In 2005 a county committeeconvened to control the crisis at the Milwaukee Public Museum. A roguechief financial officer had been covering up the museum’s snowballingdebt by raiding the museum’s endowment, while a negligent boardremained unaware that the institution was being run into the ground.With public confidence shaken and the museum bleeding money, the countyweighed every option. Many suggested bankruptcy. Some argued for fullyprivatizing the public museum; others weighed selling some of itscollection for quick cash. Always on the table was an even morehumiliating option: closing the museum completely.
“Noone wanted to see the museum fail, but it was something that we neededto consider,” says Gerry Broderick, a Milwaukee County supervisorinvolved in those tense discussions. “There was this question ofthrowing good money after bad.”
In the years since the crisis broke atthe Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), the country has seen countlessvariations of the same story, with institutions crumbling because oftheir own poor management. Many of these stories don’t have happyendings, but this one does. The county rallied around its museum,pulling it out of its tailspin.
“Everyone chipped in, fromcounty government to private philanthropists to banks,” says DanFinley, who took over as MPM’s president during the 2005 fallout. “Frankly, you can take the lessons that we learned turning this museum around and apply them to the national scene.”
Tough Decisions
Alongtime Waukesha County executive with no background in academia,Finley was an unlikely choice for the position. When he told his wifehe was considering applying for the job, she laughed at him and asked, “What do you knowabout museums?” But his confidence that he could fix the broken museumquickly won over acting CEO John Schlifske, who aggressively endorsedFinley for the job.
“When I arrived at the museum it didn’t need ananthropologist, or a botanist,” Finley says. “What it needed wassomeone who brought credibility. Someone who understoodbudgets, personnel management, fund-raising and public relations andhad experience with government relations, since the museum is stillowned by Milwaukee County … I think we’re going to see more culturalinstitutions heading in this direction, going with nontraditional CEOswho understand the business of running an organization. Even in highereducation, I think we’ll see the realization that you don’t need aphysicist to run a university.”
Finley set out to fix MPM’sfinances and reclaim its standing. He overhauled its failed board ofdirectors and reinstated business controls that had eroded over time toleave its chief financial officer with unbridled power. Finley madeaggressive budget cuts, trimming employee hours and slashing more thana hundred positions, including most of the museum’s curatorial team.
Meanwhile, a wide-ranging coalition of allies demonstrated its faith inthe museum, including county executives from both sides of thepolitical spectrum, business leaders and philanthropists. The county’sbacking helped MPM secure lowinterest loans from Chase and Marshall& Ilsley banks, while Finley worked to win back skeptical donors.
“Alot of donors were justifiably reluctant to reinvest, but we spent alot of time meeting with corporate foundations and individuals and wewere encouraged to see that, even after everything that had happened,there were a lot of people that never hesitated to increase theirsupport,” Finley says.
Jim Popp, the president of Chase in Wisconsin,says his bank’s philanthropic arm initially was reluctant to fund aninstitution in such turmoil, but Finley assuaged his concerns. “DanFinley and his staff over there made some hard decisions to get themuseum back on solid footing,” Popp says. “They did a great job ridingthe ship through the storm.”
Chase is now the title sponsor of“Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition,” the latest in a string of travelingexhibitions booked to generate excitement around the museum. “We’vegot some iconic exhibits here: the buffalo hunt, the butterflies, theStreets of Old Milwaukee, the rainforest,” Finley explains. “But a lotof people have already seen them. So we had to ask, ‘What can we do tomake this place dynamic?’ We settled on the strategy of the blockbustertraveling exhibits. People would come in for those, then stay to seetheir favorite exhibits that they remember from when they were kids.”
That strategy paid off beautifully with the museum’s previous featuredexhibit, “Body Worlds.” Its semi-sensational hookactual human corpseson display made “Body Worlds” a magnet for media coverage, and itlured spectators from around the region and became the museum’s mostsuccessful exhibition ever, drawing a record 338,000 visitors. In itsfinal days, the exhibit remained open around the clock to meet thedemand.
Vision for the Future
Thoughthe Titanic exhibit hasn’t proven quite the blockbuster that “BodyWorlds” was, it has performed well in the run-up to the museum’s busierspring season, drawing about 10,000 visitors weekly. MPM’s next plannedexhibit, a collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the oldest knownsurviving biblical documents, will be a symbolic victory for themuseum. Several years ago MPM aborted plans to host the exhibition whenFinley determined that the museum didn’t have the money or marketinginfrastructure to support it. Finley now believes MPM has the trackrecord to pull off nearly any touring exhibition.
“The onlything that holds us back is the square-footage of our exhibition area,”he says. “But really, we’re getting the greatest exhibits in theworld.”
Of course, more challenges lie ahead. Like mostinstitutions, MPM has seen fund-raising fall during the recession.Field trips are down this year, as is revenue. But the museum has builtback $3 million in its endowment and is now operating cash positive.
Finley’slong-term goals include updating some of the museum’s more tiredexhibitions; exploring the green energy movement, perhaps by installinga clean-energy source that doubles as an exhibit; and turning MPM intomore of an anchor for its crowded but sometimes foottraffic-unfriendlyregion of Downtown, possibly by adding more food, coffee and retailshops to the museum’s underused ground floor.
Though Finleyhopes to restore some of the curatorial positions cut during thecrisis, he says that the role of history museums has changed. Whereonce they were in the business of collection and preservation, withstaff undertaking costly artifact-finding expeditions, he believestheir primary role now is simply education. He’s prioritized keepingadmission prices low enough that the average city resident can affordthem and advocated maintaining weekly free days for county residents(though he has debated switching them from Mondays to Tuesdays tocapitalize on the revenue potential of Monday holidays).
“Thismuseum plays a huge role in local culture,” Finley says. “We’reactually built into the curriculum of schools; there aren’t too manylocal institutions that can say that. Students learn about a subject,then take a trip to the museum to study it firsthand. We knew thatwhatever changes we made to the museum, we needed to keep it affordablefor them. That’s vitally important to us.”
What’s your take?
Photos by Dave Zylstra and Kate Engbring
