 Like Marna from Learning Times, we're going to get started momentarily. Before we start though, I'd like to just remind participants, if you do encounter any issues, please communicate with us using the chat window and we will try to resolve your issue. Just a few points to mention off the start due to the current global situation where pretty much everybody is working from home or in a shelter-in-place situation, we don't have necessarily all access to the best internet resources available out there. So if at any point in time you encounter any issues with the audio or perhaps you're not seeing slides advanced, try to refresh your browser or try a different browser, that often will help resolve the issue. As well, if you're listening on wireless connection, you may want to make sure that any other type of applications that are using Bandwidth on your system or even in your home may be either turned off or disabled or the duration of this event as obviously the more Bandwidth you have access to, the better, and you'll find that that will typically help out. But just communicate with us in the chat if you require any further assistance. So without further delay, we're going to go ahead and turn things over to our host, Robin Bauer Kilgoe. Go ahead Robin. Hi everyone and thank you Mike. Well, like Mike said, my name is Robin Bauer Kilgoe and I am the Community Coordinator for Connecting to Collections Care. If you have any questions about our program or anything else, feel free to contact us at C2CC at culturalheritage.org and Mike is our Senior Producer. So again, if you have any questions, please do feel free to put them in the chat box and we'll try to get to you as quickly as we can. A couple of quick mentions of our program. We are Connecting to Collections Care. That is our website down at the bottom. We have quite a few webinars actually available for folks. So we are a program of FAIC, but we are also supported by an IMLS grant. All of our archival webinars are available on our website for free. There's like over 700. So if you're trying to fill up some time of your day, you want to check out some older webinars we have which are all excellent. Feel free to go to our website, ConnectingToCollections.org, Archives, and you will be able to see a great history of all of our programming going all the way back to 2010. Our community is also connected to a discussion forum. It's located, if you go to again to our website, click on Discussions, you will go to it. You have questions concerning care of your collections. You can click on there, post your question, and a whole wonderful collection of experts will come and take a look at it. It is monitored, moderated, so we try to keep it to the point about things dealing with collections care, but it is there. It is a safe place for you to ask any kind of questions you have. We are also, like many people online, you can reach us on Facebook.com slash C2C Community or follow us on Twitter at C2C Care. At both those locations, we announce upcoming free webinars and let people know just kind of the news of what's happening within our community and the world in general. We have some great upcoming webinars. I wanted to give everyone a few hints about, again, these are all free. So if you'd like to go to our website, sign up for them. On July 22nd, we have a Care of Historic Silk webinar that will be coming out from 2 to 330. That one is already up on our website, so if you want to go ahead and register for it, please do so. August 26th, we will be doing Care for Archaeological Collections and on September 9th, we will be doing a photography basics webinar. All really excited about the upcoming programming and please do take a chance to go check out our website regularly in order to sign up for these free webinars. A quick note about our platform, as you guys are doing, and I feel like I don't have to finish anymore because you all are using the chat wonderfully, but there is a chat function over on the left-hand side. As you chat, please hit send, the chat appears. I will be moderating or taking a look at the chat during this entire period, so if you have a question for our presenter and you want to go ahead and post it, go ahead, I'll copy it and I'll be tracking that throughout the entire presentation. And now I'm going to go ahead and introduce our webinar. Today we are going to be talking about advocating for collections during challenging times. This is a Connecting to Collections Care webinar, but we are also co-sponsored by the Association of Registrarers and Collection Specialists, ARCS, which represents collection specialists and registrars from across the world. It has over 900 members. If you're interested in learning more about the organization, please go to the website, arcsinfo.org. Our presenter today is Laura Horitz-Stanton. She is Executive Director of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, a nonprofit for conservation and conference. Philadelphia, providing conservation treatment, preservation services, and education resources for cultural institutions and collecting organizations. Boa is both a member of ARCS, which we're very excited to have her, and has done other presentations for us during CDC care. We're going to give her just a few minutes to believe that she got locked out of our system, and until then, we're going to just wait for her to pop back in and then she'll be able to start her presentation. I do want to step back while we're waiting for Laura to pop back in and talk about some of our upcoming webinars. She'll be right back. The fun of all these technological things that we've all experienced from now on. We're pretty excited about some of these upcoming webinars that we wait for, Laura. The Care for Historic Silk webinar will be really interesting because, you know, a lot of us have to deal with silk within our collection, and when you are dealing with it, as many of us can know, it can be a very challenging actual thing to deal with, especially when you look at, you know, how it shatters, how it can treat itself within the actual collection itself. For August 26, when we're discussing our Care for Archaeological Collections, in my previous life, I've actually had to deal with archaeological collections, and I think a lot of us know that it can be quite challenging when dealing with actual bags of stuff as compared to things within the object level. I think especially dealing with a lot of historical societies, you will have an issue where you will be looking at them and realizing, you know, have to deal with it at a slightly different level. Laura's back here to join with us real quick. Excellent. All right, great. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and load up your presentation, and Laura, you can go ahead and take control of the presentation whenever you're ready. Great. Thank you so much, Robin. I really appreciate that, and thank you for having me here. I'm sorry for the technical difficulties on my end. As Robin mentioned, my name is Laura Hort Stanton. I'm the executive director of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia, and I'm so thrilled to be here with you. As I've looked over at the people in the chat and been saying hello, I wish I could just say hello to everybody, but you were too fast for me, and I am looking forward to chatting with you, and I see so many friends in the colony that are there, many of whom could probably have presented those topics in the shows. But I also see people from institutions that I know, and I value, and I'm so glad to see you here, and thank you all for spending your time with us today. So today I know that it works for all over the community and that's all over the world here attending this session, but I do want to acknowledge that today I'm here in the suburb of Philadelphia. And before we begin, I want to acknowledge that I'm speaking from the unfeated land of the Lenape people, and I would like to acknowledge the Lenape community and pay my respects to the past, present, and future elders. So thank you. I wanted to start by also saying, when Robin reached out to me about doing this session, I hesitated a moment, a short moment, albeit, but I did hesitate a moment, because the topic is