Hello everyone!

We have now reached the end of week 8. This fellowship has gone by so fast!

This summer, the MAC has switched over from Arts People, a fundraising and donor management software, to AudienceView, an event management and ticketing software. This switch has been a process for all the MAC staff, and everyone has put in a lot of work to make this switch a success. One of my main tasks this week has been to make sure that all annual fund donors have been uploaded to AudienceView and that all spouses are connected to one another, specifically for future mail merges connected to acknowledgement letters. It is important to give proper acknowledgement to those who gift annual funds, no matter the size, because in reality all contributions equal impact.

Something else I got to do this week was sit in on a strategic planning meeting with some of the MAC staff. The purpose of this meeting was to continue to work on a strategic plan that can help the MAC move towards becoming a designated museum. What I found interesting, about this process, is that each part of the strategic plan falls under a certain department (education, performing arts, operations, marketing, etc.) and each department has a role in engaging a certain goal or strategy to produce a certain outcome. This, overall, ignited a lot of brainstorming for me as I felt personally attached to the goal of the MAC wanting to draw in younger audiences. This process brought forward another task for me as I was asked to find examples of current museum’s collection management policies and to do some research on them to help the MAC, in turn, draft its own.

On Wednesday of this week, we had our last MAC on the Road tour which took place at
the Ohioana Library. The Ohioana Library is a very unique and special place that dedicates itself to all thing’s literature connected to Ohio. This includes books, graphic novels, scrapbooks, maps, sheet music, and much more. As a part of the experience, I got to see a miniature Bible about the size of my thumb, an original copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, letters written by Langston Hughes, and a poetry book written by a talented poet who tragically died in her high school years. The amount of materials connected to Ohio is astonishing and the amazing thing is that it is all being preserved and celebrated by this nonprofit organization.

This week, I also had some time to reflect over what I have learned this summer at the MAC. I have really gotten a strong grasp on what nonprofit is and the different roles within a nonprofit. I understand a lot more, then when I came in this summer, about what it really means to be a nonprofit, what it takes to run a nonprofit, and the amount of dedication and passion it takes to be employed in a nonprofit organization. Not only this, but I have come to understand how people-centered the nonprofit sector is. If a nonprofit does not engage its mission through people, it is not really making an impact in its community.

Until next week,

Graci