They’ve just launched a full programme of training for trustees, browse the collection below:

Aspiring trustees: For anyone considering becoming a trustee – these sessions will introduce trusteeship and help you find the best way to present your skills, knowledge and lived and learned experience, how to identify your purpose, will discuss challenges you might encounter and much more. You can  also prepare for the role ahead by dipping into essential skills and knowledge.

Newly appointed trustees: These sessions are aimed at demystifying trusteeship and what goes on in the boardroom as well as providing a solid grounding in subjects such as how to read financial statements and governance 101.

Recruiting trustees: A collection of sessions that help charity leaders and staff equip their organisations with the tools, resources, rationale and know-how to set up and maintain open recruitment policies to find the best trustees for them.

Trustee refresher: Been a trustee for a while but want to give your learning a boost? Or have an area of knowledge that’s always been a bit fuzzy? These are the sessions for you.

Hot topics: These are the fascinating, sometimes challenging, current issues that impact our roles as trustees. The format of these might be panels or webinars. Some subjects up for dissection will include why too much governance is actually a bad thing, why trustees should keep their noses in and fingers out, and how to deal with board conflict.

Taking on new responsibilities: If you’re finding being a trustee so rewarding that you want to take on more responsibilities – perhaps move onto a chair, vice chair or treasurer role, or chairing a subcommittee then this collection will help.

Skilling up: This collection covers a range of subjects, all related to deepening your knowledge of essential board matters. Target areas include addressing challenges around fundraising, deepening your financial understanding, how boards can work most effectively with the CEO.

All the Trustee Learning Programme sessions embed best equity, diversity and inclusion practices.  Many of our trainers are experts in the field and all trainers who are taking part in the programme are committed to making the training fully inclusive.

Click here to view the full programme.

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The purpose of the Annual Museum Survey 2023

The purpose of the Annual Museum Survey is to gather evidence to help demonstrate the social and economic importance of museums to funders and stakeholders – locally, regionally and nationally – and to provide museums with data to enable them to benchmark their performance.

What’s in it for museums?

• Advocacy – evidence to make the case for your social and economic value in order to sustain investment
• Performance benchmarking – consistent data to compare your museum’s operational context
• Informing strategy – knowing your operational context will support your business planning
• Fundraising – the data can be used as evidence to support funding applications or to express your value with the public

Read the interactive reports for Annual Museum Survey 2022 for England and the nine English regions here

The process

The Annual Museum Survey 2023 is open now. Registered museums are have been invited to participate in the survey by email. The email includes a direct link to an online survey tool called SmartSurvey.

We have provided the survey questions offline below to assist you in preparing your return. Please note, the offline surveys will differ depending on whether you are a single site or a multi site organisation. The definitions will help to provide added clarity on the terminology used within the survey questions. Please note, the online survey uses logic to apply only relevant questions. Therefore, some of the offline survey questions listed below may not apply and will result in fewer questions and a shorter survey process.

• Single Site Questions
• Multi Site Questions
• Definitions

If you require any further support, please contact: museum.data@bristol.gov.uk

Data sharing and open source data

Reports based on this survey will be published widely and made available on this webpage. Data provided via the survey will be combined with those of other museums to produce publicly available reports. The data will support sector advocacy, inform Museum Development business planning and sector wide strategic planning.

The dataset will be published as open source data on Museum Development websites from January 2025 – approximately one year after regional reports are published to support further research. The datasets will not include financial information or any personal information generated by the survey process. The aggregate data set generated by the survey in 2024 will be shared with our main funders, Arts Council England.

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MDEM and MDWM are delighted to appoint Jennie Crawford as Accreditation Advisor for the Midlands region. Jennie is a freelance consultant in the museum and heritage sector, with extensive experience of facilitating workshops and delivering workforce development programmes for the museum sector. She was one of Arts Council England’s Accreditation Advisors from 2011-15 and Museum Development North West’s Accreditation Technical Advisor from 2019 – 2022 where she and delivered a programme of support and training focused on governance, operations, collections management, learning and access for museums. She has also delivered Accreditation workshops for museums in the West Midlands and she is looking forward to getting to know museums in the East Midlands.