difficult at the best of times, and even more so now. But after a bit of reflection, I wanted to take the opportunity to have this discussion as a community and to give us a shared platform for sharing some resources. When you Google, I'm sure as most of you know, when you Google Advocacy, almost all of the literature and resources that pop up are focused on making an external case on fundraising and on essentially lobbying your legislators. This work, of course, is critically important, but we also need internal advocacy, and this internal advocacy is what's going to be our focus today. How do we work to get support from our administration, from our boards, from teams, bosses, whoever the powers that we are as they're dealing with collections, care, and management at your institution, and how that they can understand how crucial your work is to the underpinning of all of your institution's efforts. When I talk about collections in this context today, I also want to make sure you know that I'm referencing collections care. This, of course, includes physical preservation activities like conservation intervention, but it also refers to anything and everything that impacts the care and stewardship of your collection. Your written policies and how they're in place on down to what kind of storage enclosures you're using or what the materials are in your collection. And as we go forward, I want to also remind you and just state that everything that you're doing, the work that you are all doing in cultural heritage, is important and it's meaningful. I know that in times like next that we're dealing with now, some of that can come into question, but just be reaffirmed in that. That said, if I was giving this presentation in January of 2020, it would be very, very different than the one that I'm going to give today. What advocacy looks like now is different in light of a global pandemic, in light of the massive state and institutional budget cuts that are taking place, and in light of the social justice movement that's currently taking place in the United States. Our place in the world is very different than it was six months ago. As we move forward in this session today, let's all just acknowledge that and know that that's where we're coming from. I won't pretend today to have all of the answers or maybe even any of the answers, but I do hope to present to you a framework for thoughtful development and deployment of your advocacy message in this change environment and this change world that we're in. And as we go through, as Robin mentioned, please ask your questions in the chat. I can't promise that I'll see them, but we'll certainly try to address as many as we can at the end of the session today. So I wanted to start before we go much further and ask you all a couple of questions, so hopefully you can help me as we go through our session. So there should be a poll popping up here and asking you a quick question. Do you see yourself as an advocate? Click click in there. Give everybody a minute to answer. I'm glad to see most of you saying yes. All right, so I'm glad to see, you know, we have almost 500 people here on the call today. The majority of you are answering yes to this question, which is really wonderful. So hopefully today we can give you more tools in your toolbox to be able to inform your advocacy work. And for those of you that don't feel quite right in that role that you don't call yourself that, we'll see what we can do about that by the end of our session today. So I'm going to have one more poll question for you now just to get what needs to be a better sense of who's here. What is your primary job function in a collection care role? Do you have to think about your job? Is it mostly collection care? Or are you doing a ton of other things? Are you wearing a lot of hats to your organization? I know I certainly had a job for one minute. I am caring for the collection, doing a rehousing project, next time giving a tour through the historic house, and then after that cleaning up the restrooms. All right, so we have a real mix of folks here, which is good to know. All right, so thank you for taking the time to answer that. I have a couple more poll questions that we'll do in a moment, but we're going to move on from this for now. So, as I said before, every single person on this call is an advocate, whether you think of yourself or not. People often think of advocacy as the image of, on the left here, and yes, that is advocacy. That's me and some colleagues in Advocacy Day on the Hill in support of funding for the humanities. It's hard to believe that this picture was taken March 10th, 2020. So, it feels like a lifetime ago, but it's worth that we were doing that too long ago. I also want to point out that advocacy is also the image on the right. That's two people talking and sharing ideas, being open to learning, discussion, and compromise. So, they are learning and working together, and that in itself is a form of advocacy. But let's be actually realistic. Advocacy right now looks more like this as we all continue to communicate in these digital and electronic formats that we're in. And I won't sugarcoat it at all. Advocating when you can't sit across from someone and look them in the eye is more difficult. It's hard, but it's not impossible. So, let's keep that in mind as well, that some of our advocacy strategies may have to change when we can't have face-to-face meetings and people can't necessarily see the passion that we have for the work that we're doing. So, now I have actually two more quick poll questions for you that will also help for where we're going next. Think way, way back to before COVID-19. Way back to January of 2020 or even further back to November of 2019. And my question for you here is what stewardship challenges were you facing before March 2020? And we know we have a ton of different challenges that we're all facing. Insufficient budgets, maybe our administrative support doesn't know us or understand us. A lack of understanding for the board or others. If you have other things, please put them in the chat box. So, a lot of us are dealing with insufficient staffing and insufficient budget, needing a bit more understanding overall. Too small a physical space, that's definitely one. How do you care for a collection when you don't have a big enough space to do it? We keep putting those into the chat box as well. So, yes, storage space, someone saying A through S, all of the above go. So now let's take another little jaunt down memory lane or put us back to actually the present and think about, are there other things? Did your challenges change in light of COVID-19? What happened after March of 2020? Did new challenges surface? Is it the same things that were there before or were things amplified? Did the challenges that were there before just become even bigger than they were? So it looks like we're coming out at some of the same things, but that lack of support or understanding, that percentage is going up here and the budget in staffing, of course, is amplified. People saying same issues, but even worse. And that is honestly what I expected. People not having access to their collections, staff being cut. So lots of different things happening here. You might have gone from having a staff to your now Department of One. So thank you for sharing and please also continue to do that. So many of you have had persistent challenges, but clearly the current events have brought up new issues or perhaps have amplified, as I said, what was already there. So thinking about why do we advocate? Why do we have to do this work? First, we need to make sure there are governing authority, whatever that may be. Understand what we do and why it's important. Many times our board members aren't in the cultural heritage field. They don't have expertise in museums, library, archival functions. They have other expertise that they bring to the table. But our work necessarily isn't their expertise. We also have to advocate, and ideally we should be doing this all the time, so that we are not just dealing with things when we're in crisis mode or when a major issue arises. So right now, as clearly as coming across in the chat, so many of us are in justification mode. We