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, for example, are challenged by changing …
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 updates. This post shares some of the material we’ve …
The Future—Brought to You By
Ever wonder how CFM can deliver so much content to the field for free? I get that question a lot, from museum professionals as I travel, and from staff of other associations wondering how they might create their own CFM-equivalent. The …
Museums are the Future of Education
Earlier this year, I shared some thoughts regarding the future of education with face-to-face and on-line attendees at Museums Advocacy Day. My thesis, which I’ve advanced on this blog before, is that we are on the cusp of transformative …
A Museum in Every Community?
Accreditation Commissioner Bill Eiland recently stopped by my office to share his concerns about the hundreds of small communities in the South struggling to maintain their culture, identity and population in the face of economic and …
CFM Returns to the Future with TrendsWatch 2013
The Alliance has just released TrendsWatch 2013: Back to the Future, CFM’s second annual watch list of important emergent trends. If we’re right, and the trends we’ve tagged this year shape the evolution of museums, a museum visit in the …
No Future
The Field Museum of Natural History recently announced that it is cutting its budget by 7%—$5 million from its overall budget of ~$70 million—with $3 million of this coming out of the science departments.The museum has begun a process that …
Finding Community: Engaging Diverse Audiences in a Historic House
In April, 2007, a small but influential group of historic house professionals, association and foundation staff gathered at Kykuit, the historic Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hills, NY, for the Forum on Historic Site Stewardship in the …
Pop-Up Museums…On Main Street
One of the themes CFM explored in TrendsWatch 2012 was pop-up culture: the public’s growing appetite for mobile, transitory retail, culinary or cultural experiences. Today’s blog post is by Nate Rudy, director of economic and community …
The Freegan Museum: Notes from an Experiment in Progress.
This Monday I posted some brief thoughts on free museum memberships, sparked by the experiment being launched by the Dallas Museum of Art. Bob Barzan, director of the Modesto Art Museum wrote to share his museum’s experience with going …
