Category Archives: Strategy

AASLH and AAM Align Efforts to Raise Standards and Practices

The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) recently announced they will work together to raise awareness of national museum standards and align their assessment programs in order to streamline application and self-study processes. The agreement outlines ways in which applicants of AAM’s Museum Assessment Program (MAP) will benefit after completing AASLH’s StEPs program, in other words, AASLH and AAM have linked StEPs with MAP. If you understand that sentence, you’ve been working in this field a long time.

What’s this mean for historic sites? Both StEPs and MAP are great programs for improving your organization’s work, but they’re very different from each other. StEPs allows you to Continue reading →

Is Your Historic Site Unsure About Next Steps?

In this uncertain environment, many organizations are unsure about the direction to pursue for their historic site or house museum. Through a self-study process and a personal assessment by an external professional colleague, the Museum Assessment Program (MAP) offers a thoughtful and proven approach to refine your operations, programs, and collections. I’ve participated in several MAPs and clever organizations have used it to confirm a strategy, refine a project, resolve a vexing issue, support a funding proposal, or move to the next level of operations. I can’t think of a better program available, except if you’re accredited by AAM, you have a large professional staff, or if you’re able to afford a large team of experts. Really. To stay sharp, every historic site and house museum in America needs to go through this program every decade and in between, they should be tackling a section of AASLH’s Standards and Excellence Program. Really. If you’re not sure, call the director of the historic sites that participated this year: Montpelier Mansion (Maryland), Old Barracks Museum (New Jersey), Louis Armstrong House (New York), Seward House (New York), Stewart House (Ohio), French Legation Museum (Texas), Poplar Forest (Virginia), and Pabst Mansion (Wisconsin).

To participate, your organization needs to meet some basic requirements (such as be open to the public at least 90 days a year), Continue reading →

Interpretive Planning for Dozens of Sites

Arroyo Seco Parkway National Scenic Byway Interpretive Plan produced by Engaging Places for the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority in May 2012.

If you’re interpreting a group of sites or a heritage area, you might be interested in reviewing an interpretive plan I completed earlier this year for the Arroyo Seco Parkway National Scenic Byway. When the Parkway was completed in 1940, it connected Los Angeles and Pasadena and began southern California’s Freeway Age. It’s also a region that has a dense concentration of museums, historic sites, parks, historic Main Streets, architectural landmarks, and unique businesses, including the Gamble House, Huntington Library, Lummis Home, Heritage Square, and Olvera Street. To bring attention to these cultural riches, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority commissioned me to develop this plan and work with a local stakeholders, build on an inventory of assets developed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and integrate audience research conducted by the Community Land Use and Economic Group and Decision Support Partners.

The planning process followed a traditional approach by collecting content to develop topics and themes; conducting visitor research to identify target audiences; and finally Continue reading →

AAM Unveils New Logo, Name, and Attitude

AAM logos: old and new

Today, the American Association of Museums becomes the American Alliance of Museums, which may appear at first to be merely a cosmetic change ushered in by a marketing consultant, but actually signals some significant changes in attitude. Those of us in the history field often felt like outsiders at AAM, which seemed to be dominated by art museums, our classier and richer cousins. But take look at the new AAM and you may find two major changes that may appeal to history organizations:

1. Accreditation becomes the end Continue reading →

What Sites Can Learn from the Olympics

The summer Olympic games in London are now over and if you were watching, I bet you not only reveled in the athletic competition, but you also contemplated the logistics and expenses. Those of us who work at historic sites don’t experience events like most other people. Sure, we like the music, food, and tours, but we also look at the placement of signs, calculate ratios between attendance and restrooms, check out the store for items we can sell, and mentally map out visitor circulation and note the bottlenecks. Or is that just me?

The Olympics is just another special event, although it’s huge and involves a cast of thousands and decades of planning. The designers and planners of this event are the best of the best, so what can historic sites, at a much smaller scale, learn from their experience? One of the most valuable lessons is that Continue reading →

Put Your Organization to the Rorschach Test

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If you’re finding that your organization is in a rut and you no longer feel as inspired about its work, it might be useful to look at it in a new way by creating a “word cloud” of key documents, such as a strategic plan, mission and vision statements, interpretive themes, or visitor evaluation. A word cloud is a visual presentation of the most frequently used words, sized by frequency. For example, if you use the word “history” ten times more than “preservation” in your strategic plan, “history” shows up much larger than “preservation” in the word cloud. The word cloud allows you to look at your organization from a different perspective: words jump out at you and prompt questions about what’s being emphasized (and what’s not).

