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Tag: webinars (Page 3 of 4)

Free Webinar from NEDCC: Risk Assessment for Disaster Planning

NEDCC (that’s the New England Document Conservation Center) is celebrating May Day and Preservation Week by offering a great free webinar about risk assessment and disaster planning.

Here’s what they say about it:

NEDCC is offering a free introductory webinar on Risk Assessment for those who are beginning to work on a disaster plan or need to expand or update an existing plan.Date: April 28, 2011
Time: 2 – 4 PM
Cost: Did we mention that it’s FREE ?!
(Register now – seats will go fast!)

Complete Webinar Information and Registration

Questions about the Risk Assessment webinar?
Contact: Donia Conn, dconn[at]nedcc[dot]org, (978) 470-1010, ext. 220

AAM Webinar on Social Media and Museum Advocacy

In early December, AAM sponsored a webinar on social media and museum advocacy. Led by Stephanie Vance of Advocacy Associates, the presentation provided basic lessons in how to use newer tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to cultivate supporters and engage elected officials. Here are some of Vance’s suggestions:

Blogs: If you’re writing on behalf of an organization, Vance advises avoiding politically partisan messages, but there’s no reason you can’t talk about legislation that affects your museum or ask your audience to let their representatives know how important your museum is to them. She cites I Heart Art: Portland, Small Museum
Association
, and Exploratorium Explainers as examples of blogs that do a good job informing and inspiring their audience beyond just marketing.

Twitter: Search for your museum’s name to see who is already talking about you, and respond to those people. Cultivate followers and let them know about issues your museum is facing, locally or nationally. You can follow AAM (@AAMers) to get advocacy action alerts that you can share. Sign up for your legislators’ Twitter feeds and tag them in relevant messages. For example, Michael Capuano (@mikecapuano) is the congressional representative in Tufts’ district, so you might ask your audience to retweet a message asking him to support FY12 funding for IMLS.

LinkedIn Connect to your city councilors, congressional representatives, mayor’s office, etc. and see if you share any 2nd-degree connections. You may find that a former classmate or colleague has a connection that could help your message find its way to a legislator’s desk more quickly.

Facebook The fastest-growing demographic on Facebook are users who are 35 and older, Vance says, and more and more legislators are using it as a major communication tool. You can “like” your legislators’ pages and post on their walls about upcoming events and community partnerships. Search for your museum on Flickr or YouTube and repost links to any user-generated content that shows their constituents are engaging with your organization.

Once you get the hang of in social media as a way to communicate with legislators and cultivate community supporters, make sure you teach these tools to volunteer committees or friends’ groups who are already valuable “real-world” advocates for your museum.

Speak Up for Museums is AAM’s museum advocacy initiative. Check there for more tips and webinars, and to find out more about AAM’s Museum Advocacy Day, February 28 and March 1 in Washington, D.C. You can view a recording of this webinar as part of AAM’s advocacy trainings website.

Kris Bierfelt is a student in the Tufts Museum Studies certificate program, and works as a freelance writer and editor.

The Foundation Center

Remember our post a while back about skills every museo should have?

Well, one of them was grant writing. In that spirit, we’ll be talking about a few ways to educate yourself about writing grants. They may not be the flashiest, quickest way to fundraise, but they are an important piece of the puzzle. Being able to point to your resume and say “yes, I wrote and secured that grant to fund that program/conservation/collection assessment” is a great big plus for anyone seeking a job.

First up is The Foundation Center. This is a HUGE website and resource, and primarily exists to connect grantmakers with grant writers across the nonprofit field, not just museums. At its heart, the Foundation Center is a searchable database of all places you can find funding. It’s really so much more than that, though. The Center also provides research reports on all aspects of fundraising, and extensive training opportunities for those interested in learning more.

There are a few ways to get that training.

1) The Grantseeker Training Institute is the Center’s most comprehensive overview of how to set about finding, writing, and administering grants. It comes highly recommended. It’s a bit pricey, at $795 for a week of training, and is only offered in certain locations.

2) One-Day Training Sessions. These run about $195 per session, and are more tightly focused than the Training Institute. They’re also offered more widely – there are several coming up in Boston this spring.

3) Last, but most certainly not least: free webinars. Lots and LOTS of them, on all sorts of interesting and useful subjects. They’re 60 minutes each, and if you watch even a handful you will be well on your way to understanding all sorts of issues with grants, foundations, fundraising, and nonprofit management.

Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action

The IMLS is running a series of free webinars about caring for collections.

Per their description:

Using the content of the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf, Forums, and Workshops, these highly interactive webinars will connect you with experts and colleagues to discuss issues of common concern.  The series has a dual focus:  four webinars will help you learn how to conduct outreach to the media, the public, and funders on behalf of collections, and two webinars will help you derive maximum benefit from the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf.

Past webinars will be archived so you can view them on your own time.

Check it out!

Free Project Management Webinars

Following up on those essential skills from Museos Unite, here’s an opportunity to get some free management training.

Project Management Webinars from Boston University

Upcoming webinars are listed at the top, but scroll down for other titles. A few to highlight:

What You Must Know About Stakeholder Management

Strategies for Managing Change: Managing People in a Changing Environment

Projects 911: Managing Troubled Projects

Project Management for Everyone: A Non-Technical Approach

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