Transparency is the future of museums
There is a theme of financial transparency emerging this year in the museum community, and it’s not going to go away. Culturally, there is a profound discomfort with talking about money. It’s not something done in polite company. That way of thinking, however, has become outdated, particularly for younger generations. Museums need to start being transparent about money.
Connecting the dots from Warren Kanders and the Whitney Biennial to paid internships to salary spreadsheets, what we see is a demand for transparency in where the money is coming from and where it’s going internally. The world of philanthropy has been defined by donors who want to give to non-operational expenses. Overhead, which includes salaries, is not glamorous. You don’t get your name listed on a wall or in a coveted hard copy program if you helped boost the salaries of museum staff. A donor may be willing to give $20,000 to reserve a table for 10 at a gala, but would that donor be willing to give the same amount to fund 10 summer internships (maybe if you name the internship program after them!) or, even less likely, give the social media manager and the development director a raise?
The board of trustees can’t play a role in the nitty gritty of staff salaries, but they can start with publishing amounts that board members give to an institution. Numbers can be inferred from the annual report and finding the giving tier where each board member is listed, but that takes some digging. More useful perhaps is knowing how much board members are required to give. This can get uncomfortable quickly, because giving requirements are never publicized, but the price of admission to sit on a museum board shouldn’t be a mystery. It shouldn’t be a secret society that requires a prospective trustee to be vetted for giving capacity before the magic number is revealed.
Related to what the trustees are giving is the growing desire among staff, artists, and visitors to see how that money was earned. How many museums include a detailed bio of each trustee on their website? What about a link to a resume, CV, or LinkedIn profile (keeping in mind that most trustees are over the age of 60...another problem)? How many museums make board members sign a conflict of interest statement that defines conflict not just in financial terms but in ways that align with the mission and values of the institution? Are any of these documents available upon request?
Another necessary step is publishing executive compensation like public companies are required to do. Of course, seeing the dichotomy between what museum directors make and what the rest of the staff makes quickly makes the nonprofit sector look like most other companies (take the scandal over Disney compensation, for example).
Let’s say we do get to this magical world of transparent numbers, what does it accomplish? For one, there’s a naming and shaming aspect to airing the dirty laundry and admitting that staff are underpaid and, in a sense, undervalued and possibly under appreciated. This transparency will probably lead to some increases in salary as museums try to compete with each other and even with the private sector. Does the disparity between what is required to serve on the board (which in some cases might be more than all the junior staff salaries combined) and what is paid out to the worker bees become so ridiculous when viewed together in one place that the field willingly evens itself out due to embarrassment?
The last critical problem in getting to this utopia is that if museums lower or lift board giving requirements, how will the museum be able to afford to pay the staff more? The ultimate goal would have to be changing nonprofit culture to where board roles are decoupled from giving, where trusteeship is based on skills and not used as a reward for giving.
In this happiest of scenarios, wealthy donors would give for operational expenses with no expectation of board service, board members as volunteer leaders of the institution would support the values of the museum both inside and outside the boardroom, and staff would make more than the cost of a museum studies degree.
