Showing Its Plumage

 

 

Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts

The power of the new emphasis on marketing at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts could be seen in the attention brought to its treatment of the works of John James Audubon. The conservators were quietly conserving three of Audubon’s 50- to 70-pound volumes of The Birds of America in 2004. The books from the early 1800s feature Audubon’s famous prints, etched on metal plates, printed, and hand colored, which had to be painstakingly conserved image by image. When Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes released a new autobiography on Audubon, the Center arranged to host a book signing, which drew attention to the Center’s work in restoring Audubon’s originals.

 

This is just one of the ways the Conservation Center has helped to make its work more visible with an Organizational Development Fund grant for $48,300 to hire its first Marketing Coordinator. “The funding we received from PCMI to hire a marketing coordinator has really transformed our organization,” said Ingrid Bogel, Executive Director. “We never had enough resources to do something like a newsletter or annual report. We are pretty well known in the non-profit arena, but not among corporations and individuals. People have to know we are here and understand our work.”

 

The internal marketing resources also have allowed the Center to offer assistance in grant writing to institutions with important collections. “We can be much more proactive in identifying an organization that has a fabulous collection and matching them to a potential donor or creating an adopt-an-artifact program. A big part of our marketing is to help other institutions learn how to leverage their collections in order to fund stewardship activities.”

The new focus on marketing also is changing the way conservators look at their work. In the monastic tradition of the scriptorium, conservators have worked without fanfare on projects such as restoring a 15th century Bible. “Conservators have been like doctors and lawyers in that you don’t advertise what you do. This has had an incredible impact for the institution. People are now looking at the project they are working on and saying there might be a good story we could tell on the website or newsletter. You are not just working at your bench in isolation. It has been a real eye-opener to all of us that we can be more in control of our destiny. We don’t have to wait for people to find us.”

 

Bogel has seen the Center’s budget grow from $800,000 to more than $2.2 million in her five years as Director of the Center. PCMI also offered Bogel a Professional Skills Development grant to attend the Stanford University’s Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders in 2004. There, she made a connection through a classmate with a conservator from Hong Kong who came to the Conservation Center for a one month internship to study Western bookbinding techniques. When Bogel returned from the program, she also established a group of four non-profit leaders who are working with an executive coach to continue to develop their leadership skills. “I came back from the Stanford program and wanted to find a way to keep this going,” she said.

 

“PCMI is the best thing to come to Philadelphia for a non-profit organization,” Bogel said. “It is just extraordinary. It supports us in so many ways – as individuals through professional development grants and institutionally by giving us additional resources to grow our institutions. So many people working in the cultural arena are starved for management and business classes, because it is not something we have studied.”