This is another post in my series looking at the ABS’s Arts and Culture statistics, again trying to get to grips with what the published statistics are saying about the sector. Here I focus on the statistics about museum income, expenditure and staffing as detailed in Chapter 8 of the report (the ‘museum’ chapter).
As noted previously, around two-thirds of museum income comes from Government sources: either Federal, State or Local. The report breaks down income and expenditure by museum type; I’ve also shown income and expenditure streams as a percentage of the total:
(Note that the income categories are a little different from that in the chart shown previously – the Government figure is the same and I’m assuming the discrepancy is down to other categorisation differences.)
This shows considerable variation in the funding mix for different museum types, with the differences between Historic Properties and Natural /Science /Other showing the biggest contrast. Whereas less than half of Historic Properties’ income comes from Government sources, Government provides three-quarters of Natural /Science /Other museums’ income. The fact that Historic Properties are far more likely to be paid admission (see here) is consistent with this and explains the higher proportion of income coming from admissions.
There is also a marked contrast in the proportion of income from fundraising, with Art Museums taking in more than triple that of Natural /Science /Other when taken as a proportion of total income. Given the fact that both of these categories are likely to represent some of the larger and national museums (the reasons for this are given in the previous post), it seems that either Art Galleries are punching well above their weight in the fundraising stakes, or Natural /Science /Other museums are lagging behind somewhat (or maybe a bit of both). Another possibility that cannot be ruled out is that one-off capital grants (which are included in the Government funding total) have skewed the figures in this particular financial year.
On the expenditure front, I was surprised at how little (as a proportion of total expenditure) is spent on exhibition and display development. Given exhibitions are the main public face of the museum, and that exhibitions are typically quite expensive to produce, I would have thought it would have come in much higher than a tiny 4% (on average) of total expenditure.
The other thing that surprised me was the relatively high proportion spent on exhibitions by Art Museums (7%) as opposed to the much lower figures spent by other museum types. I can’t think of anything inherently more expensive about mounting art exhibitions and wonder whether the increased cost is down to an increased frequency of exhibition changeover in Art Galleries, rather than anything inherent in the cost of mounting a given exhibition. (Assuming Art Galleries do indeed change over exhibitions more frequently, that is!)
It should also go without saying that having a category called ‘other’ that accounts for half of museums’ operating expenses makes interpretation or generalisation from these data somewhat difficult.
Just to see what would happen, I took these income figures from above and divided them by the number of museums and number of visitors (paid and free admission) to each museum type (as provided earlier in the ABS report and summarised here). Among other things, this shows the amount of Government subsidy per visitor to each museum type:
(I should add a disclaimer here: these figures have been derived by combining numbers from two completely separate tables in the ABS report. This may or may not be a valid way to treat these data. You have been warned . . . )
This bears out what the other table indicated – Historic Properties gain a higher income from their visitors ($6.95/visitor) ; Natural /Science /Other museums attract a greater Government subsidy for each visitor they attract ($34.65 per visitor).
Presenting Government subsidy in this way is pretty sobering in general really: with Government (Federal, State, Local) support coming in at an average of $21 per visitor, I can see the need for us to demonstrate real value and benefit. Conversely, it would be interesting to see how this figure relates to per-visit / per-use subsidies for the rest of the arts and cultural sector – that $21 may well represent excellent value when the full cost-benefit and comparison analysis is done.
So to look at expenses more closely, manipulating expenses in a similar way to what I did with income, it seems that the main reason Natural /Science /Other Museums are more expensive to run is due to staffing costs:
As indicated previously, I think the Natural /Science /Other category is more likely to include large institutions (I’m thinking the Australian Museum, SA Museum, Melbourne Museum, etc. would all fit into this category); all of which have relatively large public programs teams, design departments, and so forth. The Art Gallery category would also include its fair share of large insitutions, but this is probably balanced by many other smaller and regional galleries.
So how do these staff costs break down? According to the ABS report, 7,856 people were employed in museums (June 2008). At the same time, there were 23,426 people working as volunteers in museums:
As with all the figures which are averaged out ‘per museum’, interpret with caution as it’s a pretty blunt instrument. That said, there is a marked difference between categories with respect to the ‘average’ number of employees and the numbers of volunteers (and their ratios to paid staff). These differences would definitely appear to explain the differences in staff costs.
I also wonder whether the cause of the difference in volunteer ratios is supply-side (i.e. social history museums are more willing to take on volunteers), or demand-side (i.e. people who wish to volunteer are more likely to choose social history). It could also be a bit of both: social history and historic sites tend to be smaller, local organisations with relatively low staff numbers and more dependent on volunteers; conversely because they are ‘local’, they may be more attractive to volunteers either through geographic convenience or because their impact is more visible than it would be if they part of larger institution’s ‘machine’.
Museum employees are broken down by category; I’ve shown the supplied numbers and have also presented them as a percentage of the total number of employees by museum type:
So for instance, the bottom row of this table shows that 31% of Art Gallery employees fall within in the ‘Security’ category, whereas this category only accounts for 20% of Natural /Science /Other Museum employees; 26% of museum employees across the board are ‘security’ personnel. I’m not sure if any of these proportions leap out at me for being noteworthy or unusual, however.
As always, your insights and comments are very welcome . . .
That is fascinating, I never realised that door receipts were such a small part of museum income, and therefore how much a visit actually costs. I am involved in a science outreach project to schools with 1:3-4 levels of supervision by science undergrads and I was worrying about pushing the total cost to £5 per visitor by employing an administrator.
Does the number of administrators and managers indicating that a really huge part of the intelectual effort of the museums is going into looking for funding sources? That surely can’t be a sensible use of the government’s resources.
Anyway I would be fascinated to see similar numbers for the UK.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the comment. The bottom line is: running a building is costly! And collections conservation, management and storage are arguably a ‘public good’ which should not be shouldered solely by a museum’s visitors – hence the greater subsidy than science centres, which tend to earn closer to 50% of their operating expenses through earned income like admissions (a broad-brush figure – check out ASTC’s Sourcebooks of Science Center statistics for more in depth analysis). Also many museums are free whereas few science centres are.
I feel your pain regarding science outreach – I am on the board of a nonprofit here in South Australia that does outreach to schools – science shows, robotics programs, mobile planetarium domes, etc, etc. Simple fact is that schools cannot afford the true cost of running these, hence we depend heavily on fundraising and other more profitable activities, such as consultancy, to help keep these programs going and to fulfil our mission to reach underserved and underprivileged schools (who often receive our programs for free thanks to sponsorship support).
But, having said that, I wouldn’t read too much into the number of ‘administrators and managers’ cited above. Yes fundraising and grant writing will take up a significant amount of staff time. However, I did wonder exactly what types of jobs were included in this category, and I imagine that anyone who didn’t fit neatly into the other categories listed (curatorial, security, gallery attendants) may have been lumped into here. For instance there is no neat box for education staff, in-house designers, etc. etc. But if these people had ‘manager’ in their title somewhere (and they often do), they may have more likely ended up in this category than the ‘security and other employed’ category.
Regarding statistics in the UK – Statistics UK might collate data in this area; alternatively the Museums Association or the (soon to be wound up) Museums, Libraries and Archives council may have done their own analysis. If you find anything comparable for the UK, let me know!
Regan