11 easy ways to protect your museum from heap-sprawl
or “Fall Clean-up for your Start-up”
Throughout Minnesota, it’s the time of year for the great fall clean-up. When the days are getting shorter and the temps are dropping, Mother Nature tells us it’s time to prepare for winter. With the great Halloween Blizzard of 1991, it was more like she screamed it at us, but she got her point across. Blizzards and subzero temps are around the corner, so finish up those outside projects before they’re buried in snow until spring. Lake weather is behind us, so why not take a lovely autumn week for tidying up and getting organized?
In Minnesota, not only do we need to fortify our homes to survive -20F° and 4:30 p.m. sunsets, but we also need to make strategic preparations to turn the darkest part of winter into a season of thriving and productivity. Craft rooms are tidied and restocked, home offices are rearranged and spruced up, and this fall my garage is getting a deep clean and reorg. Minnesotans take pride in enjoying long winters as part of our high quality of life, but it requires intentionality. As with starting a children’s museum, there are real benefits to strategic planning and preparation for what’s to come.
When I moved back to Minneapolis from Baton Rouge (a place where summers drive you indoors) in October three years ago, I jumped right into my museum planning business, which meant that a bunch of stuff from my move got parked in a big heap in the garage. One heap is not a huge problem, but heaps are seldom monolithic. Throughout the pandemic, I, like many of us, have been obsessing over home improvement projects, and the garage heap has become a junk magnet. It’s like a planet with its own center of gravity, pulling in any discarded item that doesn’t have a logical storage spot. Any time a chair gets demoted from the living room, a kitchen cupboard gets replaced with open shelving, or an obsolete printer stops working, the garage heap grows. When the heap-sprawl is affecting our ability to park inside during the winter (a near necessity in Minnesota), the heap has become a problem.
No more putting it off! Now, with winter coming, it is the time to deal with the heap. Since last weekend I’ve been stealing away any free hour to get out to the garage to organize, clean, and tinker on projects that just can’t be done in winter, and most importantly to chip away at the heap. Today I am pleased to report that, aside from what’s still advertised for sale on Marketplace, the heap has been vanquished, and I feel great. Last night, sweeping up after a neighbor hauled away an old fridge that had been collecting leaves in the corner, I truly felt Marie Kondo’s quote “Once you have experienced what it’s like to have a truly ordered house [or garage, in my case], you’ll feel your whole world brighten.” It’s amazing how the psychic burden of clutter and mess weighs us down, often without us realizing it.
Another Marie Kondo quote that strikes me is: “The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.” As a leader in starting up a children’s museum for your community, imagine this quote applied to your start-up organization: “The space in which we work, physically and digitally, should be for the children’s museum it is becoming, not the start-up organization it was in the past.”
Start-ups are meant to grow and evolve. To realize a high quality children’s museum, the children’s museum of your dreams, your start-up needs a foundation of organizational tidiness; otherwise, the burden of clutter and disorganization will only get in the way of what you can achieve. As founders, we’re pulled in many directions, racing from one critical task to the next, and we’re forced to choose from many competing priorities. Despite this, we need to carve out the time to intentionally record, file, organize, archive, and make accessible whatever it is we’re fulfilling before considering the task complete.
As founders, we are setting the foundation of habits and practices that will follow the start-up right into operations. If you start up your children’s museum in chaos and disorder, your children’s museum will likely carry those negative traits forward. In contrast, building a culture of intentional organizational management, wherever you are in the start-up process, will lead to a more disciplined and high achieving children’s museum which is much closer to the museum of your dreams.
Since it’s Fall clean week here in Minnesota, why not make it standard practice to schedule your own annual fall clean-up week? At least once a year, create a list of all the areas of your start-up operations that could use some tiding, organizing, sprucing-up, and major deep-dive cleaning.
To help you get started, here’s my Starting a Children’s Museum Clean-Up Checklist:
Electronic files: are your electronic files organized in a way you can easily find what you’re looking for and easily share with others?
Physical files: do you have a physical filing system that’s in alphabetical order without a huge heap of “to be filled”?
Contacts list: Is your contact list up to date or do you have a stack of business cards and email signatures to enter?
Formation documentation: Are all your formation documents easy to get to in one place? Are you just a couple of clicks away from your bylaws, Articles of Incorporation, tax exempt declaration, Federal EIN letter, State Attorney General declaration, etc.?
Tax records: Can you easily access any year’s 990, and are your files in order for this year's filing?
End of year reporting: Have you created a list of all your required end of year filings?
Donor records: Are all your pledge forms entered into your donor database and caught up on receipt letters and thank you notes?
Start-up archives: Are you keeping track of all your start-up milestones and accomplishments in one place? Do you have one place to store your press clippings, important communications, and start-up “artifacts”?
Equipment inventory: Do you have an on-going equipment inventory list noting serial numbers, replacement value, and procurement information?
Program material storage: Are all your program materials stored in clear, transportable bins that are fully labeled?
Tidy Office: Is your office organized and tidy, with adequate filing and storage equipment? Are there dust bunnies under your desk?
There you have it! The clean-up and organization that you may have been putting off, divided into categories and manageable bites. It doesn’t sound like such a monumental task when made into mini-goals, and I’m sure you’ll find that the same principles of management applied throughout your museum business structure will help clear those mental cobwebs and keep your museum healthy and strong for the long haul. Happy Fall!
