As museums face ongoing challenges associated with the prolonged closures of their physical sites, communities are facing challenges of their own. Organizations are striving to produce vibrant, mission-driven content and programming, while also supporting the diverse needs of community members and constituents. How do you assess the needs of your community? How can your organization deliver content and resources that support the community? And how can museums imbue their mission into digital resources and programming?
On April 29, 2020 over 1,500 people joined Brendan Ciecko (CEO and Founder @ Cuseum), Terri Freeman (President @ National Civil Rights Museum) & Mara Kurlandsky (Director of Digital Engagement @ National Museum of Women in the Arts) as they discussed how museums can serve their communities and further their own missions through digital initiatives. This webinar strived to address aspects of community engagement, digital programming, creating educational content, and more.
View the video recording here.
Read the full transcript below.
Brendan Ciecko:
Hello, everyone. My name is Brendan Ciecko, I'm the Founder of Cuseum. First off, I want to say thank you to everyone who is joining us today, as well as say thank you to our amazing panelists that will be engaging in the conversation for the next hour. I hope that you're all staying safe and healthy during these unprecedented times. If you're joining for the first time, welcome. For those of you who have tuned in to any of our past conversations, welcome back. It's great to see you again.
Over the past few weeks, the world around us has changed in ways we never could have imagined, our days have been filled with new challenges, new questions and new levels of uncertainty. To really put our best foot forward to respond to all of these changes, we've pulled together a wide range of voices and topics to help guide us through these new realities of engaging audiences at home, shifting the ways in which we communicate, craft educational programming, and really all things in between.
This is the seventh in the series of conversations that we have hosted to help share some of these best practices, some of these voices and concepts that museums are embracing as they react and respond to the coronavirus. Today's conversation, we will discuss community. It's incredibly timely because this morning, ICOM, the International Council of Museums, put out a guide which focuses on steps to support community resilience. Today's topic is supporting communities with digital programs during coronavirus.
Without further ado, I'd love to introduce our special guest. Joining us today, we have Terri Freeman. Terri Lee Freeman was appointed President of the National Civil Rights Museum in November of 2014, and as president, Freeman is responsible for providing strategic leadership in furthering the museum's mission as an educational and cultural institution. During her short tenure, Freeman has emphasized the connection between the historic civil rights era and today's contemporary issues. Freeman has placed her emphasis on building the organization's reputation as a new public square. Through her collaborative approach to the work, she has increased the visitor engagement with the museum's public programs by four times, fourfold. That in itself is amazing and I think that's a dream for just about any museum director. That's incredible.
Prior to the National Civil Rights Museum, Freeman worked both in community and corporate philanthropy, serving as the president of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region in Washington DC, as well as founding executive director for the Freddie Mac Foundation, where she developed an intense passion for the nonprofit sector and community. A graduate of the 2016 Class of Leadership, Memphis, Freeman serves on several boards, including The Community Foundation for Greater Memphis, the Orpheum Theatre Group, New Memphis Institute, Memphis Brand Initiative, Urban Teachers, and the Southern Council of Foundations. Lastly, Freeman received her Bachelor's Degree in Journalism and Communications from the University of Dayton, and her Master's Degree in Organizational Communications from Howard University. She is married to Dr. Bowyer G. Freeman, and is the proud mother of three daughters and three grandchildren. Thanks so much Terri for joining us today.
Terri Freeman:
Thanks for having me.
Brendan Ciecko:
I have to ask, between the three daughters, the three grandchildren, being married and being on about a dozen boards, how do you have time for any of those? That's pretty remarkable.
Terri Freeman:
What is time?
Brendan Ciecko:
What is time? Also joining us, we have Marla Kurlandsky. Marla is the Director of Digital Engagement at the National Museum of Women and the Arts where she oversees the museum's website, social media, interactive digital content and the museum's award-winning #5WomenArtists campaign. She's currently working on a complete redesign of the museum's website, and as of yesterday, Mara and her team are officially Webby nominated for the @womenandarts Instagram account. That's incredible. Congratulations.
Mara Kurlandsky:
Thank you. Shout out to Adrienne Poon, who I know is on this webinar, who runs the Instagram account.
Brendan Ciecko:
That's awesome. Before joining the National Museum of Women and the Arts, Mara was a project coordinator at Gallagher & Associates where she worked on developing museum exhibitions, including the Spy Museum, Flight 93 National Memorial visitor center, and the Museum of Jewish People in Tel Aviv. Mara is part of the Museum Computer Network, MCN, board, and has given presentations at MCN, MuseumNext, the Council of American Jewish Museum conference and at Georgetown and George Washington Universities about how to start a career in museum technology. She holds a Master's Degree in Museum Studies from the George Washington University and a Bachelor's in Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto. Thanks for joining us, Mara. And congrats again to you and your team on the Webby nomination.
