I’m afraid I don’t have any surefire strategies, only encouragement.

Allyson Lazar (http://twolsanday.blogspot.com/) and I devised a similar project back in 2007. Under the working title MuseumMatch, we hoped to create a site where people could give any amount directly to the museum of their choice. Alternately, museums could post descriptions of exhibitions that they could produce only with specific, additional funding. If a visitor wanted to see that exhibition become a reality, he or she could donate directly to that cause in any amount they wished.

Unfortunately, Allyson and I hit many of the same roadblocks you encountered. And, again, it was early 2007 so the technology (or at least awareness of certain technologies) was not as far along either.

If you’re curious about similar models used by non-profits other than museums, I encourage you to contact Allyson as she presented on the topic of e-philanthropy at a number of museum conferences.

Best of luck. I really do hope that this idea comes to fruition.

///
@creativemerc

I know there’s a lot to figure out technically. If I was a coder, I would have worked it out all myself.
Authenticating people who work for museum would have been simple, just like I do here with comments. You register, I approve/validate each one. Not a quick process, but hey. I do it with every twitter follower and I did it with the ArtFriday social network that used to run on here (it was based of Elgg)

The “promise” thing was just a fancy petition (because I can work out a way to be an agent of membership registration. That would take far too much work). People would “promise” on a simple piece of honesty. I know I would love to have actual running totals on credit card sales, but again, too much work.

I figured a million (I had silly/high hopes) people said “I’m going to support my museum”, then that would make an impact. Me and Nina made a lot of noise and Brooklyn Museum got new members. Simple as that. This was something to make a lot of noise over. It was more a banner than a recruitment drive. If I had this little app, I would have spoken about it, blogged about it, got on my high horse and told everyone about it. People would have linked to it and retweeted it, and maybe some museums would get something out of it. Nothing more. I knew it wouldn’t solve a problem…

K Landon – I imagine it could have been built on lots of things. All of which tends to baffle me. But I would have maintained it. If there’s a set of buttons saying APPROVE, DELETE and EDIT, I would have done all the leg work like I do in the background of this Wordpress blog.
If it took off, of became really popular, then I might have thrown something more substantial behind it. This was to start small.

Who knows if people’s habits are to seearch for memberships in their area. I did think a database/directory of several hundreds museums and their membership plans may have been useful. Especially when I’m shouting how our museums are hurting and we, the people, need to help them out when many aren’t helping.

I got a ton of traffic from my No Sleep Till Brooklyn Museum post. An absolute ton. I imagine Nina Simon got a bit as well. It wasn’t from google searches, it was from activism. It really spread like wildfire over twitter (especially over that little band of very close-knit museum professional and artists that I call followers) and Brooklyn got a couple of dozen members. That’s real money from real people that goes right into BM just because me and Nina made a call to museum-loving folk.

This app was only going to capture that. Nothing more.

On the other hand, I kind of wonder how much such a thing would be used. Do people search the web for organizations (like museums) in their area with the goal of becoming a member? I’d guess not (and looking at our website analytics would support that negative guess).

I would be interested to know if anyone gets much traffic from searches specifically related to membership.

Then you have the issue of figuring out how to handle the whole “promise” idea. Do you attempt to authenticate whether the user has made it to the “donation successful” page or something similar, or do you just take the user’s word for it? And are promises compelling to the public who sees this (promised) museum bailout? I’m not sure. That’s not supposed to be a leading question.

So while I feel a bit shamed for being one of the 8, you gotta cut us some slack here, Pete. There’s still a lot left to do on the intellectual side for this, and it’s a big time commitment to do correctly. Just my two cents. That said, I also hope to see it done. And done well.

this looks extremely useful, indeed. I was speaking about something pretty similar, in a way, some months ago, at a UNESCO workshop organized for museum professionals in Tashkent: one chapter of the workshop dealt with the “Spend less, let others work” issue (very crucial, due to budget cuts not only in some remote country, but in the “affluent” ones, as well…).

My approach, at that time, was rather “the other way ’round” – with resources like (google?)map linked data, info and pictures on a specific site provided to museum (or archaeological) institutions by what could be considered a potential audience of primary relevance (since they where already so interested in the institution’s “object of conservation” to document it, and to make an upload thereof to the internet…).

But your description is very powerful and detailed. I’m not so good a programmer, I fear, to be of practical help to you, right now – but I’ll gladly help you spread the word about this.

With kind regards,
Alessandro

P.S.: I’m behind @crdav on twitter, btw… :)