Born in Canada, Jennie has lived and worked in North West England since 2002: from heritage and culture roles in Cheshire and Manchester; to Pennine Lancashire Museums where she established a compelling vision for museums and art galleries.  She was the original architect of Pennine Lancashire Museums. In 2016, she settled in the Lake District to reinvigorate the visitor experience at Blackwell the Arts & Crafts House and plan the inaugural schools and families programme for Windermere Jetty Museum.  As a freelance consultant, Jennie has worked with organisations to develop strategic plans, write funding applications, carry out research and feasibility studies and evaluate projects.

As your regional Museum Accreditation Advisor, Jennie will provide:

An Accreditation Training and Development Programme

• A programme of Accreditation workshops to support new and returning applicants to the scheme

Advice to Accredited/Working Towards Accreditation (WTA) Museums

• Providing advice surgeries and responding to queries about Museum Accreditation via phone, email and online.
• Assessing Working Towards Accreditation (WTA) applications and giving pre-WTA advice.

Accreditation Mentor Support 

• Supporting the regional Accreditation Mentors Network

Heather Lomas is continuing to facilitate the MDEM Organisational Health programme for 2023/2024 and she looks forward to catching up with museums on the programme.

Contact:

Heather Lomas (Organisational Health): office@heatherlomas.co.uk

Jennie Crawford (Accreditation Advice): jennie@museummatters.co.uk

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Now the Museum Accreditation Scheme is re-invigorated we wanted to share some exciting opportunities for individuals to become Accreditation Mentors.

What is an Accreditation Mentor?

To meet the requirements of Accreditation, all museums must have access to professional advice and one way for volunteer-run museums to achieve this is to appoint an Accreditation mentor.

Accreditation mentors are experienced professionals in the sector, who help smaller museums achieve and retain Accreditation. They do this by supporting those museums to develop accreditation applications and returns. Mentors need to have three years relevant experience, with skills linking to one of the main areas assessed through Museum Accreditation.

Take a look at MDEM’s interview with current mentor Angela Tarnowksi, Accreditation Mentor for the Loughborough Carillon War Memorial and Tower discuss what it’s like being a Mentor, including a discussion on benefits, time and commitment needed and how you can make a positive difference in this role. What’s it like being an Accreditation Mentor Film.

Why become an Accreditation Mentor?

Being a mentor can give you valuable additional experience. It’s a two-way learning process, for the museum and for you: as a mentor you will learn from the different experience and knowledge of those involved with the museum, and gain experience of a different type of organisation. If you work in a defined role in a department within a museum, working with a small museum can give you new perspectives on a whole organisation.

Mentoring will give you access to networks and networking opportunities. It builds a stronger sector which supports the exchange and development of professional knowledge and shares expertise.

What next?

You can take a look at the below museum adverts, for museums currently looking for a new Accreditation Mentor and contact them directly. MDEM are able to support you in this process if needed, and you can contact the MDEM team centrally to access individual advice and support.

Accreditation Mentor Opportunities Newsletter – MDEM

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The Wild Escape, led by Art Fund and supported by Arts Council England, is a major new project uniting hundreds of museums, schools, and communities in a celebration of UK wildlife and creativity. For museum teams and schools, the project offers a fun and educational way to engage children with museum collections, through a focus on wildlife and the nature around us.

The Wild Escape coincides with the BBC’s Wild Isles programme, a major new BBC natural history service, presented by Sir David Attenborough, revealing a rarely seen wild side of the UK. It will inspire primary school children through art and design activities on BBC Bitesize, also lined to from other BBC sites.

The Wild Escape

Led by the Art Fund, with support from Arts Council England, Foyle Foundation, Kusuma Trust and a group of generous individuals and trusts, The Wild Escape grant scheme has been developed and delivered by Museum Development England, Museums Galleries Scotland, Northern Ireland Museums Council and Museum Development UK.

