In two years, museums have moved from assuming growth was good to accepting cuts as inevitable. After years of being told what to do, they now find that government is offering little guidance – at least in England.
Here, the shift from the top-down bossiness of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to the bottom-up encouragement of Arts Council England combines with a minister for culture who offers little sense of direction.
For this article, the second of two on the state of UK museums, I spoke to a range of people about how, in the new climate, they are changing the way their museum operates. I found that successful directors are focusing their work.
They also have a sense of humility: they recognise they don’t have all the answers themselves and are working with external organisations, groups and individuals. The best directors also work inclusively within their organisations, listening to the full range of paid staff and volunteers.
About three years ago, Sue Hayward, heritage manager for Bournemouth Borough Council, spotted the coming crisis. The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum’s Renaissance funding was under threat and public-sector cuts looked likely.
“We were determined to take the initiative and not go into victim mode,” says Hayward, who spent two years (and £150,000) working with a range of people to produce a business transformation strategy.
This was “a systematic review of everything from energy efficiency through to front-of-house, income generation, conservation-management planning, audience development – everything”.
She says that previously there wasn’t a strategic vision for the service. “That meant we could only be reactive – we responded to Renaissance priorities and did some fantastic work, but we ended up with two business plans: the Renaissance operational plan and the Bournemouth Borough Council plan.”
Now the museum has detailed plans and five clear priorities: reduced dependence on local taxation; focus on Victorian and Edwardian collections; culture change within the museum; community-focused learning and engagement; and reconfiguring the building.
Hayward says it has been about repositioning the service within the council and the community. Much of the change would have happened anyway, but the pressure of cuts means change will be “more of a revolution than an evolution”.
Curator Alison Pattison knows where Godalming Museum is going, but has to be flexible about the route to follow. “In a small museum you’re dependent on project funding; you have to go with the zeitgeist,” she says.
“It’s like sailing a sailing boat instead of driving a powerboat. You know where you want to go, but you just have to go with the wind that you’ve got.”
Like many museums, Godalming’s direction of travel is increasingly towards its community. Pattison says museums traditionally have been places visitors have come to for answers.
“Perhaps there’s a recognition that museums can’t have all the answers,” Pattison says. “In the 1950s you could have come to the curator here and he would have given you a very knowledgeable answer about archaeology, about medieval documents…
"Whereas, if you come to me I tend to pass you on to someone else for really subject-specific knowledge. I suppose I’ve become more of an administrator, but also because we’re valuing the knowledge that’s in the community more.”
Pattison says that events at her museum, for example, are more about enabling a community event to happen, rather than just conveying knowledge to people.
Godalming Museum’s strong links within its community are manifested in its 80 regular volunteers. And museums of all types are increasing their use of volunteers to better connect with their communities.
The Russell-Cotes now has about 40, with a waiting list as a result of advertising its volunteer opportunities. In the past few years, York Museums Trust has gone from a handful of volunteers to about 200, with a full-time volunteer coordinator supporting them.
York Museums Trust chief executive Janet Barnes says her organisation is also increasing its use of subject-specialist “fellows” who, paid or unpaid, come and work with the museum for a limited time and hone in on aspects of the collection that the service needs to know more about.
The outcome will be an exhibition or a display. The danger is of a wider pattern of museums replacing permanent full-time staff with casually paid or self-employed people. This can save money, increase flexibility and make it easier to focus activity, but with the risk of losing knowledge, experience and contacts.
Many people will see dramatic changes in their employment patterns if the number of full-time jobs continues to fall and the museum workforce becomes more like that in arts and media: recent figures show that a mere 4% of the cultural heritage workforce (including museums) was self-employed, compared with about 20% in publishing and 50% in television production.
One example of changing working practices comes from the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket (where staff numbers are actually increasing). There, someone works in three different capacities at the organisation: as a part-time paid museum assistant; a volunteer woodsman; and a self-employed charcoal burner.
The better a museum’s connections – to organisations, to communities – the more effective and more sustainable it is likely to be. Even the largest museums recognise the benefits of working with others.
For Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland (NMS), one of the reasons for working in partnership with other museums is to do more than it could do on its own.
