Mission & Institutional Planning

Join Me at The Museum Summit

By Elizabeth Merritt

How can your organization stay true to its mission and values in the face of funding constraints and mounting partisan pressure? What practices can make volunteering rewarding and accessible to people confronting their own challenges of …
Reduce Uncertainty, Increase Confidence: How Internal Audit Supports Museums’ Success

By Laura Hopman, Christienne Johnson, Cynthia Liriano, and Roman Lindauer

We’ve all seen the dreaded headlines: “How many treasures have been stolen from the British Museum?” “Grief and Anger Mingle After Devastating Brazil Museum Fire” “How the Mona Lisa almost came to a watery end at the Metropolitan Museum of …
The Greater Good: A Q&A with Author Sandy Skees on Purpose

By Adam Rozan

If you know me and follow this series, you probably know about my obsession with purpose and its power to make good organizations great. When I come across a book or article on purpose, I have to read it, as I did with Sandy Skees’s …
Learning from the Double Diamond: How Divergent and Convergent Thinking Can Improve Collaboration and Problem-Solving in Museums

By Dana Mitroff Silvers

Have you ever been in a meeting and thrown out an idea, only to have a colleague start listing all the reasons it won’t work? Or maybe you’ve thought of one in your head, only to second-guess yourself and shut down your own thinking? These …
Resilience for Museums: Strategies to Address Challenging Realities

By American Alliance of Museums

Times of extraordinary change and disruption demand flexibility, humility, perseverance, self-reflection, and responsiveness of museum leaders. Agile leadership requires mapping out a meaningful, relevant, and financially viable direction …
What Happens When Museums Close

By American Alliance of Museums

Watch this recorded discussion about what happens when museums close from the 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting. Senior leaders with firsthand experience at a museum that has closed (or come close) will share their reflections and suggestions on …
Assess for Success

By Laura Nice

The AAM Museum Assessment Program inspired the Janet Turner Print Museum to expand its programming, collection, and collaboration with campus and commun…
How a Disturbing Historical Discovery Inspired a New Mission at Old North Foundation

By Nikki Stewart

The enduring fame of the Old North Church in Boston began on the evening of April 18, 1775, when church sexton Robert Newman and vestryman Capt. John Pulling Jr. climbed the steeple and raised two lanterns as a signal that the British were …
How the Museum of Science and History in Memphis Used the Pandemic to Springboard Its Strategic Plan

By Kevin Thompson

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis had already started a radical reshaping of its image, structure, and programming. When I began as Executive Director in January 2020, we were armed with an …
A Futures Approach to Museum Planning

By Elizabeth Merritt

Nothing gives me greater joy than learning how the futurist materials created by CFM have helped museums and museum people in their work. Today on the blog, Ty Smith and Jeremy Taylor tell us how the California State Railroad Museum used …