For sites that rely on donations, museums don’t always do the best job at 1) making the case for donating, and 2) making it easy to donate.
I don’t pretend to be an expert, but a few examples in New Zealand/Aotearoa really stood out to me.
By simply taking your annual budget and dividing it by the number of visitors you get every year, you can get an average cost per visit. This is a powerful reminder to innocent visitors of the cost involved in running a museum or heritage site.
Grant-funding might be available to help you set up “tap” donation systems as fewer and fewer visitors carry cash money. You may notice this box also sends a powerful message about whose museum this is (“…support your museum”), and thus implies a responsibility it is to support it.
Steal This Idea is a new series of blog posts designed to promote some of the best heritage practices that we observe around the globe. We hope you’ll find these as inspiring as we do!
North Wind Heritage Consulting 