And then finally this has been a thing that’s worked really well for us as programs as a volunteer funnel so having specialty programs in particular that draw in people that already have an interest in your site and you kind of funnel them into your volunteers so we did a Model T driving school that we had people that wanted to learn more and we’re like hey well if you come a volunteer you can certainly get more information and learn how to become a driver at our site and with our youth we have a train camp where they actually get to drive one of our trains and we found out through that program we had a lot of youth that were really interested in actually getting involved with our organization beyond the trains so we created a whole youth volunteer program based off of that and it has been really successful to the state.

Passing the baton.

Ann Bennett:

Okay thank you so much Ali. Yeah so, I should have said it’s going to be 60 ideas in 30 minutes because, again, we’re very excited and we talk very fast, but that leaves more time for all of you.

So, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. And thank you for that, Allie, because I also want to say that my small museum, I am the only full-time employee, and then we have two part -time employees of up to 30 hours.

So, we do a lot with the little, as I’m sure most of you in this room can relate to. So, I am going to be talking about the next two sections, Interactives and Exhibits.

And we’re going to start with something from my museum. Again, really low-tech options, low budget options, and then higher end ideas of the same thing. So, if you need to collect money and ideas at the same time, put them into a donation feedback container. So, if you want to go really high end, do what the Virginia Museum of History and Culture did. This tied in really nicely with their existing exhibits on the regions of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and then you can vote and represent the area that you live in, and then museum gets money, and also gets a little bit of data about its visitors. And so, we did something similar before we actually went down to Virginia. But we just had a board member make this with random craft supplies and it worked just as well we the money, we get the data, it matched our exhibit at the time, and bonus tips if you can get field trips or cub scout groups to bet against each other it rises up the change and the dollar bills that you will get. So, if you find them to live in different areas, then this is a win-win.

So, in terms of interactives going with exhibit space, we’re talking about having facilitated educational experiences. And these can be added to your museum at really every price point.

The Museum of the American Revolution obviously has a much higher budget than a lot of us in this room, but it can be as simple as a basket of dress up in the corner, or it could be a board with practicing how to tie knots or rope tying. Whatever the theme of your museum or exhibit is that you want to highlight, think about these two things. What hands -on pieces can you pull out of that exhibit, and then what skill or fact, do you want the visitor to learn?

So again, my formative years, we’re at a Maritime Museum, so we leaned really heavy into the sea shanties because everyone needs to learn sea shanties, right? And also rope tying and things like that. So, they can be added at any skill level, any participation level. And I will say, don’t forget the adults. We love interactives too. show of hands, if you love the children’s interactives, yes, exactly, so don’t forget the adults when you add these facilitated experiences to your exhibits.

Also going along with a similar theme is we have low-cost interactives, and these could be seasonal, they can be very super simple, they can be switched out very easily based on exhibits, based on seasons, And this is a nice way just to put a sign in a sign stand, have a basket of crafts, and a social media hashtag with it, and you can get engagements virtually and on site. And so that’s a nice way to kind of marry those two aspects together.

Again, very similar. You can see that in this sign stand we have copies of primary source documents that you might have in your collection. And here at the Molly Brown House, they really highlight Molly’s or Margaret’s life and capitalize on current issues or questions that they might wanna highlight related to an exhibit or related to a school group that’s coming in. So again, these are infinitely switchable, you can switch them in and out based on exhibits, the time of year, or anything like that for different groups or different needs.

And this brings us to archaeology, so how much time do we have left? Like 50 minutes? I’m going to fill up the rest of the time talking about archaeology, because I’m an archaeologist and I can take us into a really deep dive about all the great ways you can do archaeology at your site.

So, if you have a chance to do archaeology, do it, or dinosaurs, but we won’t talk about that because archaeologists do not dig dinosaurs. But if you are not an archaeologist, look into grad students or college students at your local college or university. And a lot of times CRM firms or cultural resource management companies, they’re required to do public reporting, so they might all already have to look for cultural or historical institutions to partner with. And so, they can assist you with doing archaeology programs or getting you started at your organization. And it can be very, very simple. This example just south of here in Laurel, south Laurel, Montpelier Mansion, they have a, I don’t know, plastic peanut butter filled pretzel from Costco Container or something like that. And they filled it with sand and replica artifacts. And you just kind of turn it over and it’s a very, very mess free option.

