Why does it matter where we get our money from? I’m not talking about the morality of accepting money from a company whose ethical practices are non-existent, or a foundation whose ethos might be at odds with your organisation or charity. Not this time. Instead, I’m interested in the belief that it’s ok for an organisation to live on “hand-outs”, but not to create income generation through talent.
There are two specific examples that pushed my thinking on this. They are charity based, but I think the arts sector has some crossover. The first was hearing about woman who works at a hospice, which costs £16,000 a day to keep open. She’s trying to find new ways of generating money. One of the ideas was delivering training sessions at a cost to local companies. The idea was met with horror by most of the staff. ‘But we’re not a commercial company’ they wailed. This is true, however, not having the aim of turning a ‘profit’ doesn’t diminish the huge sums that need to be generated.
The second was seeing a tweet by a dedicated young man on twitter that said “this yr ive done a firewalk, mcr 10k, yrkshre 3 peaks, a skydive & national 3 peaks for [ X charity] pls sponsor Me…” It made me wonder who his work colleagues and family were that they could keep giving large enough sums to support his charity of choice to make these activities feasible for him.
I can’t understand why it’s deemed acceptable to ask people to sponsor a cycle ride / bungee jump / skydive and ask people to repeatedly put their hands in their pockets, and yet it isn’t acceptable to look at the organisation’s skillset to see whether there is something marketable or of value that could be used to create income generation. While we in the arts don’t tend to rely on sponsored activities in the way that other parts of the charitable sector do, we do rely heavily on trusts and foundations to support us and our projects.
I’ve been in plenty of discussions where the idea of working out what saleable skills were present in the organisation, was met with worry about ‘diluting our core aims’ or ‘taking time away from what we should be doing’. It is obviously sensible and right to examine the feasibility of a proposed idea and the organisation’s capacity for delivering it, but if part of your core aim is staying open for ‘business’ perhaps it’s time to reflect that shying away from these options is to neglect our responsibilities as organisations.
It strikes me that a lot of organisations are keeping their nose just above water by thinking that as long as they can just keep going until the funding situation improves they will be fine. I think they’ll have to be treading water for a very long time, which can sap creativity and enthusiasm and leave the organisation weaker in more ways than financially. This isn’t a one year blip on the funding horizon, we have no idea how long this will last. The organisations that will survive, and thrive, are those who approach things differently. They will look at their diminished budgets and think up new ways to replenish them, they will look at their outgoings and find new ways to reduce them, they will look at the danger inherent in simply berating the changing landscape – danger to morale of the organisation and danger to the survival of the organisation, and they will look at the benefits of change. Benefits which, depending on what you do, could include improved employee self-esteem, or improved skills in public speaking, increased profile for your organisation, better relationships with your community and local businesses, and improved employee loyalty to the organisation when an idea is taken seriously and implemented rather than met with ‘we don’t do it like that here’.
You already know the value of what you do, but do you know the value of your potential? You must find new ways to communicate that value to other people, whether they are individuals, organisations, companies or foundations.
As the pool of money available at trusts and foundations shrink, and the number of organisations applying to them increases, as the amount of expendable cash people have to give or buy tickets to see a show or an exhibition reduces and our need to create income through tickets becomes greater, something different will have to happen so that we don’t lose our hearts and minds in the battle for survival. Holding our nose above water and hoping to be rescued is not enough.