Crowdsourcing can mean a variety of things, but it’s all about people helping you reach your goals. This is ideal for museums, because crowdsourcing can make people feel like they are contributing and engaging directly with us – because they are. Volunteer projects is a type of crowdsourcing that museums are very familiar with.
An offshoot of crowdsourcing is something called crowdfunding, which allows you to ask people for money for a specific project. It differs from donations because it usually has to relate to a specific project, making it time-bound and setting milestones and outcomes that need to be achieved. Kickstarter is a popular website for such projects, and it’s certainly the kind of thing museums should be looking into more. Earlier this year the Bowes Museum launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to re-display some artwork, for example.
This isn’t limited to exhibitions or full-sized museums, however. There’s a current project on Kickstarter in which a freelance conservator asks for funding to go to Bhutan to conserve sacred Thangkas. I genuinely hope she makes it. Conservation is engaging and interesting – there’s definitely a place for us on Kickstarter, whether we’re freelancers or companies or part of a museum. I hope to see a lot more of it in the future!
On a more quirky note: sometimes projects crop up on Kickstarter that challenge what you’d consider a museum to be. This is long since funded, but I love the concept nonetheless – the Mini Museum. Interesting!