Voces del Prado

Friends of the Prado Museum Foundation

Nuria de Miguel Poch, General Secretary of the Friends of the Museo del Prado Foundation, 1989-What's on

The special features of this Foundation are more than just one. One of the things is how it was incorporated. I wasn't there but it started in the 1980s and rose up from society itself, in other words, it wasn't set up by a Ministry or by the Museum. It was set up by a group of people from Spanish society at the time, a society that was bubbling up, because Franco had died in 1975, the Association Act had just been enacted, and immediately people wanted to get together and do things. So people from the world of business, from museums, from universities, got together and put forth capital and they started working. It's one of the identifying traits that marked me, because I had the volunteering spirit in me, I wanted to help out. The second thing that makes it special is the idea of always knowing what our goal was, helping the Prado. We always wanted it to have a strong social foundation.
Right now the Friends of the Prado Museum consists of 36,000, but for some time we were just 2,500. It's something that has developed over the years. It's not that all of a sudden everyone wants to be a friend of the Prado Museum. It took many years to build it up. It's a pyramid with a very solid base, because there are many very small donations, but we have also made it a point to make up different groups of friends for larger donations, with an attractive program of benefits, gratitude and opportunities. And that leads to the international Trust, with people from all over the world who make large donations. I think this Foundation has the specific trait of having built up a very large social base, but also other riskier forms of aid, meaning that donations are larger and more interesting, from people who are convinced they can help. The third specific trait is that we have not only focused on having friends making donations to help out the Museum economically, but we have tried to be supportive, in the sense of making collections known. We want the Prado Museum to be well known in Madrid, in Spain and all over the world. That is why we have developed all the cultural activities, courses, lectures, publications, creating a mass of people who are interested. We want them to become friends of the Prado, we want to build up their loyalty, get them to come back, buy things in the shop, come to exhibitions and become ambassadors of the Museum outside the Museum.