Mara Kurlandsky:
Thank you. Make sure you vote in the people's choice.
Brendan Ciecko:
I will. Let's jump into the questions. I'm really excited to have both of you with us today, and excited about the dialogue that will follow. Let's start with a question for you, Terri. You've had an impressive career as a leader in the nonprofit sector. You've increased the attendance and engagement at the National Civil Rights Museum by a multiple of four. What strategies have you used to increase engagement? How has your strategy shifted or evolved since coronavirus forced you to physically close down the doors to your museum?
Terri Freeman:
First off, thank you for inviting me to be a part of this. Appreciate it. When I got to the museum in 2014, they had just undergone a pretty significant $27 million renovation to the museum and its exhibits. We had this incredible facility located at a historic site and really emphasize history. My goal then was to connect the history to more contemporary issues as we were right in the middle of the more heightened era of seeing a lot of issues around police brutality involving African American men and women. It was really an easy way to make a connection, the issues that occurred in South Carolina, the shooting that occurred at Mother Emanuel Church, then 2017 Charlottesville. There were all sorts of things that were easy, unfortunately, to make the connection between pictures of the walls in the museum and what was happening today.
We wanted people to engage basically, start looking at how to bring in voices, thought leadership into the museum, expose people in the community to that level of thought leadership, what authors were out there that were available, what films, documentarians are doing such fabulous films and the conversations we could have. That's really what we started to increase. All of that took place inside of the museum. Obviously, right now, we can't do that.
We've been talking more and more about digital and been live streaming for a couple of years now, but, you know, never waste a crisis. What this has done is forced us to really think more strategically about how we continue to have that level of engagement and be out there as a thought leader in this space and present people to our audiences that will keep them engaged during this time and still focus on issues that continue to be very, very relevant. The virus environment has really forced our hand in thinking more strategically about how to utilize the digital tools that are at our disposal.
Brendan Ciecko:
Excellent. We've been hearing a lot of that across the field where coronavirus has been a little bit of a forcing function for digital initiatives that have been on the back burner for the last couple of years. I think it's put some organizations in a position to stand up as a community leader. It's been amazing to see some of the programming that you and your institution have led with over the last couple of weeks. I want to ask a question to you, Mara. Last year, you spoke on a panel at the Emerging Arts Leader Symposium on the topic of Breaking Out of the Four Walls, How Museums are Using Digital Strategy to Engage a Wider Audience. Right now, there's really no question that museums have needed to look outside of their four walls, and digital has played a critical role in reaching new eyes, ears, minds and hearts.
At the National Museum of Women and the Arts, during these past few weeks, have you been trying to broaden the net that you've cast? Or is now the time to deepen the bond with the community, whose attention you've already captured and cultivated over the last couple of years?
Mara Kurlandsky:
We're doing both. It's funny that you mentioned the symposium from last year because that literally is like another lifetime ago. I think at the time, I was mostly just talking about our social media campaigns. We're in this whole new unchartered territory. There's also a great tweet that I've seen going around, and it says, Who led the digital transformation of your organization? Select from your CEO, your CIO, and then the last choice is COVID-19, which I think is definitely happening at our museum, but I think it's a really positive thing. When we're talking about how we're using our digital strategy, I actually surveyed a bunch of my colleagues before this webinar because right now, everybody is starting to dabble in digital. Whereas my role is really managing websites, social media and any kind of hard interactives that we do. It's really starting to flow throughout the museum, which I think is really exciting.
In terms of our audience or our community, we're doing both. At least for social media, we're always trying to expand our audience to find more people who want to engage with what we're putting out there. We're sticking to what we already do, which is just making really good content that speaks to people and turning them into our own champions in spreading the word for us. But in terms of other stuff, I wouldn't say that we've necessarily targeted brand new audiences, but I think it is a byproduct of the fact that everything has gone digital and we're putting so much more out into the world that, like you mentioned, some stuff, it's been, maybe one day, when I have time to sit down, I'll put together this resource guide from the library, but now, all of a sudden, there's all that much more incentive to put it together. For example, we know that we have a lot of students who do online research on our website if they're in history classes in high school or college. Our library staff has been putting together these really incredible guides that we might not have done before and are reaching students that might not have had access to them before. We have limited programming for young kids, preschool to third grade age, we have specialized tours for them but we've actually been experimenting with people from all across the museum doing these kinds of story time videos. We're choosing books that are written or illustrated by women and just having somebody read the story. Our thought is maybe this can buy a stressed out parent five minutes of peace just to hear a story read by a friendly face. I think just by virtue of what we're doing and experimenting, we're gathering more people into our net. Young parents are not necessarily our target demographic, it's something that we're now creating content for.
