Goodbye Arts & Business, hello…what exactly?

I have only met Colin Tweedy once. This took place at a board meeting of the Oxford Stage Company (he was a member, I was consulting) and his first remark to me was that he was “surprised I wasn’t horned”. I misheard him at first which led to a moment of confusion and slight embarrassment but then I realised he meant that I lacked devil’s horns. He was referring to my well-known view that Arts & Business was hindering the development of fundraising in the arts by over-emphasising business links instead of individual philanthropy and that its annual subsidy of several millions of pounds from the Arts Council should be stopped; for Colin, that meant I supped with the Lord of Evil. For the record I should say that he was otherwise quite charming (Colin, that is, not the Lord of Evil).

I was reminded of this brief encounter by the recent news that Colin has now resigned from A&B to facilitate its merger with Prince Charles’s charity Business in the Community, following ACE’s decision to cut all funding to A&B. Naturally I was pleased with this development (I claim no credit) but I can’t help feeling that it is a sad departure for Colin himself and I hope that his work over the years will be recognised in some way now he has stepped aside; a knighthood perhaps?
I was a vocal critic of the work which A&B did and thought it a huge waste of public money but its demise does raise an obvious question; who is now supporting arts fundraisers? When ACE cut A&B’s budget it announced it would find alternative ways to promote arts fundraising using some of the money saved, but what has actually happened? Earlier this year I was invited, along with others with long-experience of fundraising for arts organisations, to a series of consultation meetings at ACE’s offices. This process led to the creation of the Catalyst scheme whose effectiveness will be judged when the first awards are made early in 2012 and then implemented by the recipients. But we also discussed two other important topics which have yet to be addressed: a) who is providing training in arts fundraising and b) where is the professional network for arts fundraisers?
ACE has been trying to put together ad hoc seminars for organisations applying to the Catalyst Fund but ACE does not claim that this amounts to a training programme and indeed they have now cancelled some of the few seminars they had planned. Perhaps they are working on a programme behind the scenes but I and others in the field are not aware of it. The Institute of Fundraising has many excellent professional training courses but none speaks directly to the context of arts organisations. There is a big gap here.
Equally problematic is the lack of a professional network for people engaged in fundraising in the arts. The Institute of Fundraising is completely open to arts members (and I recommend it strongly) but since few arts fundraisers are yet members it cannot function as a peer-network for them – the classic paradox of networks. For me the answer is that the Arts Marketing Association should step in and embrace the fundraisers too. After all, fundraising is essentially a marketing discipline and in most arts organisations the marketers and the fundraisers sit in adjacent offices, sometimes as part of the same department. Why not an Arts Marketing and Fundraising Association? I would even volunteer to make it happen.
Overall the arts in England (I apologise for not writing specifically about the other parts of the UK) are set to lose 25% of state funding plus whatever they will lose from local government money. Anyone involved in fundraising to help fill this gap needs professional support more than ever.