For the confidence of our Boards, donors and funders, there is huge value in having the baseline of the Private Investment in Culture Survey to refer to. This information coupled with the comprehensive, publicly-available Arts Council England and DCMS data about the fundraising performance of their regularly funded organisations, makes this new survey a helpful part of the benchmarking process.
A comforting picture
There are no real surprises. In fact the familiar picture that’s outlined in the data is rather comforting. We know that generating private investment is crucially important alongside earned income for the arts and cultural sector. We also know that individual giving remains the most important form of private investment, accounting for around half of all giving, albeit with donors having a preference for larger organisations based in London and the South. Similarly, it’s no surprise that the largest organisations dominate the sector, with the 50 largest survey respondents accounting for 60% of total private funding.
We know in this context that we need to increase the support for smaller organisations and those based outside London to maximise fundraising.
There are also clear artform specific trends: music, theatre and visual arts attract the largest private sector investments, whilst museums appear to attract disproportionately less private investment. Yet overall, visual arts organisations and museums have grown their private income much faster than the rest of the sector, with literature organisations and theatres seeing low or stable private investment.
Unexpected positivity
But perhaps the biggest shock is that the survey predicts further growth in private investment, with over 57% of survey respondents expecting their total income (earned and fundraising) to grow over the next three years.
Overall, a rather battle-weary sector facing fundraising challenges on many fronts has risen magnificently to the fundraising challenge. Any overhang of entitlement culture in relation to Government funding is long-gone. But given that this Survey was finalised pre-Brexit, I wonder if such a positive outlook would be the case if respondents were filling it out right now?
Post-Brexit blues
At face value, the Private Investment in Culture Survey might lead us to conclude that we need to invest heavily in individual giving and major gifts, to maintain our trust portfolio at current values, and to investigate corporate sponsorship, whilst recognising that this area might be the most challenging.
This is all true.
However, we also need to beware of the status quo, because in this post-Brexit era, the survival of the fittest organisations is surely going to equate to those organisations with the confidence to adapt their business models to a new economy, and to prepare their fundraising teams accordingly. Indeed, instability in the wider economy may lead to decreased consumer confidence, impacting on individual giving, reductions in the investment portfolios
of grant makers and falls in fundraising and earned revenues as businesses hold back from investing.
Of course, we may also see reduced public income from EU, national and local government sources.
I’m certainly no doom-monger, but we need to be realistic.
New skills, fitter for purpose
So I am wary of the message to diversify private sector fundraising too broadly. So often we see organisations stretched too thinly across all areas of private sector fundraising, from trusts to crowd-funding.
This approach makes it almost impossible to create a sustainable base for fundraising. Those organisations that seem to be thriving pick 2–3 key areas of income for focus and build a team with depth for delivery. The survey tells us that 63% of respondents are concerned about lack of in–house staff capacity and time to meet their fundraising aspirations. But it’s more stark than that – in this post-Brexit context, the skill-set needed to build successful fundraising capability and teams is changing considerably.
So whilst the skills needed to produce high quality written submissions to trusts and foundations won’t change much – for those wanting to increase their major giving, highly creative, programmes of transformational change need to be built with donors. For large and small organisations alike, this is a very different skill-set from the traditional stewardship of major donors. We need staff that can build programmes that capture the zeitgeist, those that can build greater community cohesion and embrace collaborative working.
Similarly, whilst corporate income looks to be in decline, it is still an important part of the picture. We now need those well-versed in making commercial deals happen, a creative producer type mindset that can conjure up value with limited resources. This is very different from the stewardship skill-set aligned to the more traditional brand and hospitality relationships.
Most importantly, at senior levels and amongst Trustees, we need the ability to scan the environment, to challenge and to support a team to be ruthless in changing course if an area of fundraising isn’t working. The biggest threat to arts and cultural organisations will be post-Brexit paralysis, where we do more of the same whilst ‘waiting to see’ what might happen.
So let’s not forget post-Brexit the need to focus, to change course when needed, and to build skills and teams that maybe look different, that have the depth of understanding to deliver in this much changed economy. Future income will rely on it.
