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Fundraising for the Arts:Changing the Performance
Julia Rowntreewww.jrowntree.co.uk
BudapestApril 2008
Programme for the day
• Lift, London International Festival of Theatre
• Three types of relationship:
1 Commercial
2 Civic
• Practical exercise:
Will we sponsor you?
• Another type of relationship
3 Co-Learning
How do you feel about fundraising?
• Arts’ relations with business are determined by wider cultural, political and economic context;
• A different focus and style in each country;
• Boundaries between arts and business blurring;
• But a need to leave space for neutral ground between commerce and culture;
• Engagement with business a route to learning about the role of the arts in facilitating this neutral ground.
• Adapt adapt adapt.
1981-2001 LIFT biennial summer festivals 4500 artists, 62 countries
LIFT Education 1993
Transition: 2001-2006 LIFT Enquiry into the role of theatre for our times worldwide
2007-2008Change of leadership and
The Lift - a civic performance space
one example from The Place Theatre
Lift’s relations with business evolve
Commercial sponsorship begins 1986Civic role asserted 1991
Lift Business Arts Forum begins 1995Lecture series 2004
The Lift - a civic performance space 2008
1993
Meaning of “international” changing
London thought to be probably the most culturally diverse city in the world
Intercultural engagement at home
Lift Learning begins
THE LIFT ENQUIRY 2001 - 2005
What is theatre?Who can be involved?Where can it take place?
Preparation for transition in response to globalisation, new technologies,
climate change.
Year-round programme
The Lift : 2008
A portable public meeting and performance space,
programmed internationally,
in response to conversations we need to have locally, nationally and globally.
Lift sponsorship
Why engage with business?
1986
Expense of international visits
Public subsidy at standstill
Only way to diversify income
Accessible ticket prices
What are the motivations of sponsors?
Programmes from London
What sponsorships can you find?
What benefits do you think the sponsors see in the sponsorship?
Rise of free market politics - relations with business based on commercial values
Reaching new markets - logo on publicity
Senior level networking - receptions
Image - press and broadcast media coverage
Entertainment - Tickets to performances
Client/employee entertainment
Corporate Social Responsibility
Product sampling by influential people
How much?
Costs of sponsorship:
£5,000 - £50,000
No real market, more like dating!
First step was to engage allies and Lift champions to walk with us, be our advocates, help us make connections, develop a language.
Board members and development council.
(Lift’s legal status - a charity limited by guarantee)
Commercial sponsorship in 2001 approx 13% of overall budget at £2.3million.
Opening up access to and understanding of other worlds.
Board: Legal status, practical expertise, figurehead chair with passion for arts and sense of public life.
Development council: no legal status, meets occasionally as council, way to call on one-to-one advice.
Process of engaging with businesses
Research:
• Who are they? Precise information about individuals and companies.
• Building your allies and champions
• Building internal solidarity and entrepreneurial outlook.
Contact
• Getting past the switchboard
• Engaging individuals
Making and keeping friends
• Research, research, research
• Walk in other worlds
• Enlist champions
• Get invited to the meetings of others
An almost impossible job!
• Competing with other demands for funding.
• Fitting with corporate plans - too short, too long
• Uncertainties of Lift programme
Schemes at one remove from the programme but within the spirit and values of Lift.
International Dinner Series 1988
Légrádi Testvérek
Katona József visit 1999
Remove the risk - sponsor the choice of the audience!
The Place Portfolio - London’s centre for contemporary dance.
Four choreographers. A party to show their work.
Project champion, Tony Elliot, Time Out director.
Guests asked to donate £50 in future work of choreographers. 100 donations at £50 = £5000.
Framlington, Financial company, matches that investment with £5000.
Public Arts fund matches that with £5,000.
New work performed in autumn. Guests invited to return.
Be a Brick, buy a BlockReal concrete blocks with different designs stencilled in red, dark blue and royal blue
£10 for peasants£100 for bourgeoisie£1000 for Aristocrats
Project champions:Melvyn Bragg, television - peasantStuart Lipton - bourgeoisieRichard Rogers - bourgeoisieLord Palumbo - Aristocrat
Stuart Lipton’s address book
Architects, builders, individuals etc
£8000
Arts business relations exist in a wider context
Civic questions come to the fore
CRISIS!Early 90s
Civic fragmentationLondon’s local government
abolished by Margaret ThatcherIn 1986
Lift’s motivations for lateral thinking
Low morale
Need for a new conversation
Need to build different forms of support
Need for celebration rather than complaint
Taking a ‘helicopter view’, we had:
An ability to bring people together across levels of power, working role and experience in a spirit of curiosity and celebration.
Our idea was to raise morale in the capital.
To celebrate London and engage others in an understanding of exceptional projects
happening in different walks of life.
LIFTING LONDON CONFERENCE 1991
Setting the stage for stories of
success:Housing
EducationCulture
Business
Project champions, allies, participants and advocates from:
• civic organisations• business (Financial Times), • public sector, • education• the arts• NGOs
What we learned
• Interdependency between sectors but need for neutral space: i.e. a space for public collaboration beyond the market and the state to imagine responses to issues of common concern.
• A cultural commons made through a shared project.
• Role of the arts - imagination, celebration, reflection, critique.
• Starts with a personal and organisational change of performance and taking a lead without formal authority.
Group working• Which of your projects might be successful in securing a sponsor or backing from other organisations?
• Put together a five-minute presentation.
• Name the company/organisation to whom you are presenting.