Then with our public programs department, you'll hear me talk about it a lot, we have a program called Women Arts and Social Change, that is a broad series, the signature programs are called Fresh Talks, which are panel discussions around certain topics, but then have a cocktail hour or a dinner element. They're really meant to make bonds between people and get really deep on a topic. Those folks really are involved and they tend to be local. Our public programs team is in communication with them, particularly around those who are working in the arts, and putting out resources for funding or emergency grants for artists and they're actually submitting also to a Google doc. It's really a collaborative resource building, I would really say investing, definitely, in that community. We're also very aware of the fact that there is a digital divide.We're not going to reach everyone all the time just because we're doing more online.
Brendan Ciecko:
I want to get into some of the distinctions between community and audience. In some of our past webinar conversations, someone has made some clear distinctions between a community and an audience. They noted that your digital community is a community and an audience is someone that you speak to, you perform to, you lecture for. Do you see a difference between community and audience as it relates to physical, as it relates to digital? Does your content and community strategy reflect this either before coronavirus or now, has any of that changed?
Terri Freeman:
For us, I would say that we certainly have a variety of different audiences, right? They break down by geography, they break down by age demographic, they break down by local versus national versus international. But from our vantage point, all of those different audiences are a part of a broader community because ultimately, what the museum is trying to do is to educate people on a period in history that far too many people know too little about. Our goal is to look at how we target this particular audience so that they have a broader knowledge, but that ultimately, all of those audiences actually have a very similar understanding of what was the American Civil Rights Movement and the impact it has had through time. We have an audience that we know is far more focused on social media, and we constantly are pushing out information. But there are things like, on this day in history X, Y, Z occurred. We're constantly putting out those sorts of things. During women's history month, we're putting out names of women that we think people should know that have had an impact on movements today, as well as movements, of yesteryear. They're all a part of this broad community that we want to impact and we want to, ensure has a knowledge of what was the Civil Rights Movement, because if there is a consistent comment that we get at the museum, when people were able to go inside of the museum, it is, "Well, why didn't I know this information?" Our goal is to make sure that everybody knows the information.
Brendan Ciecko:
Great. And how about for you, Mara?
Mara Kurlandsky:
I posed this question to some other colleagues and actually got some really interesting answers. A lot of them pushed back on the idea between making a distinction between community and audience. Actually, one of my colleagues, when she read the questions, said, "Well, that's a master's thesis."
I think our public programs team in particular really felt like everything that they do and that we do as a museum is to create a community, that our community is always our audience. But at the same time, there's an interesting point brought up that it's almost not really for us to define, as in you can have these kinds of distinct audience segments who are interested in particular things, but it's up to an individual to determine if they feel like they're part of a community that they want to join in that require some level of interaction on their part, or if they just want to be somebody who is a casual bystander. We have individual groups of people that are really interested in some things we do and less interested in other things, but they can also move fluidly through the different things that we offer or that they can participate in. We do try to collect as much feedback as possible, and particularly from in-person programs so that we can get a good sense of that feeling of community resonating, and by and large, it is, which is something that we're really proud of. But it's not really up to us to say who is community and who is audience.
Brendan Ciecko:
That's a really interesting perspective on that.I do look forward to the master's thesis on that topic. It does have a lot of threads and ends. Do you have to opt in, do you have to opt out. Is it active? Is it passive? I find that to be really nuanced. Diving a couple steps deeper into the notion of community, in ICOM's guidelines for community resilience that they released today, they encouraged museums to "see how others are joining forces to stay relevant and provide a rapid response to current issues and needs to empower partnerships". I want to know, has coronavirus caused either of your museums to jumpstart or deepen partnerships with organizations in your community, state or local initiatives, or even corporate partners out of necessity or out of deepening the great work that you're doing in your communities?
Mara Kurlandsky:
I actually don't know. I feel like we're still a little bit in that period of getting our sea legs in terms of everything that's changed. We're certainly reaching out to our existing partners and checking in with them and giving updates about how we're doing. But in terms of really looking forward to what it could be like to have these kinds of brand new partnerships, I'm not quite sure. I think we need a little bit more time.