have to say why is what we're doing important in collections in light of the current landscape? Why do we have to do what we have to do? Answering questions perhaps like, why can't we capitalize those collections for their monetary value? And how is the work of collections care, preservation, and conservation relevant if people aren't going to the museum, visiting the archive, or visiting the library? I want to say here, advocacy is all about relevancy. Relevancy to your organization, relevancy to the leadership within your organization, and relevancy to the broader world and your mission as an organization. So keep that in mind and keep that one word in mind as we go through. So let's look at the world of external advocacy for how we can frame our approach to internal advocacy for collections and collections care. There are many, many, many great resources online, but one website that I like is called bolderadvocacy.org. At this point, I also want to point out that you do have a resources handout as part of this webinar, and anytime I mention an online resource, it is in that handout, so you don't feel the need to write down these websites. But Boulder Advocacy, the one I just mentioned, has many tools that I want to point out to you, their Advocacy Quick Capacity Toolkit. It asks guiding questions to see if your organization is ready for advocacy. And again, this is focused on the external, but you can use this to take a look at internal advocacy as well as your own readiness. But let's take a look at some of the steps that they outlined for external advocacy and think about how we can apply them internally. So this is some Advocacy 101, and we're going to go over each of these in more detail as we go through the rest of the slides. But quickly, you know, first, when we're thinking of advocacy, we have to set our agenda, and we have to think about clearly what we're trying to achieve. We have to prepare for our advocacy effort. We have to have a strategy in place. We need to think about what data we need to support our cause. We have to think about what's the actual message, which can be different from your agenda, so your messaging versus your agenda. Who do you need to have on your side? Who are your partners that you have that can help you? How are you going to deliver your message, which is your outreach and influence? Who are the people that you need to influence and what areas of influence do you yourself control? So hopefully this framework all makes sense to you and you can think about, and I'm sure many of you are already doing this work intuitively. What I'm going to talk about today is that I hope you take what you're doing intuitively and put it into a structure and a framework that can be passed on to other staff members and that you can articulate better by writing down. So before you start any advocacy work for collections, you need to know your goals and what you're advocating for. Many people in storage collections think that there should be an inherent understanding of what their work is and why it's important. I take care of important things and you should know that. And I equate that to thinking about, you know, that we have to develop a persuasive argument. The inherent goodness of what we're doing isn't enough. I'll give you an example from my personal life to, you know, illuminate this for a bit. I have two kids that are 10 and 5 and my kids advocate for a later bedtime all of the time. But it wasn't until my 10-year-old was able to find a compelling reason for me to say yes that he won. He researched how much sleep an average 10-year-old boy needs and he said he wanted to stay up so he could read longer. So he found data to support his cause and he also paused at my heartstrings because he knows I want him to read more. So do the same for yourself and the work that you're doing. Saying that your work is important isn't enough. Think about what you do in a clear and concise manner. Think about how it impacts your institution. Show understanding that these are tough times and we all know that that's what we're dealing with. And make sure you can show those results that are measurable and attainable, which I know you all do and write wonderful grant applications. We have to do the same thing in our advocacy work. So for example, here's one agenda item that we could put forward. So here's the example. We're requesting that the special collections budget is reduced by 5% rather than the proposed 20%. A 20% reduction will mean that we serve 500 fewer students annually and can't work with professors on developing projects for classes to involve primary resources. So here we're demonstrating that we're willing to take some cut but that we can't take a huge cut. And we're also demonstrating in a clear, concise way what impact this will have on our institution. A few more ways that we can think about this in terms of specific goals and outcomes. We have to be, again, clear what you're asking for and that could be in terms of funds, time that you need, staffing and people because I know that that was something that came across clearly in your answers. Or sometimes you just need more support and authority for your work. So funding, let me give you an example here. Again, we need to maintain the collections care budget at $10,000 a year in order to ensure the collections can be safely handled so the new online public programming is happening. I understand that sacrifices have to be made and we've reduced its request from our normal $12,000 budget request. But when it comes to money, that is pretty clear and straightforward about how we might want to advocate for ourselves. For people, you know, for those of so many of you, I saw in the chat saying that, you know, your summer internships were cut or your internships were cut or your staff, permanent staff were cut in the current situation. Let's think about that in terms of people and advocacy message you might have. The museum has a robust exhibition schedule that requires our staff to spend half of their time on preparing collections for exhibits. If one of our three staff positions is cut, we'll not be able to respond to research requests in a timely manner or continue our project to digitize the collections for online access. So you're showing clear issues with that cut. Time, sometimes what we all need is the gift of more time to do our work. So an advocacy message here might be, this is an exciting project and I understand that it's essential to our new program delivery model, but we need four months, not two, to ensure that the collections are properly housed for handling and shipping. So that's something that might actually be a really easy get to think about in extension of a timeline. And so many of you I saw in the polls also mentioned that just getting some additional support and understanding is what you need at this time. And so in that case sometimes what we're asking for is authority. So an example of that kind of advocacy message might be, the collections team loves collaborating with the education team. However, we need to be able to have the final say in what objects can be used for programs based on their condition. We would like to have everyone work from the decision-making tree that our department develops. So you're giving a solution that hopefully everybody can get behind if you have the authority to be able to do that. Now, frankly, your issues are probably way more complex than the examples that I just gave, but this gives you a starting point to think about how you might think about your issues. As you develop your agenda, you have to be prepared. Much like a chef does their meals on place before a dinner service, and don't we all just miss restaurants? I miss restaurants. Before they do their dinner service, you too must have all of your information gathered from the right places to support your advocacy message. Know the landscape inside and outside of your organization, and know what work has already been done to go towards your advocacy work. So for example, you might go to your institution's leadership and say, I would like some support in going for a grant to inventory the Smith Collection of Painting and have an item-level conservation assessment completed. In this