How to Identify Potential Museum CMS Projects for Funding

Providing access to museum collections—and all the work required in order to facilitate access—can be a time-intensive and expensive endeavor.

Present-day museum Collections Management Systems (CMS) have evolved to the point where many elements of our job as collection stewards are easier. However, in order to have a strong CMS tool, there must be comprehensive object records. In other words, we still need to gather and create the data to go with each item when it’s cataloged in the CMS. This takes time and expertise, two resource items that are stretched thin at many institutions. In addition to supporting collections care and management, the CMS is a major engine for providing collections access to the external community. Therefore, it’s no surprise we’re seeing an increase in the number of grants that will now cover museum CMS work with access as the goal.

Where to Begin?

As this is a newer area in grant application work, it can be difficult to conceptualize how daily work with a CMS could be temporarily supported via a grant award. There’s an important distinction here: What work in the CMS can be carved out and thought of as a discrete project? This approach is the opposite of asking funders to pay toward daily operational costs—something many granting agencies and foundations frown upon.

The following aids will help you to identify CMS projects that are suitable and attractive for funding:

• Give the People What They Want
• A Wow Factor
• The Perpetual To-Do List
• Requires Tremendous Resources

Give the People What They Want

A simple place to begin is reviewing past records of items requests, research appointments, and other demand-driven data to help identify items your stakeholders want. High use and high demand items can be leveraged to the max by ensuring they have robust object records in the CMS. Robust meaning each record has enhanced detail, tags, related items, etc.

A Wow Factor

Next up are the projects that could provide a “wow factor”. Once the data is solid in the CMS, it can be further leveraged for additional outputs such as a digital exhibit, educational curriculum, a research symposium, a feature in museum communications and outreach, etc. While data enhancement can seem dull, it’s absolutely required in order to meet user expectations with these (perhaps more exciting) “products”. To kick start your creativity think of ways you can encourage the user discovery process, how you can better deliver assets, or how you can improve upon how users engage with the online CMS material.

The Perpetual To-Do List

While fulfilling an item on your to-do list may seem mundane, it’s the beneficial impact on your capacity and the improvement in collections access that makes it compelling. There never seems to be enough time in the day to achieve everything on the to-do list, so carving out an item that you just never get to can be framed as a temporary aid in capacity while also improving collections care, management, and access.

Requires Tremendous Resources

Finally, there’s the consideration of projects that aren’t possible without access to better tools and personnel. These are often high-priced projects that require a cash infusion to acquire advanced digitization technology, implementing a new CMS or Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), or personnel to help with a heavy lift of intensive data creation or remediation.

Conclusion

On its surface, a museum CMS project can seem boring. And when we perceive things as boring, it can be difficult to hype them up to the level required when asking for money. If you’re not excited about it, then neither are the funders. When thinking through your strategy, acknowledge the expected work to be done, but be sure to speak equally about how it meets demand, offers a wow factor, makes your job easier, or requires a one-time investment to achieve what would otherwise be impossible.

Additional Grant Funding Resources

• A Survivor’s Guide to Museum Grant Writing: https://lucidea.com/grant-writing-ebook/
• Webinar Suite: https://lucidea.com/project_category/rachael-woody-webinars/
• Lucidea Grants Directory: https://lucidea.com/grants-directory/
• Lucidea Grants Workbook & Templates: https://lucidea.com/grants-directory/grants-workbook-and-templates/

Additional Reading

• How to Construct a Fundable Museum Digital Project
• How to Win Museum Grant Funding for “Boring” Projects
• Top 4 Funding Ideas for Museums