Terri Freeman:
We have a group in Memphis called the Cultural Coalition that brings together a cross-section of all of the culture and arts organizations. We met yesterday. One of the areas that we are focused on is really looking at how we can all help with the issues around education. We don't know what's going to happen with the school system going forward, but what we do know is that all of us have some element that targets school students. As opposed to all of us going to the system to talk to them about what we can offer during this time to have a collective effort more of a package deal. That's one thing that's going on. The way we are approaching programming really is collectively and collaboratively. We have been doing a campaign around the census since the end of last year, but the beginning of this year, it engages a lot of other nonprofit organizations. It engages the public sector, and they utilize the museums in new ways to push forward just why it's important and what it means and what has meant throughout history.
Another thing that we are looking at doing is, and we haven't developed it out yet, we just were approached about doing a collective program around June 10th, which is coming up in June. It's the date in which slavery had ended, except not in Texas. We are planning on doing some joint programming with some other African American focused museums around that, and it'll probably have a lot of different components. It'll be streaming, it'll be musical, it'll be poetry, it'll have a lot of different elements to it. I think that this does give us great opportunity to look at the resources of all of our institutions, looking at what I call the three-leg stool of the public sector, private sector and nonprofit sector, and how we can actually move forward trying to, focus on issues of justice and ensuring that justice is something that is preserved. We want to work with the other sectors because we can't affect that change solely on our own. I do think that digital is incredibly powerful around issues of justice, social justice, equity and those sorts of things.
Brendan Ciecko:
That's great. I'm really inspired to hear about all of the partnerships that your museum has locally with nonprofits, with the Department of Education or the local schools. That's fantastic to hear. That seems like it's been a part, since the very beginning but is accelerating out of necessity.
We have a question from someone in the audience, Amy Kirk, who wants to know, "I'm particularly interested in how your new partnerships, example, are you partnering with food banks, hospitals, other essential organizations right now?" I know that's going to vary community to community, but Terri, is your museum playing a role in any of that dialogue? Is that part of the recent conversations that you've been having in Memphis?
Terri Freeman:
It hasn't actually been a part of recent conversations. That said, we have had a partnership with our local food bank for years. In fact, every year, on King Day, we have a major food drive for the food bank. Every year, we are contributing many tons of food through our King Day activities. The same goes for, and this is a real issue right now, for our blood bank. We have a blood drive on site on King Day as well. These partnerships aren't new for us. It's what we are putting back into the community. Now, because we have not had the ability to have, even though this is a good idea actually, now that I'm thinking about it, to maybe place some bins in the courtyard during this time where people might be able to, just drop food off, and they don't have to be close to anybody and we could get the, food bank to actually, pick up, the food. But we have had a longstanding relationship with our local food bank.
Brendan Ciecko:
That's great. Now shifting gears a little bit to the role various departments in the museum play in interfacing and interacting with digital and the content that relates to those types of strategies. Mara, today, you are the director of digital engagement at the National Museum of Women and the Arts, but your organization did not always have a dedicated digital department. I would imagine, for a lot of museums that are tuned in to this webinar, they're probably in the same boat. They don't have a dedicated digital department, or if they do, it's fairly new, it might even be a couple weeks old.
Your digital department grew out of the education department, and every week, we receive questions about how digital and education departments can effectively collaborate. Based on the evolution of your department and your professional path, what are some ways that education and digital can better work together to serve communities with programming right now?
Mara Kurlandsky:
Yeah. It's interesting because from my perspective, it never seemed unusual. When I started at the museum four and a half years ago, it was my first digital role at a museum where there were enough people to actually make independent departments. The fact that it was part of the education department didn't seem that weird to me. I've since learned that that's not always the case, but it's actually I think been really wonderful because our digital properties in terms of the website and social media have always been thought of as educational tools.
We've had quite a bit of freedom in terms, especially with the social media, of using it really as a platform for educating and for talking about our mission and sharing information in a way that wasn't necessarily constrained by other marketing concerns, although we're also promoting programs and otherwise getting the word out. I think one thing that has really worked for us that could probably be applied at other museums, even if your digital team doesn't live with your education department, is we've always had a cross-departmental social media working group.
We also have a fairly collaborative staff. We have a lot of departments that are small, so there's a lot of horizontal work together. It's a little bit less hierarchical than other places, which has its own challenges, but it means that there's quite a bit of working across departments, and especially digital works a lot with education but also with territorial when we're developing contents specifically related to the specialized editions. I think it set us up for a lot of success in terms of breaking out the digital department to be independent.