kind of advocacy message and instance, it would be really important for you to know that that work was actually done 10 years ago before your arrival at the institution. It doesn't mean that it's not valuable or valid to do it again, but you have to have your justification ready and don't be blindsided by not having all the necessary information in your toolbox. So keep that in mind that it does take some research, even though sometimes our gut reaction is our emotional reaction to want to move forward. I also encourage you to think about who else in your organization has skills that can help you make your case and pull them in whenever possible and have good knowledge of resources about what outside resources are at your disposal. So can you seek outside funding? Is there a tool already that exists that can help you do your job and make it a little bit easier? So think about that in all of your preparations. In doing this work, I also want to acknowledge that it can be frustrating to continually have to advocate for your role in your work. As I mentioned before, we know what we do is inherently important, and it's important to cultural institutions, it's important to history, it's important to the world, it's important to art. We have to stick here and think about how we advocate for ourselves. So what are we even making the case for? It's those resources, money, time, staffing, and attention paid. We are fighting the perception all the time of the dusty back-of-house kind of work, the things that are cliche about what the collections kind of work is done. If I read one more article where the reporter waxes poetic about the mushy smell of the backroom in the museum or the library, I'll pull my hair out here. But these are things that we need to be aware of that we're fighting against. And we're fighting against them with fundraising and from a donor point of view as well. As we think about our advocacy work and donors that might be pulled into the conversation, it's really hard for donors sometimes to get behind the work that they can't put their name on or that there's no public-facing part of what we're doing all the time. We also have to keep in mind that there may be more immediate needs that administrations see as more pressing, like a global health pandemic that's happening. And I'm sure as many of you are aware, the recent AAMD statement on the use of funds for deaccessioning is one example of that. That people are looking much broader, much bigger than outside of the work that we're doing. And even more cynical being, what a lot of this means is that institutions, finances are always stretched in, and parts of our work that are not public-facing are vulnerable to being cut and to being viewed as non-essential services. And that's our job as non-essential, to make sure people know that we are essential services and not non-essential. There's a wonderful paper, and it is on the resource list by Elizabeth Morgan that was called Delivering Value for Money. Why and how institutional archives should market themselves to their internal public. And in that paper, she writes, in this situation, the archive cannot afford to be considered a peripheral luxury that makes no significant contribution to the core work of the organization. It's not enough for the staff of an archive to assume the decision-makers understand the value of archival records and share their commitment to preserving this resource. We're clearly here, she's talking about archives, but it is relevant to no matter what kind of institution you're working with. But this also requires that everyone in leadership understands what you do. We have an advocacy toolkit on CCHA's website, also on the resource list. And in that introduction, we noted this, that the public and trust cultural organizations to serve as guardians of our material evidence with the expectation that organizations will model responsible stewardship of collections. This complex task requires the attention of all staff members and the cooperation of visitors and guests. Collections care activities include oversight of administrative and management policies, finance and budgeting, building system design and control, appropriately handling of collections, and treatment of objects when necessary. So all of this plays into what we have to do. But also, this all means is that in your advocacy work, you have to think about how collections care fits into your institution's mission and be ready to articulate that. And I think someone from one of these institutions is on our call today that has their mission statement up here. So is preservation listed in your institution's mission statement? Are collections listed in your institution's mission statement? Preservation might not be explicitly there in your mission like these samples have, but look critically at your mission or your vision statement to see where you fit in. Where does your collection fit into your institution's website or institution's mission statement? And I see some chat happening about the terminology behind the scenes, and there has been a lot of talk about the cultural heritage field not using that terminology anymore, and I agree completely, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's not the perception that is wider out there in the public. It's probably not terminology that we should use, but it is terminology that are public and perhaps some of the people that we're advocating to still have that perception. So think about that again also from your mission statement point of view. Also, in preparation as you're doing this work, look at what's in your institutional strategic plan. Is there anything in this plan about collections? If it's not explicitly mentioned, where do your collections play a role? How does your work make the goals in that strategic plan attainable? What can you do to move those goals forward? The strategic plan is your institution's guiding document, and I can tell you the strategic planning document, which was hopefully developed collaboratively with these stakeholders informing the decisions. Well, this document, the strategic planning document, guides almost everything a director at a cultural institution or a board member does. For me in particular, it keeps me on course and reminds me of the core shared goals for our organization. So show relevance in your work to those goals and you have the basis for a good advocacy argument. And I hope that you all are as lucky as the two sample organizations on the screen right now to have collections goals so clearly articulated in your strategic plan, but I will tell you it is very, very rare. As you think about your planning, you also have to think about strategy. What are your tactics for getting your message heard? How are decisions made at your organization? Do you understand that process, both the formal and the informal process? Because let's keep it real here. We all know that there's an informal process for how decisions get made as well as the formal ones. So think about all those ways that you can get your message heard. Who are the decision makers that you need to have hear that message? We can sit and cry into our tea all we want about how the roof is looking on our collection storage space. But who is in charge of not only funding that, but also prioritizing fixing it on the list of capital projects? Is it the director? Do you have a head of facilities or maintenance that's in charge of prioritizing those capital projects? Is there a board member that's the head of the facilities committee? If it is a board member, what compelling information does your director need in order to make the case to that board member? So there might be multiple levels of influence that you have to think through as you go on. Also, what's the budget process in timeline at your organization? This is something that is essential for you to know. And that may be shifting now because of COVID-19. Find out that timeline because it's hard to make changes once the budget has already passed. And hopefully you work at an institution where there is some transparency about that. For example, at my organization, I have a board meeting at the end of July. And at that meeting, we're going to be looking at the second