Many museum professionals will sympathise with being offered an object with a price tag attached. In our case, at the David Livingstone Trust (which aims to continue the Scottish missionary’s mission “by enabling people from Scotland, Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond to engage in intercultural dialogue”), it was a magic lantern slide showing Livingstone using his own magic lantern to give a sermon.
We saw this object as a tool to show how the technology worked, and also to illustrate our new museum’s discussion of missionaries’ role in the colonisation of Africa and the problematic representation of African people in objects in our collection.
We decided to run a Crowdfunder campaign in order to acquire the magic lantern slide, linked to the stories we were telling and our magic lantern. I worked with Lucy Brayson, who is a Museum Galleries Scotland Skills for Success trainee like me, to plan and set up the Crowdfunder, with an associated social media campaign.
This allowed for narratives to be further explored through our blog, for example, such as the so-called “discovery” of Victoria Falls.
The rewards attached to the Crowdfunder allowed us to engage with our audiences in new ways, and by January 2019 we had successfully raised £1,141 in under two months. 
Overall, things we learned from the campaign include:
  • Set lots of time aside for planning and preparing the rewards (and make them straightforward to source)
  • Don’t run a crowdfunding campaign at Christmas (people have other things to spend their money on)
  • Try it out – the David Livingstone Trust had never set up a crowdfunding project but this was a great way to engage audiences in the new museum’s narrative through the lens of this particular object. 
  • Include information about the campaign on your collection catalogue to avoid dissociation of objects from their acquisition history.
The lantern slide will be on display in the newly refurbished David Livingstone Birthplace when we reopen. For more information on when this will be, please sign up to our newsletter here.
Charlotte Roberts is the learning and outreach trainee at the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum (Museums and Galleries Scotland Skills for Success programme)
The David Livingstone Birthplace Museum is an independent museum in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire. The historic building and museum exhibition are being refurbished as part of the Birthplace Project – a £6.1m scheme funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Scottish Government and Historic Environment Scotland