But then there’s me at the St. Joseph Museum in a big trench of sand just digging. So again, adults love the interactives too. So, you can be very messy or very high tech depending on your budget and needs.

Okay, excellent. So, we will go on into the exhibit section. And just a reminder that exhibits don’t have to be heavy on content. It could just be an excuse to have fun and just kind of get tactile and just do something with your family or your friends.

So, this is a great way in the telephone museum to talk on different phones. Anytime you can have a rotary phone or an old-fashioned typewriter in your collection that hits hands on, it’s a great way to have fun and get engaged, especially with the younger and younger generations that don’t hang up the phone like that. They hang up the phone like that. And you’re like, OK, now I feel old. But anyway, it is a great way to have that low -cost interaction. And exhibits can be everywhere.

Has anyone been to the St. Joseph Museums? Okay, yes. The exhibits extended into the bathrooms in the St. Joseph Museum, and it was interpreting one of their sites, which is the Glore Psychiatric Hospital Museum, so they deliberately put you in a small space to do your business and then just highlighted all these phobias.

And one of them, right, so, you know, so if there’s a fear of ghosts, then you go into a small room called the haunted bathroom, right? There’s also one that is not pictured here for good reasons, and that is the clown bathroom. So, take your chances there, but again, don’t pass up the opportunity to extend your exhibits anywhere. Obviously, this is higher end. They wrap the doors. They wrap the walls inside the bathroom, but if you have a corner of your room, if you have a poster frame, if you have one display case, you can use that to extend your exhibits into small places and just keep layering that information that you’re interpreting.

This framework, I see quite often, and I really like it as kind of an internal, easy understood framework for exhibits. And this could be the exhibit itself or it could be an introduction or summary of your museum. And so, these two examples are from History Colorado, they have Denver A to Z, and 100 Objects and The Grand Rapids Public Museum has A to Z as well. And so, with the Denver one, they had entire exhibits, entire rooms based off of this framework. With the Grand Rapids one, it’s just that wall that you see. So, they have an artifact representing either a letter or a number, and it’s a great internal framework.

Oh, and this is great. Alli, do you wanna model this with me?

So again, you can do exhibits on the Jeep and they can be very useful and very low cost.

So, they don’t have to be big and complicated. So, my personal favorite tool is the blue painter’s tape. We have to hoard it in our office so the collections volunteers don’t find it. But there are other ones.

So how many of you have used the plastic, corrugated yard sign type boards. Yeah, so you can use it in your exhibits. We’ve also used it in just updating yard signs, but there’s a useful tool actually

Allison Schell:

That cuts it down a channel. So, you can fold it in half and make these little sign holders or whatever you wanna make bigger signs. And you can cut all the way through a channel with it as well.

Ann Bennett:

Yeah, so no more X-Acto knives, no more metal rulers, although those are very helpful as well. And so that is the what the coroplast and the coroclaw which you can see here.

Also, useful tools are just spray adhesives, spray mount, double-sided tape, hard squeegees for folding things, bone creasers, all these really handy things.

If you’re a crafter, a lot of this will be familiar to you. So go into the craft section as well for your exhibits.

Okay. So how many crafters, speaking of that, do we have in the room here? Okay. So good. So, start raiding your stashes. The cricket machine or the vinyl label machine can really be a useful tool for making in-house exhibit labels. And like I said, they can be used to update the Coreaplast for dates and signage that you might have outside of your museum. And if you don’t have one or don’t have the budget for one, check with your local library system because oftentimes you can actually check out the machine and you just have to pay for the cost of the materials. And as the note said, take the time to weed.

I don’t know what that means, but I think of your crafter. You know what that means. I think it just means to clean up your work.

And then coming to the middle of our exhibit section, what we did is we just peppered in our regular exhibit schedule with pop-up exhibits or temporary exhibits. And we did this with a local photographer, Tracy Camilla John. She actually lives in Laurel. And it was great because not only were her pictures gorgeous, but they matched the exhibit that we have on display in terms of looking at all the neighborhoods of Laurel.

