Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Writing my masters thesis for Gothenburg University’s International Museum Studies program while also working four days a week as the Director of Community Programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History this spring was certainly a challenge but also an incredible opportunity.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. We have an incredible group of people working together at the MAH right now.

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Gretchen Jennings convened a group of bloggers and colleagues online to develop a statement about museums'' responsibilities and opportunities in response to the events in Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island. Museums are a part of this educational and cultural network. Where do museums fit in? Here is our statement.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 6, 2013

I write this piece in good faith about the organizations I know best: museums. The vast majority of American museums are institutions of white privilege. They tell histories of white male conquest. I never saw comparable adjectives used in the European art labels at the museum.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 27, 2012

A year ago, I wrote a post speculating about whether events (institutionally-produced programs) might be a primary driver for people to attend museums, with exhibitions being secondary. Many museums, big and small, thrive on events. At our museum, about 68% of casual visitors (non-school tours) attended through events this year.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. Many people would look at the world''s oldest mechanized silk mill and say that the core content of the museum is silk.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Neon CRM

JUNE 16, 2023

Making fundraising more efficient: Sending and tracking thousands of emails to a broad group of possible donors isn’t the most efficient way to manage your campaigns. Finally, you have her son Tim, who is 25 years old and works as a curator at a museum. You can segment by: 1. It builds on what you know.

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Database Guide Nonprofit Gift 52

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. Despite its long history, few researchers studied the use and impact of citizen science until the 1980s. Most of my work involves museums, but these categories can be useful in any project that involves user participation.

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

SEPTEMBER 9, 2012

They are active in our communities, in our schools, and have valuable knowledge and experience that our nation’s elected officials could learn from and be inspired by, and yet very few U.S. Crisis Group :: @ CrisisGroup. National Museum of American History :: @ AMHistoryMuseum. DoSomething.org :: @ DoSomething.

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Twitter United States Afghanistan Iraq 246

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This morning, I checked in on the Pocket Museums on our museum's ground floor. After I took down all the "kick me" and "kick it" post-its covering the Pocket Museum title label in the men's room, I realized that this is the perfect example of an A-to-B test for gendered response to a participatory museum experience.

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

One of the greatest gifts of my babymoon is the opportunity to share the Museum 2.0 First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

M+R

FEBRUARY 5, 2021

First, your active mid-level donors, who you want to retain and upgrade. These two groups are important, but you already know how to find them, so let’s set them aside for a bit and focus on the third group: prospective mid-level donors. This also features a link to their private Facebook group. .

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America Digital Audience Channel 105

Museum 2.0

JUNE 24, 2010

Last week, I visited the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. I've long admired this museum for its all-encompassing commitment to community co-creation , and the visit was a kind of pilgrimage to their new site (opened in 2008). I'm always a bit nervous when I visit a museum I love from afar. What if it isn't what I expected?

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Museum Participatory Model Seattle 51

Nonprofit Tech for Good

AUGUST 24, 2011

Nonprofits can use Dipity to create timelines that highlight their organizational history, current events, and special campaigns. A free, open-source software program that enables users to send group text messages from computers or mobile phones. You can either manage your group online or on your mobile phone.

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Fun Resource Audio Stats 274

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 6, 2014

MuseumCamp is an annual professional development event at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in which teams of diverse, creative people work on quick and dirty projects on a big theme. The JerBears group used "passing of joints" as an indicator of tribal affinity at a Grateful Dead tribute concert. Taking photos.

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Bloomerang

APRIL 12, 2022

When my sister first started working with a nonprofit museum, she had a lot to learn about the fundraising process for the organization. The museum had notes saved in their donor management software about the seating preferences for their major donors and that particular donor preferred their regular seat toward the front.

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Software Management Donor Guide 102

Museum 2.0

MAY 6, 2016

Five years ago, I left the consulting world to take the helm at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) at a time of crisis and change. We have spent the past three years planning and raising money for a project to build a creative town square for our city on the front porch of the museum.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 17, 2012

When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information. The museum gets better the more people use it.

