How to Attract Patronage with the Museum CMS

Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Rachael Cristine Woody. My name is Bradley, and I will be your moderator for this webinar titled How to Attract Patronage with the Museum CMS.

Before we start, I would like to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions as well as knowledge management and library automation systems. Our brands include ArchivEra, Argus, Presto, and SydneyDigital.

Now I’d like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Rachael Cristine Woody. Rachael is the owner of Relicura and provides services to museums, libraries, and archives. She specializes in museum collections management systems, digitization technology, digital project management, and digital usership. During the course of her career, she has successfully launched multiple digital projects that include advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management systems. She is also a popular guest author for Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog and has provided us with many great webinars that are listed on our website, so please feel free to check those out after today’s session. Take it away, Rachael.

Great. Thank you so much, Bradley. Thank you to Lucidea for hosting us today, and, of course, thank you for attending. So we’re gonna jump right into it. And we’re for today’s webinar, gonna talk about a couple different ways in which the museum collections management system can help the museum attract and further steward patronage.

So first off, we’re gonna talk about how online collections inspire new acquisitions and how the CMS, of course, is a major part of that, the benefits of moving the potential acquisition intake process, into your collections management system or part of.

We’ll then get into how crowdsourced metadata can help drive museum patronage and the benefits of cultivating that crowdsourcing community.

Next, we’ll then talk about expanding museum patronage through loans, sales, and rentals, which for some museums is a a very robust part of their revenue stream and the benefits of further integrating or utilizing your collections management system in those, areas of revenue. And then we’ll talk about the power of adopt an artifact or adopt an art piece style of giving and the benefits of using the collections management system for that type of patronage.

So let’s get into it.

First up, how the online collections inspire new acquisitions, which for us as collection stewards, the collections management system has, like, two main jobs. First job, help us to do the stewardship piece, do the collection management of management of data and the the gathering of it.

And then the second piece is the access piece. And, of course, that is for us the ultimate goal of having the collections be viewable, be used and enjoyed by our community.

And a further layer to that then or the next natural layer is in how these collections online through our collections management system help drive and encourage patronage in general, but specifically help to also then further inspire and engender trust and interest in potentially giving to the museum in form of whether art or artifact sort of donations.

So the collections management system in this case and and our use of it helps to build trust with our community and with these potential donors. It helps us to move those potential donors from browsing our collections in our collections management system to potential intake, workflow.

And in that intake workflow and how we can potentially use the CMS is, utilizing a reference form, but in this case, not for reference and using the concept of forms to help capture donor information, the potential acquisition information.

And if we are open and interested in, proceeding with that particular acquisition, the donor has the opportunity to further supply what would then be object metadata or raw data for us to use and incorporate into that future object’s object record. So really helping to to streamline the process here and utilizing the CMS first to attract and build that trust with potential donor, but then also to leverage as part of a new acquisition workflow.

So benefits of moving the intake process to the CMS or at least kicking it off there in terms of information gathering is that it can be set up in such a way that donors can upload the high quality media they have of that object or art piece. So whether that is, high resolution photography, whether that is a three d image scan, perhaps even audio visual materials of maybe the piece of artwork being made, they can directly upload those as part of the intake process.

Then with the form that the museum creates and has available online, The donor can then enter in that object information and we as the museum folks can control the way the data is entered by offering different structure which can help pipe that data into that future object record in a seamless way as possible.

Of course, we’re also, as museum professionals, going to want to review and perhaps add to that information, but it can make the job much easier if the raw information provided by the donor is already in the appropriate fields and is already structured in an appropriate way according to our standards.

And as part of this form, could further capture what the motivations are or the desires or the goals are of the donor in wishing to present this potential acquisition to the museum. So we can gather information from them that can further inform our processes or our strategies for how the museum may want to go about strategic acquisitions, what community members or potential donors they may want to connect with, and just better understanding the community, and in this case, the the niche community of our potential donors and what their needs are.

A museum spotlight to sort of see this in action is the International African American Museum. And I’ve got links for you at the end of the slide deck, if you are having trouble Googling and getting to their portal. But, their museum collections portal is publicly available as many of ours are.

And there is a specific part of their portal where they can direct donors or where donors can sort of naturally end up where they can view this, initial landing page to understand more about the particular collection and what the museum’s collecting mission is and what sort of artifacts in this case it may be looking for.

