Before working in nonprofit arts fundraising, Francis worked in the for-profit world with marketing and other similar fields for roughly a decade.
Francis, who describes herself as "musically and artistically ingrained” as a child, realized that she had “[become] a little disengaged with the corporate world” and began searching for art-related job opportunities.
This led Francis to take up an administrative assistant position at the Saint Louis Symphony.
“I had sung in the lobby, and I had gone to performances, and I thought, 'what a cool place to work that would be.' And so I applied for a position supporting the VP of external affairs, which managed public relations, fundraising and marketing,” said Francis.
Once hired on, the symphony experienced some administrative changes.
“They sort of gave me a choice,” she said. “If I wanted to go through fundraising or go into the marketing PR side. And I had fallen in love with the fundraising side. So I became their campaign manager. That sort of started my love for not for profit work and particularly arts fundraising.”
Over the years, Francis has worked for many entities, such as the Arizona Opera, the Phoenix Symphony and Jazz St. Louis, as well as operated her own Orpheum Theatre in Illinois.
Eventually, her career led her to Springfield, “specifically to join the art museum and to bring this capital project across the finish line for this community,” she said. Francis had worked for the museum for several years and was recently named the executive director of the Foundation.
Francis said that “moving over to the Foundation,” a pseudonym for Friends of the Springfield Art Museum, “just seemed like a natural evolution.”
“It still is the same job that I was doing for the art museum, just with more administrative responsibility and then also management responsibility as we add employees in,” she explained. “But really, my moving over to the Foundation, one, lends credibility to the Foundation as an institution, but it also is meeting the goal that the Foundation serve as the primary fundraising arm of the art museum.”
Friends of the Springfield Art Museum differs from the Springfield Art Museum itself as it allows for the art museum to expand its fundraising abilities. It is a private, 501c3 organization, meaning that it is deemed tax exempt. In addition to tax exemption, registering as a 501c3 organization also allowed the group to receive donations from foundations that typically wouldn’t donate to a government institution, which the Springfield Art Museum technically is.
The Foundation was developed from a prior membership-based organization with the same name which was getting ready to disband.
“We saw that as an opportunity to sort of repopulate that board, reinvigorate it and take on this role,” said Francis. “[The Foundation] is just a better best practice in terms of management of fundraising for a city owned entity.”
Previously, fundraising and campaigns were organized by this group.
Francis hopes that by changing the structure of the fundraising process, the museum can continue to develop as an entity.
“I think our goal is to have a facility that reflects the quality of the collection that this community has owned for nearly 100 years and to really give it a place where it can be seen in an environment that people love to come to,” she said. “One of the reasons that I came [here] was because this art museum has been in a unique position, that it's free to the community. A museum that is owned by the city, is owned by the citizens of this community and has been such a benefit not only to Springfield but to the region.”
Development plans include connecting the physical building of the museum with its outdoor surroundings, including Fassnight Creek and the Hatch Foundation Lawn. Francis hopes to further develop the area as a “third space,” which she said is also a goal of the city.
“We really see [the museum] not only as a wonderful institutional destination, but also a partner to our other organizations and serving our community for another century,” Francis added.