So, we were able to capitalize on her network and to really boost our attendance and just have something that wasn’t history related. If you’re a history museum, you don’t have to just do history.

So, you can do arts and other social events as well.

And then coming into the last couple of examples here, going Back to the St. Joseph Museums, like I mentioned before, they have several different museums under one big umbrella. And this was a really spiffy way, I thought, to represent visually all the different museums that you can see on their campus.

And it was done by a single color and a single motif, a designer, a picture. And so, no matter where you ended up on the campus or the map, you can say, oh, I want to go to the Purple Museum and just head in that direction. So that was a very kind of low -tech way of just bringing cohesion to multiple site interpretations.

So, this is fun too. This is a picture from the JFK Presidential Library, and this is just a way to get your staff paid or unpaid, your volunteers, your interns, even your community, do people’s choice. And this is great because you can showcase items that might not make it into regular rotation. You might have a lot of items that are super cool, but just don’t meet the theme of an exhibit. So, this is a way to pick those out, highlight them on a regular basis, and they can be copies put into a display case like this one in Boston, or they can be online. This could be something that you do regularly, and people can vote on it, and it could be turned into a contest. But this is a great way to, again, show your collection beyond just the exhibit that you have currently on display.

So, these are great too, and if anyone has other examples of these from your museums, I would love to hear more about this. So, the idea of exhibit marketing going viral and doing something fun and wacky and creative and out of the box can be found everywhere.

Canadian Museum of Nature, American Revolution Museum, the Jinxon Arts Festival, that is all actually fake food as an art form to really you know kind of highlight the exhibit and they put them in vending machines so vending machine culture is very big and it’s a special limited edition and they sell out very, very quickly in these big popular office spaces. But you can also get your living history, your costume nerds like me just to go dress up and mark it, Occupied Philadelphia for example, or just get a bunch of your friends together and get a dinosaur costume because honestly, that’s just so fun, you know, whatever dinosaurs are doing in costume, mowing the on dancing. I will watch it on my phone.

And then again going back to some low-tech options. These are examples of just ways that you can either get feedback, again going back to that donation feedback box that we talked about earlier.

This was kind of a military based exhibit and so that’s why they say sound off, but it’s just post-its in a paper. You see this all the time. It doesn’t have to be very complicated, but it’s a way to get that feedback that you might not get elsewhere.

And then this was a very fun and creative voting exhibit. Again, this came from the psychiatric hospital, so they’re talking about health and healthcare and medicine. And so, you’re voting on the question by placing a tongue depressor into one of the voting receptacles. So, just having fun and being creative with the information that you’re asking the public.

And so, this is a way to do partnerships on current topics. This was actually a way to commemorate and memorialize the lives that have been lost in the years of the coronavirus pandemic and it provides space for families to come together, to gather, to mourn, to heal, to process, and just to show the public that these were people and they’re not just a statistic. And this is a great example of a museum being a resource for the community and being a place to heal, not just for the pandemic, but for really any type of tragedy or mass event that might have happened in your community.

Oh, that was what I was talking about.I ‘m sorry, I messed up. I’m sorry, that probably makes more sense now. I’m sorry about that.

And then, sorry, I’m gonna go. There we go, I got my slides mixed up, so I’m sorry. This is the one about exhibit partnerships, and so this can be done with other nonprofits or groups in your community, especially ones that encourage dialogue on contemporary issues.

This is the example on border and immigration dialogue, and then this is the one that I was saying about the memorial to the victims of the pandemic, and that can be turned into any memorial or a sense of healing for your community. So that, I think, yes, that is where I end, and Kenny begins, so thank you.

Kenny Libben:

All right before we get into my list one thing I want to remind everyone I’m sure if you’re in a small museum you know this as well for all of these topics but especially events and programs the best ones aren’t just an event or program they increase membership they increase engagement they bring attendance to your attendance to your museum recognition, more donors, more members, everything. So, when you’re looking at these ideas or thinking of your own, think how you can incorporate all the other subjects into it as well. All right.

So first up, everyone knows, add alcohol, and that will usually make it a good event. So, some of these ideas, one of them, the Brenton House, is a virtual idea where they will actually recommend suggested cocktails or drinks for that event, and then they host a virtual lecture. You can also do them in person, obviously.

