Keeping it running

 Business Planning

• Have you written your business plan yet? 
• If you have one, when did you last look at it? 
• Why did you write it? 
• Who did you write it for?

Business Plans should be written for your museum and should be a realistic plan for the short and longer term that reflects what your museum is trying to aim for and how you might achieve those plans. It is not a plan written for the bank manager or a grant application.

The benefit of writing your business plan down is that it is a physical act that will help you to set out plans and see, literally in black and white in front of you, where the gaps are, where you are making unachievable commitments etc. The business plan should bring everything to one place so that you can see how the different people/teams/projects etc within your museum fit together.

It should be re-visited and changed every 6 months. In the course of 6 months it is inevitable that things will have either been more successful or less successful than you had hoped, new opportunities will have come along (grants, schemes, training programmes etc) and your business plan should reflect all of these changes. If you have a bad season and visitor numbers decrease you will probably need to show in your business plan how you will overcome this – your cashflow will be different; you may need to change the opening hours of the museum; you may need to work on something different in the way you market the museum; you may need new skills from your staff (volunteers or paid).

If you are in the midst of a rapid period of change it may be that you choose to review your business plan more frequently than at 6 month intervals. Do not fall in to the trap of creating a business plan and never looking at it again so that it becomes a historical document as opposed to a living, current and relevant plan.

A template that you can use to start your business plan is downloadable from the link below, but your plan should reflect your museum and therefore the headings are only a guide. As it is your plan it can include anything that you think is relevant to running the museum.

Business Planning Template (26 kb)

Opening up

You have your business plan and part of that will include an overview plan of what it takes to open the doors of your museum. You should have a long list that involves more than having the collection on display. Your list might include:

Rotas and day-to-day

Your business plan shows how and when you want to open and you probably included information that supported your reasons for opening when you are.

For the practicalities of managing your day to day operation, assign specific roles and tasks to people (whether volunteers or employed staff) so that your team knows what it is doing.

• You should be clear about who is accountable for what.
• From the beginning it is advisable to be clear on how the rota is set up, who has responsibility for seeing that all tasks are fulfilled and how changes can be made.
• From the beginning it is advisable to enable a review of the rota allowing for changes in availability. You should put in to place a review date so that staff and volunteers know that as circumstances change they are not committed to a responsibility forever.

For day-to-day rotas you need to make sure that there is good communication with your staff and volunteers. Is the rota displayed in a staff area so that it can be referred to on site?

Communication in general must be attended to.

• Do you send emails, or have pigeonholes in the museum?
• When a post item is received how is it dealt with?
• Is there any record of all mail received by the museum or does each member in the museum receive things addressed to them and deal with them individually?
• You might choose to set up a log of mail received so that you can track that items are dealt with.

Whilst the day-to-day operation is a current concern that is ongoing and can be time-consuming, do not forget that the business plan is looking at developments in the future and the long term survival of the museum. In the course of the M2B project we have found museums in the East Midlands region that are very efficient on the day-to-day running but are running out of time as the volunteers get older and the long term plans are not attended to. This is a trap that occurs so slowly over time that you can be in it without realising that it is time to do something about it.

Use of IT

The internet and computers are fundamental in 21st Century life, however this does not mean that each museum in the region cannot open without having at least one computer on site.

As part of the M2B project a report on e-commerce was commissioned. A major finding was that most of the museums in the East Midlands are engaged in e-commerce at some level. E-commerce is not something to be wary of and to shy away from.   This report and its recommendations can be viewed on the Museum 2 business page of the site.

A checklist to assist you in considering your IT requirements is given below:

• Can you afford to have a computer on site? (Remember insurance, security and storage issues)
• What will you use it for?
• Who will have access to it?
• Will you plan to use home email addresses?
• How will members of the public contact the museum with queries?
• If home email addresses are used, will these be read frequently enough? And will the person receiving the emails be willing to take responsibility for answering the emails on behalf of the museum?
• How will you back up information?
• How will records be kept and/or distributed?
• Are you planning to sell anything on your website? See the full e-commerce report with further information about this.
• If you are selling through the website, who will take on the responsibility for receiving the orders and then packing and posting the goods purchased?
• Maintenance and content management of your website will be crucial; a site that never changes its information and even has outdated information will lose visitors very easily.
  1. Set up maintenance from the start
  2. Plan how often the information be updated
  3. Plan how you will encourage the web visitor to return to your site.