Economic Trends – Page 2 – American Alliance of Museums

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 …
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 …
TrendsWatch 2013 Mid-year Update: The (ever) Changing Shape of Giving

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 concerted action to re-shape public expectations …
Futurist Friday: Nonprofit Apartheid and the Overhead Myth

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 comment section, “Albert Nonymous” posted a …
The Class System of the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 these terms as being issues worth monitoring as …
Who is the Development Staff of the Future? Look in the Mirror

By Elizabeth Merritt

/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-priority:99;mso-style-parent:””;mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt …
The (Ever) Changing Shape of Giving

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
Museums are the Future of Education

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
One from each Category: Part 2

By Elizabeth Merritt

Time for a brain stretch. This is part two of a quick review of recent scanning hits in five STEEP categories of forecasting—this one covers economic, environmental and political developments. (You can read part one, on social and …
Updates to CFM’s 2012 Trends to Watch

By Elizabeth Merritt

Our first annual summary of Dispatches from the Future of Museums—TrendsWatch 2012: Museums and the Pulse of the Future—is getting a lot of attention and commentary, which is great. But as soon as Phil Katz (my co-author) and I sent it to …