This collaboration to deliver small grant investment in museums across the UK builds on previous work undertaken by Museum Development UK and Art Fund, which provided small grants through the Museum Development Recovery grant programme in response to the pandemic, across 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Art Fund’s director Jenny Waldman said, The Wild Escape is a fantastic opportunity for the UK’s museums, galleries and collections to creatively engage the next generation in a positive future for our wildlife and natural environment. I hope all museums, galleries and historic houses join us and take part in The Wild Escape. Where cost is a barrier, they can apply for a grant to support their activities. We are enormously grateful to Arts Council England for their generous support for this ambitious project through a major National Lottery Project Grant.”

Applications are now closed for The Wild Escape small grants however museums, galleries and historic houses can still participate and benefit from a wide range of resources and project opportunities developed as part of The Wild Escape programme. For full information and to register, please go to About | The Wild Escape or contact thewildescape@artfund.org

The post The Wild Escape: programme update appeared first on MDEM.

The service will pool millions of object records – decades’ worth of knowledge from UK institutions large and small – and share them as the raw material for countless public and research uses. The service will also provide high-level information about each collection.

The first major user of data from the new infrastructure will be Art UK, which already brings more than 300,000 artworks, from 3,400 collections, to an online audience of over 4.5m people a year. The Museum Data Service will allow Art UK to scale up its operation adding millions more artworks over time. Thanks to support from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator Programme, Art UK will also build a new state-of-the-art e-commerce platform to generate much-needed commercial income for its partner collections.

Collections Trust will use its longstanding relationship with hundreds of smaller museums to help them make the most of the new service, and broker data-based projects that demonstrate the Museum Data Service’s game-changing potential for the UK museum sector as a whole.
The University of Leicester’s new Institute for Digital Culture completes the partnership, bringing a research dimension to the design and use of the service, the data expertise and technical capacity of a leading university, and a bridge to longer-term infrastructure ambitions for the wider digital humanities.

With guidance from the Open Data Institute on sustainable data stewardship, the three founding partners will set up a new joint organisation by spring 2024 to run the core service beyond the start-up phase and for decades to come. Until then Art UK, as the recipient of the two-year funding award from Bloomberg Philanthropies, will manage the grant. The governance structure for the Museum Data Service will be announced soon.

Professor Nishan Canagarajah, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, says: “Providing access to information and empowering people with knowledge is key to our mission. Appropriately for one of the first major projects for our new Institute for Digital Culture, we will work with partners to unlock millions of records in museums across the UK, making them visible for research, for creativity, for inspiration – for everyone.
I am grateful for the generous support of Bloomberg Philanthropies that will allow this major national infrastructure initiative to be realised through our partnership with Art UK and the Collections Trust. This project embodies the principles the Institute was established upon: assembling progressive thinking and diverse talents from across the research and cultural sectors, working collaboratively to make culture accessible to all.”

Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, Director of V&A East, says “The last three years have been transformative and testing for our sector, we have had to face into extreme challenge and think about where the big opportunity for the future might lie. It has been a period in which many of us caught up with the Art UK vison, have thought about the benefits of greater collaboration across the digital space, how sharing our art collections might offer paradigm-shifting collaborative and dynamic engagement potential across other sectors. I am deeply grateful to Art UK for their vision and leadership.”

Dr Catherine Eagleton, Director of Libraries and Museums, University of St Andrews, says “The new Museum Data Service is exciting for universities and researchers, making it much easier to search across collections to find particular types of object or specimen, to research what was acquired in a particular time period or from a particular place, or to investigate objects related to an individual or event across a number of collections. It will also mean researchers can more easily discover the richness of our local and regional museums across the UK, alongside the collections taken care of by national museums.”

Rebecca Bailey, Programme Director, Towards a National Collection, says “Towards a National Collection warmly congratulates the Museum Data Service on their significant funding award and will follow the development of the initiative with great interest. We look forward to sharing learnings between our two programmes on how the UK cultural heritage sector can increasingly connect and share its outstanding digital collections.”

