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2011, the endowment provided nearly half the Newseum's $63.7 million revenue. In 2010, it was more than half.
• Museums with healthy balance sheets would generally draw 20 to 30 percent of their revenue from an endowment, said Barry Lord, co-president of the museum consultancy Lord Cultural Resources. Such revenue would usually come from interest on an endowment, not its principal. Another 35 percent of revenue would come from admissions, facility rentals and sales, and the remaining 35 percent would come from membership sales and additional fundraising.
• In 2011, the Newseum received about 8 percent of the Freedom Forum's net assets, and the endowment also spent millions on other programs.
• "That I would consider a red flag because they are basically using the principal of the endowment, to some degree, to pay for operations," said consultant David Ellis, a past president of the Museum of Science in Boston and of Lafayette College. "To be sustainable, it's crucial that the draw on the endowment, the amount that is spent ... needs to be realistic in terms of the endowment maintaining its purchasing power."
• Most museums have been struggling in recent years since the Great Recession, Ellis said. Many are contending with rising expenses and must find ways to increase revenue.
• As part of its reorganization, the museum launched the Newseum Institute recently to reach more people in schools nationwide, to become more efficient and to create more fundraising potential around its First Amendment initiatives. The institute will encompass programs that have been based separately at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, the University of South Dakota, and the University of Mississippi.
• Duff, a lawyer who joined the Newseum as CEO in 2011, said the new institute can serve a critical need to improve civic education.
• "Thomas Jefferson said that the best way to preserve our liberties is to have an educated public. We really believe that that's the case," he said. "We're positioning ourselves to be a national leader in that regard."
• Annual surveys tracking knowledge of the First Amendment show attitudes toward those freedoms often change based on fear over national security or other factors, said Gene Policinski, a veteran journalist who will be the new institute's chief operating officer.
• "Knowledge is just not where it should be about freedoms we've had for 220-plus years," he said. "So I worry about freedoms not known. Freedoms not exercised can be lost."

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