How to Get a Job in a Museum Or Art Gallery - By Alison Baverstock Page 0,10

with truncated options?

7. Widening participation

Given that funding decisions in the public sector are often based on footfall – taken as a crude measure of local value – it is vital to consider the participation of the community in the amenity. How can you increase visitor numbers, particularly among the specific sectors whose engagement (or not) is seen as the current political objective?

All galleries and museums have to think about new experiences and services that can be offered in an attempt to woo wider participation. The commercial sector, too, has to think about how to widen access to customers and encourage them to become regulars rather than one-offs.

Museums often run holiday schemes for children, which may interrupt the peace of the surroundings for regular visitors, but draw new generations into involvement with an organisation they may not previously have noticed.

Things to think about

• Introducing a new ‘experience’ to attract specific local groups, such as schools or teenagers, who might not have thought it relevant to them.

• How would you sell the local history museum to schools in the area as a possible day trip? What special programme could you lay on? How could teenagers be encouraged to come in?

8. Measuring your efficiency

Whether or not you consider it an appropriate response to the cultural heritage on offer, all publicly funded organisations need to be able to measure their effectiveness and impact in order to promote their efficient management of public resources and sustain future funding. Private institutions will need to satisfy their boards of trustees – or their bank manager. As spending gets tighter, this becomes more of a priority.

The world of marketing has done this for a long time, thus a magazine’s circulation (the number of copies sold) may instead be expressed as its readership (the number of people who read it, which may be many more than just the original person who passed over the money). I even saw a marketing campaign expressed in terms of eyes that saw the poster, and if we consider that most people have two eyes, the number quoted must signal half the quantity of individuals who walked past. This kind of commercial sleight of hand, or on occasion duplicity, is often difficult for those involved with the care and preservation of objects for future generations, but is increasingly important.

Things to think about

How you can prove that the public value and support your organisation in order to secure its future access to funding? How can you prove that you are efficient stewards of the public purse?

If you have to monitor the number of visitors to a gallery, what time of day would you make your recording? How can you express the value denoted by those who attend but do not pay? You could consider:

• providing an experiences book which you ask visitors to write in – this might produce a useful series of quotes that you can use for wider promotion;

• sending a form to schools who visit that asks them how the visit went (but is not so long that they delay returning it);

• giving visitors a short introduction to your collection and its history – this can increase their satisfaction in attending and encourage them to communicate the positive experience to their friends.

Case Study

Interview with Gyles Brandreth, joint curator of the exhibition ‘Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter: Portraits of Children’s Writers’, National Portrait Gallery, 2003

Like most professions, the world of galleries and museums can seem relatively closed to those who are not part of it, so the experience of someone entering from the outside is illuminating – hence this interview.

How did he come to get involved?

This was not a completely new departure – Gyles Brandreth has been involved in the business of putting on exhibitions and shows for a long time. When he was in his early 20s he ran several ‘son et lumières’, bringing history to life, and has also run free enterprise exhibitions. For example, in 1988 he opened the Teddy Bear Museum in Stratford-upon-Avon, which exhibited the first Padding-ton Bear, Winnie the Pooh, Pudsey and Sooty. The Teddy Bear Museum ran in a Tudor house for nearly 20 years after which it was necessary to secure its long-term future and to find a permanent home and it is now housed at the Polka Children’s Theatre in Wimbledon. So the world of museums – putting items on display and their wider exposition – was not new to Brandreth.

The National Portrait Gallery initiative came out of another meeting – Brandreth had been