Dear New Museum Trustee

From my viewpoint as a volunteer trustee for a number of non-profits, including museums, over the last 50 years, here are some suggestions about what a new museum trustee needs to start knowing, doing and not doing:

In a nutshell, as a new museum trustee:

• You are a steward, for the short term, of a long-term institution holding collections that record and exhibit what was, and, is important, in whatever way, from generation to generation, to the advancement of our civilization for the public’s benefit.
• You are responsible for ensuring your museum’s sustainability as your oversee the museum’s operations.
• You are bound by three legal duties:
  • Duty of Loyalty: you must always place the museum’s interests ahead of yours
  • Duty of Care: your decisions must be made with reasonable care and competency.
  • Duty of Obedience: you must ensure that the museum obeys applicable laws and regulations, follows its own bylaws, and adheres to its stated corporate purposes/mission.

You also need the following three types of knowledge:

KNOWING Yourself as the Museum Trustee

Before accepting the Museum Trusteeship

Know why you want to be a museum trustee. Motivations run from the extreme of 100% self-promotion (could care less about the mission, care completely about being with the people on the board) to 100% dedicated to the mission (the museum is my life). I’ve seen both and neither was good for the museum.

Know your skills, experience, talents, connections, and financial wealth and how much of each one you are willing to donate.

Know when you can be available as a museum trustee, (e.g, during the work day, only in evenings/weekends, you winter in Florida and are away for 4 months).

Evaluate being a Museum Trustee   

Know why you are being invited to be a museum trustee. The reasons run from the extreme of “we just need a body to fill an empty board seat” to the other extreme in which your skills, experience, talents, connections or whatever are “crucial to the museum.”

Know what the board’s expectation of each museum trustee is. Many boards (all boards should) have these expectations written out. For example, is there an expectation of:

• A minimum financial donation amount? 
• Free professional services if you are a professional?
• Commitment of time to:
• Attend most, if not all, board meetings?
• Serve on a committee/task force?
• Volunteer at/attend at fundraisers
• Attend Annual Meetings
• Volunteer at/attend museum programs?
• Attend board retreats/workshops?

Know how much time you can donate, not only the time demanded in the board’s expectation, but also the oft-unmentioned additional time needed to:

• Prepare for board meetings (reviewing materials sent out prior to the board meeting)
• Commute to and from meetings and other museum activities.
• Educate yourself about your museum in terms of your museum’s:
• Collections
• Programs
• Operations
• The museum field as a whole
• Your museum’s particular field (e.g, house museum, art gallery)
• The regulatory maze your museum operates within

CAVEAT: If you are going to be an effective museum trustee and steward, realize that your biggest donation will probably be your time.

CAVEAT: As a museum trustee you need to have a working familiarity with the museum’s mission side and business side. Like a horse and carriage, you can’t have one without the other.

CAVEAT:  I have been amazed over the years of how many trustees thought their good intentions about the mission and whatever popped into their heads was excellent museum governance. The days of trustees being able to do whatever whenever with no government and insurer regulation are long gone. Just for your museum to operate today while effectuating its mission requires constant and careful navigation through an every increasingly complex landscape of federal, state, (county, if your museum is in a county jurisdiction), local, and insurer regulation. The museum lives by regulatory compliance and can die from non-compliance.

CAVEAT: Bear in mind that as a museum trustee your role is to oversee and not run the museum operations. Don’t get into the nitty gritty if there is staff doing it unless it’s essential to your overseeing. You’ll waste your time and that of the staff.

KNOWING Your Museum’s Mission

The mission is the reason why the museum was created and exists. Mission statements come in all sorts of forms from succinct to stultifying, from simple (e.g. to chronicling X’s life) to complex (e.g. chronicling western civilization’s development). But whatever the mission statement form, it follows this simple formula stating that the museum mission is:

• To preserve whatever
• By collecting together, in some way, the whatever that is being preserved
• For the public’s benefit through whatever ways.

CAVEAT: If you have occasion to review the evolution of your museum’s mission statement, don’t be surprised if what your museum does today has morphed somewhat, if not greatly, from the original mission statement. Your current statement should match the present mission.

CAVEAT: I’ve seen boards spend endless hours trying to develop a single elevator speech (you in an elevator expounding to the captive audience about your museum). It should be your personalized sales pitch to encourage your audience to support your museum.  “This is what my museum does, why it connects with me, and why it may connect with you.”

KNOWING The Institution That Is Your Museum

You need to have a good working knowledge of the key elements of what you are ultimately responsible for. It’s helpful know how many of the following are part of your museum:

• Sites
• Buildings
• Artifacts (sometimes divided into how many collections, e.g., the painting collection)
• Programs
• Employees
• Volunteers
• Visitors

For example, when I was Danvers (MA) Historical Society President I always carried in my head that the board and I were overseeing:

• 4 sites, including an ancient cemetery, totaling 13 acres with 11 acres being Olmstead-created formal gardens
• 11 buildings ranging from a gazebo and a National Historic Landmark Tea House, to a museum/meeting hall and a 16,000-square foot mansion all on, or eligible to be on, the National Register of Historic Places, some within the Salem Village Historic District and some subject to historic preservation easements
• Approximately 16,000 historic artifacts
• More than 100,000 documents/ephemera deposited with the town’s state of the art archival center
• 15 trustees
• 9 employees
• Assisted by up to 200 volunteers
• Approximately 10,000 visitors a year through more than 20 programs and activities.
• With an annual budget of money plus donated goods and services.

CONCLUSION

Being a competent museum trustee requires quite a commitment of time and education about your museum and the museum world. The downside is no money, no museum. So the museum’s business side is vital. But the upside is that your museum is a business that, focused on benefiting the public and with you as a museum trustee, makes a difference for the better with everyone it engages with.

As keepers of the past and present, museums broaden experience, perspective, knowledge, and appreciation of civilization; ignite and encourage learning, dormant talents and skills; bear witness to the fact that life is constant change and that today’s world didn’t fall from sky as it is today but developed in a mindboggling mixture of ways; and today’s world will be subject of tomorrow’s museums. That’s a museum trustee’s joy!

Wayne Eisenhauer
The author is a trustee and Vice President of Essex Heritage (The Essex National Heritage Commission) which is developing the Bakers Island Lighthouse Museum in Salem, MA.