The Effective Museum

The Effective Museum: Rethinking Museum Practices to Increase Impact features practical suggestions for how to be more successful at achieving a museum’s intentional purposes.

These practical suggestions can help you:

• revise your museum’s conceptual framework
• revitalize your audiences and supporters
• reorganize your museum
• reinvest in your resources (staff, collections, facilities, etc.)
• reposition your programming and
• restore management basics.

This book seeks to help you rethink these key museum practice through a diversity of suggestions, not a single system. However, the suggestions share definitions and frameworks and a unifying voice and structure. While any museum can adopt whichever suggestions are appropriate, the last chapter helps you explore how the suggestions might be mutually reinforcing.

Each chapter includes a) generalized statement of a problem and the need for new ideas; b) new suggestions implementable in many museums; c) the likely resistance; e) a summation of the idea’s potential impacts and benefits, and e) the start of an implementation process.

The suggestions vary in form—some are suggested strategies, others lists of options or research questions or implementation steps.

In attitude, The Effective Museum is not thou shall, but much more think about trying this suggestion Underlying all suggestions is a new way of thinking about museum practices as a basis for readers to build their own learning and legacy.