Louise Burke, Managing Director of the Open Data Institute, says “As museums must properly steward knowledge about our societies and civilisations, so must we steward data about those collections. We are excited to be working with the University of Leicester, Art UK and the Collections Trust to support the Museum Data Service in becoming an important data institution in the culture sector.”

Camilla Hampshire, Museums Manager and Cultural Lead, Exeter City Council, and Chair of Collections Trust, says “The Museum Data Service can’t come soon enough for hard-pressed staff and volunteers. Dynamic collections need dynamic collections information, which is really hard for individual museums to achieve by themselves. The new service will help us all collaborate better with our audiences – and each other. Collections Trust is hugely grateful to Bloomberg Philanthropies for seeing the transformational power of this project, and proud to be working with Art UK and Leicester to make it happen.”

Andrew Ellis, Director of Art UK, says “All of us at Art UK are hugely grateful to Bloomberg Philanthropies for inviting us and our partners to participate in this farsighted investment programme focused on supporting cultural institutions invest in digital infrastructure. The benefits to our audiences and participating collections will be significant in terms of the growth in artworks joining Art UK and the growth in commercial income. But the real excitement here is to be working with Collections Trust and the University of Leicester on such a transformational initiative for the wider sector, one that will do so much to reduce silos and grow knowledge sharing”.

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Statement on heritage museums and collections at risk_1

The new statement is as follows:
Relevant funders alongside sector bodies have updated their co-ordinated approach in response to urgent situations when museums, archives, historic sites or collections are at risk. This joint statement sets out this commitment.

Arts Council England; the National Lottery Heritage Fund; Museums Association; Army Museums Ogilby Trust; the Association of Independent Museums; Collections Trust; English Heritage; Historic England; University Museums Group; Art Fund; National Museums Directors’ Council; National Trust; Museums Galleries Scotland; Northern Ireland Museums Council; The National Archives; Museum Development UK and the Welsh Museums Federation will work together to offer guidance to organisations which face a precarious future exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The organisations supporting this statement wish to provide appropriate and timely advice in such situations, supporting governing bodies in their decision-making. However, the responsibility for the stewardship of the organisation, site and collections remains with the respective governing bodies and an effective response will depend on the willingness and ability of an organisation to take ownership of its issues.

We urge organisations, or individuals, who have concerns about the sustainability of a heritage organisation, museum or collection to contact the most relevant organisation, as early as possible. We commit to sharing information between relevant parties, if given permission to do so, so that we can determine who is best placed to help. We recognise that in some cases, there might be a need for confidentiality and more discreet
conversations.

When approached with concerns, we commit to working in partnership. We will discuss appropriate responses. Our aim will be to help ensure the public retain long-term access to the collections held for their benefit.

Our joint response will take into account the circumstances of each case, recognising that organisations vary greatly in terms of the collections and buildings they manage, their purpose, their users, stakeholders and funders, business and governance models, scale of operation and income streams.

We recognise that it will not be possible to secure a long-term future for all organisations or collections. However, we believe that the chances of a positive outcome are greatly increased if there is timely and open discussion about the situation and if all appropriate organisations are involved in giving advice and support.

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How to apply:
Send CV and covering letter to:
Town Clerk, Stamford Town Council, Town Hall, St. Mary’s Hill, Stamford, PE9 2DR

Interviews will be held:
Tuesday 17 and Wednesday 18 January 2023 at Stamford Town Hall

Summary of Role:
To lead an exciting project over the coming years to develop the museum offer in Stamford starting in the Town Hall (including the development of an Escape Room attraction) and extending into other sites across the town. This will be through partnership working and development of new projects and funding opportunities. You will put in place policies, plans and procedures to achieve Museum Accreditation, and will work with Lincolnshire County Council and other partners (including volunteers) regarding collections management. The role will also explore opportunities to increase use of the museum and collections by the local community including schools.