“We’re a substantial museum organisation but covering a huge range of areas,” says Rintoul. “For example, in our decorative and applied arts we don’t have the strength and depth of the V&A. It’s about recognising our limitations… We’re becoming much more partnership-focused.
Identifying who we can work with has been given a heightened priority because of resource constraints.” One response to “resource constraints” has been to change the parameters for environmental control to save energy.
Hayward has turned off the Russell-Cotes’s air conditioning. “It never worked, it was never going to work and it was costing us a shed-load of money,” she says.
As well as spending less money, many museums hope to generate more of it. Carole Souter, chief executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund, sees the challenge as: “How do we get the best in terms of commercial income without doing violence to what we are here for?”
At York, Barnes agrees that being commercially minded is fine “as long as you remember your core values and why you’re there”.
NMS’s recently reopened main site in Edinburgh has four shops and three catering outlets aimed at different markets. It has increased its capacity for corporate hospitality and can now host dinners for 850 people. With more space, the museum wants “higher net revenue” from its temporary exhibitions.
Rintoul has also found that simple things, such as mak- ing better use of donation boxes, can increase income.
He says that the national museum was already looking at ways to generate more revenue, but this is now happening more widely and with greater focus because of budget cuts. Despite the emphasis on revenue, the museum still has free exhibitions and offers free events, such as lunchtime concerts.
In general, the directors that I spoke to are pursuing a quiet, gentle commercialism rather than trying to screw every penny they can from their visitors. Different museums have widely differing opportunities for income generation.
University College London Museums and Collections benefits from a commercial partnership with a 3D scanning company and from working with its parent university’s international campuses.
Russell-Cotes has a commercial partnership to sell images of its popular collection online. It is also experimenting with admission charges during the peak tourist season – and every member of staff’s job description includes income generation.
The Museum of East Anglian Life already generates most of its own income. About a quarter comes from local authorities, while visitors pay for admission. But the museum’s director, Tony Butler, says it is often more effective to put energy into “well-crafted fundraising bids for interesting work” than trying to get significantly more income from visitors.
Partnership working is increasingly popular. It can generate income, create new opportunities, improve quality and bring efficiencies. But partnerships aren’t automatically good. They can be extremely time consuming, or can fail.
Consultant Gaby Porter warns against “top-down, hierarchical, policy-driven partnerships” and advises that collaboration needs to be more about doing things on the ground, working with groups and organisations to ask: “How can we work together to improve the service?”
To get a new focus, museum staff need to take the time to stand back, to listen to new voices from inside and outside the organisation, and to think about what they could do differently. But Porter says: “Everyone is so ridiculously busy with the wrong things – reactive and transactional – when they know there’s much bigger things they need to attend to but they can’t find the time to do that.”
Porter praises the Museums Association’s Smarter Museums programme: “It gave people space at work for high quality thinking and working with others to create new approaches and new possibilities – we need much more of that.”
Click here for the MA's Culture Change report on working innovatively with shrinking resources
“Growing in influence, content, ambition. Better displays and better quality”
Janet Barnes, chief executive, York Museums Trust
“As many people as possible knowing about heritage and caring about it”
Carole Souter, chief executive, Heritage Lottery Fund
“Still here in 100 years, still doing a good job, still building relationships; not dusty and static. Don’t create new galleries with soon-to-be-obsolete equipment we can’t maintain”
Alison Pattison, curator, Godalming Museum
“Being relevant, being innovative, being connected, and being flexible enough to research and experiment and to measure success in a variety of ways”
Tony Butler, director, Museum of East Anglian Life
“Active disposal as well as active acquisition... Taking a broader view of environmental control”
Sally MacDonald, director of museums and collections, University College London
“Museums are more sensitive and skilful in working with audiences and much more knowledgeable about their communities. [But] how much are museums actually opening up to different perspectives and different ways of working?
Are collections records open to user-generated content? How far are we willing for people to have equality with us in our venues and our thinking? It’s a really, really hard journey that has a huge amount of uncertainty”
Gaby Porter, consultant
“Be prepared to accept that there are parts of some collections where the community will have more knowledge than the museum. Co-production needs much careful thought… valuing ‘traditional’ knowledge and learning, but also bringing in other perspectives.
