I have another policy-writing-related question for the cognoscenti.
Please reply off-list.

We are grappling with the problem of non-cash non-capitalized donations:
specifically, how these are documented, tracked, and acknowledged. To
date we do not have, and never have had, a museum-wide system for this,
with the inevitable result that much falls through the cracks. I am
looking for good policy statements, procedures, and tracking forms.

Right now we have several major problems to be resolved:

1. There are approximately 7 different and mutually exclusive forms for
roughly this purpose that are used by different departments, each of which
has its own procedure, and most of which do not report such donations any
higher up the administrative food chain. Many donors go unthanked (at a
formal level) and unacknowledged.

2. Our membership director does not now have Razor's Edge set up to accept
a donation without an appraised value or estimate, yet a great many
natural history materials aren't and can't be routinely appraised. The
practice of assigning a token value to such materials is, as I heard at
the value and valuation of natural history collections conference in
Manchester, a *bad* and potentially disastrous one. We need to set up a
category for non-cash non-capitalized donations that still recognizes the
importance of the donated materials, and no one is sure how to do this.

3. Other than the boilerplate language in the ethics and collections
policies re not doing or verifying appraisals, we don't have much policy
language in place to govern how we accept and deal with such donations.
Right now, equipment and in-kind services accompanied by an invoice are
tracked through both membership and accounting, but donations of specimens
without an invoice value are not. I am looking for samples of such policy
language from other museums so that the task force I set up can make
recommendations re policy and procedures for the executive director to
take to the Board.

Our goal is to create a single form with good ease of use that will be
used by all departments to document donations as they are accepted and to
get that information into the development/finance tracking system. By
doing this, we hope to ensure that all donations are acknowledged at the
proper time and level even when they do not have a financial value.

The problem of valuation of natural history collections is a tough one,
and I don't want to open that particular can of worms here. All I'm trying
to do is to figure out a good way to recognize the value of these
donations and to encourage donors of non-cash non-capitalized materials in
the same way that we encourage and recognize our financial and in-kind
services donors.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,
Sally Shelton
Director, Collections Care and Conservation



-------------------------------------------------------------------------
|                                                                       |
|                 San Diego Natural History Museum                      |
|                          P. O. Box 1390                               |
|                San Diego, California   92112  USA                     |
|             phone (619) 232-3821; FAX (619) 232-0248                  |
|                     email [log in to unmask]                          |
|                                                                       |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------