half of our fiscal year and making necessary adjustments. If one of my staff members cadence to me on August 15th with a big idea and big plans, that they might be wonderful but the budget has been... If they come to me in August with those plans, the budget is set. It's really, really difficult to change it at that point. So again, as I mentioned, hopefully you have some transparency about that within your organization. And if not, maybe just ask. Find out if you need to reach out to you and see what your timeline is. I also want to encourage all of us to be flexible. Don't hone in on one strategy and go all or nothing on that strategy. Think as part of your planning about different scenarios, how they may plan out, and how you might address them in your advocacy efforts. One of the best tools that you can have in your planning kit is something called a preservation plan for your collection. Much like your institutional strategic plan, this plan is specifically for the collection. And it maps out your plans for three to five years. If you don't have a plan like this and you're still working remotely, you're teleworking, maybe you can find a little time in your schedule to work on something like this. And I encourage you to develop it if you don't have it already. In this kind of plan, it outlines the activities you hope to accomplish for collection stewardship in a set period of time. And what that period of time is, it's different for every institution. But I recommend it's usually a three to five year timeline. Why these activities need to be done, your desired outcome, and you're identifying the necessary resources. So for an example, in this one that I have up on the screen here, this institution has identified a photograph collection that needs digitization, it needs a survey from a photo conservator, and it needs rehousing. And their outcomes is that they hope to have these 68,000 prints in negative house and digitized. They've identified some grant resources that they need and the staff time. If I was going to add one thing to this, I would add another thing under resources needed that says institutional strategic goal and note which strategic goal that this addresses for the entire institution. And below that they put together an impact and feasibility for this project. So they said this is on a scale of one to five, it would have an impact of four at our institution. It has a feasibility of three which gives it a medium priority for them. And they've also put out who are the stakeholders and collaborators. So think, you can think big or you can think small with your preservation plan, but it's an important tool to have in your tool boxes. Think about this because it shows that you are thoughtful, that you have strategy in mind and that you have long-term goals. And again, many of you might already be doing this intuitively. You might have it in the back of your head, but having something in writing and formalizing is very helpful. When you're planning and thinking about your strategy, you may also have to make a value proposition for your collection and your work. And think about which of these potential values has sway or impact with your decision makers. And again, we're not always not talking monetary here. We're talking the research potential, the historic potential, the art historical importance. A monetary appraisal may have been done for insurance purposes at your institution, but since cultural heritage collections can't be replaced and are one of a kind, we're not thinking about these from the monetary point of view. And figuring out what type of value your work has and the value of your collection has is very different from institution to institution. And thinking about which of these cases might make the most sense for the influencers you're trying to reach. Do they care about the information that's held in the collection? Do they care about it from an art historical point of view? Do they care about it because it has administrative information in there that they need to attain for records management? They might need to think about, you know, does someone on your board like things that are just because they're really old? It doesn't matter if they, you know, have great provenance or anything. They just like them because they're old. Can you make that case for value? So think about through all of these things and what will speak to the audiences that you are trying to reach. So we touched on this a bit already in an earlier slide, but part of your advocacy work is to arm yourself with as much data as possible. Information from inside your organization but also from outside your organization, that external information. What's happening going on at organizations of similar size and scope in your region? What about what's happening outside of your region? What's happening in the field overall versus adjacent fields? Sometimes we can get really good data from fields outside of museums, libraries, and archives. For example, I often look at systems and trends in architecture and design firms, because that informs my work at a nonprofit conservation center because there are more similarities than you might think in terms of processes and how those different kinds of organizations work. So to also look inside your own organization, information from your own collection and your institution. How many people access your collections with a smaller budget or fewer people? How would you provide access to that number of people? How big is the collection? Most likely your board stakeholders don't know that. So let them know just how much stuff are you caring for. One of my favorite tools to use is actually the institution's investment in her item held by the institution. So for example, if I have a staff of two that are each paid $45,000 a year working with a budget of $20,000 in the year in supplies to care for a collection of 200,000 objects in the collection. With that math, each object gets just $0.55 a year in terms of expert staff time and supplies for their care. And when you pay a number like that, $0.55 per object, that speaks to people, and it's not very much money. So when they want to cut your budget and say, well, now we're going to have $0.23 per object, how does that speak to them? And this can be a pretty impactful number to share. Another thing to research and be ready to share is what's the timeline for impact to your organization because of these changes that are being proposed or taking place? And what's going to happen if you don't get what you need? Many times, budget and staffing cuts have long-term ramifications for collections that also take a long time to be noticed in a material way. So think about that as well. Making your case saying the cuts you make today will impact our collection's work five years down the road, 10 years down the road, and think about how you can demonstrate and what data you can use to articulate that. One fabulous source of national data for here in the United States to support your work is the 2014 Heritage Health Information Survey. Which was done by IMLS. Although the survey was done in 2014, the data wasn't released until last year in 2019. And it's a wealth of information on the state of collections' care and preservation in the United States. And it's helpful for gathering comparative information and showing where your institution is on this national scale. So that's something else that you can look at. This is just a screenshot of a portion of some of the infographics they have. So I would encourage you to take a look there as well. There are some other tools that you can use for data collection in comparison. And I sometimes like to think of, what will happen if action isn't taken? What's wrong? And what's at stake? And why does it matter now? What's the urgency behind it? Because urgency is an important part of an advocacy message. So here are three more resources for you to do that. There is the cost of an inaction calculator, which is mostly focused on dealing with audio-visual collection. It's a good tool for showing the cost of not investing in making materials accessible. And it's a good one to take a look at. The next one here is digitization cost calculator. It's put out by Clear and the