In an environment highly filled with offers for spending free time and in order to reach its target audience, in order to send its message and to diversify its financing sources, each museum has a longer or shorter list of partners (friends, supporters, sponsors, donors).Regardless of their name: authorities, sponsors, donors, friends, visitors, staff, all of these entities are an integral part of the rich and diverse category of a museum's stakeholders. As a community institution, the museum's duty is to keep a strong connection with its stakeholders aiming to achieve its own objectives as well as the stakeholders' expectations and requirements.

The strong emphasis on achieving excellence in the services the museums provide to its target public opens a new road to an area that is not characteristic of traditional museology, namely the journey of innovation. This road to innovation has two pillars: a mature knowledge-based strategy (in response to identified needs of target groups) and the ability to provide education (according to identified needs). Both components are totally dependent on visitors, their needs and their personal or collective experiences. This paper addresses these pillars, considering that education is not a mere accumulation of knowledge, but how the visitor experiences, interacts and learns during his visit. Using the literature review as research methodology, this paper aims to analyze the stakeholders of a museum and to assess their partnerships with other museums, by highlighting the clear advantages of stakeholder involvement in the management system of the museum. The main results shows that museums, as cultural organizations, are a brick at the foundation of economic development in many cities. The involvement and support of the stakeholders is essential for a museum that wants to set and meet appropriate community service goals. Understanding stakeholder`s value is important for effective reporting on the performance of the museum, which transforms and translates through continuous public support for the museum.

Museum professionals worldwide make considerable efforts to maintain the integrity of the cultural institutions they manage, as organizations that collect, research, conserve, and exhibit, as well as in their educational and social purpose, in a concerted effort to make museums more performing, more popular, more attractive and more competitive. In this context, many questions arise about how a performing museum looks like in the current social, political, and cultural contexts, how the performance of a museum can be evaluated, and, especially, how the managerial performance of museums can be increased. At the center of these concerns, the issue of stakeholders, the partnerships with them, the strategies for their optimal approach, as well as the impact of such initiatives on increasing the managerial performance of museums, occupy an essential role. One of the objectives of this research is to emphasize the need to use new strategies, methods, and tools in an attempt to make museum institutions perform better from a managerial point of view. To verify the perception of such initiatives, two practical applications were carried out: quantitative research, which analyzes the perception of internal stakeholders (museum staff) on the involvement of external stakeholders in the process of improving museum services, and qualitative research, which sought to capture the perception of museum managers in Romania regarding partnerships with stakeholders and their role in increasing the managerial performance of the institution. The results show that museums are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of stakeholders with an active interest in museum practices and policies and optimized solutions regarding the institutional and organizational transformation of museum institutions in Romania are taking shape, to rebuild the way museums interact with relevant stakeholders.

Understanding museum visitors’ behavioral patterns may help in predicting their number of visits. The aim of the research is to identify the trend models associated with the number of visitors, in 2012-2019, in 2 national museums in the top of the most visited museums in Romania: the National Museum of Natural History “Grigore Antipa” in Bucharest and the National Museum “Peles” in Sinaia and forecast the number of visitors to these objects in 2020 and 2021. Subsequently the same methods were used to analyze the total number of visitors to museums in Romania in 2012-2019 and to forecast the number of visitors for the years 2020 and 2021. The research method used was that of coefficients of variation, which aimed to determine the forecasts for the number of visitors through three types of models: linear, quadratic and exponential. However, Covid-19 pandemic dramatically changed the forecasts of visitor flows in the museums and the managers of these cultural heritage institutions had to cope with this situation.