In 1967 local philanthropist Dorothy Holman started a small local museum in a disused wing of her house. When she died the museum and the rest of the building were willed to Exeter City Council on the condition that they were used for the purposes of developing Topsham Museum.
In 1984 members of the community formed a charity, the Topsham Museum Society, to support the provision of the museum service, historic house and attractive grounds to the community. The key consideration was to create a model that could enable a service to be provided to the community and to tourists without requiring local government financial support.
Anthony Jennings, the Society’s Honorary Treasurer, said, "Initially Topsham Museum opened as a fee paying museum, but an experiment with free admission to mark the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 successfully increased the number of visitors and spend per head. The decision was then made to maintain the museum as a free service."
Approximately two thirds of the museum’s annual income is earned through onsite retail activity centred around its shop and successful café; this income covers what the museum terms its ‘core’ or operational costs. The remaining third of yearly capital is achieved largely through philanthropic activity, including an active, gift-aiding membership of 400, visitor donations, and fundraising events including a biennial open gardens event.
All staffing including its 12-20 strong management team, is provided by a network of 170 volunteers. This represents significant cost savings. The museum’s Treasurer calculates volunteer hours worked in 2009 as 7,500 of which only just over a third were spent manning the museum, tea room and shop during opening hours. The main benefit for volunteers involved is that it is a fun and engaging way of giving something back to the local community.
In 2005 the museum successfully applied for a £260,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant to create display space and conserve and display new elements to the collection. This was supplemented by a grant of £15,000 from Exeter City Council.
The Society now opens the Museum four days a week from April to October; attracting some 12,000 visitors and generating £39,000 of gross income in 2009.
For Topsham Museum, the key elements enabling smooth and successful devolution included:
- Identifying necessary skills for the governing body and developing strategies to bring them in (developing, for example, the relationship with the Royal Albert Museum which provides curatorial advice)
- Clarity from the outset about the amount of volunteer time commitment and/or liability involved with participation
- Planning to develop volunteers – it is relatively easy to get volunteers to help with stewarding/ tea room/ shop/ maintenance, but much harder to progress volunteers to manage these activities or help with other back room activities such as collections display, research, documentation and aspects of governance of the charity.
Topsham Museum’s sustainability is reliant upon
- Low operational margins including ‘free’ staff and a quid pro quo relationship with the Council over rent and insurance
- The creation of diversified funding model including retail, events, and philanthropy
The key outcome of Topsham Museum Society’s management of the devolved Topsham Museum has been a growth in organisational professional excellence. This has brought industry-wide recognition through HLF funding, longlisting for the Art Fund Prize in 2008, and successful Accreditation in 2009.
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