Successful organizations lead, and leading organizations are willing to challenge their audiences’ thinking. Diluting one’s story, therefore, hurts your positioning, your brand, and impedes your ability to build community and raise funds.

I’m less concerned about technology and more concerned about the substance and quality of your stories. That’s the starting point. Are you saying something worth listening to? What are you giving people to talk about? That’s the crucial litmus test. How you tell the stories of your leading research — what positions you as credible leaders in your respective fields — will vary. Focus more on multiple points of contact rather than “technology”: documentary films, print magazines and books (as well as their online variants), as well as social media. Whatever it takes to demonstrate your position as a vital and relevant leading organization.

Small museums have to work harder than their larger cousins at differentiating, establishing their expertise…AND reaching out beyond their four walls. Otherwise they are fated – doomed (?) – as local organizations with limited potential. Who ever made the “rule” that people have to visit in situ to have a proper museum experience really handcuffed them and limited museum imaginations. Museums would have more members (and more visitors) if they learned to effectively communicate with people between their visits, to incentivize them to visit in the first place, or to connect with people who may never be able to cross their threshold. If you’re a small museum in New York, shouldn’t you be reaching out to people in Montana, or Texas, or Alaska? Build community where ever interested audiences exist, don’t force them to come to you. Social media/technology does have limitations, it’s no panacea, so offer them multiple points of contact to your story. Bottom line, you want more members, and more funding, you have tell more people why you matter. Substance sells because it builds quality perceptions: people want to associate with leaders. Most of all, I reject the notion that you’re “entitled” to anything. Your organization will be deemed to be deserving of support if you can demonstrate your vitality and relevance; organizations that can demonstrate they fulfill their missions are organizations that are seen to have value, are thought to be credible, and are considered worthy of support. But that has to start with effective outreach, providing evidence of expertise that connects people and builds larger community.

This is a crucial time for museums and curators, both of whom are starving for opportunities to share what they do with the public. It is curator-produced content and programming that must dictate the identity of the organization and what establishes its uniqueness; marketing and communications staff then find the effective way to sell that content to customers. Success will not come to museums if they jettison research; the opposite, in fact: only new research can produces the knowledge capable of intellectually and financially sustaining the organization. Without R&D the organization stagnates, loses its audience, and its base for support. At the same time, we have to recognize that research cannot be disconnected to everything else: there is an indelible link between new research, outreach, and organizational success. Administrators may believe they have more pressing concerns, but it is substantive communication – transforming the R&D of the museum into unique (and, yes, saleable popular content) – that promotes the institution’s intellectual ambition. Survival depends on securing new audiences, holding their attention, and continuing to earn their trust. Not the traditional notion of audience, mind you: we have to redefine “visitor” to include those who may never pass through the turnstile but are otherwise eager to interact with your brand. So it is the traditional focus on programming that we have to look beyond because that is what makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the museum to broaden its horizons.

Years ago I wrote an article for Muse (Canadian Museums Association) about the role of children’s book publishing on the museum brand: http://wp.me/pqoXT-1U In it there is a description of an organization that is, to me, a very valuable model for museums to consider adopting: Smithsonian Business Ventures; National Geographic Society has a similar business ventures unit. Essentially it acknowledges the essential role of curators/academics, yet also acknowledges their traditional antipathy toward marketing, and makes accommodations to this situation by bringing in strategic marketers to work with them to transform their narrow knowledge into tools/products (call them what you will) to benefit the whole organization. I don’t want to be the one to say “curators and other scientific staff should get out more,” but may be they should. On the other hand, I will happily say that marketers and fundraisers should read more and better understand the sources of expertise that lie untapped within the museum. 
I would apply this to learning organizations generally, including universities and hospitals; a great many nonprofits, in fact. It’s worth remembering that the Smithsonian’s Stephen Weil once wrote that the problems of museums are really no different from those of most nonprofits. Period.

In 2003 while I was preparing a study on the impact of childrens’ publishing on a museum brand, Terrence Winch, Head of Publications at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian told me “Publishing exposes the museum’s intellectual blueprint.” That’s the catalyst museums need: it should be a critical tool of a museum’s strategy but, at most, it isn’t. Why not? 
As gatekeepers of content, curators can easily frustrate publishing plans if they see their involvement as a burden rather than as a positive initiative. Most museum collections are not set up for public access; only a small selection will ever be displayed and the rest remains uninterpreted. Supervising work on unexplored materials quickly becomes a distraction for curators because they feel as though they are working outside their mandates (i.e. helping the publisher’s bottom line, as opposed to advancing the mission of their museum). Many curators understand publishing has dramatic marketing power, but they feel it simply does not fit with the existing skills of the museum and its scholarly apparatus. Others may simply feel intimidated, lacking experience and understanding about the nuances of publishing. Sensing a gap between the publisher’s motivation, their museum’s motivation, and their own inclinations, some curators respond by being, in the words of one children’s publisher, “actively hostile.” Consequently, publishers have come to regard museums as institutions that are reluctant to produce commercially viable projects. 

Museum managers have to educate curators—and the whole exhibit team—about how marketing complements their work and develop a system that aims to find, then publish, the best stories. The Field Museum did wonderful job in this regard in its series about “Sue,” the largest T-Rex fossil ever found.