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 Arts Dallas History 53

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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Museum Photo Policy Open 54

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

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 104

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

I like to ask myself this question periodically, challenging myself to find substantive ways for visitors to contribute to our museum. We actively seek participation and develop structured opportunities for visitors to collaborate with us. Last month, a couple came in and asked if they could stage a pop up tea ceremony at the museum.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

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 Artist Remix Professional 47

Bloomerang

OCTOBER 20, 2021

The donors who are most active and engaged with your organization are your best major donor prospects. . Are you asking them to contribute to something specific that they have already indicated interest in, like the Sanderson Sisters Museum? How does that relate to fundraising? If so, you’re ready to make the ask! .

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Gift Teach Fundraising Donor 136

Museum 2.0

MAY 31, 2017

Excited to open. This is the eleventh in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History ( MAH )'s development of Abbott Square , a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz. Twelve days ago, we started the two-week countdown to opening Abbott Square. but not quite yet. He said April 15.

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Open Brain Press Museum 37

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2017

The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History keeps growing and experimenting in our quest to build a stronger, more connected community. We're expanding beyond our walls this summer with the opening of Abbott Square. With Abbott Square opening, the whole idea of what the MAH "is" is evolving.

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Work Artist Museum Press 37

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

I feel strongly that there are huge issues with racial and ethnic diversity in museums and arts organizations that deserve a million more posts. One was a conference on pushing our practice in art museums. In library- and museum-land, the participants were 80-90% women. I don't know if gender diversity deserves more posts.

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Arts Problem Open Museum 54

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. The exhibits are exciting.

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Museum Participatory Model Seattle 51

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 24, 2016

Nina Simon, a long time colleague and author of the Museum 2.0 blog and executive director, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History , told me about this amazing and fun co-created card game to help you think about self-care activities called the The Space Deck. How have you made them a habit or regular part of your life?

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Life Professional Create Work 50

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 Audience Music Arts 20

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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Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

NetWits

JUNE 6, 2011

Personalized offers – In addition to content specific to your activities, we could even provide specific offers–such as discounted event tickets to everyone who visited the event registration form, but didn’t register, or a store discount to your most active web visitors.

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Websites Offline Doc Newsletter 165

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 Difference Participatory History 29

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. Several groups created projects that were somewhere between engagement activity and research activity. How do you measure that?

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Experiment Impact Social Museum 52

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 Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2016

Museum technology nerds: this post is for you. I've been thinking recently about distributed content experiences--ways for people to interact with museum content (art, history, science, etc.) as they make their way through the world outside the museum. At the museum? but none of them are great. Who's tackling them?

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Museum Experiment Digital Podcast 20

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. Museum of Me :: intel.com/museumofme. FrontlineSMS :: frontlinesms.com.

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Fun Resource Audio Stats 274

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

They diversified the voice of immigration in the exhibition and encouraged people to share their own histories verbally. People could take the pastports home or hang them, open to a preferred page, on a clothesline. We created a simple wheel with open-ended questions about identity and place, setting it in a lounge area.

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Participatory Museum History Arts 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

For the past two years, I''ve been working on a project to activate the concrete space adjacent to our museum as a vibrant, community plaza. We are hiring a temporary contract curator to activate the plaza this summer with 25+ cultural events. How do you know who you need before you open?

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2013

TCG is the industry association for non-profit theaters, the way AAM is for museums. Given TCG''s multi-year Audience (R)evolution initiative, I took the opportunity to write a new talk about what revolution has looked like at our small museum in Santa Cruz. We heard again and again that the museum was cold and uncomfortable.

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Museum Learning History Arts 55

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

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). A month before MuseumCamp, the MAH is opening a new exhibition, Lost Childhoods , co-developed with foster youth, youth advocates, and artists in our community. Sleep in a museum.

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Childhood Museum Artist History 26

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

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

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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Storytelling Story Photography Museum 39

Museum 2.0

MAY 10, 2011

It's my second week as the Executive Director at The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA, and boy is my everything tired. Film festival openings. Yes, I feel that museum workers should be paid and paid well for their efforts. Ever wanted to build a museum website from scratch? This one is wide open.

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Museum History Participatory Arts 53

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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Children Philanthropy Japan China 78

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creativity Lounge on the third floor of our museum. It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out. Lisa was thrilled that her work was on display at the museum.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Ze was really hands-on with everyone, giving hugs, taking photos, jumping in to do activities with participants. The activities had a really low barrier to entry.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

Everyaction

JULY 16, 2018

For social services organizations such as food banks, shelters, and community centers, managing data well is a critical part of keeping their doors open to members of the community in need of their services.

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Database Service Effective Organization 40

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

Our county board of supervisors had brought their official meeting to the museum. It felt like something opened up, right in that room, between the flag and the tissues and the microphones. In it, I argued that museums could give up control of the visitor experience while still maintaining (a new kind of) power.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2012

But we've just compiled all our attendance data for the past year at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (our fiscal year ends on June 30), and several people have written to me asking for the numbers behind our turnaround. actively sought out community needs to respond to. design new programs with a focus on history.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

How do you help visitors know what they can and cannot do in your museum? Most museums have this figured out: they have signs, they have guards, they have cases over the objects. And this works pretty well in science museums, where designers talk about "hardening" exhibits to withstand the more aggressive touchers among us.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

JUNE 8, 2010

This guest post was written by Rebecca Lawrence, Museum Educator, Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in Pennsylvania. You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 The Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center (SLHC) is a small museum located in Pennsburg, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

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Place Museum Discussion Pennsylvania 27