The Barnes Museum will go to micro-breweries that operate out of historic houses or historic buildings, and they will tell the history of that building while you’re there drinking at that location. You can do a traditional holiday market. So, this museum is actually in Upper Austria, and it’s a small Pine Farming Museum. They do a Christmas and an Easter market and it’s all local handmade goods that are pretty much traditional to that area. So, the town is about 2 ,000 people. They’ve been doing it for 20 years but they bring in about 8 ,000 people per weekend that come just because everything is local, handmade, and then they also use it to preserve local traditions and techniques, musicians, art craft, and cuisine as well.

You can always add food to make something popular. So, this is from my museum. We did a World War One on the home front exhibit. Part of that we tied in victory gardens, gave away seed packets, but the biggest straw was we went, we gave all our volunteers and board members historic recipes from World War One and they made them and then everyone came in to try them.

And I can assure you most of them are not worth trying but that’s why people came in. This was a few years ago so I forget all of the crazy ones, but we had Welsh rarebit which does not have rabbit in it and it’s not from Wales. Peanut butter soup was actually one of the more interesting ones, but you can find all kinds of these recipes online because the government made cookbooks and put them all over so now it’s public domain. So, any way you can incorporate odd foods, that always brings people in.

Do anything hands-on with workshops? So, the Richland Early American Center for History, they’re near me. They actually built a whole blacksmith’s shop. So, every week they have blacksmithing classes you can go do. Other ones like the Grand County Historical Association do flower pounding where you use real flowers and natural dyes to make designs on cloth.

I’m sure you’ve seen a million other ideas that museums do. Anything to let people do things hands-on is always a great way to get them in and they remember that experience with you.

Also, if you have a green space, include that in your programming whether it’s for just social hours or outdoor lecture series. There’s a million ways you can incorporate that. Hiking series, you’ve all seen a walking tour in your city, but if you have a forest or a natural park You can go do a natural history walking series with that

Or if you’re in a rural area consider a barn tour So this is a drive-it -yourself barn tour they do it every other year, but I believe they sell about 500 tickets each year And it’s their biggest event by far each barn that they have lined up. It’s a volunteer owner that cleans up their barn. They’ll bring in food trucks, something interactive, like a blacksmith or an artist, something like that. And then throughout the day, people can just buy a ticket and drive around to all the different sites and see these historic barns that are quickly disappearing. So, it’s a great way to both promote preservation of history and give people a chance to explore these private properties. You can also do archaeology, workshops, and discussions.

So, this is my museum. I will say we’ve put it on temporary hold as most of you know, NAGPRA has been updated. So, we are in the process of just making sure everything is kosher with that.

In our case, we’re not actually showing people how to go look for the stone tools, but our area has millions of indigenous stone tools that are found just from the fields when people plow you can walk through them and for decades that’s what everyone’s done.

So, our session we pair up with the Ohio Archaeological Society and do more of identification of stone tools so they can learn what they have already found what it is what time period that sort of thing. So, if you have opportunities like that, they’re always extremely popular with our museum.

Also, cemetery preservation is a big thing. We all know somebody who’s died and is buried, so hopefully they’re buried. I guess it doesn’t have to be. But you see all these old historic cemeteries around and they’re all beautiful, except they’re in disrepair. And so, cemetery preservation is a big draw now. We teamed up with Atlas Preservation, I believe they’re out of etiquette, but they do a national tour. They call it 50 states in 50 days. And we partnered with them to bring them to Ohio. And I think we attracted about 200 people to the event. So, they learn how to clean headstones the proper way without damaging them. And then as you can see in that picture, also how to reset ones that are falling over or starting to lean. And it’s a great way to help preserve people’s memories.

You can also do scavenger hunts, and there’s a couple different options with that. You can obviously do a scavenger hunt in your museum You know hand out a guide where people can go look to explore things that are in your exhibits Whether it’s relevant to the exhibit or like the Cleveland Museum of Natural History hides cheeseburgers It’s a huge draw for them. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s fun to do

Another one like my museum, we call it the adventure hunt, and it’s an outdoor activity that people drive throughout our community. And they have hints and clues to where to go, like historic sites, so it helps them discover the area. And for each task they do, they get points and then can win.