The reason that we made it independent was because digital in the year 2020, it's complicated. My former supervisor, Deborah, who might be on, the demands of running a digital program are just increasing tremendously. She was doing two full-time jobs, running the education department and overseeing digital. This allows us to just spread out the staff resources in a way that allows us to just do more. Once we separated the two departments, they're functionally separate but we all have a really good working relationship, and we're accustomed to working together. There wasn't a particularly difficult transition. I think having that working group that has stakeholders from across the museum has been really tremendously helpful because then, everyone feels like they have a stake in what we're doing online, that it's not the digital department's over there doing their own thing. They do the digital stuff but it's really, digital is really just a conduit to everything else that your museum is doing.
Brendan Ciecko:
Great. I feel like that really clearly answers the question that came in from Brittany Vernon of the Art Bridges Foundation in Bentonville, Arkansas who wanted to know what are your thoughts on digital staff living within the education department. What does an ideal world look like? I think by you mentioning that the working group has been a nice conduit and connective fabric to making that process as easy as possible, it sounds like something anyone could take back to their organization. That's really helpful, Mara.
Terri, earlier this month, the National Civil Rights Museum presented a virtual commemoration in honor of Dr. King's life and legacy. This included a wide array of programs, including music and poetry and other types of activities. I thought this was an incredible and thoughtful example of how museums can collaborate with artists, musicians and poets during this time to create something that's greater than some of its parts. Can you talk through how this program came together and how it came together on a digital platform? What did you learn from this? How might it inform some of your future programs at the museum?
Terri Freeman:
First, I would say that April 4th is the reason why our museum exists. That was the date that Dr. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Each year, we do a commemoration. It's a major event for the museum. Usually, it takes place from the balcony, at the Lorraine. This year, having closed on the 17th of March, we knew that wasn't possible, but we also knew that we had quite a bit of content that we had picked over the course of several years that it might be good to try to curate a commemoration out of that. What we tried to do though was to actually use the time between the first sanitation workers strike in Memphis, the date in March, through April 4th, because that's the period of time in which we cover for these activities.
There was a lot of social media campaigning around things that had occurred during the course of that week 52 years ago. There was something coming up on all of the different platforms, and what we decided was we wanted to have programming that really engaged everybody. So many people come to the museum and they're so sad all the time and it's not, we're really not a sad place. We really aren't. We're quite a victorious place. But we didn't want that to be what people were focusing on. We wanted people to focus on inspiration and hope, and having the situation be what it was that we are currently in, we really felt we needed people to be uplifted in some way, shape or form.
We encouraged a lot of the poets that we engage with through the years to actually submit spoken word pieces that we could stream through the website prior to April 4th. We curated a rendition of Precious Lord, Take My Hand, which was Dr. King's favorite hymn, with musicians that we have worked with, through time. We reached out to the musicians and said, "Are you willing to contribute to this?" We had opera singers, we had violinists, violists, we had gospel singers, we had R&B singers, we had jazz saxophonists, all create this new version of Precious Lord Take My Hand, which was pretty powerful, I must say.
We created a program that began at 4:00 Eastern Standard Time ending around 6:15, which was speakers and thought leaders and performances that we had occur at the museum, many of them at the 50th anniversary of King's, assassination. And we rebroadcast a lot of those folks, and these were James Lawson was one of the people, William Barber was one of the people, we had scholars that were engaged in this. We had a choir made up from students at historically black colleges and universities that were a part of this program. And we just put all together so that it gave the message of what King's life was about, what his legacy was about, those things that we needed to continue to think about.
And then at 6:01, which is the time that the shot rang out, we had done a bell ringing at the 50th anniversary. At that point of time, we had the bell rang to commemorate that particular moment in time. There was some solemness that came into that, but then we had the fabulous presentation of the song Precious Lord, and we partnered with a dance troop here, Collage Dance Collective, who had done a performance called Rise that was to much of King's spoken word. After we had our commemoration, we then streamed, this performance of Rise that had been performed at an earlier time. We ended up providing the community with a broad spectrum of information but also a spectrum of presentation methods of who and what King was all about. While it was a good number for us, we had 21,000 views of the program, which we would not have been able to have 21,000 people sitting in the courtyard at the Lorraine Motel. We were thrilled with it, and it lives right now on our website.
Brendan Ciecko:
That's great. That's a really beautiful example of something that can be done interdisciplinary, with your community reaching a new audience, I think for me, that's one of the quintessential examples of a great community-based programming piece that lives online during the moment, lives online right now. Looking at the chat right now, people seem really inspired by the program. I Imagine you'll get maybe a couple hundred more views right after the webinar.
Terri Freeman:
Let me just say this, because I know that Mara's job is hard. We don't have a separate digital department. We have a marketing communications department, and they worked so hard with our education department to come up with this content truly. It certainly took a pound of flesh to have to edit all of the video, but what they came up with was something that we were incredibly proud of and we really felt that it did encapsulate what the museum is about but also what King's legacy was about.
