Ep. 20 — The Love my Museum Planning Calendar
The 2025 Love my Museum Planning Calendar is here! In this episode, Amy talks about why she created the calendar and walks you through how to use it.
Show Links
Download the calendar here: https://bit.ly/2025museumcal
Also mentioned:
Episode 5: Planning the Planning
Join the Love my Museum Facebook Group
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00]
In today's episode, I'm excited to share the 2025 planning calendar for museums. I'll cover some top planning tips and discuss how to attract visitors who will come back to your museum and bring a friend. Let's get started.
Hello, and welcome to the Love my Museum podcast. I'm your host, Amy Kehs, and I love museums. I am also a brand strategist and communications expert for museums. Today is the launch of my most popular free resource, the Love my Museum planning calendar. This is the third year I've created a planning calendar for museums, and I really hope it will help you as much as it's helped my clients and the rest of the Love my Museum community.
If you’re new here, the Love my Museum suite of services are free or affordable resources for museum professionals. This podcast, and my weekly email newsletter are part of those free offerings. The Love my Museum Planning Calendar is the most popular of those free resources. And the 2025 version is launching today. In this episode, I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what inspired me to create it and then I’ll walk you through it a bit so you can get the most out of using it.
Now in episode five of the podcast, I talked about why you should be planning for your museum. I imagine most of you are doing some sort of planning already. But problems that I’ve seen around planning that then lead to bigger problems for the museums I’ve worked with are that my clients have a hard time carrying out the plan for the whole year, that don’t decide on priorities and communicate that to their staff and their staff gets burnt out because the big picture is missed and resources (both money and time) are exhausted.
[00:02:00]
I hope this calendar and this podcast inspire you to plan and include your staff as much as possible at each stage of the planning process. The Love my Museum planning calendar is the first stage of planning, it’s the 30,000 ft view. It serves as your roadmap when you’re doing quarterly planning and then monthly planning and then creating a task list for each employee. Those museum priorities win out over all other tasks. Let’s talk about priorities for a minute.
I have a client who was working on a big project. There was a lot of time, money, and thought that had gone into this project for a year. We had come up with some events to take place throughout the year. Like I said, this was a major thing for the museum. When the team leading the project asked for help from another department, they were told no, they couldn’t help because they were working on other things. Deciding the museum priorities—not the department priorities or an individual person’s priorities—and communicating that to staff means that everyone knows when there needs to be “all hands on deck” for something. It’s important to support your colleagues and it's vital to support the museum’s priorities, especially when you are a small museum.
[00:04:00]
So using this planning calendar is important to establish priorities for the year, it is also important to get an overview of when your resources will be used. There are seasons in a museum year that are always busier than others. During those seasons, I’ve had colleagues sleep in their offices. I myself have gotten a hotel room for a time when I would be at the museum until midnight for an event only to turn around the next morning for a 4 am tv crew arrival. Sometimes those seasons aren't avoidable but you can try not to overbook your staff. A tired, exhausted staff is an unhappy staff and unhappy staff aren't going to be able to give the best visitor experience. And staff that are unhappy for too long are going to leave. And then you'll be short-staffed. This might seem like a grim and dramatic picture to paint but I have seen time and time again.
Before we dive into looking at the calendar, let's talk just a little bit about my inspiration for the calendar. When 2020 happened and all of my museum clients had to shut their doors, all of my contracts were canceled. My daughter was applying to colleges and I needed to keep my business running.
[00:06:00]
I did a pivot and I started helping online business owners. I also at that time I started working on my own business. I noticed with my business owners, that they did a really good job of planning and then breaking down that plan into quarters, months, and weeks. One of the business programs I completed focused on the importance of. 90-day planning. It made a huge difference in my business. I started teaching this to my museum clients when museums started opening back up again. But it was one instance in particular that inspired me to create this calendar. One of my favorite clients is actually really good at planning. They have just one exhibit space and they try to plan several years out and then around that one exhibit space they will create a theme for the year, which I think is a great idea. It gives them great focus for programming and also really helps with their brand messaging and alleviates some decision fatigue. But as they were coming out of the pandemic for a couple of years in a row, they would forget to plan for this one event. This one particular holiday. It's an event that they are known for and journalists would actually call them and ask what they had planned and then they would need to scramble to put something together. It had quite literally just fallen off their radar screen.
