The Ohio Museums Association is committed to connecting and empowering museum professionals at all stages of their career — including our student and emerging museum professionals!
For our 2016 OMA Annual Conference, OMA was very proud to offer six students seeking careers in the museum field, scholarships to attend OMA 2016 in Columbus.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing from each scholarship recipient about their OMA conference experience.
Below is the first installment, by Kathleen Moore. Ms. Moore is currently pursuing her degree in Business Management and Museum Studies at Walsh University. Kathleen’s past museum experience includes work with Walsh University’s Hoover Historical Center, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Massillon Museum and the Smithsonian Institute.
Conference Builds Connections
By: Kathleen Moore
My name is Kathleen Moore and I am a rising senior at Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio pursuing my undergraduate degree in Business Management and Museum Studies. Over the past year, I have interned with Walsh University’s Hoover Historical Center, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the Massillon Museum. This summer, I will be interning with the Smithsonian Institute’s Office of Fellowships and Internships.
I attended the Ohio Museum Association’s 2016 Annual Conference as a student scholarship recipient. The new experience gave me the chance to learn about the issues Ohio museum professionals face as well as see, first-hand, how these problems are being tackled. I gained new information and perspectives by attending a variety of breakout sessions led by diverse museum leaders. For me, information boiled down into three salient points to consider as a museum professional. Through casual observation of conference attendees, I saw that these characteristics were already being carried out within Ohio arts and culture organizations.
The first theme I deduced was of the importance of partnerships. Partnerships with other organizations and institutions was first brought up in the session, “Marketing and More: Strategies for Connecting Audiences with your Programs and Educational Products”. The presenters spoke on their own success partnering with schools, community organizations, and homeschool groups to improve attendance at their programs. Partnerships were also an important aspect of museum accessibility. Understanding the requirements of the local, special-needs populations is vital to a museum and can more easily be accomplished through partnering with local support groups. Finally, partnerships fit in well with the conference’s theme, “Advocacy Builds Capital”. Uniting with other arts and culture organizations will have more power over influencing legislature and government funding than one museum advocating alone.
Having the ability to articulate your personal or organizational story was another recurrent recommendation from conference presenters. Museum professionals need to know their message and how best to share it. While this has always been a requirement for marketers, all museum staff should know their organization’s elevator speech and be able to tell strangers why their museum is relevant and necessary. This again plays into advocacy, both at grassroots and lobbyist levels. While museum visitors and volunteers do their part advertising for the museum, it is primarily up to the professionals to express the benefits of the museum to the community. Knowing and sharing your message
appropriately is also crucial for emerging museum professionals. Self-advocacy goes a long way towards securing a mentor or job. As a young professional, communicating what skills you can bring to an organization is an important part of the hiring process.
The final theme especially stressed in this year’s conference was patience. It takes time to form partnerships, to perfect your message, and to make a change through advocacy. Professionals who do not see the immediate results of their work should continue to persevere and they will eventually see the fruits of their labor. This is applicable to emerging museum professionals as well. Presenters in the “What it Takes to Work Here” session emphasized that most professionals have roundabout careers and that you never know where you may end up if you are open-minded, willing to work, and extremely patient.
With the fresh eyes of stepping into the museum world for the first time on a state level, I was able to see these characteristics already at work in many museum professionals attending the conference. OMA’s annual conference gives professionals from all over the state a chance to catch up and work on building partnerships. While there, attendees can practice sharing their message and get feedback on how to improve it. Finally, the conference is an opportunity for professionals to learn from one another and encourage others to keep up their work, even when the process is slow-going. I took so much away from OMA’s annual conference in the way of connections, knowledge, and experience. I thoroughly enjoyed my time and I look forward to attending future OMA conferences as an emerging museum professional.