Who we’re looking for:
Someone with management experience in museum/heritage settings and/or with a heritage/museum qualification who can enthusiastically lead a project to creatively reimagine the museum offer in Stamford. You will need to be a great negotiator and communicator, able to forge new partnerships locally to develop and raise the profile of the museum offer, making it relevant to local communities and visitors to the town. You will understand the needs of potential audiences and have an ability to rethink methods of storytelling about the diverse and rich history of the town through its collections and buildings.

The post Vacancy – Heritage & Cultural Officer, Stamford Town Council appeared first on MDEM.

East Midlands Museum Development (MDEM) and West Midlands Museum Development (WMMD) are seeking a freelance individual, agency, or team to analyse the various data sets collected by both programmes, with an emphasis on the training data for 2020-22.

Both regions collect and monitor several data sets. We recognise that the analysis we carry out is light touch and this is an opportunity to link the data sets together for greater insights.

Aims of the Museum Engagement Trends project

The project aims to understand how the two museum development programmes are meeting the training needs of museums both in the short term and the longer term and to identify areas for improvement. The project findings will help inform our Museum Development 2024-26 programme application.

We’d like to know more about how factors such as museum size, the governance type, the location of the museum and the delegate experience level influence engagement with our programme, and how learning is embedded when we look at the long range evaluation.

We want to understand where there are gaps in the reach of our training and if there is more we can do to improve our training offer.

The brief

We are looking for a candidate (or candidates*) to carry out the data analysis, including:

• Agree final parameters at launch meeting (in person or online)
• Inform our understanding of how to get the most out of the data sets we hold
• Advise the MDEM and WMMD teams how they can clean the data before analysis
• Carry out the agreed analysis such as cutting data by key variables and coding text responses
• Provide Midlands-wide data analysis outputs, including cross tabulations
• Provide regional data analysis outputs, including cross tabulations
• Report of trends and insights Midlands-wide and for each region
• Presentation to MDEM and WMMD Programme Managers which could be in-person or online
• Learnings and recommendation for future data collection

*MDEM and WMMD will consider applications from agencies, individual freelancers or a team of freelancers if you wish to apply as a group.

We are seeking candidates with the following experience and expertise:

• Project management: Track record of delivering projects to plan, on time and within budget
• Technical skills: Proven data analysis skills, working with multiple data sets and an ability to manipulate data using advanced Excel functions or specialist software to draw out the patterns from the quantitative and qualitative data
• Communication: Excellent communication skills with the ability to present the data in an understandable formats for non-data experts
• Museum and/ or heritage sector experience and knowledge: Desirable

Timescales and key dates

• Invitation to quote closes: 5pm, Monday 5 December 2022
• Interviews: week commencing Monday 12 December 2022
• Successful applicants notified: by Monday 19 December 2022
• Start of contract and Initiation meeting w/c 9 January 2023
• Final report, data set and presentation: by Monday 27 March 2023 at the latest

Project budget and payment terms

Up to £12,000, including VAT and any expenses.

Please note, as this is a freelance opportunity the successful applicant will be responsible for arranging their own National Insurance and tax.

This work is funded with public money through Arts Council England, so it is imperative that we follow ‘best value’ principles when appointing our consultancy partner.

Download the full brief

Any queries or things you would like to discuss before submitting a proposal?

We are more than happy to discuss the project with you beforehand and answer any queries you may have. Please email Dawn Allman to arrange an informal phone or Zoom call.

Deadline for tender bids: 5pm, Monday 5 December 2022

> Apply Now

The post Museum Development Tender for Data Analysis project appeared first on MDEM.

The survey is intended to highlight key vulnerabilities in the sector and provide data to help the government to identify which sectors will require ongoing support with energy costs beyond 31 March 2023, when the current universal price guarantee for businesses is due to end.

The survey is being run by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

The link to complete the questionnaire is here: https://beis.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cTob3uhBoMiwgOW

The survey is hosted on the Qualtrics platform and all responses will be collated by BEIS as they are submitted.

Please note : we would ask museums and galleries to use the descriptor Museums activities in question 1.3. In addition, the SIC code to be used is 91020, Museums activities.  This will ensure that responses are collated by BEIS under the correct sector.

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