Financial Trends – American Alliance of Museums

Companies with Benefits, Part 2: B Corps or not B Corps, that is the question

By Elizabeth Merritt

Tuesday I blogged about Benefit Corporations—a relatively new kind of “hybrid” legal structure for mission-driven for-profits. Today’s post is about B Corps—companies participating in a certification program that measures their impact on …
Monday Musing: Travel and Tourism

By Elizabeth Merritt

Among the stories I included in Dispatches from the Future of Museums last week was a piece from Quartz Media speculating that the US could be on the verge of “tourism shock.” I’m worried about the economic impact of such a downturn on …
Monday Musing: Social Impact Bonds

By Elizabeth Merritt

Monday musings are my way of sharing “brain blorts”: brief, off-the-cuff thoughts about something I have read recently, both to help clarify my thinking an in the hopes of generating discussion and response. I give myself 15 …
What’s a Good CEO Worth?

By Elizabeth Merritt

This is part three in an ongoing series of essays sharing my thoughts on museum economics, training and compensation. Catch up with parts one (The Museum Sacrifice Measure) and two (What is the Fair Market Value of a Museum Job). I had …
The Museum Sacrifice Measure

By Elizabeth Merritt

How much are you willing to give up to work in a museum? How much didyou give up to work in a museum? I’m not talking about quality of life issues like relocating to a new city, having to explain over and over again, at parties, what a …
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 …
Flower Power: A Story of Organizational Re-Blossoming

By Elizabeth Merritt

A reporter recently asked me to name the biggest barrier standing in the way of museums adapting to the forces shaping the future. My reply was “ourselves—the funding and organizational structures that tether us to outdated models and …
Who is the Development Staff of the Future? Look in the Mirror

By Elizabeth Merritt

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CFM Returns to the Future with TrendsWatch 2013

By Elizabeth Merritt

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

By Elizabeth Merritt

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 …