New donation boxes to refresh Natural History Museum’s gallery fund raising campaign

New donation boxes to refresh Natural History Museum’s gallery fund raising campaign

We are very proud to have collaborated with creative consultants, Uniform, to realise their design and build new donation boxes that are going into the Natural History Museum galleries this month.

The brief for the donation boxes was to build an attractive display unit using high quality durable materials that will withstand high footfall and encourage visitors to the Natural History Museum to donate voluntarily. The Natural History Museum attracts over 5 million visitors each year, and cares for and conserves a collection of 80 million specimens spanning billions of years. Through its unique collection and unrivalled expertise, the Natural History Museum is tackling the biggest challenges facing the world today. They are focused on ways to combat the issues where natural resources are diminishing, the ecosystems we rely on are under stress, food sources are declining and new diseases are emerging. At the Museum, the front-of-house team engages visitors and inspires the younger generations through innovative educational programmes.

I visited the museum last year and was quite astonished at how much it has changed since my childhood. I found it a veritable treasure of information and experiences which my own children also recall and recount, particularly when we talk about dinosaurs and the blue whale – which was in the BBC news.

To help with funding the huge volume of cutting-edge scientific work, the museum encourages visitors to contribute into gallery donation boxes because general admission remains free. The nine donation boxes are displayed around the main galleries and Amalgam are also making a table-top version for desks around the museum.

Uniform’s design for the donation boxes suits a simplified cash process – by utilising interchangeable cash boxes in the base of the display. To meet a high safety standard the donation boxes are fireproof, made with toughened laminated glass and stainless steel. Our project manager Dan Fenwick worked with Uniform’s design to ensure the requirements for the donation boxes were met – as ever, the range of experience of our people allowed for cross pollination of ideas and multiple manufacturing techniques to achieve the final product. Amalgam always arranges suitable transportation for completed work, and for the donation boxes, Dan is working directly with the Natural History Museum to install them without disrupting public viewing times.