Aspects of Attraction of Investments into Museum's Endowment Funds in Russia during the COVID-19 Crisis

The practice of endowment funds is closely related to the culture of philanthropy. In Russia it is contradictory and underdeveloped, so changes in the system may strongly affect the practice of donation. The crisis is a situation in which there is no unambiguous understanding of how donors behave. In this case, an endowment fund may act as a relatively stable practice compared to other forms of institutional budget replenishment. Thus, the present study focuses on exploration of how a museum's charitable relations with its target audience should be arranged in order to keep endowment funds functioning, not only by retaining existing donors, but also by attracting new ones in times of crisis. The central aim of the study is to determine the place of the endowment fund in the system of charitable practices depending on the socio-economic environment. The main research method is an in-depth interview with all participants of charitable relations within the endowment fund which are internal and external. This method will allow us to discover how fund representatives and donors perceive this practice, to define a number of general motives them to enter into these relations and determine how communication between them occurs in the sphere of charity. This is followed by an analysis of the resilience of the described system to adverse conditions from the outside of how it is transformed in the context of a crisis. The result of the study is an attempt to describe a crisis-resistant model of communication with all participants of philanthropic relations within the museum. It has major practical significance for museum marketing in Russia, particularly for the management of museum endowment funds.