Digital Library Federation. And this allows you to estimate the cost and time of a digitization project pretty accurately. And the last tool here is actually more of a report. And it's data collected by the American Library Association's preservation section and their technical services section on long-term preservation trends in the library field. This was published in 2015, but it's still relevant. And it covers conservation, assessment, exhibition, preventive conservation, reformatting and digitization, and digital preservation and digital asset management. So there's lots of things like this out here. So here's just a beginning sampling to point you in some directions. So hopefully at this point, let's move forward in our timeline. You've gathered all your data. You've done your research. And now as part of your advocacy, you need to think about your message. Again, be clear, be compelling, be concise, and make sure your message matches your audience. Articulate or even better, show what problems the institution will face without funding for collection stewardship. Think of your series of if-them statements. By cutting the collections budget, it will cut our digitization output by 60%, and it will take 50% longer for new content to be added to the online catalog. During the COVID shutdown, the digital collections were accessed 1,500 times per month by people from 30 states and four countries expanding our institutional reach. The online collection is valuable research, programmatic, and marketing tool for the museum and needs to be sustained at current funding levels. So that is a message that can be understood by just about everyone within your institution, and everyone can see how that would have an impact. And you're showing that it has impact outside of collections. It has impact in education and programs. It has impact in marketing as well. Another example that you could use is our team of conservators are innovators in the field drawing interest from both the scientific and cultural heritage community. Their work is essential to our outstanding exhibition program as they ensure the collections can be safely made accessible to the public. Their work also brings in half a million dollars in grants each year and contributions. The staff reduction of 10% in this department would have ramifications internally and externally, and building up the depth of professional knowledge would take 7 to 10 years to rebuild. So you're showing the long-term ramifications again there. So I feel like a broken record saying it, but it's important to state again, be clear, be thoughtful, and be sure in your stamps and what you're advocating for. When we think of an advocacy message, we also have to think of audience, which I already mentioned. And when I'm thinking of what my advocacy message is, I like to start by writing for a general public audience, for the broadest audience possible, and then think in terms of levels of influence. Who needs to be influenced and who can influence the change makers and the implementers? Having anything in writing, does it better credibility? Having written statements or handouts is even good for internal advocacy. One of the things if you go and meet with your legislature, they always say, take something that's a lead behind. And I would say the same thing. If you can get a meeting with a board member, what's that lead behind that they can constantly and think of later? What are the tools that you can provide to your administrator to make their life easier? Understand who your boss needs to convince. Is it their board? Is it the donor? Is it a foundation? And how can you help them to do that work? And you might have to reformat this or refrain it for different audiences or who's receiving it. And figure out how to pivot. Isn't everybody so tired of hearing that word now? We're pivoting every day in what we do. But in your advocacy work, you also need to think about how you pivot, how you can figure out how to be tactfully persistent with that initial no or a tepid reaction. Not everyone would say this in advocacy, but I also believe that you need to be able to compromise. Some people think that you have to be steadfast in what you are asking for and not fudge from it, but I do think that we need to be ready to compromise in these times. And we have to strike the balance between, you know, what best practices are, alternate recommendations, and feasibility, so that you can demonstrate the greater importance and value without overwhelming and making people think it's unachievable or that you're unreasonable. Especially now, as so many institutions are having to make gut-wrenching decisions about what they need to do, so your willingness to give some leeway and that you understand that the sacrifices will need to be made. So if you're still thinking about how to craft your message, we're going to play a game of Collections 20 Questions. And here is, these questions are taken, again, from the Advocacy Toolkit from CTA Chase website that I mentioned before. It's on the resource list. And the questionnaire will help you, these questions will help you describe your collections, how they serve the interests of your visitors, and your supporters, and you can change these questions to suit the needs of your own particular institution. And this can be done with other staff as an important exercise to figure out how you can collectively articulate your message. You may even try the same exercise of taking from these questions and asking board members or donors or volunteers or a casual visitor once we can have visitors again, and think about how we can frame our response. And so some of the questions that I have on this list, how do these collections fit into local, regional, national and world contexts? What's unique or extraordinary about your collection? How do the collections impact your visitors? How do you go about discovering how you're serving your audiences? How do you engage with your audience? Do you collaborate or partner with institutions that complement yours? And what would be lost if your collection or your institution no longer existed? These are important questions that you're able to answer and be able to, if you have a team of people working together, that you're all consistent in your messaging. A few other tools that I wanted to give you to help you out in thinking about your advocacy message. One on the left here is the Aspen Institute. If you haven't explored what they have on their website, they have so many wonderful resources. But in particular, their planning and evaluation program has tools such as their Advocacy Progress Planner and their Continuous Progress Advocacy Tools that are designed to help with planning, evaluating and implementing advocacy efforts. Again, these tools are focused more on external advocacy, but they are easily turned into your... to look inward as well at your institution. And the other one, which is very, very small in this picture, is called SmartChart. And SmartChart is a free communications planning tool that breaks down the communication planning process into six steps. From initial decisions to my favorite part of the tool is the Reality Check, which is the sixth step to make sure your strategy is sound and be able to implement. For all this work, however, it comes down to compelling stories. Advocacy is compelling stories. If you can tell stories about collections in a convincing way with data, that is great. If you can appeal to a lot of art or history or knowledge with compelling stories, that's fabulous. If you can think of your work in terms of community, engagement and impact, however you define community and for each of us that is different, that is fabulous too. But the most compelling collection advocacy combines all of these together. You're thinking about history and art, thinking about data, and thinking about community altogether. As in many things in life, our collections advocacy work is helped when we have friends and partners that can help us out. What would Batman be without Robin? And what would Robin be without Batman? So think about who your partners might be in your advocacy work. Is there another department within your institution if you're large enough to have departments? It