Administration matters

Systems in Place

Many of the items listed in this section are covered in more detail elsewhere in the toolkit.

Have a plan and make sure that everyone – your volunteers, your staff, your MDO and other potential supporters/helpers know about it. Volunteers and staff need to have ownership of the plan and feel that they are part of it rather than ‘having it done to them’.

Your business plan (or forward plan) should have every aspect of running the museum in it:

• What your museum is
• What opening the museum involves
• All people involved, what they do and what they have the skills to do
• Total costs of running the museum
• Future plans and how they will be carried out
• Financing the future
• Visitors – current, and getting more
• Other projects – current and future
• All Administration matters – to show you have the processes in place

Renew/Update your business plan (forward plan) every 6 months minimum. Things will have changed in the last six months, new opportunities will have arisen and some lost. Make sure your plan reflects this.

Attend to legal matter, insurance matters, intellectual property matters, health & safety matters, security matters

Have systems in place so that information is to hand when it is needed. Make sure that information is not ‘silo-ed’ with one volunteer or staff member.

Consider where and how you are storing information. Does only one member have access to museum records, whether financial or insurances, rotas, development plans etc? How do you back up any information? What stops when one particular volunteer goes away on holiday or is otherwise unable to spend time on the museum?

Key requirements

To run your museum as a business you should consider:

Marketing issues:

• Who are your customers?
• What is your product?
• How do we make the collection available to the public?
• What retains their interest?
• How do we bring in repeat customers?
• How do we find new customers?
• What are our resources?

Personnel issues:

• Who are the personnel – paid and/or volunteers?
• How are they recruited?
• How are they motivated?
• What training and support can the museum give to maintain their interest?
• How will people be organised – in teams, led by the committee, working as individuals, answering to the chairman?
• How will personnel be informed of what is going on in the museum?
• How can personnel have their say on what is going on in the museum?
• How does the museum review tasks and people doing those tasks? Build in opportunities to review tasks, and enable volunteers to have the opportunity to change what they do.                        

Financial issues - Who keeps the records of income and expenditure?

Development issues:

• What are the future plans for the museum?
• Who will lead these plans?
• How will the time line for the project be set and who will oversee it? An individual, a committee
• What partners and other external organisations should be involved in the museum?

Property issues:

• Are we making best use of the property?
• Are there any access issues – for the museum, for visitors?
• Maintenance responsibilities
• Ownership responsibilities