Thinking ahead

This year has taught Welsh National Opera three lessons. Firstly, the loyalty of our audiences and donors made the difference between a financially tough year and a financially impossible one. Audiences dropped 4% year-on-year, but a bigger fall was anticipated. The shortfalls came on productions where we probably staged too many performances. Our philanthropic partnership scheme currently has more members than ever before, contributing more funds than ever before. Donations from our Friends reached record levels. These were critical results in a year when corporate support for the arts outside London collapsed, and trusts and foundations elected to favour organisations facing more brutal short-term challenges than our own. Did being a touring company make a difference to this? I think so. Having clusters of support in many places means we have more marketplaces to grow. Being rooted in one recession-hit hotspot could have been extremely tricky. We’re lucky that we can retain loyalty but keep on moving.

The second thing we learned was that the Arts Councils of England (ACE) and Wales (ACW) have appreciated the impact of recent events on their clients. They have delivered financial support: Sustain funding from ACE, coupled with equivalent funding from ACW, has positioned Welsh National Opera to exit the recession with free reserves intact. Without this support, those reserves would have been depleted to dangerous levels. They have delivered on-the-ground intelligence – ACE’s quarterly tracking survey of key RFOs has been enormously reassuring. The best way to ride out this recession has been to sit back, take stock and avoid the hasty decisions. Not being pressured into kneejerk reactions has been important, and we’re grateful for funders who are shrewd enough to play the long game.
The third thing we’ve learned is that large touring arts organisations need to start questioning their operating models. WNO has come through the past 12 months with the books still balanced, and artistic programming unaffected. But the recession may turn out to be the least of our worries. We expect that the 2010 public spending round will be savage. We know that the digital age will cause the next generation of arts audiences to be incomparably different to their predecessors. We’re aware that high fixed costs and stringent touring patterns compromise our ability to deliver the shock of the new as often we might like. We are ready to face up to these challenges. The real threat lies ahead for the organisations who genuinely believe that the worst is over, and life should carry on as before. That way madness lies.