All right, and for memberships, then.

So, this one, is that our time on it? This one is my favorite one, so we’ve developed a travel series where we will put together small group tours for our community and our members can sign up and get the opportunity to travel abroad. It’s been extremely popular. The best part about it is I get to go along for free, so I will always promote that one.

You can also give away free membership.

Real quick back to why that’s under the membership thing. We only offer the first week to sign up to members. So that may not seem like a big deal, mostly strip sell out in two days. So, our membership has more than doubled since we started the series, because everyone wants to know how they can sign up. And even though there’s only a few chances a year, they’re still willing to pay for an annual membership for years just for the chance to sign up.

You can also give away free membership. I actually really like this idea. I believe it’s Sue’s Museum. They have a couple different ways that they do it, but if someone new moves into your community, give them free membership.

For the most part, membership doesn’t cost any of our museums anything. My museum is free admission, so it certainly doesn’t cost us anything, but it makes them appreciate the gift you gave them and maybe they’ll come in and maybe they’ll keep paying year after year.

You can also do different types of membership drives. I like both these ideas because they incorporate the month into them. So, in February you can do like a Valentine’s Day theme where a member can give away membership to someone else that’s not a member.

For the Marshall Steam Museum, they do a March membership madness. Which do you want to say that one or two?

Oh, yeah, that’s right.

All right, you can also do special members -only events. This doesn’t just have to be film screening. Think about any way that you give a perk for someone being a member. It can be a behind-the-scenes tour.

It can be, you know, if you want to do an antiques roadshow sort of thing where you have an appraiser come in to identify objects for people. What my museum does is we have a historic theater in town that was bill has an opera house it’s now a state-of-the-art movie theater, but we’ll rent that for private screenings and we’ll show historic films and part of that is we try and make it more fun and engaging for our members so last week we did Blazing Saddles in addition to just showing that we gave away bags of gold candy we tied up the Rollo tubes of candy to look like dynamite and we passed out fake mustaches and badges so everyone could do photos and then they get free popcorn as well.

So that’s always a popular activity.

And then to tie it all back together, bring alcohol into your museum. So, Ann’s annual meeting they found out was during Cinco de Mayo and we all know annual meetings are super fun for everybody, but when you add alcohol, everyone did enjoy it. So, any way you can tie in a theme, whether it has alcohol or not, but tie in different themes with your events, it always gets people excited for something fresh and something new.

All right, and now it’s up to Sue.

Susan Goganian:

I just want to mention two things before I start.

One, about the exhibits in the loo, hang your event calendar in there too it’s a captive audience after all. And the other thing is most museums are small museums and we have a power that we’re not taking full advantage of, so I just throw that out there for anybody who needs to know that.

So, we’re gonna start with community. The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, New Jersey, participates in their local farmers market, installing art displays and engaging the community with interactive opportunities, such as coloring books for children.

Minnetrista Museum staff serves the community brunch, themed around holidays like Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day. They say it’s not just about indulging in delectable dishes; it serves as a reminder of how our community connects, interacts and shares experiences.

For sites with limited hours, the Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho install the box where people can get brochures and trail maps after hours, plus stamp their NPS passport or scavenger hunt, geocache, et cetera. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had calls from people who wanted their passport stamp when we weren’t open. This is a great idea.

Community collecting days at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Programs built around community collecting days. They could be stories or photos. Laurel Historical Society and Rehoboth Beach Historical Society have done photo ID nights in person and online.

We’ve also put images on Facebook and asked people to identify people or places and to offer us additional items related to those topics.

This is one of my favorite programs at my museum. We do a community art show annually. With a theme and we attract, I think our last show had 40 artists and about 60 works. We remind the public that we are interested in collecting recent depictions of our city.

A lot of people think historical societies only want things that are really, really old. That’s not true. It provides acquisition opportunities for us, and it brings in income through commissions. The closing reception includes awards sponsored by the local art college and others.

Buy nothing. Check Facebook, Google, and other sites for free or low-cost items. We are always trying to do more with less, right? We also ask on those sites for donations of office furniture, monitors, or anything else that we need.

