FOR SMALLER MUSEUMS
Most smaller art museums run with twenty-five people or fewer, and few have anyone on the leadership team whose job is digital. The collections system, the donor database, and the image archive were bought in different decades and have never spoken to each other. Nothing needs replacing. Everything needs connecting.
WHAT YOU ARE CARRYING
The permanent collection and its records: accession, loans, condition reports, rights. A donor and member database that disagrees with the newsletter list. Exhibitions on a calendar nobody can move. Restricted gifts to track, grants to report, a board packet every quarter. A website on a platform someone chose years ago. And one person, usually, who is the only one who knows how any of it connects.
WHAT WE HEAR
Collections management, digital assets, donor records: three systems, three logins, the same object or the same person entered twice. Connecting them is usually cheaper than replacing any one of them, and it is where the hours go.
The registrar who also runs the website. The development officer who also maintains the database. When that person leaves, the smaller museum’s memory of how things work leaves with them. We document, connect, and stay on call so no one is the bottleneck.
Budgets are flat or falling and the work is not. The only lever left is how much of the week goes to administration instead of the collection. That is the lever we work on.
WHERE WE BEGIN
A diagnostic maps the systems you have and where the double entry lives. The first project is usually the connection between collections, donors, and communications, not a new platform.
A few weeks with the registrar, the development office, and whoever runs the website. Where the time goes, which systems hold what, and what to connect first.
Collections, donor, and communications systems that share one record of the object and one record of the person. A website the staff can edit. One login fewer.
The server in the closet, the backups nobody has restored, the accounts that still belong to people who left. Moved, secured, tested, written down.
THE MISSION WORK
When budgets tighten, the first things cut are positions and exhibitions. We exist to make that choice less necessary. The hours returned by connected systems go back to curatorial and scholarly work, not to a smaller staff.
HOW WE BUILD
Everything we set up assumes you will grow. Five people today, fifty in a few years: the tools, the permissions, the data, the costs are chosen so that nothing has to be torn out and rebuilt on the way up.
Tools, permissions, and data that hold at five people and at fifty.
The most capable option inside what you can carry, not the most expensive one.
Current, well-supported technology only. Nothing that is old in three years.
Nothing switched off until the old record and the new one agree.
We work the way we advise. Systems we supervise carry the searching, drafting, testing, and documenting; people who know the field review every decision. A practice this size can therefore take on this scope, and keep its price within reach of a nonprofit.
START HERE
Book a first conversation. It costs nothing.