Jeremy Mitchell considers some of the fundraising challenges facing arts, culture and heritage causes
Money – that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
There are so many ways to look at this – what do we mean by money? Cashflow? Reserves? Sustainability? What do we need this money for? These are the thoughts that went through my mind when, ahead of the IoF’s recent Fundraising for Arts, Culture and Heritage Causes conference, I was asked to consider some of the challenges facing Petersfield Museum.
We are a small (less than 10,000 visitors per annum) market town museum in East Hampshire, set up 15 years ago. We have a potentially significant costume collection, the Flora Twort Gallery and art collection, and a social history archive of the town. We are based across two small sites and, like many other similar organisations, can only display a fraction of our collections.
The way we were
The museum was extremely fortunate that one of the members of the Petersfield Area Historical Society (PAHS), which founded the museum, left the museum a substantial, unrestricted legacy that has now been designated and invested to provide an income stream for employing a full-time curator and an education and outreach officer.
When interest rates were at 7 to 8 per cent, everything in the garden was rosy. However, as fixed-term deposits made in those heady days have been repaid, our returns have been reducing. Potential funders now look at these reserves and question our need for external support.
Indeed, should you look at our balance sheet, you might question it too. My argument is that, to us, long-term sustainability and the ability to remain free to visitors are overarching priorities. Unless funders or other benefactors recognise this, we will have the same gap between income and expenditure as experienced by many others.
The way we are
Apart from an earlier, successful Heritage Lottery Fund grant application to run an outreach project, we are fairly new to fundraising. Our naïve and optimistic approach to researching and targeting potential funders resulted in an almost nil return on investment in fundraising. Something had to change.
We have revisited and redrawn our forward plan and used this to identify some of our priorities and where the gaps in income generation lie.
We are moving from a reactive to a proactive approach. This has involved looking more closely at our enduring needs and how bringing some of those to the fore can complement our existing activities.
We are taking advantage of as many opportunities as possible – often on reduced-rate bursaries from the Institute of Fundraising, or through our museum development officer – to train one of our trustees in fundraising.
As a small organisation with a limited budget, we do not have the capacity to employ a professional fundraiser until we have the funds – a bit of a Catch 22 situation. Through the above training we aim to become more proficient in our fundraising in the interim and to generate that additional income to take the fundraising activity to the next level, where it will be recognised as being an integral part of our core activities.
The way we will be
If there is wider awareness and appreciation of our activities, and our place both in the fabric of the town and the lives of its inhabitants, it will help us over some of the hurdles along the way.
Do we have enough tangible evidence of the value we add to people’s lives? There is plenty of anecdotal and sector-produced evidence, but our own evidence is essential.
We are now compiling that tangible evidence to give us a base from which we can confidently embark on a range of fundraising activities to bridge the income gap.
It was great to have a conference like Fundraising for Arts, Culture and Heritage Causes that focused specifically on organisations such as ours. Everything was relevant to our situation and it provided me with the tools to advocate our cause in these competitive times, while bridging those income gaps.
Jeremy Mitchell is finance trustee at Petersfield Museum
This article first appeared in The Fundraiser magazine, Issue 29, May 2013
