During my summer at the Brooklyn Museum, I primarily worked on developing a publications strategy. Museum publishing serves various disparate goals, from producing cutting edge academic research to tapping into new audiences and enhancing retail revenue. Through conversations across the retail, publications, art, curatorial, exhibitions, finance, and marketing departments, I recognized the misalignment between goals and outputs. I proposed a refined approach to publishing by

1. creating a decision matrix;
2. identifying correct stakeholders within the publications landscape;
3. enhancing the production process to include those stakeholders; and
4. understanding the museum's expenses for publishing. The four proposals, coupled with the completed “decision matrix” product, helped ensure that the goals and outcomes were aligned within the publications department and that the brand of the museum aligned properly with the completed publication.

   At the Brooklyn Museum, I applied skillsets from my Accounting, Strategy Formulation, Entrepreneurial Strategy, and Corporate Finance courses. Strategy Formulation and Entrepreneurial Strategy provided me with the skillsets to assess BkM's current situation, including its mission, goals, target audience, and available resources. This analysis was crucial in order to evaluate new opportunities and tap into new formats and channels for publications (identifying who would be early adopters as we tap into new mediums, gauging audience member's willingness to pay, and analyzing the competitive landscape for museum publishing). Leveraging new learnings from Accounting and Corporate Finance helped me develop a stronger sense for the financial strength of the museum broadly but also within the publications department. Analyzing individual publication's earned revenue, costs, profit, and margin was helpful in assessing the retail success of each publication. This further helped me create a financial model to understand the potential success of a permanent collection publication, which leveraged data from previous budgets, sales rates, and other financial assumptions.

   Oftentimes, there are competing or conflicting goals within the museum. A goal for the publishing department can sometimes be very different from a goal from the retail department, even if both departments work or engage with a similar product. This was quite challenging in finding a balance between identifying which goals were more important than others. This required me to have various conversations across the different departments that worked within publishing and created a system in place that had buy-in across all of those departments. The system helped ensure that there was alignment in place early on and ensured that the goals set were definitive rather than adaptive per each department. This was a very challenging task since it required nuance, communication, and adaptability throughout the course of my internship to ensure that all parties were comfortable, engaged, and excited to implement a new strategy and product within their workflow.

   Working at the museum was an invaluable experience. It allowed me to fuse my interests in both art, media, and nonprofits with the strategy and business skillsets I had sought out to develop throughout my time at Columbia Business School. Working at the Brooklyn Museum allowed me to explore my interests in the world of media and the arts while allowing me to embrace new skillsets in strategy. I was able to communicate with departments across the museum to understand the unique challenges they faced and built out my financial analysis and data analysis capabilities in order to develop a feasible strategy for success for the museum and the publications department as a whole. Further, having the ability to roam the exhibits, connect with staffers across various backgrounds and departments, and attend exhibition openings and curatorial conversations provided for a unique experience. This truly allowed me to fuse both interests in the creative world and business. With the support from Tamer Center for Social Enterprise, I was able to work in an industry that provided a great deal of meaning to me (having been raised in New York City and having attended museums throughout my childhood) while formulating and creating a strategy that will help the publications department expand into new territories.