Financial Models – Page 3 – American Alliance of Museums

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 …
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 …
Balancing the Equation

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 forces shaping our shared future. As is often …
A Case Study in Survival from the Sacred Realm

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 Future—Brought to You By

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
A Museum in Every Community?

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …
Pop-Up Museums…On Main Street

By Elizabeth Merritt

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.

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …