country
activities

Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine

Audience Development and Fundraising Seminar
September 21-26, 2009

Consultants: Rena Zurofsky and Deborah Schwartz

Responding to requests from the Ukraine, Fund consultants Rena Zurofsky, a strategic planning and marketing museum consultant, and Deborah Schwartz, former Deputy Director for Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, led audience development and fundraising seminars in Kyiv and Lviv.

The seminar in Kyiv was hosted by the National Museum of Literature and had over thirty participants, most of whom represented “literature museums,” institutions primarily dedicated to literature written in Ukrainian. In Lviv, twenty-one participants were hosted at the house museum of Solomiya Krushelnytska, an internationally renowned opera singer in the late 19th and early 20th century. Participants at each seminar represented a wide range of museums and institutions, and the Kyiv seminar also included university professors and students.

Each seminar began with a discussion of mission statements, audience development, and programming concepts. Ms. Schwartz used examples from various American museums to illustrate the conceptual range of mission statements, which were discussed and analyzed by the group, as well as programming examples from the Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, and others. Participants were especially interested in how to conduct audience surveys and different approaches that can be undertaken for in-depth interviews and focus groups of visitors.

Ms. Zurofsky’s presentations focused on the many aspects of marketing, especially how museums and institutions are using their websites to achieve their goals. The website of the Thomas Cole Historic Site in Catskill, New York struck a chord with both seminar groups, as it is a small house museum whose website markets not just the institution but also the artist in a very broad and intriguing way. Participants were interested in learning more about museum “trails,” which link related institutions and often local hotels and restaurants, as well as branding in general.

At the beginning of the seminars, participants were divided into small working groups. Their first exercise was writing, presenting, and defending a mission statement for one group member’s institution. They also created and presented collaborative programming for the institutions within the respective groups; some of their presentations were so creative and inventive, it is hoped that they will be put into action. The groups then created marketing plans for their collaborative projects.

Final discussions at both seminars were on fundraising, which is only just beginning to be practiced in Ukraine. Most of the time was spent on membership programs, again using websites to discuss how museums build their donor pools level by level online.

Future Activities

There was a great desire among the participants to learn more about recent exhibition design and interpretive approaches in American museums, and, as such, The Fund is exploring the possibility of adding seminars which are focused on education, interpretation, and exhibition planning.