The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, which collects stories as much as objects, describes itself as ‘a museum about you, about us’. This doesn’t always mean the character looks or sounds like us. When we read, watch or listen to a story we want to identify with its central character, someone who takes action to overcome a challenge. Museums habitually use objects as a starting point, but the most affecting stories are all about people. These six questions can help you make smart choices as you develop stories for exhibitions, programming, fundraising and social media. Armed with this knowledge, you can start to make decisions about the sort of stories you want to tell. You need to know who you are as an institution, what matters to your audiences and what you want your stories to achieve. Like a marble slab waiting for the sculptor’s chisel, the possibilities are endless.įinding the right stories is less about looking for them and more about thinking through what you need. The sphere in which museum stories live, undiscovered or untold, is vast.
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The myriad options can make finding one single story to focus on feel overwhelming.
#Your story isn t over full
Museums are also full of people, who bring their own stories with them, from researchers and other visitors to staff and volunteers. Look inside a museum and you’ll find stories about the foundation of the institution, the history of the building, the collection, individual objects and the people who made, used, sold or owned them.
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How can Museums find stories?įinding potential stories isn’t usually a problem. Stories are how MAH ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections. The Museum’s mission statement makes this clear: ‘we find, spark, preserve, and trade stories, ideas, and elements of creativity drawn from people across Santa Cruz County’. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), once a place for art and history, now a place that uses art and history to build a strong community, puts stories centre stage. Looking beyond the museum itself, stories help organisations drive change in society. By connecting the teenage Roosevelt’s story with the Museum’s education programmes, the call to action was obvious: donate money and you could inspire a new generation of young Eleanor Roosevelts. For instance, when the Tenement Museum in New York wrote about former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in a fundraising mailing it told a story about Roosevelt’s work in the local area. As any advertiser knows, stories drive people to take action, whether that’s buying a product, gifting a donation or making a difference in the world.įrom a marketing perspective, stories can help museums raise funds, encourage visits and trigger sales. This emotional connection is the reason stories are so powerful. They connect us with people and places, even stimulating the release of a hormone usually expressed during intense bonding experiences, like childbirth, breastfeeding and sex. While we see ourselves in them, it is through stories that we encounter new perspectives that change how we think and feel.Īt their core, stories make us care. We use stories to make sense of the world. They are full of detail, but leave space for us to insert our own thoughts, feelings and memories. They feel familiar, yet enable us to step into the shoes of others.
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Stories share personal experiences in an authentic and easily accessible form. Salort-Pons might as well have been writing about stories. More fundamentally, Salort-Pons describes museums as spaces for empathy and “a bonding medium for our society”. This is the view put forward by Salvador Salort-Pons, Director of the Detroit Institute or Art in a recent article. While valid in many ways, this view omits the human element of museums.Īn alternative approach is to think of museums as places that collate and share human experiences. Museums are often thought of as places that collect, care for, display and interpret objects. In fact, stories are so ubiquitous, we often don’t think about what makes a good story, or question why stories matter in the first place.