Museum 101: Success Guides

Understanding your audiences

This guide will help you to consider what you know about your audiences both current and potential, why it would be worthwhile improving this, and how you might go about doing it. Crucially, it looks at how you can then use this knowledge and insight to deliver your strategic goals and make your organisation more resilient.

Successful marketing for museums

This guide aims to demystify marketing for small and medium-sized museums, providing an overview of what marketing is and a framework for developing a strategy and a template for an action plan.

Successful visitor experience

Getting the visitor experience right will ensure your collection or site is appreciated and understood, your museum or heritage site is valued and that more people visit.

Museum displays and interpretation

It’s important to take a strategic approach to interpretation even if you are only planning one display or exhibition, you need to consider how it fits into the rest of the museum, how it will communicate with your audiences and what story you want to tell.

Successfully managing archives in museums

This Success Guide aims to provide an introduction to managing archives in museums. It will help you to assess which aspects of your collection could be managed as an archive and support you in your work to meet any legal requirements.

Successful collection care

This guide is a companion to the Successful Basic Interventive Conservation guide. Together they provide a practical foundation to understanding 'preventive' and 'interventive' conservation of our collections.

Successful basic interventive conservation

This guide is designed to lead you through the conservation that it is safe for you to carry out yourself, as well as to help you to decide when to use a conservator.

Successfully setting admissions pricing policy

This guide is designed to be used to help museums and galleries decide admissions strategies that maximise income from those able to pay, put the museum in the right pricing bracket in the market, and still offer pricing options that make it accessible and welcoming to all.

Successfully negotiating business rates

This updated guide on 'Successfully Negotiating Business Rates' covers the basics required to understand Business Rates and, importantly, how the related appeal systems work in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Successful fundraising at museums

This fundraising guide is intended to help small and medium-sized museums to fundraise as successfully as possible.

Successful retailing for museums

Whatever the size of your museum it is important for your shop to be profitable and managed in a professional way. This guide is designed to help with this, whether reviewing and improving an existing shop or establishing a new shop at a small museum.

Successful museum cafes

Everything you need to consider to make your museum cafe a success.

Successful venue hire and corporate hospitality

For those starting out, or looking to grow, the use of their venue for corporate events.

Successful governance for museums

This guide is designed to be of practical help to Boards of independent museums throughout the UK.

Setting up a new museum

This success guide aims to help groups or individuals in the UK who are thinking about setting up a new museum to make some informed choices.

Successfully taking over your local museum

A guide to Community Asset Transfer of museums.

Successful business planning

This guide will take you through the process of business planning in logical steps, show you what information you will need and who should be involved in formulating the plan.

Successfully managing capital projects

Capital projects are exhilarating, exhausting, exciting, demanding and all consuming – but this guide will help you plan ahead and make a success of your completed project.

Successfully managing data and privacy regulations

This guide is intended for museums and other cultural organisations wanting to understand how they should be responding to data protection regulation.

Successfully working internationally

This guide explores the diverse ways in which the UK's museums work across the world and includes case studies, tips and considerations for organisations seeking to develop their overseas activity.