Partnerships and collaborations, sorry. The Ashland County Historical Society hosts live bar trivia each month at a local the shop. Trivia is free for all to play with the restaurant providing gift certificates as prizes. The museum uses the venue to advertise upcoming programs, membership, etc. What was the slowest night of the week for the restaurant is now the busiest, with increased awareness and attendance at other museum events with younger demographic. This is a huge win-win for everybody.

I love this one, this is Kenny’s. Playing off the Victorian tradition of hiding a pickle in the Christmas tree, the museum hides fake pickles throughout the community in December and posts clues to their location on social media. A local business custom prints the resin pickles and a local art club custom paints each one. Often The fighting spot or the clues involve historical tidbits that lead participants to otherwise unknown locations or landmarks, helping them discover and appreciate the history and the culture of the area more.

The Brandywine Valley Educators Forum suggests you form a local committee with area museums, choose a topic to connect on like education, volunteerism or fundraising and invite local professionals to participate, brainstorm, and resource share. Some community foundations also convene gatherings of small nonprofits to share resources.

Partner with local hotels for the use of historic photos in buildings. They can be in the parking lot, on the room walls, or more simply in frames in the hallway. We also work with developers to add images to the exteriors and common areas of housing projects and office buildings, especially if there was formally a historic property on the site.

The Marshall Steam Museum hosts joint training opportunities that include other local sites which can help to reduce training costs. They did this for audio description training and the creation of touch tours. If they got 10 participants to come to the training, the costs would be $50 each.

Recognizing their strength was in running small museums, the Denison Railroad Depot became a contract manager for several nearby historic sites, providing administration, training, oversight, and resources to several institutions. This improved these sites while also earning income for Denison.

Fundraising. The Denison Railroad Depot Museum also restored a historic Pullman sleeper car and put it on Airbnb. It gave new life and purpose to an otherwise unused site while providing more income for the museum and an increased interest from the public in the history of the car.

The Marshall State Museum says, “Create your own merchandise.” They invested in a button and a cricket machine to make their own buttons, bottle openers, magnets, ornaments, t -shirts, and more. Great souvenirs. I also believe in selling merchandise so people can’t get anywhere else in your gift shop.

The Landis Valley Museum holds a silent auction with items that utilize the talents of their volunteers and staff. The auction which features a variety of handmade furniture, woodworking, décor, metalwork, ceramics, artwork, and crafts along with experiences and gift packages donated by area businesses raises money for the programs of Landis Valley.

So, this is ours. We do a yearly holiday house tour of five to six private homes that sells out well in advance and brings in lots of new people. We usually sell about 250 tickets. This type of tour requires two shifts of four to five volunteers per house, and we would never be able to do that with our core of volunteers. Realtors are perfect for this because they love talking about houses. Our partnership with Coldwell Banker has been amazing. In addition to providing the majority of the volunteers, they cover the costs of the mailer and the event day map. All it costs us is the staff the day of the program. That’s it.

Ashland County Historical Society’s Pumpkin Glow event invites community members, businesses and organizations to carve pumpkins and then display them on the museum’s campus and adjacent park. The park and buildings are lined with the jack -o -lanterns and the community is invited to come out at night and walk through the park to see all of the pumpkins lit up.

Our final subject is Board Relations and Board Development. The Ashland County Historical Society youth board is meant to give Ashland County teens a voice in their communities’ history and heritage sector.

Members have a chance to create inclusive and innovative programs, events, and initiatives with the assistance of the staff.

Onboarding made fun. This is Laurel Historical Society, I believe. Having an informal reception at a board member’s house for going and incoming board members makes onboarding more fun by removing the formal structure of meeting spaces. And I’m sure it also makes it much more welcoming for the new people.

— Also, alcohol.

Funny money.

Make strategic planning fun by adding a funny money exercise to focus on goals and planning from the SWAT. But give each board member dots worth $1 ,000 to vote with and see what they would spend an imaginary donation on.

Have you ever gotten an actual donation out of that? Well, you can always hope, right? New board member orientation packet and meeting to get members up to speed on how the museum operates, recent financial statements and meeting minutes, as well as recent or recurring exhibits, programming, advertising, and more. We also give an in -depth tour of our main building, which was built in 1781, so that the board members understand some of our challenges.