[00:08:00]
That was when I realized that it isn't just the exhibits that you're planning for, but it is how you support your community, how you create those annual traditions that you become known for, and making sure that those events are in your plan too so you can manage your resources, be proactive and be prepared. No one likes those kinds of surprises.
So the planning calendar helps you set those goalposts for the year, those non-negotiables. The planning calendar is going to help you brainstorm and identify those. It doesn’t mean that you need to do something for everything in here. Your exhibits, programs, everything that your museum does needs to be authentic to your mission and vision.
The other important thing, I talked about this a lot in episode 5, is that you need to include everyone in this plan. Depending on the size of your staff, this might mean doing it together or maybe the leadership team takes it back to the other staff.
Okay. So. Let's dive into the planner. First, let’s download the calendar. Click the link in the show notes for the calendar. It's going to take you to a page where you add your first name and your email address, and then I'll email you a copy. When you do this, you'll also be added to my email list. I love creating content for the people on my email list. It is my favorite.
[00:10:00]
The people on my email list are also the first, well, besides my clients, the first to find out all the things. For example, my email list got this calendar last week. If you’re just now signing up for my list, you get a few extra emails this week and then you’ll just get a new email every Tuesday. If you’re already on my list, don’t worry, as long as you use the same email address, you won’t be added twice. One more quick note on my email list, because I realize we haven’t really talked about that before. First and foremost, my goal is always to make sure that the emails I send are worthy of your time. I know that a lot lands in your inbox every day, and I want you to be excited when you get an email from me. I also want it to be a really quick read, because I know that as museum people, we are busy. And so I don't want to take too much of your time. If you don't like my Tuesday emails and you do not want my emails anymore. It is okay to unsubscribe. I will not take it personally. It's totally. Okay. I promise.
Okay. So you've signed up and you'll get the calendar in your inbox. It's a PDF. Feel free to print it off if you'd like, if that would be helpful. Then open up the calendar. I really hope that it will serve as a jumping-off point or even like a brainstorming trigger list for your planning session with your staff. Use it for this annual planning but then pull it out at the beginning of each quarter for your quarterly planning session and also as a reference when you’re planning for the month.
[00:12:00]
The main part of the planner has a page for every month. The first thing I want you to do is go through and in the notes section at the bottom go ahead and add in any exhibit openings or signature programs or annual events that you know right now will be happening in the corresponding month.
So, for example, one of my clients does an amazing October event, ghost tours for their community. It sells out every year. So they would turn to that October page and put the dates in for next year's tours. And then depending on how long it takes to prep for those signature events or upcoming new exhibits, maybe jot a note in the previous months to remind yourself that you'll be planning for that main priority. Another example will be the first museum that I talked about with the annual exhibit, a lot of times they will have some marketing ad buys that they do in coordination with that exhibit opening. They may jot down when those ads would be due. You won’t have room to get too down in the weeds with these to-dos but think of things that may require work from multiple departments.
After you’re done filling in those big events, go through each page of the calendar. Remember this is that 30,000-foot view and then we'll kind of zoom in each quarter and then by month and then by week. And that's how you will see success.
[00:14:00]
At the top of each month’s page, the first thing that we look at is a monthly theme. So for example, January is getting organized month, February is black history month, March is national women's History Month and so on and so forth. So when you get to the month, look at those and see do you have any events that might coordinate with it. Do you have any artifacts or things in your collection that relate to the theme of the month? After the month themes there are notable dates for that month. Now this by no means is an exhaustive list. There are literally days for everything now. It really is just to get you thinking. Do you have an exhibit that would go with that holiday? Or an artifact in your collection that you can highlight? You can also do this in reverse. Maybe there is a collection item that is new or you feel like it doesn't get a lot of attention, you can see if there's a holiday that might go with it and mark it on your calendar. You'll go through and do that for every month of the year.
Also in the calendar, you'll see a page talking about your media list. Having these ideas gives you things to pitch to the media. They are looking for story ideas, especially on slow news days. If you’re providing them with newsworthy and timely ideas they will be very thankful.
[00:16:00]
I hope that this calendar inspires you to be proactive and to get everyone on the same page for 2025.
Once you’ve downloaded the free calendar, if you have any questions, please hit reply on that email and let me know. I’m really the one on the other end. Also, a reminder that I have a new Facebook group, the Love my Museum Facebook group, where museum professionals share tips and strategies, and success stories. I would love to see you there. Thanks so much for listening, I’ll see you next time.
