We are investigating starting a "Friends of the Museum" group at the Portland
Museum, a small community history museum (with arts programming) in a
neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. We're looking for models that have
worked for other museums. The Portland Museum is 20 years old, and used to
have membership program, but it was discontinued. The Museum is emerging from
a very difficult period financially, and we are working to restart our
programming and rebuild our audience.

One concept we have is to cast the widest net possible, with the goal of
drawing people in as supporters, in whatever way they can offer support,
whether that is as donors, as visitors, as program participants, as
volunteers, or even as simply as those who wish us well and are aware of what
we are doing. We'd send a bimonthly newsletter to all the "Friends". This
would be one way to re-energize and bring closer our old supporters (and there
are many, we just haven't communicated well with them for a while), and we'd
build out from there.

Another model might be the "Friends of the Library" kind of program, which is
essentially a volunteer and fundraising auxiliary, run by volunteers.

So we're trying to get a fix on what might work, and we ask:

-Should we have a small fee to be a "Friend", to cover the costs of producing
and mailing a newsletter? Or would this discourage people from joining?
-Should we consider our existing donors (and donors to the collections) to be
"Friends" already, and add them to the list, or should we ask them explicitly
to join a new program?
-Should the Museum run this in-house, or try to recruit volunteers to set it
up as an independent but auxiliary group with its own organization and
funding?
-Do we want to offer any benefits to being a "Friend" (other than the
newsletter)?
-How much should "Friends" and volunteers overlap - should we expect to be
able to call on Friends to help out with aspects of operations, like running a
festival, or should there be no expectations of specific kinds of help from "Friends"?

Any experiences or thoughts you can share would be appreciated.

Carol Ely
Assistant Director
Portland Museum
Louisville, KY

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