Financial Sustainability

Explore dozens of articles, member resources, and On-Demand Programs on financial sustainability in museums.

A Game for (Future) Good: FutureCoast

By Elizabeth Merritt

The first trend CFM tackled, with the help of futurist and games-designer Dr. Jane McGonigal, was the rise of “gaming for good” and the potential for games-design to make museum experiences more compelling and rewarding. Today’s guest post …
Monday Musings: What Price Nonprofit?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Today’s brief musing was prompted by an article this past Saturday in the New York Times: It May be a Nonprofit Theater, but the Tickets Look For-ProfitIt lists the ways in which nonprofit theaters in New York are acting more and …
Revisiting the Borgias

By Elizabeth Merritt

This Throwback Thursday post revisits an issue I touched on back at the beginning of the financial crisis, in 2009: how the decline in traditional funding sources and the increasing inequality of wealth in American are shaping the behavior …
Monday Musings: The End of the Blockbuster Era

By Elizabeth Merritt

Today’s brief musing was prompted by a story I included in our weekly e-newsletter Dispatches from the Future of Museums last week—a video clip of a panel discussion on the Future of the Museum, hosed by the Boston Athenaeum that brought …
Why You Don’t Want To Be Nice

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’ve been using this graphic in talks lately when talking about successful financial models for museums. The point being that if your organization provides experiences or services that are addictive or essential, or better yet, both, you …
Dark Futures: Nonprofit Fragmentation

By Elizabeth Merritt

I wanted to start the year on a positive note, I really did. But I find myself writing about a middle-of-the-night worry, instead.What gave me nightmares? Not a bad dinner, unfortunately, but a steady diet of sobering news. I spent most of …
The Entrepreneurial Museum: Down on the Farm

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’m collecting examples of entrepreneurial museum projects—mission-related initiatives that contribute to the financial bottom line. Last month I profiled the Spark!Lab National Network, an initiative of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center. …
Entrepreneurship in Museums: The Spark!Lab National Network

By Elizabeth Merritt

Entrepreneur, ˌäⁿn-trə-p(r)ə-ˈnər, (n) “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money.” While “entrepreneurial” as applied to museums has usually focused on the “willing to take risk” part, in recent …
Inspiring a New Generation

By Elizabeth Merritt

Author Neal Stephenson recently launched the Hieroglyph project, to rally writers to reintroduce optimism into science fiction. That is pretty ironic, considering some of the dystopian visions he has painted of our future. But, as he …
Why “Free” Isn’t Always a Good Thing

By Elizabeth Merritt

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” shoe company that donates a pair of shoes to a …