Museum TrendsWatch 2025: The Next Era of Volunteerism

Each year, the Center for the Future of Museums (under the American Alliance of Museums) publishes the TrendsWatch report. With each report, the Center uses strategic foresight to analyze trends in the museum field. This year’s report theme is Mapping Complexity, which includes three main trends:  

• The Next Era of Volunteerism  
• Stop, Look, Think: How to Manage Digital Vulnerabilities  
• Facing the DEI Backlash  

Additionally, this edition of the report also offers: 

• Short Take: Pulled in All Directions  
• For Your Radar: Managed Retreat and Targeted Universalism  
• Trend Alert: An Artifact from the Future: the 990 of 2035  

The intention of this miniseries is to offer TrendsWatch snapshots to support distillation and application at museums. For our purposes, we’ll cover each major trend addressed in the report with an individual post. Today’s post will focus on Trend #1: The Next Era of Volunteerism. I’ll provide a summary of what the Center presents as the current challenges, how it applies to the museum field, and the Center’s advice for what museums might do. Throughout, I’ll offer analysis, insight, and tie-ins. 

The Challenge

TW begins with explaining that US national volunteerism has historically experienced a natural ebb and flow. However, in more recent history, they observe that there is now a longer-lasting pattern of decline. Among the changes to volunteerism that could be contributing to the decline are: 

• Volunteer roles have become more professionalized with position descriptions, goal setting, and reviews. 
• Some existing volunteer activities (TW mentions stuffing envelopes) have been taken over by technology services. 
• The demographics of potential volunteers indicates that financial affordability is necessary to partake in volunteerism. TW notes this is an issue of equitable access. 
• The intent to volunteer does not necessarily translate into the action of volunteering. 

Self-Imposed Constraints

What TW does not mention is the superficial limitations museums often place on themselves. Specifically, museum programs often don’t include digital or online work as a way for volunteers to contribute. For example, it would be fairly easy to leverage cloud access to museum collections data (via a Collections Management System) for research, data cleanup, label editing, and tour creation. Volunteers no longer have to be hyper-local, and there’s tremendous potential in volunteer offerings of a remote nature. In fact, there are now a whole range of  technical tools and infrastructure that can support remote volunteering.  

When considering the Next Era of Volunteerism, my hope would be that the next era includes lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic—utilizing technology that has demonstrably helped bridge accessibility gaps and can further increase the number of volunteers connected to the museum. This approach can improve equitable access to volunteer opportunities, and I’m not sure why this concept wasn’t included as a possible solution in the TW article. Why must the volunteer role be relegated to in-person and during business hours? It’s my opinion that these arbitrary and self-imposed constraints are a significant contributor to why volunteerism at museums has declined. 

What This Means for Museums

According to TW, COVID and societal shifts have 33% of directors reporting that their museums are unable to find the volunteers they need. TW observes that the volunteer issue has collided with pre-existing issues of a profession with staggeringly low pay, precarious employment, and inequitable access to volunteer opportunities.  

TW notes that volunteers are: 

• An effective connection between the museum and the community. 
• Often financial donors, in addition to their volunteer activities. 
• Also, often board members. 

TW further states that volunteers are both essential for their work as well as for the resources they unlock: trust, knowledge, access, connections, and credibility. While volunteers are not the only way a museum can foster trust, knowledge, access, connections, and credibility, their contributions can be significant. When considering the relationship benefits for volunteers, TW emphasizes that this loss for a museum is also a loss to the community. Volunteering also confers benefits to the volunteer. These benefits were discussed in more detail in a previous TrendsWatch report: Museum TrendsWatch: Livable Communities for Our Elders (June 2022). 

Advice for Staff and Leadership: “Museums Might…”

Here is advice provided by TW for museum leaders and staff to consider:  

• Cultivate an atmosphere that values volunteer work. (This advice is standard regardless of the trend.) 
• Highlight the benefits it provides to volunteers, not just the benefits it provides to the museum. 
• Evaluate (and presumably address) the museum culture for tensions related to age, paid versus unpaid work, and professional standing. 
• Embed the volunteer program into the museum’s strategic and operational plans. 
• Include volunteer representatives in museum planning and decision-making. After all, they are an influential stakeholder. 
• Evaluate institutional needs and its alignment with the current group of volunteers. If there’s a misalignment, make strategic adjustments. 
• Consider the needs and expectations of the volunteers and provide for them. 

For additional information regarding ethical volunteer programs, please see my previously published post: How to Ethically Build Museum Intern and Volunteer Opportunities.  

Envision and Create an Environment in Which Volunteers Can Flourish

Solving the problem of a volunteer deficit is not impossible, and positive change can be effectuated fairly quickly. This is one TW area that is fairly easy to approach and there are a tremendous number of resources available from AAM and other professional organizations. The place to start is by identifying the barriers and challenges at your museum. From there, you can work with your team and the community to build an improved, flexible, and accessible program where volunteers and the museum can flourish.  

Additional Reading 

For additional reading regarding volunteer programs, please see these published posts on Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog.  

• How to Best Leverage Museum Volunteers (2018) 
• 5 Steps to Museum Volunteer Project Success (2019) 
• Museum Digital Project Roles for Staff, Volunteers, and Interns (July 2022) 
• Strategies to Effectively Work with Museum Staff, Interns, and Volunteers (2022)