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 13, 2011

Rather than just doing an activity, visitors should be able to contribute in a way that provides a valuable outcome for the institution and the wider museum audience. This week, I saw a great example at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum that blew me away with its power and simplicity. The best participatory projects are useful.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 15, 2014

This week, my colleague Emily Hope Dobkin has a beautiful guest post on the Incluseum blog about the Subjects to Change teen program that Emily runs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Subjects to Change is an unusual museum program in that it explicitly focuses on empowering teens as community leaders.

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2016

When we say we want our museum to be "audience-centered," what do we mean? My career first got moving at a brilliant example of the customer-centered museum: the International Spy Museum. Many of my favorite museums, libraries, and zoos are customer-centered places. They care about visitor comfort.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2013

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to give one of the closing talks at the Theater Communications Group annual conference in Dallas. TCG is the industry association for non-profit theaters, the way AAM is for museums. When I came to the museum in May of 2011, we were on the brink of closure financially. They looked junky.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 8, 2015

Whether you are a nonprofit leader with a track record of using technology to improve outcomes, or a for-profit tech leader with a history of commitment to social justice organizations, we want to see a commitment to both sides. As one of our partners from an LGBT group in Uganda noted last year, “If it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen.”

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Technology Literacy Social Uganda 100

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 7, 2017

I first read about Story House Belvédère on Jasper Visser’s excellent blog, The Museum of the Future. On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city. The place surpassed them.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 26, 2017

Throughout history, philanthropy plays a very important role because it directly impacts our wellbeing. One of them was the curator of the world largest archaeological museum, Grand Egyptian Museum. She came up to me and said she was very impressed by the history of American philanthropy and the AFP professionalism.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 17, 2017

Dear Museum 2.0 friends, I want to share two great opportunities to get involved at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in 2017. Each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History hosts MuseumCamp , a professional development experience that is part retreat, part unconference, part adult summer camp.

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Job Museum Childhood Arts 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

Earlier this fall, I read this headline: "Stanford study: Participation in a cultural activity may reduce prejudice." I eagerly read about a new social psychology research study in which whites, Asians, and Latinos engaged in a simple collaborative activity--making a music video together. I wanted to know more.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

I spent last week in the glorious country of Taiwan, hiking, eating, and working with museum professionals and graduate students at a conference hosted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. It's not topic-specific; I've done these exercises with art, history, science, and children's museums to useful effect.

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 20, 2009

I'm working on a section of my book about sharing social objects and am writing about the most common way that visitors share their object experiences in museums: through photographs. Revenue Streams: Museums want to maintain control of sales of "officially sanctioned" images of objects via catalogues and postcards.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Last week I was honored to be a counselor at Museum Camp , an annual professional development event hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Each year they bring together diverse, passionate people for a sleep-away camp for adults where they learn together through active, creative workshops and activities.

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Causes Change Museum Social 50

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Dear friends, We're about a month from the deadline to apply for MuseumCamp 2017 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Last year Camp welcomed academics, museum folk, librarians, poets, artists, bike advocates, engineers, and one American Ninja Warrior. Sleep in a museum. Check out past projects here.)

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Childhood Museum Artist History 26

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 3, 2012

But Vi doesn't work in a science museum. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, who are well known in museums for their excellent Smarthistory website and podcasts. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker's content about art history is social and dialogue-based in format. the way the best museums do.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" We just started to try to live up to that vision, partnership by partnership, activity by activity.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Have Fun - Do Good

JULY 9, 2008

." - Seasons Fund for Social Transformation Lately I've noticed a small, but steady stream of mentions about the connection between spirituality, religion, and activism. In May 2008, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that six groups (Fetzer Institute, Ford Foundation, Hidden Leaf Foundation, Jewish Funds for Justice, W.K.

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Activities Active Activism Conservancy 41

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Me with a friend As I keep saying, I’ve been to a few museums of late. In reflecting on the sample, I’ve made some broad reflections on museum workers and visitors. Our visitors often see museums as a genre, not unlike hospitals or libraries. But, while adjacent, museums differ from formal classrooms in numerous ways.

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