AUDIT METHODOLOGY FOR MUSEUMS & ART GALLERIES

While the payment of, or the receipt of, fees or dues does not by necessity determine the ‘membership’ of a Community of Ownership & Interest of an institution, those who do pay fees and/or are in receipt of salaries, wages, honorariums, retainers etc. relative to the institution will typically be COI members – but not by definition or exclusively. 

A fee may be required for some reason to be a member of an auxiliary or affiliated group but this does not rank a membership in any way given that individuals will often have a diversity of parallel and/or coexisting ownerships and interests. 

COI members may also be members of affiliated and connected groups, organisations and institutions. 

That group of people often referred to as “the audience” will typically be COI members. Likewise, researchers with an interest the institution’s collection, or a component of it, will be included in the membership along with people whose work is held in the collections, intellectual property owners, donors, sponsors, funding agencies et al.

Compiling a COI membership list is a useful marketing exercise but more importantly doing so is in large part a marketing technique. Knowing and identifying the scope and characteristics of an institution’s COI offers multiple marketing options and opportunities. 

By necessity a COI Audit is a desktop research exercise with the COI membership being subjectively assessed for the purposes of ‘policy development’ and the institution’s ‘management & marketing’. Generally, research is the organised and systematic method of finding answers to questions. It needs to be systematic because it is a process broken up into clear steps that lead to conclusions. 

An audit needs to be planned and structured in order to reach a useful conclusion – or set of conclusions. A COI audit can only successful and useful if ‘cognitive owners’ and interested parties are identified, whether or not they are imagined as sympathetic or empathetic. Albeit counterintuitive, 'antagonists' need to be included/identified in the COI mix in order to manage their relationship to the institution in future marketing strategies.

COI audits are focused on identifying relevant, useful and important ‘players’ relevant to the institution’s raison d’être. If there are no COI members there can be no institution. Likewise, if the COI membership is ambiguous then the institution’s marketing is likely to be less cost effective than would be ideal. 

Desktop research – sometimes described as secondary research – involves developing a summary, collation and/or synthesis of existing research rather than primary research, where data is collected from, for example, research subjects or experiments that leads to the discovery of new knowledge.

Typically literature searches are desktop research projects devised to better understand existing knowledge and understandings plus the knowledge systems all this is founded upon.