This year’s conference theme Future-Proofing Museums & New Realities will be held November 4-6, 2020. This year's focus is providing conference attendees skills and methods to manage our new reality in the age of COVID-19 including the development of digital storytelling, virtual exhibits, and creative means of distanced audience engagement. 

Sarah Hill, Senior Consultant at Lord Cultural Resources, will be a panelist and Veronica Gonzales, Associate Consultant at Lord Cultural Resources, will be moderating the conversation on What's Next? Exploring the future of travelling exhibitions, digital engagement, outdoor experiences, and DEIA.

Watch Gail Lord & her guests from India, USA and Canada at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival 2020 in a discussion about Soft Power. Soft power is the ability to impact behaviour through influence, persuasion and agenda-setting. Countries tend to build walls while cities build bridges, especially in our current period of mass migration. Gail Lord, founder of Lord Cultural Resources and leader of the soft power movement, interviews three pioneering public servants who understand how soft power works and bring it to life.

True disruption is not temporary: the changes wrought by a once-in-a-century pandemic, a transformative societal movement to fight anti-Black racism, and the accelerating pace of human-driven climate change have left many cultural institutions reeling with the knowledge that they cannot — and should not — return to business as usual, even if and when the current maelstroms abate.

“It would be a mistake to try to reopen the same museum that we closed. This is an opportunity to leapfrog over where we were into some new realm,” said Judy Gradwohl, President and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum. She was speaking at a virtual Summit on the Future of Natural History Museums and Science Centers facilitated by Lord Cultural Resources.

“More and more culture-sector leaders recognize that IDEA Planning is not just the ‘right’ thing to do, but that it also makes their institution more successful and resilient,” says Lord Vice President Joy Bailey-Bryant. “Often, they are ready to make change, but are not sure how. We have proven tools, processes, and measures to manage IDEA Planning strategically, to make substantial change possible that all stakeholders can support.”

Lord Cultural Resources offers planning to facilitate building Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access strategically into your cultural organizations. Lord consultants and thought leaders can guide institutions through “IDEA Planning” either as a standalone initiative, or as part of a strategic plan, master plan exhibition, or expansion plan.

During the Fostering Leadership online talk, Gail Lord discusses the impact the current crisis situation had on the global trends in culture, what lessons we learned and what we should take with us to the future.

In this video, we discuss the steps and process that organizations move through in responding to inquiries and feedback. In pulling back the curtain, we will look at PR, Human Resources, and Social Media roles in responding to crisis and controversy. Conversation will also seek ways forward in transparency towards answering to public and staff questions.