Many Minnesota historical organizations participated in an online/social media-fueled fundraising event dubbed “Give to the Max” through GiveMN.org on Tuesday November 17, 2009, which raised approximately $14 million for charities across the state. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports on Washington County Historical Society, which then prompts the question of how well did others do? Any new donors? Any big surprises? What did you and your organization learn from participating in the event? If you did not participate, can you share your reasons?

The November-December issue of Museum from American Association of Museums carries an interesting article about how some museums are moving from their roots to “greener pastures” of larger populations, better buildings, fresh start, etc. In August 2008 this blog community briefly looked putting ourselves where people are bound to be (see: Getting in the way). That’s still an important consideration, but actually moving a facility to another place takes the discussion to another level.

Although the article does not mention any museums in Minnesota that have moved, the article does talk about the Mount Horeb (WI) Mustard Museum moving to the wealthy Madison WI suburb of Middleton and renaming itself the “National Mustard Museum.” The museum is doing so to place its organization on better financial footing and provide more access to people. However, the author, Joelle Seligson, states that the “public love for museums is tied to their sameness, the sense that they will preserve and protect what they hold and remain in place for posterity.” The Mustard Museum will no longer be in the same place anymore.

In Minnesota there are examples of moves, too. For example Fort Belmont in Jackson was originally established in 1958 to take advantage of the traffic on US Route 71 south of town. When I-90 was built in 1974, much of the tourist traffic seemed to disappear. Fort Belmont completed a relocation to a site visible from I-90 a couple years ago. Neither the original attraction nor this one are on the actual site of the historic Fort Belmont. But, this is an example of an institution that is placing its facility where people are anyway.

Still, relocating an entire facility is a costly and extraordinary endeavor. In considering a move, how might an organization balance the “public love for museums … that they will … remain in place” with the public’s feet? If traffic has migrated from its historical location, must also the historical organization also migrate in order to be where people are? How should a historical organization balance financial considerations against mission which is so often tied to place? (History Where It Happened)

Alison Circle, a librarian who writes the “Bubble Room” blog for Library Journal, recently had a posting on “Top Ten Things for Marketers to Try.”  Number 5 is Learn a New Technology: “Last Friday I had a conversation with a friend about social media. I loved what she had to say: the people who are successful in this arena just jumped in feet first into the deep end. They didn’t worry about how, or who, or metrics, or audience. They just went for it. So if you don’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, open one today.”

Do you agree or disagree that jumping right in the deep end is the best way to get started with social media?

~Kathie Otto

The conversation about credentialing local history workers tends to be periodic. It often revolves around momentary needs to assure employers, the public and funders of the legitimacy of local history work. American Association of Museums’ Emerging Museum Professional Survey provides a glimpse of new museum worker needs, which could inform the discussion as credentials not only need to help the public understand what we do but also serve the worker.

The purpose of credentials really is to build trust in a knowledge base; in other words, credentials establish legitimacy. While some credentials require a degree from an accredited educational institution, in many fields these often come from a variety of sources that demonstrate the integrity of the worker’s skills and knowledge.

How might the local history community in Minnesota certify its trustworthy workers? Would local history workers benefit from a credential? Here are a few (mostly) do-it-yourself credentials that spring to mind, with both pros and cons:

Awards Programs: Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums, American Association for State and Local History, Preservation Alliance of Minnesota, and Friends of Minnesota Barns all offer awards programs. These are free to enter, but remember only the work that truly represents the best of the field gets recognized. Projects and functions that do not go above and beyond a routine generally do not receive recognition. However, sometimes it is the discipline of routine that needs recognition most.

Small Museum Pro!promises certification for workers in small and rural museums throughout the country by focusing on practical museum training.  All-online courses cover Museum Administration, Collections Management, Collections Care, Exhibitions, and Museum Education and Outreach. Small Museum Pro! program should affordably fill gaps in professional training common to among small, emerging and rural museum workers. Courses cost $195 each.  To receive Small Museum Pro! certification, participants must complete all five courses.  

Continuing Education: A survey conducted at the Minnesota Local History Workshops this past spring revealed the preference among survey respondents statewide that, to stay current, local history workers should be accomplishing 15 hours of continuing education annually. That means reading trade publications, attending workshops and classes, participating in conferences, teaching classes, being active in other meetings (such as serving on the board of the Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums, on a Minnesota Association of Museums committee, etc.). Keeping track of time spent improving skills could inspire trust in potential funders. Doubters may, however, dismiss your records as not measuring to a common standard.

Let’s continue the conversation. While time is a limited resource, it is necessary to spend time validating what we do in the eyes of the public and funders. How do you do that? Would it be useful to have some organization set a common standard? If so, should that organization be broad (e.g. a museum or nonprofit association) or focused (e.g. a history organization)? National, or statewide? How might credentials matter to your board, the public or funders?

McLeod County Historical Society uses Past Perfect Museum Software on its network computer system, like many small historical museums. In the last three years we have been adding a tremendous amount of digital media, i.e. photos and recordings, to the system. This has created some storage and backup problems for us. My board would like to explore the option of offsite memory storage, and was wondering if any other organizations have done this or have looked into it. 

