The Buffalo Nations Museum, like many other museums all over the world, relies heavily on donations to keep functioning. Whether you're a small business owner who is barely making ends meet or a rich philanthropist looking for a new cause, you can help your local museum. Here are a few ideas on how you can help out by making a donation to your local museum and some information on how your donation will be used by the museum.

You may be wondering, especially if your museum charges admission, why you need to make a donation to support it. The answer is that admissions fees probably don't cover the whole cost of running a museum. The museum needs to buy artifacts, pay staff to maintain, study, protect, and display them, buy materials for displaying the artifacts, pay for utilities like rent, electricity, and the alarm systems that keeps opportunistic thieves from helping themselves to priceless artifacts. All of this adds up, and if the museum doesn't get enough visitors, admissions won't cover it.

A lot of museums, however, don't charge anything to get in. These museums care more about getting people through the door and helping them learn about the burial grounds found than they do about money. These museums will usually have a donation box at the door. They may have a suggested donation amount, or they may not. You should donate whatever you think you can afford, proportional to your estimation of the worth of the museum.

Even those with money to burn are not obligated to donate to support a museum whose mission they don't care for, so in order to feel like your donation means something, you should find a museum dedicated to something you're interested in. It might be a war museum or a hairdressing museum. Or it might be a small, poorly funded museum that you feel bad for. Whichever tugs your heart strings.

There is no donation amount that it too small to bother with. Some individuals will donate large portions of their income to charity, but if you and twenty others each donate a dollar, that's twenty dollars. It adds up. You can simply put your money in the donation box, write a check to the museum foundation, adopt an artifact, sponsor an exhibit, or you can buy tickets to museum fundraisers. Museums like to make it easy and fun to donate