How to get Museum Funding Part II: Crowdsourcing

Hans Peter Feldmann's installation of 100,000 $1 at the Gug

With the rise of financial crowd-sourcing, the world of museum “Development” (aka rakin’ in the Benjamins) is about to change forever. The only question is who will be an early adopter and who will continue to hunt for dusty old Patron Moneybags?

The Center for the Future of Museums had this to say on crowd-sourced funding:

Some project creators are slow to exploit the full potential of this new model. For example, some museum-fundraising projects on Kickstarter mimic traditional campaigns. (The Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, for their City Wide Open Studios project, for example, offers incentives of listing on donor walls, memberships, t-shirts and tote bags.) But others explore the creativity and rule-bending inherent in this format. The Museum of Non-visible Art (a project by Praxis and James Franco) offer one dollar donors their undying gratitude (and a thank-you note), while a $10,000 sponsorship garners the lead donor sole rights to a conceptual art work consisting of a breath of fresh air.

Now, we all know what I think about the Museum of Non-visible Art but with 57 days to go, they’ve already made double their funding goal. There are lessons to be learned from this.

Do we think Museummonger could use Kickstarter to fund a Museum of Museums?!

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