Thanks,
Lori Pickell-Stangel
Executive Director

Dear Colleagues:

http://bit.ly/MuseumSurvey

I’m interested in learning how other museums and cultural institutions are engaging their communities through social media technologies.   Are you?    Help me gather benchmark data by completing this survey about what types of social media are being used by museums, how much time is spent on it and who in the organization manages this engagement.

This survey should take less than 15 minutes to complete.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the survey results, please provide your email address.

Thank you!

Rose Sherman
Director of Enterprise Technology
Minnesota Historical Society

rose.sherman@mnhs.org

Like many museums, we receive copies of newsletters and mailing from a goodly number of our fellow historical organizations.  I will admit that I don’t always have time to digest everything that is printed.  But on occasion, an item will get my attention.

A copy that recently crossed my desk contained an intriguing statistic.  In a breakdown of their 2008 attendance figures, this organization included web site visits, which amounted to nearly 2/3 of their total attendance for the annum.  It got me to ponder again the question of whether or not we should include web site hits in our attendance figures. 

We have never counted web hits and have no plan to do so any time soon.  Why? For one, we do not use a pay counter service so out stats are not as thorough as others might have.  (We use the free feature of StatCounter dot com.)  Differentiating from actual “human” contact versus machine or spider contacts could be time-consuming. As a result, I have been somewhat suspicious of institutions that have rather large web site hit figures and use those to bolster attendance numbers.

Is there a better way to handle this issue?  Have any of you found a good way to parse those hits to determine a reliable number?  Should grants applications from foundations and other agencies even be asking institutions for those figures as a requisite for funding?

Mike Worcester

Cokato Historical Society

In the world of betting, the over-under is a wager that an actual score in a game will be over or under a number set by a sportsbook manager. In the nonprofit world, the over-under refers to over-organization and undercapitalization.

A lot of ink has been used to detail how little needed another museum - especially a historic house museum - actually is. Carol Kammen in her “On Doing Local History” column in the Summer 2009 issue of History News reports on a 1936 AASLH census of history related organizations that showed 583 in the United States that year. She notes the count probably was less than complete. Today estimates put that number around17,500, with most having been established in the last 40 years. Over-organization is a concern when there is a finite number of resources (time, money, people) to support each organization.

Kammen briefly touches on the sacrifices made to establish organizational presence in its community. Many unseen volunteer hours went into organizing, collecting, indexing, and making accessible the history preserved by the organization that often the community takes for granted the history without acknowledging the serious effort applied by organizers. Often efforts to establish organizations require sacrifices, but these resources can wear thin in time leaving the organization undercapitalized at its core. While some experts may say it is number of organizations and rate of creation, the real concern more likely is the unsustainable undercapitalization of core functions.

In working with well-intentioned citizens who wish to organize to preserve history, these arguments about over and under really do not concern the enthusiast. The response often is that where others have failed, they are sure to succeed. How could they not? They can see the passion, excitement, and energy around them at least in the short term, that they hope to build for the long term. But building on emotion is problematic at best and betting on the outcome is almost a near-certainty for both the enthusiasts and observers (but with two totally different expected results). The field needs to develop a menu of measures from which enthusiasts may choose in order to better evaluate their long term chances of success.

Local history organizations face these same challenges within their communities. How do you awaken enthusiasts to the hard realities of successful organizing to accomplish what they think they want to do?

The August 17 issue of The Daily Tell documents the efforts of a mid-size nonprofit with four employees in the Washington DC area in fundraising through a method dubbed “crowdsourcing.” The nonprofit, Critical Exposure, used Social Media applications to raise $15,669 from 614 people. Through Social Media, Critical Exposure targeted a large, undefined group rather than the usual practice of fundraising from members or close contacts primarily.

Will stories like this encourage small history nonprofits to neglect their constituents and seek “white knight” support from others? What might be the proper role for Social Media in a fundraising campaign? Are there any examples of a historical organization using Social Media to fundraise?

David Grabitske asked me to post about our new website (http://www.morrisoncountyhistory.org) and the reasoning behind how I chose to assemble it the way I did.

First, a bit of history. The Morrison County Historical Society first went online with a website in 2002. I had learned enough html to build the text portion of each page, plus I decided how the site would be structured. At the time, I didn’t know much about coding web pages, so I couldn’t figure out how to insert tables or images, which meant I didn’t know how to make the page attractive. We had help on this from Eric Swanson, our Web Guru, who formerly did work on the early Minnesota Historical Society website.

In 2006, we released the second version of our website. By this time I had learned enough to create the entire thing in html, including all the pretty stuff. While the first site had quite a bit of historical content, the second site had even more - at least 100 history-related articles. Since the beginning of our web presence, when someone reviewed our earliest version of the site and asked, “Where’s the history?”, we’ve been conscious of the fact that people want more than just information about our organization. Our website had to contain history, too.