Board member expectations. That is the form that we give out to prospective board members, which lists all our policies and a giving program, and we ask them to sign it yearly. It includes things like respond promptly to every communication from staff or other trustees. And the minimum number of events they’re expected to attend each year.

And I’m going to turn it back over to Ann.

Ann Bennett:

Alright, thank you everyone. Hi Rica! I told you it was a dream team, right? So, uh…thank you so much for presenting today and for you being in the audience. So, we did that in under and hour because like I said we talk fast and we get excited so…Now is the time, if you want to share anything that is happening in your museum in your community, please, we would love to hear from you.

So again, this session is being recorded, so we ask that if you are willing to share, no pressure, you don’t have to. And if you need to take a break and step out, feel free just to head out as well.

A quick reminder, use the center microphone, so if you wanna start lining up to share your ideas, while I just have a few announcements, that would be wonderful.

Again, we do have the handout available and the presentation, which we are happy to share with everybody. All you have to do is just leave your business card or ask any of us at the end of the session.

And then also there’s a few goodies still left at the front of the stage, so please feel free to grab those on your way out. And just a—

>> Questions about our—

Yeah, we’re going to take questions.

And just as a reminder, quick before we hear other ideas, I am presenting tomorrow, and Ali is presenting on Sunday, right? So please check out our presentations.

We would love to see you at those sessions as well. So, I think the mic is live. Why don’t you go ahead and test it out for us, please? Why don’t you say your name, your organization, and go for it.

Marshall:

Oh, so my name is Marshall.

I’m actually at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, which is not a small museum, but a smaller museum, as far as natural history museums go. So, we have a few ideas. We haven’t implemented them yet, but we want to do a downward dino, which is yoga under the dinosaurs at our museum. Kind of bring people in that might not come in, but also do it like before we actually kind of a sunrise or sunset sort of thing.

And then another one that we’ve thought about doing is art nights, where we have a plethora of taxidermy that’s kind of kept behind the scenes that doesn’t usually come out for displays very often, pull those ones out and then you could have kind of those wine and sip night, or wine and paint, wine and sip, wine and paint night sort of things where you get to like draw or paint a tiger or something like that that’s not normally a display. But I love all the ideas, though, thank you.

Ann Bennett:

Marshall, yes. I love that.

Rachel:

Hello, my name is Rachel, I’m from the Calvert Marine Museum down in Solomon’s, Maryland. So, local but I wanted to share an idea about accessibility that we have actually happening tonight, that we have at the Calvert Marine Museum. It is Night at the Museum for Friends with Disabilities. We do a low sensory, lights down, low audio, or we have tour guides for low vision people, we also have hearing accessibility, so we’re not considered a small museum either, but for the area, we’re one of the only museums. It’s pretty rural, but that’s just something I wanted to put an idea out there for everybody. Thank you.

Ann Bennett:

Yes, thank you. Anyone else?

Sarah Maylano:

Hey, I’m Sarah Maylano. I’m a PR consultant in Philly. I work at a few different museums. One of the museums I work with, we put on a holiday market outside the museum store and we brought in all of these vendors that have things in the store like local makers and artists and didn’t sell the things that they sell in the store but sold different things from their collection that they sell and then people went into the store and the store did really well that day and we brought in like local bakers and people that sold food and hot chocolate and just had fun.

Ann Bennett:

Yes, hot chocolate is always fun too. Anyone else? Come on up please.

Emily:

My name is Emily and I’m from the National Museum of Industrial History. Two ideas. Related to making your own labels. You can actually purchase vinyl paper that you can run through a regular printer and then you can trim it and either stick it to the wall or you can mount it on foam core or any other sort of board. As long as you’re doing something small enough, it looks a lot more professional than if you’re just printing and gluing. So that’s a fun little hack that we figured out recently.

And then as far as unusual partnerships go, we actually recently partnered with a local amusement park. They opened a new roller coaster related to steel. And we have a huge collection of steel artifacts. So, we partnered with them to move those things and put them on display and to potentially reach an audience that might otherwise not be interested in industrial history.

So that’s been a really fun collaboration.

Ann Bennett:

I love that. Thank you so much.

