A Practical Guide to Fundraising for Small Museums: Maximizing the Marketing-Development Connection turns the traditional development program on its ears, as it starts with the needs of donors rather than the needs of the organization. Just like marketing for other goods and services, museums must begin with aligning their products with their audiences. Then they can develop fund strategies that keep their audiences in mind. While the book covers traditional strategies (such as membership and events), it approaches them from a new point of view and provides tips and sample ideas all along the way for small and mid-sized museums to implement a successful development plan. Complete with sample forms, this book is a must-have for every museum development professional, volunteer, and student who wants to succeed.

It's time for the small nonprofit to shine. Finding the right tools and strategies for your nonprofit is the ultimate goal of The Essential Fundraising Handbook. Most fundraising books focus on nonprofits with large budgets, leaving smaller nonprofits to figure out what is relevant for their goals. That is the inspiration behind The Essential Fundraising Handbook for Small Nonprofits. Currently, there are no fundraising books that comprehensively deal with the specific challenges of running a nonprofit on a small budget. Small nonprofits have a unique set of challenges and require a special kind of creativity when fundraising. The Essential Fundraising Handbook focuses on these challenges in a powerful way. Written by a panel of consultants and experts with over 112 combined years of experience, this book walks nonprofit leaders and staff through the techniques and strategies that have guided some of the most successful nonprofits (large and small). Using these successful principles, readers will get detailed case studies, worksheets, and strategies for almost every type of fundraising activity including: * Grant writing * Board development * Donor engagement * Communications * Auctions * Major gifts * And much more! No matter your fundraising goal, The Essential Fundraising Handbook for Small Nonprofits offers advice and insight that anyone involved with fundraising can use in one volume. It's time for your fundraising goals to reach your dreams.

This brief manual is designed specifically for people running the thousands of small museums and historic sites across the U.S. and Canada. These smaller institutions tend to lack funding and professional staff, so this book is meant to help the busy administrators perform their job of fundraising better and more efficiently.

Managing previously unmanaged collections can be challenging. The process of securing the collection and making it accessible needs the mindset of a collections manager as well as the one of a project manager. The target audience are museum professionals with a basic training in collections care that are confronted with collections that are either large in numbers (1000+ artifacts) or stored confusingly, or both. The book is a step-by-step guide how to approach this situation, assuming that there's nothing to start with but a collection that has to be accessioned and the person who is assigned to do it. It is about how to bring order into the chaos, to define what is needed in terms of time, money, staff and material, to spot facility issues and potential dangers, and to use the power of networking to solve an otherwise unsolvable task. Many chapters conclude with “logical exits,” the points at which the collection in a condition that allows you to leave it for the next curator to take over. A common issue is that time frames are often so tight that the target of having the collection in good shape at the end of a contract or at a fixed date can’t be met. Another common scenario may be that other projects become more important and you have to stop working on the collection, which might sound familiar to many directors of small museums. “Logical exits” are the points you can do this without risking that everything you’ve done so far or since the last “logical exit” was a waste of time. For contractors those “logical exits” might serve as orientation points when negotiating the work that has to be done on the collection.

A characteristic of all sustainable museums is long-term financial stability. In this book, we explore how to transparently and accurately account for the financial resources you have and then provide a template for fundraising more dollars to sustain your small museum. We address grant applications and legal issues as they pertain to financial management, human resources, and other topics in the Toolkit.

In this how-to guide, practitioners at cultural heritage venues share their experiences in building sustainable relationships with their geographic and demographic communities. The volume includes practical discussions of activity types that museums can employ to build relationships with their communities including education, advocacy, co-creative, while serving as a community asset and resource. Case studies include direct application of successes and lessons learned with an emphasis on small to medium sized institutions with limited staff and budgets. Highlights include: Thematic discussions on topics such as building an advocacy network between the museum and community; developing cultural heritage institutions as critical and essential components of educational systems; museum response to community expressed needs through a co-creative approach; the varied means for developing community members as cultural heritage stakeholders; and positioning the cultural heritage institution as an integral community asset. Twenty case studies directly apply the thematic discussions in small to medium-sized museum contexts. Extensive list of resources including digital links to forms, workbooks, and guides produced in the case studies. A list of national organizations and an extensive bibliography on community museum engagement. Specifically addressed to smaller institutions with limited budgets and limited or no full-time staff, the volume includes cost-effective projects that can be completed for $1,500 or less.

Are your collections up for grabs? Does the spouse of one of your trustees have too much to say about developing the exhibition schedule? How much is too much public participation? Where does a curator’s authority begin and end? With money increasingly difficult to raise, is a museum more likely to accede to potential funders’ demands even when those demands might compromise the museum’s integrity? When a museum is struggling with debilitating debt, should the sale of selected items from its collections and the use of the resulting proceeds bring the museum into a more stable financial position? When a museum attempts to build its attendance and attract local visitors by crowdsourcing exhibitions, is it undermining its integrity? Ethical questions about museum activities are legion, yet they are usually only discussed when they become headlines in newspapers. Museum staff respond to such problems under pressure, often unable to take the time required to think through the sensitive and complex issues involved. Grounded in a series of case studies, A Practical Guide to Museum Ethics confronts types of ethical dilemmas museums face and explores attempts to resolve them in chapters dealing with accessibility, disability, and diversity; collections; conflict of interest; governance; management; deaccessioning; and accountability and transparency. Suitable for classroom use as well as a professional reference, here is a comprehensive, practical guide for dealing with ethical issues in museums.