As examples, in the slide show above I’ve assembled word clouds from the first few paragraphs of the About section of the websites (which often includes the mission or vision statements) of the following historic sites:

I’ve used word clouds in strategic planning sessions to Continue reading →

Let’s Give SWOT a REST

A SWOT analysis (a listing of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a common exercise in business planning and reached the shores of the non-profit world decades ago. Some of you probably have experienced a SWOT analysis at your site as part of your strategic or long-range planning. The staff and board gathers around a flipchart to list your organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses, and then your external opportunities and threats. Sometimes there’s a bit of confusion over definitions (what’s a threat?) or where an item should be listed (is this a strength or opportunity?). You might feel a bit of competition to mention a particularly incisive opportunity or are sweating because you can’t name a strength (all the good ones have already been mentioned!). Eventually, the list might be prioritized and some items consolidated so it can be typed up and included in the strategic plan as a basis for decision-making.

Despite its popularity, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to give SWOT a rest:

The analysis depends heavily on the people participating and it’ll always be biased in that direction. If you conduct a SWOT exercise with board members who really aren’t involved with the organization, the analysis will probably be superficial and light. Stock the group with lots of educators, the results will lean towards education. There are no surprises here–people talk about what they know. The problem is that the bias is typically not recognized and you wind up building a plan on a foundation that’s skewed or weak.
It’s often long on strengths and even longer on Continue reading →

Failed Organizational Culture at Goldman Sachs Suggests Remedies for Non-Profits

Greg Smith’s public departure from Goldman Sachs after a dozen years is one of the hottest pages of the New York Times today and while I tend to ignore the personnel matters of Wall Street (oh, another tycoon getting/losing/complaining about a bonus that’s more than the value of my house), reading his statement startled me. So many of his concerns about the organization’s culture are shared by me and many of my colleagues in the museum and historic preservation fields:

1. The overriding pursuit of money that’s out of balance with mission or ethics. Smith describes a staff meeting at Goldman Sachs:

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

Gosh, if this bothers someone at a financial investment firm, shouldn’t the lack of discussion about fulfilling mission and vision really bother the board and staff at a non-profit organization? And yet most meetings Continue reading →

Haas-Lilienthal House completes Sustainability Management Plan

Haas-Lilienthal House

The Haas-Lilienthal House in San Francisco has just completed a Sustainability Management Plan, which will help them meet energy and sustainability goals while preserving its character-defining and historically significant features. Through this plan, they’ve established a goal of reaching LEED Gold, however, there’s a “stretch goal” to reach “net zero.” Many people think that historic house museums are unable to meet any “green ratings” without compromising their preservation goals, however, recent achievements by President Lincoln’s Cottage and others show it’s possible. The Haas-Lilienthal House is owned and operated by San Francisco Archiectural Heritage, a city-wide preservation organization, so plans like this not only provide a road map for greening the maintenance procedures and capital building improvements to save money and energy, but advance their position that historic preservation is relevant and historic buildings can perform as well as modern ones.

The plan was developed by Barbara Campagna, FAIA, LEEP AP, a former colleague of mine at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she was actively involved Continue reading →

More Than 300 Museum Supporters on Capitol Hill

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Congress was visited by more than 300 leaders in the museum field on Tuesday for the fourth annual Museums Advocacy Day. The day started with welcoming messages and packets of key issues, and then off we went for meetings with our senators and congressmen. The delegation from Maryland was huge with about two dozen people and met with staff for Senator Cardin and Senator Mikulski, who were very open to our requests to support funding for the Office of Museum Programs of the Institute of Museum and Library Services; including museums among the approved partners for schools in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; and opposing elimination of the tax deductibility of charitable donations. Congressman Chris Van Hollen, who represents my district, was incredibly generous with his time and came out to talk with us between votes in the House chamber.

Meeting with my senators and congressman to talk about the value of museums was a great experience, although it’s unclear how much can be accomplished in this bitter election year. More eye opening were the hundreds of people who were also wandering the halls to advocate for their cause, so we’ve got lots of competition. If we don’t participate, others will step in and happily take our place.

Museums Advocacy Day is coordinated by the American Association of Museums, and anyone is welcome to participate.