Financial Trends – Page 2 – American Alliance of Museums

Forecasting Giving to Museums in 2012 Through the Giving USA Data

By Elizabeth Merritt

Museums watch current economic trends with a combination of fear and fascination. Every major source of museum income has been undermined in recent years, including private philanthropy (which accounted for a median of 36 percent of museum …
How Museums are Like Bellybuttons and What That Tells Us

By Elizabeth Merritt

I think it’s time to share my omphalic classification scheme for museums. I started using this metaphor while I was directing AAM’s excellence programs (MAP, Accreditation) to capture my observations about major differences about museums’ …
The Backward ABC’s of Museum Data

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week’s blog post comes from Philip M. Katz, assistant director for research at AAM. This was going to be an essay about the power of museum financial and operating data—robust, reliable numbers that can help museums plan for the …
Museum Ethics in a Gilded Age

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week’s guest post by Erik Ledbetter, principal of Heritage Management Solutions and special adviser to the Forecasting the Future of Museum Ethics project currently underway in partnership with Seton Hall University’s Institute of …
Creating your own Arcadia: Where do you start?

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’m often asked, “What will be the financial model be for museums in the future?” That model may well combine the idealism and mission-driven focus of nonprofits with strategies adapted from the for-profit realm. This week’s guest post is …
The Future of Development: Crowdsourced Funding

By Elizabeth Merritt

When AAM conducted its 2009 Museum Financial Information survey, a quarter of respondents had a capital campaign in progress. We don’t even have stats on how many museums regularly run annual giving campaigns, but it sometimes it …
An Idea for New Income and New Engagement: give your collections to as many people as possible

By Elizabeth Merritt

Got your attention with that headline, didn’t I? Calm down, I’m not talking about deaccessioning. I’m talking replication and teleportation of collections objects. Everyone has their own fav future tech. Phil’s is jetpacks: Mine is …
Flex your Twitter Muscles and Prep to Tackle the Diversity Challenge!

By Elizabeth Merritt

Are you psyched about this Thursday’s Diversity Twebevent? Betty Farrell, Cecilia Garibay and Lisa Sasaki, are primed and ready to tweet with you on Feb. 24, from 2–3 p.m. (ET), exploring how museums are tackling demographic change. Full …
A Visit from the Loan Officer

By Elizabeth Merritt

For a decade or more I’ve had the privilege of co-authoring an annual Xmas poem with Sally Shelton, collections manager of the Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and John Simmons, principal of …