And it gives an invitation to add to the collection. So there is the contribute online button at which when the person clicks on it and and you can do this when you check out their website, can click on it and you can see the request form essentially which outlines information to be gathered of the potential, acquisition that the donor is presenting. It can capture some of that basic object information, while still doing a very good job in underscoring the museum, what they do and do not accept and what their process is, offering some proactive messaging and communication to that potential donor that this is by no means a, yes, of course, we’ll accept anything you submit, but this is our process and this is how we will let you know if we are interested. So a very excellent example in action that’s easy for us to access and see and, consider for our own museum and how we may want to model that.

Moving into crowdsourcing. So how crowdsource metadata can help drive museum patronage specifically.

And then to, back up for just a moment, crowdsourcing, of course, is not necessarily a new thing. Ever since museum collections have gone online, I feel like very soon afterward, the concept of crowdsourcing, additional data from our online patrons became like a natural sort of next step or pairing with our collections management systems.

So this is taking an existing concept that has certainly existed for a decade plus and tweaking it and, evaluating it for how it has sort of, at least unintentionally to start with, really helped engender and improve and increase the amount of patronage driven by the act of people participating in crowdsourcing with our collections. So, thinking about, the folks who sort of self select to look at these museum collections and freely offer volunteer their knowledge and time to put together and and, contribute their information to these items.

So when we think about how that drives patronage, it helps in the act turn passive viewership into emotional stewardship. Like the act of inviting these folks to contribute their information and their knowledge helps cultivate that emotional tie. Like, they have participated in the stewardship of our collection as a community and helping to sort of formalize that tie.

It helps to drive membership as well. So as these folks help to self select and enter into this crowdsourcing and contributing data, the statistics of how many of these folks, if they weren’t already museum patrons turning into museum patrons, is quite a high success rate.

So in cultivating that emotional stewardship and that sort of, collective possession of the stewardship of the items really helps to increase and drive the regular museum patronage Even if those folks aren’t even, geographically proximate to the museum, they still feel like they are such a part of the museum community that they do, tend to get memberships even if they can rarely, visit the museum in person.

So benefits of cultivating this crowdsourced community intentionally can can be, very powerful. So helping with that immediate validation of contribution. So as these folks are contributing their knowledge and data, the ability to see that data be incorporated then into the museum’s object records in this case, really helps with that validation and not even needing to be manually triggered on our own part. It’s built in.

Having the higher engagement with collections contents, of course, it’s anytime somebody is interacting with our items helps to increase that collections content, helps to increase the discoverability, and broaden our audience.

This also helps to increase, conversions from the contributors to the members. So one of the the main pieces that comes out of crowdsourcing is that many of those folks, if they aren’t already museum members, they have a very high likelihood of becoming museum members.

And cultivating this crowdsourcing community in general can be very attractive to granting agencies and foundations, especially if those granting agencies and foundations are local, regional, community oriented.

Then with that orientation towards community, if they are seeing you are also actively cultivating your community and essentially the shared community, is very attractive to them and and something that definitely catches their attention.

Museum spotlight, the history of Colorado, and we’ll see them at least twice in this presentation because history of Colorado has been doing some amazing things with their, celebrations over these last couple of years.

This particular project for this example is Portrait of Colorado at one fifty storytelling initiative.

And this is sort of like the next level of crowdsourcing and thinking about folks contributing their own knowledge and content in concert with object records, this is the next level. It is inviting the community to contribute their knowledge and experiences, but in the form of contributing their own stories.

So moving a step further of, like, contributing knowledge in reference to art or object and instead their story being the the artifact or the art piece essentially.

So, checking out history of Colorado’s page and learning more, they’ve got a memory collections section, which is, something that’s been going on, longer and before the history of Colorado one hundred fifty telling. So they have a couple examples of how they have interacted with the community and sort of solicited this very active participation and contribution from their community and essentially crowdsourcing into directly their collections.

Okay. Thinking now about the the third concept here, expanding museum patronage through loans, sales, and rentals. And, museums, I feel like, are are fairly binary in the camp of, like, yes, we for sure do loans, sales, and rentals. It’s a very robust piece of revenue to museums that are like for various reasons, sometimes capacity reasons. We just, we don’t even, touch loans, sales, and rentals. There may be an in between though. If you’re a museum that hasn’t done it in the past it may be something to consider as you think about diversifying revenue streams, and taking a look at the museums who have really embraced using the loan sale rental model as a revenue piece.

