Advice and help with building history capacity.
The Minnesota Historical Society’s Local History Services helps Minnesotans preserve and share their history. This blog is a resource of best practices on the wide variety of museum, preservation, conservation, funding, and non-profit management topics. We’re here to help.
Improving Credibility
By: grabitsdm | June 4, 2008
Scott Russell covered "Nonprofits discuss how to improve their credibility" recently for MinnPost. Although the Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and Charity Review Council forum he cites looks at nonprofits in general, the observations are instructive for nonprofit historical organizations. On the one hand for historical organizations is the comfort of the often cited statistic that historical museums are perceived by the public as the most trustworthy source of history ("Presence of the Past," by Roy Rosensweig and David Thelen), and the forum showed that the public trusts nonprofits with making better use of financial resources more than government and business. However, there is concern that the level of trust is only 72 percent. History museums seem to take public trust very seriously for all aspects of operation. To help in many of those aspects, the American Associaiton for State and Local History is piloting a Self-Assessment project to further ensure at least minimum standards are used through a graduated system.
Without worrying about other museums, what are some ways that you and your organization seek to bolster public trust in the communities that you serve? Have you seen improved results from users after making a change to improve trust?
Without worrying about other museums, what are some ways that you and your organization seek to bolster public trust in the communities that you serve? Have you seen improved results from users after making a change to improve trust?