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Mutual benefit?

from Ellen Collins, Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Where's the real value in a relationship between a museum and a business?

In the last few days, a couple of things have really begun to focus my mind on one of the big questions from the first exchange programme session. Namely; how can you ensure that a partnership between a business and a cultural institution benefits both organisations equally? That it’s not a kind of mutual back scratching exercise dressed up as something grander, but genuinely changes things in some way?

This was an issue which sort of bubbled under the surface during some of our group exercises, and was finally given voice by one brave soul towards the end of the day. Funnily enough, it was relatively easy to see the business benefit – something we had always thought would be tricky to identify. Harder by far, it seemed, was to see what the museum gained from a partnership. We touched on, but didn’t explore properly, the way that organisational silos can sometimes leave curators and archivists focused wholly on the collections, doing engagement if they must but really preferring to leave it to the education department.

I felt the first tweak of introspection when finalising the brief for the Innovation Fund. We think that this project, which offers museums and archives a small sum of money to develop and run an activity with a business, has real potential to change the way that the sectors work together. But there is a concern, of course, that it becomes just another funding stream to chase; that the only benefit is to the business ‘consumer’ and the museum gets nothing more out of it than a bit of extra cash.

Then, into my email inbox, popped a press article about the launch of the Stories of the World initiative. Linked to the Olympics, this ambitious project will work with local communities to re-curate collections so that they tell the stories of all of London’s residents over the ages.

Couldn’t the same thing happen when museums and archives meet businesses? Corporate archives, in particular, really value their connections with retired staff – after all, they may be the only ones who can explain what an obscure bit of kit was for, or how to understand an acronym in the Director’s papers. The London Transport Museum uses its network of business connections to inform its collecting policy, so it can record the past, present and future of transport in London.

Even businesses with a less obvious link to the collections can add value to what a museum or archive does. There’s an clear synergy between museum education work and business training – a leadership course designed for graduates entering an investment bank could be reworked for young people about to leave school and begin their career.

The benefits that business can reap from a relationship with a museum are manifold: prestige, new products, a more engaged body of staff. But the connections can benefit the core work of a museum or archive just as much. The surprise is to find that it is easier to see the business benefit – not what I had expected at all.