Like most people who work in museums, I love working in the sector, but I don’t love all museums. There are many museums that really don’t deserve it.
So I’m hoping that one of the opening conversations at the Museums Association’s new ...Love Museums advocacy workshops, being held now at a number of venues across the UK, will be about whether these organisations are worth loving in the first place.
Advocacy (getting people to fall in love with you) is not just about those glossy reports full of words, soulless press releases or targeting decision makers – it’s about making time to talk about what you do every day to everyone. And don’t call them focus groups or stakeholders – just say human beings. Finding the right language and having conversations between human beings is when you fall in love.
Advocacy in a museum worth loving is about a shift from people on the inside loving the museum to people on the outside loving the museum. You can work on the amount on the inside who can then connect with more people on the outside. In the end the inside and the outside disappear, and the museum walls are only there to hold the roof up.
It really is as simple as that. If your organisation is sure-footed, has integrity and a real clarity of purpose, there is no dilution, just an amplification of the sounds of good intentions and the din just gets louder. You shift audiences into supporters, supporters of something they can believe in.
Advocacy, like learning, community involvement and audience development becomes devalued if it’s just bolted on. Advocacy is something that should be at the heart of what you do. The Beavers who raised money for our development did not do that because we talked to decision makers, but decision makers may have their thoughts influenced by those fantastic young people’s actions.
Advocacy in this sense of having conversations can be really powerful. It drives our hearts and minds and reminds us what and who we are here for. You know you have won the case when a senior manager from the council tells you: “We’ve moved on from talking about the economic benefits of having the museum in Ryedale. It’s more the museum is the cement that binds us together and is a window through which we see the world.”
Ryedale Folk Museum is not perfect, we learn all the time and this learning is driven by talking and reflecting on what we do with our fellow human beings. We don’t always know what we are doing, but people know why we do what we do. Do we need love in museums? Yes, of course we do, but they have to be worthy of our affections.
Mike Benson is the director of the Ryedale Folk Museum, Yorkshire.
Links
Click here for further information on ...Love Museums
