Hi,

I think a great place to start would be to read Nina Simon's article "Rethinking Membership: What Does it Mean to Belong to a Museum?" on her blog Museum 2.0.  While a bit old now (from 2007), it still starts you to think critically about your membership program. In particular, are your memberships simply value focused, in that the membership program focuses primarily on providing discounts and free visits to members who return? Or do they provide a deeper connection to the institution and promote the idea of investing into the museum and its mission? 

Simon has more articles on her blog dedicated to reshaping the standard way in which museum professionals perceive their membership program and I would encourage you to read them. These principals can apply to a large metropolitan museum or a small rural institution. 

All the best,

Shane Stuart
Annual Giving Manager
Historic Huguenot Street

-----Original Message-----
From: Museum discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Yearous, Jenny Dee
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2017 9:08 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MUSEUM-L] Ideas needed

Hello, I received this email on our state museum list serve.  It is coming from a small county historical society here in ND.  We got a couple of I would be interested too type replies but haven't seen any ideas.  So I would like to post it to you all.  Do you have strategies that work for small underfunded institutions in sparsely populated rural settings?  I imagine there are others out there with similar issues so please post to the list.   Thanks in advance

Jenny Yearous
Curator of Collections Management
State Historical Society of North Dakota
______________________________________________________________-
Hello All!

I hope everyone had a good holiday season! Going through the end of year financials, we noticed that our yearly memberships are down, and seem to have been trending down for the last few years. Since it's the 25th anniversary of our opening, I was thinking that this year might be a good year to do a membership drive, and see if we can get those numbers back up. I was wondering if any of you have done a membership drive recently (or not so recently) and have a particular strategy, or something that worked well for you? Did it work at all? Any ideas would be appreciated!

Thanks!


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