Shopping or investing?

One of the terms used by a lot of people at last week’s Culture Change  conference was ‘investment’: whether that was Joe Ludlow’s rallying cry about arts and cultural organisations needing to develop more of an ‘investment mindset’ or Andrew Barnett’s distinction between funders who simply ‘shop’ and those who really ‘invest’ in organisations, thereby building their future capacity rather than cherry-picking. The conference was videoed and those – and other – contributions will soon be available to view online and I’d highly recommend them (plus David Lan and Cat Harrison in particular).

In the workshops, I was also struck by how frequently people spoke about their assets – which included their brand (as Julia Twomlow’s contribution about The Leach Pottery demonstrated), as well as buildings, their wider IP (as used by Live Theatre to develop an online writing course) and most importantly their audience base. As part of the workshop I chaired – which was ostensibly about revising our approach to money – discussion very quickly turned to taking a fresh look at our assets, and how what audiences and users value in terms of our services and facilities are not necessarily the same things we might think of. For example, a Manchester music venue running courses and events for young people might appeal to the parents of those kids because of its connections with their own youth.

As part of the Capital Matters research, along with Holly Tebbut and Rohan Gunatillake, I undertook a series of in-depth interviews with 27 leading arts and cultural organisations and one of the main features we noticed that united many of them was a very strong focus on their audiences/ users/ participants. Many were using technology to achieve deeper connections with their audiences (either via social media or customer relationship management software), whereas others relied on the more traditional volunteering programmes and collaborative leadership approaches which sought to develop strong ownership of the organisation among its communities – geographic or special interest. Co-production or co-creation was an increasingly common feature of how they were working.

I was encouraged in my workshop by this emphasis on understanding audiences and seeing them as the key focus for ensuring ACOs are more resilient (as volunteers, advocates, customers, donors, members etc). In these terms, ‘investing’ in understanding and developing relationships makes sense as a business strategy.

Another example of this ‘investment mindset’ is the wedidthis crowdfunding platform, profiled at the conference, which seeks to develop a new kind of relationship between audiences and artists/ arts organisations. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m keenly interested in this model in which deeper engagement with audiences results in wider support for artists and arts organisations – both financially and as advocates.

It struck me that ‘investing’ might be a useful way to think about these new relationships which crowdfunding both enables and relies on. I made my first donation via wedidthis last week (BTW it was this project if you’d like to try) and was struck that the range of ‘benefits’ I was offered in return for my support included recognition but also access to the artistic process (through conversations about the work in progress, attending the private view, visiting the studio with a curator – depending on the level of donation).  Higher level fundraising has long used the lure of backstage or the studio to engage donors, keen for a peek into the mystique of the creative process. Crowd-funding is now seeding some new models for this opening up of opportunities to engage – which will result in increased donations but also increased understanding.

Some at the conference expressed reservation that crowd-funding meant giving up artistic control or would result in ‘popular’ (i.e. bad) lowest-common-dominator art. If we see low-level individual giving simply as a transaction then that’s a risk – is we force our audiences/customers to stay in ‘shopping’ mode. But if we think about that relationship in terms in ‘investing’ – and we invest in our audiences/ donors by opening up the creative process to them in return for their interest and support then I think we could really see some significant returns on our investment.