Crowdfunding as a source of funding for museum activities: an analysis of projects on the Planeta.ru platform

The article presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 53 projects of the crowdfunding platform Planeta.ru about museums and museum activities. As a result, the main directions of museum activities for private donations have been determined. Crowdfunding is a new tool to get money in cultural institutions by private donations. There are specialized platforms on the Internet for crowdfunding, such as Planet.ru or Blago.ru. The crowdfunding campaign has its own conditions: the initiator of the project offers multi-level remuneration for donors from simply written thanks on the project website to the finished product such as museum book or an excursion tour. The socio-cultural projects that are posted on the crowd-portal Planeta.ru have been analyzed in this article. There are 53 museums' projects among the 5.5 thousand projects. The following topics of the projects were described: 1) exhibition activities, 2) publishing results of research in the museums, 3) museum education, 4) restoration of museum items. The geography of projects is quite diverse and includes regions of Russia and foreign countries (Poland and Belorussia). The crowdfunding is more popular among authors from the European part of Russia. Only 5 projects were presented from the Ural region and Siberia. As a result of the analysis, 40 museums of various backgrounds were identified. Some of them are real museums and museum-type institutions, others are virtual and planned to be created. They are: 1) 10 municipal museums of historical and local history profiles; 2) 3 school museums of military history; 3) 4 memorial museums; 4) 3 estate museums; 5) 2 museum-reserves; 6) 2 museum-type institutions; 7) 4 museums of other profiles. Thus, the professional museum community is represented by only 31 museums of various profiles. To sum up, it is possible to note that the crowdfunding platform Planet.ru is one of the largest resources for social and cultural projects. However, the professional museum community does not use its opportunities to get money for their projects to the full. It should be noted that school museums use this type of fundraising source because they haven't enough funding. Crowdfunding information distribution allows the museum specialists to understand and see the prospects of this tool to get money. Due to crowdfunding, museums can be on demand from their visitors, attracting modern technologies to their activities. The implemented projects not only solve the problems of museums, but also contribute to the growth of their attractiveness, as well as increase interest in the history and culture in a particular region.

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