Brendan Ciecko:
That's amazing. I do hope that you're up for the Webby next year, or this year with that type of program. Mara, can you put in a good word for Terri and her museum? Mara, I recently saw that you've been working on virtual art chats that will take place on Friday evenings. Can you talk through this initiative and what other digital projects you're working on right now?
Mara Kurlandsky:
Yeah. I can't take any credit for the art chats. That is 100% our education team, which is really cool. The art chats are basically a hybrid of existing onsite programs. We do a weekly gallery talk, which is about 30 minutes each, where educators or other people from the museum are leading short conversations in the gallery, highlighting specific works. Our senior educator also led a virtual Slow Art Day. If you're not familiar with Slow Art Day, it's a global initiative. It usually happens on one day, April 4th each year. It's a way of spending a deep amount of time with a work of art and really observing and appreciating, and then having a conversation afterwards. It's a very particular kind of experience meant to be onsite and in-person, but she moved really quickly to do a virtual version of it that I think ended up being really amazing and actually had an international audience, which is not something that we would have had otherwise. The art chats are building on that with the goal being that they're trying to approximate the intimacy of a small group gallery experience while also welcoming a more geographically diverse audience. The philosophy is the same, introducing artwork from the collections. The educators lead facilitated conversations about the artwork and create safe space that participants can share and absorb ideas in a really welcoming way that's not just, this tour guide as taking on a tour and telling you things that you need to know. It's really participatory. They're thinking of May as a pilot month to see how it goes, but I can imagine that it's something that they might want to keep doing. It'll be every Friday at 5:00, which is to encourage folks who are working from home to maybe step away from their computers at least for a while, and this is Eastern time zone, and start their weekends with some of the art enthusiasts. You can have drinks, you can do things that you can't otherwise do in the gallery. I'm really excited for them. I think that what makes our kind of gallery talk special is that intimate experience and the ability to interact deeply with one of our educators. Those will be done over Zoom, and we'll see how they go.
Brendan Ciecko:
That's great. I look forward to hearing how everything progresses there because one of the most difficult balances to find right now is how to create some level of intimate experience for people, but just doesn't feel like a broad stream to everyone where it's a one way. Having that two-way communication, I'm really intrigued by and hope that it goes well.
We have a really interesting question that came in from the audience. This came from Jasmine Turner at the Jacksonville Museum of Science and History in Jacksonville, Florida. This is a good one. We've been talking about this the last couple of webinars, a lot of things have evolved in this front. What types of programming are you creating for your audience that will also be a revenue stream? This is a big elephant in the room type of question because there's no easy answer to it. There's the balance between should we give everything away for free or do we charge for a select few? Do they pay what they want?
Terri Freeman:
It's a hard one. I think that, yeah and my development person hates this because my perspective is, well, we're here to be this public resource and we should be, providing these programs and this information to people. But in this particular circumstance, and actually going forward, I think we do have to begin to think about, revenue generation from some of the programming that we are putting together, particularly since that's the only way that we can reach people.
Right now, I think we're going to be testing something a little bit later in the summer around a film that we are going to be screening and we would be inviting people to obviously see the film, but there will be a fee for it, there would be a panel associated with it. We don't know if we would be doing any merchandising along with it or not. I think that will be our first leap into that, but we have also been talking about a program that we have called Unpacking Racism for Action, which really focuses on bias and systemic racism. It is a face-to-face seven-month program. We're not going to be able to continue to do it that way, and we've been doing it now for about three or four years. Looking at maybe packaging that into a for-fee seminar that is, online or even if, once we get back into the museum, we may even consider having that be more revenue generating. But that's one of those things that is continual that we think that we can package in a way that people will pay for. It's difficult because you want to be able to provide some of this incredible information that you have access to for everyone, and to think about saying, "Well, no. We need to charge a fee for it," can sometimes be difficult, considering the communities and audiences that you are trying to target.
Brendan Ciecko:
Mara, how about you at your museum? Or even other museums, that you've been keeping an eye on, are you seeing any interesting activity around monetizing the digital content?