can help provide you the stories or the data that you need. If you have an IT department, can they give you that information on the website tip? Have there been essential cross department or cross division collaborations that help you tell these compelling stories? Same with partner institutions or other external collaborators. Is there a researcher that's willing to write you a letter, that's willing to make a statement to help you? Are your volunteers ready to step up for you and help you out? Who are your stakeholders that might make effective partners? But I do want to caution you here. Be careful if you're dealing with sensitive internal information. You might want to think about who you bring in from outside your organization because it could certainly change an internal dynamic to the conversation that you're having and show sometimes, depending on the authority structure within your institution, some people might not appreciate what they perceive as going above their heads or over their heads for some of this work. But sometimes advocacy is just about increasing your visibility. Don't let your team and collections care be taken for granted. Get the realities of collection storage, processing, preservation, and conservation at the forefront of everyone's mind. Staff at all levels. Not just about influencing the powers that be. If awareness and buy-in is spread throughout an entire organization, it's hard to be overwhelmed if everybody knows what your issues are. So I mentioned that cross-disciplinary, cross-departmental collaboration, if you understand how each other work on and work on projects together, it's going to increase interest. Host tours of collection storage for non-collection staff. Perhaps get us at time on an agenda for a meeting, even if it's still on, you know, an online platform like Zoom. Talk about collections care and preservation and see if other folks can attend other department meetings from collections. If you have a chance to get in front of your board and talk about these issues, make sure a session on stewardship is part of orientation for new board members. Perhaps create for them a fact sheet or a list of frequently asked questions for those board members. It has to be part of a board meeting or take board members on a field trip to see storage. And don't be afraid to show them problem spots. So often, you know, when we give people tours of our spaces, we only want to show them the good stuff, the great parts of what we're doing. But don't be afraid to show what might need improvement and where we need some investment in time for funds. Outreach, as you might have told, is interwoven throughout everything we've discussed today so far. And it's quarter the work that we all do day in and day out. In collections, we're communicators, we're educators. And in order to be good at our jobs, we have to network. And so I continue to think about that as part of your advocacy work. Put all these skills together when you're doing your outreach and you're doing your advocacy. And again, nurture relationships, share your advocacy agenda with anybody you think might find it relevant and build those relationships and make them stronger for the people that might help you influence the people that you need. As you're thinking about who your influencers are, take a step back and look at your stakeholders and who your audience is for this when we're doing our communications and our outreach. Know what their current position is on any particular advocacy message that you're trying to put out there. Are they likely to support you? Are they neutral? Are they likely to oppose you? Or are they going to outright oppose you because they don't believe in what you're doing? Know why they take that stance. What are their values and priorities as it relates to your collection and the institution? What do they care about and what are they guarded against? And what channels or formats can you think to reach them? Where do they get their information and what formats will be most meaningful to them? So I noticed a handful of you at the very beginning when we had our poll said that you weren't sure if you were advocates or not, but I hope by now you're convinced that you are an advocate. And those of you that answered yes, I hope that you are feeling stronger in your stances and have a few more tools to be able to move forward your advocacy message. And that hopefully all of us feel that we can stand up and speak out for collections, collections care, collections stewardship as difficult decisions are being made at cultural heritage organizations across the country and across the world. This work is important, and it should be a foundation for all you do at some level in your work. Here are some of the resources that I mentioned. They didn't have their own slide, but again, they are in your handout as part of this. And here's my contact information as well. I'm always happy to chat with people about these things and to think through strategy. So feel free to reach out to me via email. But at Backset, I will happy to take any questions now. I lost track of the chat. You all were very, very chatty. So I can't say that I saw many questions in there, but hopefully Robin caught most of them. Yeah, that was everyone. Well, number one, thank you, Laura. That was a great presentation. And you had some really good practical advice in there, which I think is incredibly important as we all act like we are advocates for our job. And that's something I know when I started out a zillion years ago, 15 years ago, I was very resistant to because I wanted to work behind the scenes, quote, unquote, and not talk. And I realized that we all have the duty to be advocates as we work in our collections areas. So I'm going to go ahead and see if people want to keep asking questions within the chat. Please feel free. If you have questions about resources or anything else, please put them in there. And while we're waiting, I did want to know, someone had asked about resources just generally speaking for people writing strategic plans. I know AAM has some good resources. Can you think of any others off the top of your head that might be useful for when you're starting out that process? Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of resources that I would say if you have a local, like in Philadelphia here, we have the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. They have some good resources. So if you have a local cultural alliance, I would turn to them. But I would also say, C-T-H-A, we are administrators for a program for New York State called the Documentary Heritage and Preservation Services for New York. And I always did the caveat, we didn't come up with the name New York State did, but we call it good to me. And there's a website, D-H-P-S-N-Y dot org, that has also strategic planning resources, particularly for cultural heritage organizations. So you check that out there as well. Great. And someone pointed out that that is correct. If your institution is not a Tier 3 AAM member, you may not be able to have access to all their online. But I think they have a book out for strategic planning. I seem to remember grabbing an old school book a million years ago about strategic planning. So if you can access one of those, I think it would be really... Another question that came up was, in terms of calculating a cost per item for archives, where you don't have a number of individual items, what would you recommend using per box? Do you have any resources for that theoretically? I would either think of per box or per linear foot, because that is something that I think is universal within the archives world, thinking about your collections in that sense of linear feet. And it correlates nicely, too, to actually how much physical space you take up in your building. So saying, you know, you can even think about it in square footage that way, you know, how many square feet, cost per square foot, cost per linear foot. That's what I would do for archival collections. Yeah, that's something I've always struggled with, too, especially because when I started out my career, I worked for a tribal collection. So there were all sorts of just random things that you would try to figure