So thinking about using the collections management system in this case to help streamline the external loans and then driving media licensing and sales. So potential for the, the the loan piece of it for that artwork or the sale piece of it. And then as appropriate with non accessioned objects, so non unique pieces of our artifacts, thinking about prop rentals as another form of sort of that loans sales rentals piece.

Benefits of using the collections management specifically to help increase revenue in this regard is it helps to magnify visibility. So using the CMS to actively, advertise that, hey, these items are available for loan. For example, I’ve seen museums do it to great effect if there’s like a like for Colorado, there’s a one hundred and fiftieth, anniversary for the state and perhaps there’s a core collection the museum has that it would be happy to help loan to other interested regional museums. So having that present on your CMS is like an available package that people can browse and view and consider for loans, or rentals can help really magnify the visibility of that option.

It can help streamline, the processes you may have in place. So whether that is for loans or rentals, walking people through and again, leveraging like the request forms available in our collections management systems, we can help capture information and help reference objects in this case that may go out on loan or rental as part of the collections management system and as part of that workflow.

So no needing to duplicate all of like the object data, for example.

And it helps to support that, passive income structure. So while the money may not go directly into the collections management system, it certainly helps the process to get to the point where that revenue is earned.

So having that set up, having the CMS help advertise and broaden the visibility of these particular options for loans, sales, or rentals, and then leading that workflow through the collections management system to the point of where you are now supporting a very, healthy and passive income structure.

Here’s our our second history of Colorado option. And this one specifically, I recommend you take a look at the John Fielders Colorado collection.

This particular part of their portal has, of course, the the typical it’s a photography collection and and here’s how you can browse the photography collection.

But it also does another sort of lift of work here that helps with that revenue stream. It has a direct link where you can order prints of the, of the photography collection. In this case, you can order your own prints. So browsing the collections management system, browsing the photographs that are already in there with the objects information and selecting and choosing what, the people are interested in buying.

And it also highlights as a sort of an added benefit is highlighting the donation itself. So sort of tying back to the interest of point number one where the collections management system can help drive, new acquisitions.

This example is highlighting the John Fielder Colorado collection and highlighting it that you can learn more about the donation and more about the process and how the collection came to be, helping to sort of demystify what the acquisition process is like while also driving interest in the collection and driving the potential interest of the, new donors you may not have met yet. So a very interesting and, encouraging example on a couple different fronts that I recommend to check out.

Alright. And for the fourth one and and what is perhaps the most well known one among the museum crowd is the power of adopt an artifact portal or adopt an art piece portal.

And for this, it helps create, in us donating and and adopting and sort of taking on sort of a partial ownership of a particular art piece or object helps us to cultivate that emotional connection. So, again, thinking about crowdsourcing and how people are connecting and contributing and feeling like they have ownership of part of this stewardship piece naturally engenders that emotional connection.

Donors can choose where their donation goes. So as we participate in these doctor work programs, it can be built to where we can not only, we not only have the agency to sort of choose which object or piece we want to support, there can sometimes be different methods of what that support looks like.

Most common tends to be based around the conservation efforts or repair of art or artifacts, but I’ve seen other different types of projects like fundraising for three d imaging of a particular artifact, helping to fundraise for additional research into some mysterious, artifacts or art pieces. So we can really move beyond, conservation and get creative in how other folks may wish to engage and support work around the artwork and artifacts that we all love.

The Adopt A Work program also offers the micro and macro options. So as you put together your Adopt A Works type program, making sure that we’re offering options on like a full scale of things that could be very affordable to things that are perhaps very few can afford. This helps to cultivate a pretty diverse base of patrons in this particular area and helps to encourage more participation.

For some people, contributing five dollars to own five dollars worth of an artwork is right up their alley and very exciting for them. Maybe they want to buy multiple five dollars worth of your artifacts, whereas other folks may want more of the exclusivity or the pride that may go with, I have adopted this one artifact and my contribution has gotten directly to this specific piece of research.

It can really help meet the needs or satisfy the needs of the different kind of types of donors as well as the, financial brackets that they may be working within.

And then finally this particular program can help showcase donation in the object data. So again using our collections management system not just to help showcase and facilitate this adopt a work program, but also being able to validate and honor the donors that have helped adopt to these art pieces can of course be incorporated into our object data and quite easily so with the fields that we have. So multiple ways, in this case in which the collections management system is present and helps to sort of drive and then validate this particular part of patronage.