Mara Kurlandsky:
Not quite. I'm paying attention to different fundraising campaigns that are starting to come out because I think it's a really interesting balance of doing a hard fundraising ask right now. For art purposes, obviously day-to-day digital media is free. For the educators, they're still working with local schools and teachers that they were working with before, and a lot of that is stuff that they do for free or for low cost anyways. When it comes to special programming, our Fresh Talks are usually, I think it's a $25 price point, and that's for an in-person event, with food, and it goes on for several hours. I believe that even if we do them virtually, we'll still charge but it'll be at a significant discount, say, $5 but with maybe some language saying, "If you'd like to contribute more to support us," because actually, the interesting thing is, just by making it digital, it's not actually that much cheaper because you need additional tech support. We typically live stream them so we're still paying for those people anyway and any kind of additional backup that we would need to make it a decent program. I think that's as far as we've gotten. We do charge admission. It's fairly low for DC, we charge $10. There's been some talk about creating these opportunities for if you want to donate "virtual admission", which really just fee to support the museum. It's really hard to say because we don't know yet if we can't have these onsite programs that we otherwise are planning for the fall. It's hard to really make a plan for it.
Brendan Ciecko:
For sure. And I feel like it's one of the big questions for the moment, with truly no easy answer because there's a lot at stake, there's a lot of things to take into consideration, and there's also, "Is it going to be worth the reduced amount of revenue that would be coming anyway?" There's a lot of different perspectives on it, I look forward to watching as that progresses. Depending on how long this time period of closure exists, there's a lot of things that are unclear or uncertain right now. I want to jump back into community a little bit more, and this mirrors a couple questions that I'm seeing from the folks that are tuned in to the webinar. Community is a term that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and both of your careers, there have been a clear commitment to addressing inequality, supporting marginalized communities. With COVID-19 disproportionately affecting marginalized communities and with many museums aspiring to provide access and to be inclusive to all and to be there for the community, what role should a museum play in a moment like this? I'd love to hear your thoughts, Terri.
Terri Freeman:
That's a hard question. I'm not so certain. No, let me backup. From my perspective, this moment is no different frankly than all of the moments that we have to provide an opportunity to present the truth to people who are interested in hearing the truth. From our museum's perspective, what we want to do is to provide people with factual information about a period in history that is often under-taught, if you will. Not misunderstood or people see, particularly since this is the place where Dr. King was assassinated, they see King, they see 1963, they see the march on Washington, and that one speech that they think is who Dr. King was.
Our goal in this moment, like almost every moment, is to make sure that people understand the differences and the similarities between what was occurring in 1960 and what is occurring in 2020. Unfortunately, what this pandemic has demonstrated is that we continue to see significant inequities based on race, based on wealth, and poverty. We also are able to see that there are many people who are just a couple of paychecks away from poverty and homelessness. This is not different frankly in the ways that it was in the mid 20th century. Providing our role here is to provide information that helps people understand what was history, what is now, and how we need to move forward from this.
We don't tell people how to do it. We just provide the information that says these are the things that we're seeing. I think every museum, regardless of if you have a mission that is a social justice mission, or one that even is emphasizing equity, there is information and facts that you have that you can present to our broad community that help them better understand the world around them. That's ultimately what museums do. They help us understand the world around us and help us bridge into other communities in a lot of ways by understanding specific pieces of information.I think museums have this ability to also allow people some respite from what they're dealing with everyday, every moment. If our digital, and I'm talking collectively our, if our digital programming can give people some relief from the news that we hear everyday, I think that we have probably provided a significant service.
Brendan Ciecko:
Thank you so much for that, Terri. There are people on the webinar saying that they're standing up clapping. And I'm seeing lots of exclamation points for your response. It seems that your philosophy on what a museum's position should be, not just today, but all times, is really reflecting, what a lot of people in this webinar today feel. I really thank you for sharing that. Mara, that's a tough act to follow with that statement Terri just gave, but what role should a museum play in a moment like this from your perspective? Or what role do you see your museum playing? I also want a sidebar, I know that you led #DayofFacts and so much of what Terri was talking about is about the facts being presented, so I'm really interested in hearing what your thoughts are on all that.
Mara Kurlandsky:
Yeah. I will just go ahead and say plus one to everything that Terri just said. That was great. I think the point that comes up for me is we live in a period of vastly unequal society and that kind of inequality doesn't pause in a panic or in a crisis. They usually just get worse. I think for us, we are an art museum, we're not necessarily providing social services but we are educating the public about the fact that there is a vast disparity in the art world, like most industries where in terms of how women working in the arts are perceived or professional events are compensated, and all of that is still true and potentially giving even harder.I think there was, a study published in one of the art blogs saying that 90% of artists working in the United States have lost income because of canceled exhibitions or sales or what-have-you. The question of what a museum should do, I think it really depends on where the museum is located, what role they're already playing in the community.