On August 9, 2007, we started a blog called “Skimming the Cream.” The original intent of the blog was to have a space where we could easily notify our members and friends about MCHS news and upcoming events. Ideally, I wanted to have our current blog posts appear on our Home Page, but I couldn’t figure out how to accomplish that, so instead, we linked to the blog from our Home Page.

As staff got used to the routine of blogging, we evolved away from strictly news and upcoming events and started posting about collections items. We also developed a series called Morrison County Influentials, examining 150 influential people related to the history of the county.

We used WordPress as our blogging platform, having installed it onto our server so that our domain name would be attached to the blog. The fact that our blog did not appear as part of our Home Page still niggled at me. Would people link over to the blog to get the current posts, or would they skip it because it was too much bother?

Around about late 2008, early 2009, I began thinking that our website needed freshening up. I also wanted to overcome the problem of having to recode every single html page in order to change the website’s look. With around 200 pages, that was more work than I really wanted.

There were several potential solutions to this problem, one of them being to create an external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). An external CSS is basically a page of web coding that sits outside (hence, “external”) the rest of your web pages and tells them how they are going to look. Your regular web pages, the ones with the content, contain a piece of code that references the external CSS and grabs the instructions for dressing the page. The beauty of external CSS is that if you want to change the appearance of your website, you merely change the code in this one CSS document and all of the other pages will grab the new code and change automatically.

While I know a little bit about external CSS, I don’t know enough to be comfortable creating an entire site based on it. Plus, there was still the problem of the blog not appearing on the front page of the website. In addition, I wanted other staff to be able to create web pages without having to wait for me to do it.

I sought another solution. It was suggested that I find a Content Management System (CMS), which is basically a program that helps to create a structure for the content of your website. There are various CMS programs available - Drupal, Joomla!, Mambo, etc. - and each one has its own learning curve. I wasn’t keen on having to learn another program (some of them are quite complicated) in order to rebuild the website.

In discussing the problem with Eric Swanson, he suggested I look into using WordPress as a CMS. While WordPress is first and foremost a blogging platform, because it allows users to build static pages, it can easily be repurposed as a CMS. I have extensive experience with WordPress through my personal blog and the museum blog, so this didn’t seem too much a stretch. WordPress allows for quickly and easily changing the look of a website through a variety of templates that can be uploaded to a server with little trouble. No need to fuss with external CSS or coding individual web pages. And, best of all, our staff had experience with WordPress through posting to our blog, so it wouldn’t take much to show them how to add new static pages to the website. Woohoo!

Before tackling a website redesign, I solicited feedback from users as to how the site should be changed. One of our members kindly took the time to give me specific advice. What I learned from her was a shock. She followed our blog exclusively and didn’t realize we had an entire static website packed with info available online (even though the blog had a link to the Home Page of the main site). That cemented it. We HAD to get our blog onto the front page of our website. WordPress would solve that.

There are gazillions of potential ways to structure a website. With the 200 pages we had on our website, I had to decide how I wanted to rearrange them. They roughly fell into two broad categories: organizational information and history. Within the history section, we had a number of articles related to museum life and preservation methods, plus some genealogical forms. These appeared to be getting lost in the history section, so I decided I would move them into the organizational info section of the new website.

After sorting out the pages for each section and looking at the number of History pages I needed, I decided to upload 2 installations of WordPress onto our server. I did this for two reasons. I didn’t want to load the organizational info section with history articles and thus risk confusing or overwhelming users. I also knew that I was going to be building the site while it was live. If I built the History portion first, I could do this quietly, without disturbing the old Home Page.

The History section was installed in its own directory: morrisoncountyhistory.org/history/. Before getting down to the business of building pages, I had to pick a WordPress template. I chose Atahualpa, which is highly customizable, and arranged it to suit our needs. I then spent a couple of weeks creating pages of history articles, merely copying and pasting from our existing html site.

After the History section was finished, I held my breath and ripped down the Home Page of our old site. I quickly installed WordPress in the main directory of our server and madly built the new site. Remember, I was doing this while the site was live and available online. That meant that anyone who came looking for morrisoncountyhistory.org was going to be seeing the work in progress, finished or not. I wanted to make sure I completed the majority of the site in a very short time, which I did within 2-3 days. Part of the process was to export all of the content from our Skimming the Cream blog and import it into our new Home Page. WordPress makes this process simple. A few button clicks later and the blog was now part of our new Home Page.

The Main section of our new website contains our organizational information, plus what I hope is an obvious link to the History section of our website. The History section also links back to our Main section. I used the same theme to build both portions, but created subtle differences between the two. Our Main section is green; our History section is blue. The banner pictures on the Main section feature various views of the museum and grounds; whereas the banner pictures on the History section are historic pictures from our collections.

Those are the basics behind our website redesign. There’s more to it than that, of course, such as fixing broken links elsewhere on the internet (i.e. Wikipedia), creating a customized error message page to redirect people, waiting for the search engines to pick up on our changes, and playing with various WordPress plugins (note the Twitter feed on our Home Page).

You can see our new site at http://www.morrisoncountyhistory.org. If you have technical questions, drop me a line at contactstaff (at) morrisoncountyhistory (dot) org.