So the benefits of adoption style giving, is the direct impact giving. Of course, folks are very happy to know exactly what their money is going towards. In research and statistically, is where donor psychology is going is the majority of donors now want to know exactly where their money is going and how it is helping in order to encourage them to give.

There’s the flexibility with that micro to macro options like we talked about. You can attract a broad range while satisfying the needs of those different groups.

There’s that immediate recognition or gratification, whether it’s an you can do an automated trigger or a manual trigger with your collections management system, but very in a timely manner of being able to acknowledge those donors who have adopted those works.

And it can help build the meaningful connection based on interest. So this is another area similar to crowdsourcing where people are self selecting into the things that they’re interested in and care about, which brings with it information for us as the collection stewards in how people are connecting to things, why people are connecting to things, and how can we further support that style of connection to our collections.

An example that I love to talk about all the time is the Heckscher Museum of Art. They regularly have adopt a work program available as part of their collections management system online. They have, the option, as you can see, the available for adoption and adopted tabs. You can even see historically what has previously been up for adoption and sort of track it as I am always tracking it.

In this setup and of course part of the benefit of having it as part of your collections management system is the object information is right there. So, part of the the setup that you can see in the screenshot is you can click into these object records and see all of the typical object information that you would normally see or want to see including the images. There is instructions with how to donate. So in this instance again the collections management system isn’t the point of sale. It’s not receiving the money but it’s giving information on how to facilitate that, especially since these are donations. The museum likely has a very specific process that it needs those donations to go through both for donor care, but also for, tax and responsible financial reasons.

And as part of the program that they have set up, there’s the request feature here. So we’ve talked about the request feature a few times now with the potential acquisition, donation and the potential, facilitating loans or rentals. And so in this case, again, it’s using that form, but in a very different and creative way to capture the donor information about what artwork they may want to adopt and whatever sort of relevant details the museum needs. So excellent example. I’m always talking about it, and it based on their adopted tab, seems to be very popular and working very well for them.

Alright. As promised, here are the links in case googling is failing you with reaching those, particular examples. We have the International African American Museum. That was our first example of the, attraction and taking of information for potential donations.

We have the two history of Colorado examples. So just in general checking out the history of Colorado’s collections management system online, you’ll find lots of great stuff there. But we talked about two things specifically. There was the Museum of Memories collection of which the Colorado one hundred fifty project is the big active project going on currently.

And then we talked about the John Fielder’s Colorado collection, is that photography collection that has many good things going for it, but one of which is driving the, ability to buy prints of the, of the photography collection. And then we just talked about the Hechtner Museum of Art and their adopt to work program, and being able to see the adopted, artworks historically as well as the ones that are currently available.

Alright. So, in conclusion, we covered a few different forms of patronage. First, we talked about the inspiring new acquisitions and the benefits of using the collections management system to drive that form of patronage. We then took a look at crowdsourcing and sort of that next step of, taking the the already really good things happening in this sort of symbiotic relationship of crowdsourcing and how the collections management system supports that and further supports the cultivation of those members into, developing new full museum patrons.

We then took a look at museum patronage through loan sales and rentals and how the collections management system can be used within that workflow process to help them both, advertise the availability of these particular items that could be for for loans or for rentals in certain cases and how the the workflow can help you with minimizing the duplication of entry, especially for that object data.

And then we took a look at the adopted artwork or adopt an artifact, sort of portal setup givings and using the collections management system creatively for that in helping to drive that sort of adoption style workflow and request system.

Before I let you go and talking about collections online, the new book I have out, weaving a digital narrative storytelling with online collections, talks about how we can use our online collections and the collections management system to leverage into some really dynamic online visual storytelling. I had a lot of fun putting together examples and case studies part of this book. So if you’re an examples person, this is definitely the book for you. Lucidea Press, courtesy of Lucidea Press, they are offering free e copies. So please feel free to download your copy.

And with that, I’ll turn it back over to you, Bradley.

Thank you, Rachael, for the wonderful presentation. And to our audience, if you’d like to learn more about our museum collections management system called Argus, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales@lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

If you have any more questions on any of our software or our company, our contact details are listed on the screen. And please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to this series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today. And until next time, thank you.