Sammy:

Hi. I’m Sammy. I’m with the Irish Railroad Workers Museum here in Baltimore.

And fun little combination idea that we have is through a partnership with St. Peter’s, the Apostle Cemetery. We do our Irish Wake program every October, and with that we are now talking about doing saw and traditions and doing turnip carving, which are the original pumpkins. So, bringing those traditional ideas to a modern setting, but it’s really fun.

Ann Bennett:

Thank you, Sammy.

>> Hello. I’m with the General Patton Museum at Fort Knox in Kentucky. And so, we covered sort of general military history, and we have a section of our museum devoted to 9 /11.

And so, what we’re doing in the future is we are adding just a simple printed out map, blown up, of the flight path of the plane that hit the Pentagon.

And it’s a pretty good idea because it’s deeply moving and it’s complicated, like it’s complicated enough that kids will kind of just naturally avoid it, whereas adults will stand and try to understand, like for example, the red, the sections of the office buildings that are like the cubicles that are in red are people that were murdered.

And then people who survived was like yellow or green. And so, you don’t have to be really told. It’s very much explained by the map itself, and it’s, again, super cheap and deeply moving. And people can engage with it or choose not to.

Ann Bennett:

Yeah, I love that. You kind of leave it up to the visitor to make that connection. Thank you.

Kennedy:

Hi, I’m Kennedy. I’m coming from Historic Congressional Cemetery in in DC. First of all, I’d like to echo anyone who mentioned cemeteries as a good partner. We are just weird outdoor museums for the most part. Please partner with us.

We want to when everybody gets weird about it. Number two, when it comes to wanting like membership benefits and things like that, We found out that the most simple way, because we don’t have, because we’re a historic cemetery, we don’t have like collections or anything, but the easiest way to like make people feel special is let them see things that you make them feel like it’s behind the scenes.

Like we’ll let people like peek into the mausoleums and things. So, a really easy way to engage, especially like membership is being is being like, well, you can see what happens behind the scenes, see how we take care of our collections, et cetera. Yeah.

Allison Schell:

I wanted to– oh, gosh, that was really out. I wanted to share off of that Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, they do a hearse show, like a car show put with hearses. So, I love that idea. Please steal it.

Andy Schlauch:

My name is Andy Schlauch I’m Director and Chief Curator for the Cafesjian Art Trust in New Museum in Minnesota.

But as somebody who was born and raised in rural Ohio, y ‘all are bringing it home for me today. [LAUGHTER] And Loudonville’s great for canoeing and kayaking. But I’ve worked for small museums or small arts organizations for many years.

And some of the better, successful ones that were really, really simple. When I was at the Artists archives in Cleveland. We partnered with a national city bank at the time, and they provided us with little piggy banks that were branded and then we gave them to our members to save money over a course of like a few months and then they painted them or decorated them however they wanted to and then they brought them back to us and we put them on display for an exhibition. Super simple, really fun, partnered with a bank. It was great. Do you have to keep the money? Yes, we got the money. The idea was that we got the money.

That’s the hard part. But then we also did what I called Color Me Cleveland, where we did a plein air event across the city of Cleveland identifying specific areas that were like a university circle or something like that that had significance. And the artist could do whatever they wanted. They didn’t have to do an actual plein air painting. And then all of those Artworks came back to the institution for a silent auction and live auction, which was really great.

And then I’ve done a lot of work with glass, so just keep in mind, like, if you know people that have certain skill sets or certain creative abilities, like, I mean, was able to do a blind touch tour her for the Chihuly collection in St. Pete, Florida, partly because glass blowers were able to recreate clear glass elements that resembled the objects in the collection and clear glass is like a nickel. So, you know, it’s not expensive whatsoever. I did a whole blind touch tour for $250, and it was really fun to do.

And then finally, I can’t under share how great it was to have at the drag queen docent tour. It was an extremely popular event, and we did tickets. We had people do — they walked around one of the Chihuly installations and their best outfits like they were models. You know, the participants really loved it. We even did an online version of it. So, something to think about.

Ann Bennett:

Okay, well thank you, everyone. We are at just at the end of our session, so I invite you once again to keep the conversation going, join the Small Museums Network, join Small Museum Association, and we’ll see you around AAM. Thank you everyone.