Posts
Financial Sustainability
Explore dozens of articles, member resources, and On-Demand Programs on financial sustainability in museums.
Why “Free” Isn’t Always a Good Thing
The charitable sector is going through a period of painful self-examination about the unintended side effects of well-intentioned philanthropic efforts. TOMS, the popular “profit for good” …
The Fourth Sector
The second flight of “Test Pilots” is winging their way through the CFM Digital Badging project. Besides helping the Alliance test the potential of this form of microcredentialing to serve …
Who Makes the Best Advocate for the Future of Museum Funding?
Good futures scanning should include all the STEEP categories. As I’ve confessed before, I sometimes have trouble with the P—political/policy trends. Today, Gail Ravnitzky Silberglied, the …
Museum Jobs That Didn’t Exist in 2003
(& what that says about the evolution of our field.) A couple weeks ago, I read a post on Coexist called “Eight New Jobs People will have in 2025,” projecting openings for Digital Death …
Flower Power: A Story of Organizational Re-Blossoming
A reporter recently asked me to name the biggest barrier standing in the way of museums adapting to the forces shaping the future. My reply was “ourselves—the funding and organizational …
TrendsWatch 2013 Mid-year Update: The (ever) Changing Shape of Giving
In the first half of 2013, we’re seeing a growing resentment on the part of nonprofits about the some of the expectations being projected on to them by funders, and the beginnings of …
Futurist Friday: Nonprofit Apartheid and the Overhead Myth
I posted some brief musings this past Monday about the blurring boundaries between nonprofit and for profit options for young professionals seeking to do good in their careers. In the …
Balancing the Equation
I had the pleasure, last month, of addressing attendees at the League of American Orchestra’s conference in St. Louis. They invited me to share some insights from the museum world about the …
The Class System of the Future
In creating their scanning frameworks, many of the “test pilots” in the first flight of CFM’s Digital Badging Projects identified “wealth inequality,” “wealth gap” and other variations on …
Who is the Development Staff of the Future? Look in the Mirror
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A Case Study in Survival from the Sacred Realm
Museums can learn a lot by looking at how other sectors—for-profit and nonprofit—are responding to the same trends and events that shape our operating environment. Religious communities, …
The (Ever) Changing Shape of Giving
At the rate the world changes, CFM will never run out of work. It’s only four months since we released TrendsWatch 2013, and already my co-author, Phil, and I are scrambling to assemble …