• The rest of the group will take on the role of this company or organisation.
• We will decide whether to sponsor or partner with you.
What have you learned?
Another crisis…….
How we understood that business has a lot to learn from the arts
Even that we might have something to learn together
1994 CRISIS!Baring’s Bank crashes
BT sponsorship of Lift’s Education Programme fails
Ascendancy of market values
A new form of relationship with business?
Lift’s motivations for changing the game
All-pervading commercial values undermining
our sense of theatre’s sacred role
Desire to critique commercial values
Feelings of powerlessness
Boredom with being a supplicant
Need for celebration rather than complaint
Set out to discover what business might have to LEARN from the arts
Aim to change a commercial relationship to one of co-learning
First steps in what became
The Lift Business Arts Forum
Important role of project champions:
Brian Eno
Global Business Network
Heinzen, Fairtlough and de Geus
Charles Handy
Financial Times
Introductory evening at Financial Times
Business people, public sector, students and artists in small groups with facilitator
Small groups attend together at least 4 events in Festival programme
Organising question:
What did you see? What would you do differently in your work as a result?
Lift Business Arts Forum 1995
Motivations for business participation in Lift Forum
- Sensing strategic change via contemporary performance- Insight into creative and innovation management- Personal and leadership development- Openness, challenging assumptions, cultural sensitivity, the big questions- Lack of job status- Connection to people you would otherwise never meet
Learning outcomes from Lift Education:Creative responsibility
Personal potential
Potential of the group
Aesthetic sense and judgment
Relationships
Effects
Properties of materials
Emotions - hope, joy, empathy, failure, success
Risks, roles and responsibilities
Purpose and meaning
Attitudinal changes sought in large organisations•vision and an ability to take responsibility
•an ability to draw on a full range of skills and potential
•an ability to overcome fear and prejudice
•an awareness of different cultures and value systems
•managing diversity, fostering skills and potential in others
•an ability to grasp and articulate complex relationships
•an ability to regard chaos and ambiguity as positive and creative
•openness and trust
•learning individuals in learning organisations
•a continuous search for excellence
Evolved to become a year-round learning programme with:
40 participants of different culture, generation, power and expertise:
Business people
Artists
People from public sector
Young people from a London college or youth arts group
Lift Business Arts Forum what happens?
1 Organising question or theme negotiated
between all parties
2 Attend events
3 What did we see? What did we learn?
Play, try, test, reflect
4 Stories of our own learning, action and
change
What did people learn?
• ‘It made everyone step out of their comfort zone and led me to think differently about the process of change.’
• ‘We really explored the idea of a multicultural company, acknowledging that everyone sees things differently.’
• ‘We must hear a minority view, even if we don’t like it.’
• ‘All the financial regulations in the world are worth nothing if you don’t understand the cultural context in which they are set. Lift helps sensitise you to just how complicated culture is.’’
• An artist has a view of how to reflect and shape the world; it matters not at all where the material comes from.’
• ‘The idea that you can achieve something from nothing and it comes from chaos.’
How did the money work? A snapshot from 1999
40 participants in Forum from business, public sector, arts, students
Development funds up front £31,000generated from different size companies from 5,000-10,000
Participants’ Fees from private and public sectorgrant from arts funders.
Total : 54,000
Costs approx 24,000
Surplus to Lift 30,000
No logos requested, no outcomes demanded
• Relationships of trust vital, civilities and actual people who facilitate very important for bringing strangers together.
• No grandstanding. No experts.
• Diversity of gender, age, culture and working perspective.
• Qualities of physical space and welcome important: natural daylight and good food.
• The more controversial the production the better the conversation.
So what?
The ‘helicopter’ view…..Intimacy with business forged in earlier era now has capacity to offer routes to reflection and critique …..
"Most of our institutions focus on the politics of delivery which provide us with the
services we want. Lift is experimenting with the politics of invention and the skills of agreement
needed to survive an unpredictable future."
- Barbara Heinzen, geographer, Forum Adviser
How will we move beyond oil?
Rehearsing global learning connections at local level
None of us has the complete picture
Technology is not enough
Process over generations
Aesthetic exploration
Relationship to cosmos and specifics of place
The Lift Forum: engagement and experiment
A new neighbourliness in a global performing space
• Intimacy
• Diversity - age, culture, working experience, men and women
• Working together project by project over time
Business Arts Forum methodology, relationships, timetable etc have informed Lift’s current artistic
trajectory.
Relationships from Lifting London still benefiting Lift 17 years later
Business Art Forum participants still engaging with arts and civic activities.
Some thoughts…..
If it isn’t working, try a new direction. Experiment. Try turning a crisis or dead-end on its head.
Starting by not knowing is an asset. Ask people’s advice. Walk in other worlds to make friends. Start with project champions.
What’s the invitation? Think collaboration, not competition.
Start with the art. Look for a different form of invitation.
Timing?
Think cultural commons… what are the big questions that are common to arts, business and civic interests?
How do you take a lead without formal authority?
Who are your allies?
Changing the Performance: A Companion Guide to Arts, Business and Civic Engagement, Julia Rowntree, Routledge 2006.
The Turning World: Stories from the London International Festival of Theatre, Rose de Wend Fenton and Lucy Neal, Gulbenkian 2005.
Feeling for Stones: Learning and Invention When Facing the Unknown, Barbara Heinzen, 2003, www.barbaraheinzen.com
The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business, Arie de Geus, 1997, Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Two books about LIFT
Recommended