"It’s important not to give the impression that anybody can come in and say anything and it all has an equal status”
Carole Souter, chief executive, Heritage Lottery Fund
Here, the shift from the top-down bossiness of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to the bottom-up encouragement of Arts Council England combines with a minister for culture who offers little sense of direction.
For this article, the second of two on the state of UK museums, I spoke to a range of people about how, in the new climate, they are changing the way their museum operates. I found that successful directors are focusing their work.
They also have a sense of humility: they recognise they don’t have all the answers themselves and are working with external organisations, groups and individuals. The best directors also work inclusively within their organisations, listening to the full range of paid staff and volunteers.
About three years ago, Sue Hayward, heritage manager for Bournemouth Borough Council, spotted the coming crisis. The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum’s Renaissance funding was under threat and public-sector cuts looked likely.
“We were determined to take the initiative and not go into victim mode,” says Hayward, who spent two years (and £150,000) working with a range of people to produce a business transformation strategy.
This was “a systematic review of everything from energy efficiency through to front-of-house, income generation, conservation-management planning, audience development – everything”.
She says that previously there wasn’t a strategic vision for the service. “That meant we could only be reactive – we responded to Renaissance priorities and did some fantastic work, but we ended up with two business plans: the Renaissance operational plan and the Bournemouth Borough Council plan.”
Now the museum has detailed plans and five clear priorities: reduced dependence on local taxation; focus on Victorian and Edwardian collections; culture change within the museum; community-focused learning and engagement; and reconfiguring the building.
Hayward says it has been about repositioning the service within the council and the community. Much of the change would have happened anyway, but the pressure of cuts means change will be “more of a revolution than an evolution”.
Curator Alison Pattison knows where Godalming Museum is going, but has to be flexible about the route to follow. “In a small museum you’re dependent on project funding; you have to go with the zeitgeist,” she says.
“It’s like sailing a sailing boat instead of driving a powerboat. You know where you want to go, but you just have to go with the wind that you’ve got.”
Like many museums, Godalming’s direction of travel is increasingly towards its community. Pattison says museums traditionally have been places visitors have come to for answers.
“Perhaps there’s a recognition that museums can’t have all the answers,” Pattison says. “In the 1950s you could have come to the curator here and he would have given you a very knowledgeable answer about archaeology, about medieval documents…
"Whereas, if you come to me I tend to pass you on to someone else for really subject-specific knowledge. I suppose I’ve become more of an administrator, but also because we’re valuing the knowledge that’s in the community more.”
Pattison says that events at her museum, for example, are more about enabling a community event to happen, rather than just conveying knowledge to people.
Godalming Museum’s strong links within its community are manifested in its 80 regular volunteers. And museums of all types are increasing their use of volunteers to better connect with their communities.
The Russell-Cotes now has about 40, with a waiting list as a result of advertising its volunteer opportunities. In the past few years, York Museums Trust has gone from a handful of volunteers to about 200, with a full-time volunteer coordinator supporting them.
York Museums Trust chief executive Janet Barnes says her organisation is also increasing its use of subject-specialist “fellows” who, paid or unpaid, come and work with the museum for a limited time and hone in on aspects of the collection that the service needs to know more about.
The outcome will be an exhibition or a display. The danger is of a wider pattern of museums replacing permanent full-time staff with casually paid or self-employed people. This can save money, increase flexibility and make it easier to focus activity, but with the risk of losing knowledge, experience and contacts.
Many people will see dramatic changes in their employment patterns if the number of full-time jobs continues to fall and the museum workforce becomes more like that in arts and media: recent figures show that a mere 4% of the cultural heritage workforce (including museums) was self-employed, compared with about 20% in publishing and 50% in television production.
One example of changing working practices comes from the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket (where staff numbers are actually increasing). There, someone works in three different capacities at the organisation: as a part-time paid museum assistant; a volunteer woodsman; and a self-employed charcoal burner.
The better a museum’s connections – to organisations, to communities – the more effective and more sustainable it is likely to be. Even the largest museums recognise the benefits of working with others.
For Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland (NMS), one of the reasons for working in partnership with other museums is to do more than it could do on its own.
“We’re a substantial museum organisation but covering a huge range of areas,” says Rintoul. “For example, in our decorative and applied arts we don’t have the strength and depth of the V&A. It’s about recognising our limitations… We’re becoming much more partnership-focused.
