Festival finance

I relish the challenge of ensuring that our programmes balance our need for income with our artistic and social objectives. Cheltenham runs four major festivals with ticket sales of over 160,000. Our festivals are Jazz in early May, Science in June, Music in July and Literature in October. Our turnover this year will be £3,322,000. Our regular grant from the Arts Council is £223,000, and we receive a cash grant of £109,000 from the local council. In addition, the council helps keep our overheads down by providing in-kind support, mainly as IT provision and a subsidised rate for use of its box office. Our offices are provided by HSBC as a sponsorship arrangement. We need to generate 90% of our income from fundraising, sponsorship, merchandise and ticket sales. We raised £2,604,000 in 2009, and our target for 2010 is £2,722,000.

The first festival, Music, was established by the council in 1945. Although responsibility for it was transferred to a separate charitable company in 1948, the relationship continued, with the festivals sharing its staff and services. Between 2005 and 2007 we underwent a gradual separation from the council, and it withdrew £230,000 of annual funding progressively over a 4-year period. To secure the independent future of the Festivals, a one-off £500,000 grant from the council was paid to us over three years, to build our staff base, move offices and improve our technical infrastructure. This grant has transformed what we have been able to achieve and shows the benefit of providing organisations with large capacity-building grants. Our turnover has grown at an annual rate of 14% from 2005 to 2009, not including the infrastructure grant. At times, I would have liked to have changed the organisation faster. But in a not-for-profit organisation, unlike a business of similar size, there are a lot of stakeholders to take with you.
All successful fundraising requires vision, talented staff, a pool of prospective funders and time. The talented marketing, fundraising and artistic staff must work together in an equal partnership. The time between identifying a prospective funding partner and getting the cheque can be up to three years. The rich potential of the festivals had been underexploited in the past. I was in the right place at the right time, with the right set of business and fundraising skills and a love of changing and sorting things out. The most important thing was to create a dynamic and enterprising senior management team. Our journey has been supported by a number of key board members, freelance programme directors and some excellent advisors. They all share our vision of using our creative business sense to build festivals offering real benefits to society.