Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Smithsonian post, Maggie Webster, associate director for External Affairs at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., talks about her work and how it is shaped by philanthropy's past.

• What can we do as funders to support infrastructure for museums and art institutions? Which future innovations will make donor dollars go further?

• Here's an examination about whether museums have been too generous with naming rights.

Our office is responsible for developing and executing strategies for fundraising to support all of the museum's priorities, including exhibitions, programs, positions, and more. We also produce Special Events for internal and external groups as a source of revenue for the Museum.

Our current priorities include raising funds for new exhibitions such as Entertaining America. That exhibition will explore how entertainment spurs critical conversations and can foster important historical change.  We need to raise approximately $25 million to complete the third floor. With that, the entire west wing of the museum will have been transformed with new exhibitions, programming, and performance venues with approximately $100 million in privately raised funding combined with federal funding for infrastructure.   .

We need to stay on top of the way fundraising is being done now and the way that it changes over time. Fundraisers are always looking for new ways to get people interested in giving and ways to excite people about giving. It's interesting as a fundraiser to look back over time and study trends that have come and gone in fundraising. Certainly now, technology is the thing people are looking to more and more to make fundraising easy, fast, and efficient.

Read the full article about a behind-the-scenes look at museum fundraising by Maggie Webster and Amanda Moniz at americanhistory.si.edu.