out. So it was always, like, hard to be like, how much linear feet will these baskets take up, especially with the presentation between baskets and stuff. So that's something I think about as well. Absolutely. Yeah, it's one of the things that's taken me a while personally to wrap my head around. You know, my background is as a museum collections manager and curator. I've also worked in archives and worked in libraries. In the very first archive I worked in, I said, why aren't each of these letters individually catalogued? We need to know that. And the wonderful person I worked with at that point said, you know, we don't think like that for archives. You'll drive yourself mad. So we can't do a cost per letter, cost per sheet, or cost per photo there, but the broader sense. Yeah, and it's hard when you, because I mean, you know, again, the Tribal Museum is an example. Like, we had everything it felt like. We had objects. We had archives. We had archaeological collections, which is a whole other, an upcoming webinar. We're going to talk about how that's like a whole other hand of whatever, you know what I mean, of dealing with tons of bones and bags and stuff like that. So that's an interesting. Yeah. I kind of like how there's a little bit of a chat discussion happening about the discussion about a new phrase for behind the scenes tour. Yeah. I found very interesting, because I know when I started out in my career, that was right when people were starting to do more visible collections and trying to bring the collections out from behind. What are your thoughts on kind of that turn of phrase, and if there's a better phrase that we could start using, or any other thoughts on that subject? So if anybody hasn't seen, and I know that, I think you put the link in there to Becky. So nice to meet Becky. She just shared her Twitter handle. I would say, see, Becky is the person to talk to about this. And she just did a great talk for the AIC annual meeting on this topic. And it's something that I am still even struggling with myself in, how do we describe this? How do we get our work out from the quote unquote behind the scenes? And to me, it's not just a terminology issue, but it's also an access and equity issue. Because what we're doing, while important, it shouldn't be exclusive. And that terminology behind the scenes also denotes like it's special, it is exclusive, and doesn't necessarily have the openness that we want to bring forward in the work that we're doing. So yeah, go to Becky and have a Twitter conversation with her, and if you can get your hands on her talk that she did at the AIC meeting this year, it was been wonderful. Yeah, it's very interesting. Because again, I feel like I was spoiled in my career because since I worked for a tribal museum, we really looked at it as having our collections open for the community. So someone wanted access to the collections, they got it. I mean, if they had obviously right away for tribal members and then if it was other people, we had to go through a bit of a check-in system. But it was very always interesting to me about how everyone respected how to treat the collections, both from a cultural standpoint and a physical handling standpoint. And this idea of being very precious about the collections was something that you have to be careful, obviously. But providing access is one of the most important things you can do as collections people. So yeah, I find that aspect incredibly interesting. Another thing that people were really talking about early on was looking at the challenges that we had after March 2020. And it was interesting to read those results just because people really got into a discussion about how, number one, we need to do a lot more digitization, I think, in some things that people are realizing. But then also just kind of issues with people working remotely and having access, like physical getting in there. Have you heard more anecdotal kind of evidence of people having issues actually getting into the collection spaces or has it been pretty... Have people been getting access or what have you heard? Well, I think the issue that I'm hearing more of right now is that it's not regular access, whereas someone would have had, you know, be in their spaces every day. They might be able to get in once a week or once every other week. Or I've also heard of institutions saying, like, now I have to rely on our security staff or our facility staff to do the checks and collection spaces that I would normally do. And I'm having to put together an informal education program for them so that they know what they're looking for, what they need to do, and how to carefully work around the collections in those spaces if it's not something that they normally had to do. So those are the challenges that I'm hearing. It's more the intermittent access rather than no access and also thinking about how we can utilize. And people also with their own underlying health issues that for whatever reason, even if they're allowed into their spaces, that they're not comfortable doing that. So having to rely on people that aren't necessarily always on the collections team. And I'm also hearing, anecdotally as well, challenges from people that are being called on to do this work. You're saying, you know, I'm a tour guide and now I'm being asked to do these things. Or, you know, I'm the director of the museum and now I'm trying to figure out how to do collections. And I haven't done that for 20 years, you know, but having to balance all of those things. So those are some of the stories that I'm starting to hear. Yeah, I mean, I think I've been noticing the same thing. And I really like how you included a slide about how I think cross-training of staff and kind of expanding the people. Like this is what the collections do is so important. And it's even more important now. So maybe four of that cross-education will come out of this whole craziness the past couple of months that we've experienced. I'm looking through the chat to see if we have any more questions. I'm not seeing a ton. Although people are talking about how, you know, if they were furloughed, that means there was no access, which is a good point. You aren't supposed to do anything with the collections. So they're very, very polite for all that. Do you have any other final thoughts or anything else you'd like to pass along to the folks who are still here? I don't want to see any questions pop up, but I will keep looking through the stream to make sure. Yeah, I would just say it's like a final note here to take care of yourselves, too, and all of us. I don't know about you. I don't have a collection of my own right now, but when I was working in UDM, the collections that I was working in, I thought of those as my things, my collections. And I cared deeply about them and the work that I was doing. And sometimes to the point of where we were taking advantage of our own mental and physical health to care for those materials. And now, say, more than ever, I think it's important that we prioritize ourselves as human beings and think about that as part of your advocacy work. It's important that you're emotionally invested in what you do, but not through the detriment of yourselves. So take care of yourselves, keep doing the great work that everybody was doing, has continued to do, and get the message out there. Great, thank you. I'm going to, again, point out, say thanks again to our presenter, Laura, thanks to FAIC, Connecting Collections Care, also ARCS, the Association of Registrar and Collection Specialists, for helping to put together this webinar. There are links still on the left-hand side of the screen for a webinar evaluation. Please complete that. That helps us direct the program as to where it's going. We are supported by an IMLS grant. So we're here for a couple of years, and we want to follow what our community wants. So please do fill that out. If you have any questions, handouts, and the slides located on there, we will be getting this recording and everything up on our website, connectingtocollections.org. Early next week is the latest. I'm shooting for the weekend, but we'll see how everything goes. So thank you again, and hope everyone stays safe and well. Thank you.