Notes
- The Listening Post Project was established by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies eight years ago to assess, in a systematic fashion, how the nation's nonprofit organizations are being affected by a host of pressing challenges and how they are responding. To do so, the project conducts regular Soundings (surveys) of its broad network of about 1,500 nonprofits representing diverse fields and sizes from across the nation. For more information about the project, see: www.jhu.edu/listeningpost.
- The data reported here come from a Listening Post Project Sounding that was fielded in April of 2009 to the project's two national panels of organizations on the front lines of nonprofit operation: (1) a “directed sample” of children and family service agencies, elderly housing and service organizations, community and economic development groups, museums, orchestras, theaters, and education-focused nonprofits recruited from among the members of major nonprofit intermediaries operating in these fields (i.e., the Alliance for Children and Families, American Association of Museums, American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, Community Action Partnership, League of American Orchestras, Lutheran Services in America, the former National Congress for Community Economic Development, and United Neighborhood Centers of America) and from the grantees of the Corporation for National and Community Service; and (2) as a check on any possible distortion that this sampling strategy may have introduced, a “random sample” of organizations in these same basic fields selected from IRS listings of agencies or more complete listings suggested by our partner organizations where they were available. Of the 363 survey respondents, 34, or roughly 10 percent, were from the museum field. This means that they were either members of the American Association of Museums (and thus, pan of the project's directed sample) or institutions akin to the members of American Association of Museums that were randomly selected to participate in our project (and thus, part of our random sample).
- A more recent Listening Post Project Sounding focused on nonprofit jobs provides further evidence that museums are continuing to adopt belt-tightening strategies. Specifically, our 2010 survey found that between October 2009 and March 2010, strategies relied on by roughly a quarter of all museum respondents included increasing reliance on volunteers (59 percent), redefining job descriptions (47 percent), postponing new hires (35 percent), eliminating staff positions (28 percent), decreasing staff hours (25 percent), paring down programs (24 percent}, and implementing a salary freeze (24 percent). For more details on this survey or to learn more about other Listening Post Project findings, visit http://www.ccss.jhu.edu/index.php?section=content&view=16&sub=104&tri=94.