We led another little mini social media campaign a few weeks ago, Museums Thank Health Heroes, because I was so inspired by all these reports of big art museums donating all of their excess supplies, masks, gloves, which is the exact personal protective equipment that healthcare workers and other kind of essential workers need to stay safe. I thought that was just such a really wonderful thing to do, and I've seen some other really amazing examples. The Baltimore Museum of Industry, the museum is closed but they donated their parking lot to serve as a virus testing site. I think it just depends on what the museum is and what resources they have to offer while also thinking creatively about what they have to offer. I think I mentioned that our public programs team has been circulating this Google doc to crowdsource resources for artists, but if there's a lot of information about grants and emergency funding, but we're specifically looking for resources that are targeted towards marginalized artists so that we can then publish that information on our website and our emails so that we can connect people who are related to our museum to very specific kinds of resources. The honest truth is, it's sometimes really hard to know what to do. This is a really unprecedented situation and there's no playbook for it. I think in general, just being open to thinking about doing things differently than how you've done them and not being held back by, oh, that's not really something we do, but maybe now, we do. And filling those gaps as needed.
Terri Freeman:
Brendan, can I just quickly add that also, I think that we do need to, in our trying to affect people and help them through this, we have to understand that we're going through this as well and give ourselves a little bit of space as we are trying to deal with the issues that are being thrown at us daily just around preserving the institutions, as well as pushing out the content and making sure that we're maintaining some interest on the part of our audiences. That we understand that every one of us are also going through this situation, which is a public health crisis. We need to make sure that we too are incorporating the self-care that we say we want everybody else to incorporate into their daily lives.
Brendan Ciecko:
Thank you. I want to say a couple closing words before our last question for Terri and Mara. I just want to mention that after the webinar, we're going to compile everybody's questions and ideas and solutions that have been explored and discussed on this webinar today into one living and breathing document for the museum and cultural community. Feel free to share some of your last thoughts in the webinar chat or email them over to hello@cuseum.com or post them on Twitter. I'm confident that any question that you may have, someone on the other end in this community will have some sort of answer, some sort of idea, some sort of words of encouragement or support. The fact that you're here on this webinar today shows that you're taking proactive steps in preparing your museum and preparing your museum to serve your community or serve your audience. We're all in this together and we're all going to get through this together. Support systems like these are critically important. I just want to say that before our last question for Mara and Terri. Can you leave us with one big idea that we can bring back to our organizations right now? So let's start with Mara.
Mara Kurlandsky:
I've been trying to think about this, but I just decided to go in the opposite direction and build a little bit on what Terri just said, which is to not be too concerned with coming up with the big, grand idea that is the master plan, the strategy that's amazing. And just remembering to check in with yourself and your colleagues, and saying, "Are you okay? How are you doing?" This is something that we're all experiencing for a lot of our colleagues. A lot of people have lost their job, or their hours have been cut. When we talk about community, I agree that we should think of ourselves as a community also, and do the best you can for your job and for your museum and for your community, but be good to each other as well.
Brendan Ciecko:
Thank you. And Terri.
Terri Freeman:
Thanks, Mara, for that, because I think that is so important. I guess what I would encourage people to do is not to think of what we are incurring right now as just a moment in time, but that we are now looking at how we move forward potentially with different tools and different tricks up our sleeves. That none of us should ever think that we've got it down so well that we don't ever have to do anything differently, because there will be another something that will occur and we'll have to be able to adapt to that. I think that we have to just look at where we are now, think of carrying some of this stuff forward and then figuring out how we perfect it.
I think what's so great is that, I think at one point, I saw there were over 1,300 people on this webinar. So there are 1,300 friends that we have, colleagues that we have out there who we can lean on to look at ideas and think about how we might be able to do things, differently. There's one thing I'm hoping may come out of this is that we become more collaborative and see ourselves as a part of this big, big community that can do more together, than we can apart from each other.
Brendan Ciecko:
Thank you. Well, thanks, both of you. Thanks, Mara, thanks, Terri, for your words of inspiration and your insightful discourse about what museums can do to serve their community, what some of the programs you've been focusing on and just even philosophically, the role that you see museums playing in the world right now. I really appreciate both of your time and your energy and everything that you do to support this community and to support your communities. I hope that you're staying safe and staying healthy. I wish both of you the best. I know that we'll all make it through this. We're going to learn a lot. We're going to come through better and stronger.
Thanks, everyone, for tuning in for the conversation today. I hope that this was helpful. I hope that this was insightful and inspiring. We're all in this together. The next couple of days and weeks are going to be filled with the same level of uncertainty but this community is here to help one another. For that, I'm grateful and for both of your voices today, I'm grateful. Thank you.
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