Identifying who we can work with has been given a heightened priority because of resource constraints.” One response to “resource constraints” has been to change the parameters for environmental control to save energy.
Hayward has turned off the Russell-Cotes’s air conditioning. “It never worked, it was never going to work and it was costing us a shed-load of money,” she says.
As well as spending less money, many museums hope to generate more of it. Carole Souter, chief executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund, sees the challenge as: “How do we get the best in terms of commercial income without doing violence to what we are here for?”
At York, Barnes agrees that being commercially minded is fine “as long as you remember your core values and why you’re there”.
NMS’s recently reopened main site in Edinburgh has four shops and three catering outlets aimed at different markets. It has increased its capacity for corporate hospitality and can now host dinners for 850 people. With more space, the museum wants “higher net revenue” from its temporary exhibitions.
Rintoul has also found that simple things, such as mak- ing better use of donation boxes, can increase income.
He says that the national museum was already looking at ways to generate more revenue, but this is now happening more widely and with greater focus because of budget cuts. Despite the emphasis on revenue, the museum still has free exhibitions and offers free events, such as lunchtime concerts.
In general, the directors that I spoke to are pursuing a quiet, gentle commercialism rather than trying to screw every penny they can from their visitors. Different museums have widely differing opportunities for income generation.
University College London Museums and Collections benefits from a commercial partnership with a 3D scanning company and from working with its parent university’s international campuses.
Russell-Cotes has a commercial partnership to sell images of its popular collection online. It is also experimenting with admission charges during the peak tourist season – and every member of staff’s job description includes income generation.
The Museum of East Anglian Life already generates most of its own income. About a quarter comes from local authorities, while visitors pay for admission. But the museum’s director, Tony Butler, says it is often more effective to put energy into “well-crafted fundraising bids for interesting work” than trying to get significantly more income from visitors.
Partnership working is increasingly popular. It can generate income, create new opportunities, improve quality and bring efficiencies. But partnerships aren’t automatically good. They can be extremely time consuming, or can fail.
Consultant Gaby Porter warns against “top-down, hierarchical, policy-driven partnerships” and advises that collaboration needs to be more about doing things on the ground, working with groups and organisations to ask: “How can we work together to improve the service?”
To get a new focus, museum staff need to take the time to stand back, to listen to new voices from inside and outside the organisation, and to think about what they could do differently. But Porter says: “Everyone is so ridiculously busy with the wrong things – reactive and transactional – when they know there’s much bigger things they need to attend to but they can’t find the time to do that.”
Porter praises the Museums Association’s Smarter Museums programme: “It gave people space at work for high quality thinking and working with others to create new approaches and new possibilities – we need much more of that.”
Click here for the MA's Culture Change report on working innovatively with shrinking resources
What does sustainability mean for museums?
“Growing in influence, content, ambition. Better displays and better quality”
Janet Barnes, chief executive, York Museums Trust
“As many people as possible knowing about heritage and caring about it”
Carole Souter, chief executive, Heritage Lottery Fund
“Still here in 100 years, still doing a good job, still building relationships; not dusty and static. Don’t create new galleries with soon-to-be-obsolete equipment we can’t maintain”
Alison Pattison, curator, Godalming Museum
“Being relevant, being innovative, being connected, and being flexible enough to research and experiment and to measure success in a variety of ways”
Tony Butler, director, Museum of East Anglian Life
“Active disposal as well as active acquisition... Taking a broader view of environmental control”
Sally MacDonald, director of museums and collections, University College London
The challenge of co-production
“Museums are more sensitive and skilful in working with audiences and much more knowledgeable about their communities. [But] how much are museums actually opening up to different perspectives and different ways of working?
Are collections records open to user-generated content? How far are we willing for people to have equality with us in our venues and our thinking? It’s a really, really hard journey that has a huge amount of uncertainty”
Gaby Porter, consultant
“Be prepared to accept that there are parts of some collections where the community will have more knowledge than the museum. Co-production needs much careful thought… valuing ‘traditional’ knowledge and learning, but also bringing in other perspectives.
"It’s important not to give the impression that anybody can come in and say anything and it all has an equal status”
Carole Souter, chief executive, Heritage Lottery Fund