Funding Good Ideas in the Cultural and Creative Sector

Last November, we asked members of the cultural and creative sector a simple question: What’s the best idea your organisation never found funding for?

We wanted to understand more about how funding challenges were affecting the ambitions of cultural organisations – particularly those pursuing social or environmental impact – and to get a sense of the creations, innovations and programmes the UK was missing out on as a result.

We received a fantastic response; thank you to everyone who got in touch. These insights are invaluable as we develop new funds, programmes and initiatives to support the sector.

We want to make sure we’re continuing the conversation and inviting wider feedback. So, here are a few common themes that emerged from the survey, and what they might mean for the sector and for our own work.

What ideas are organisations trying to get off the ground?

We heard about a wonderful variety of ideas, many of which looked beyond the traditional remit of arts organisations, reaching across sectors and addressing wider societal challenges from community health and wellbeing to education and professional support, local placemaking and climate action. Ideas included:

• Community hubs combining creative opportunities with other local activities and services.
• Culture, health and wellbeing projects to take music into hospitals, art therapy classes to youth clubs and women’s refuges, and improvised comedy to people with experience of mental ill health.
• Digital technology innovations to help cultural venues engage underrepresented and hard-to-reach groups.
• Education and talent development including plans to bring creative activities and performances to school-age children, and initiatives to help young people explore artistic interests from DJing and music to theatre, clowning and digital animation.
• Support for creative professionals including programmes to develop artists’ social practice and forge links with social prescribers; discussion groups and shared services for Black-led creative businesses; and cultural leadership programmes targeting diverse talent.
• Place-based hubs and networks to help local organisations, businesses, community groups and individuals support each other. Ideas ranged from a city-wide community singing campaign to a university-led ‘arts, culture and knowledge exchange’.
• Environmental sustainability projects, including inventive proposals to share resources (for example by making theatre sets and costumes available for reuse) and plans to use creative storytelling to lead calls for climate action.

What are the barriers to achieving these goals?

Such ambitious ideas could have far-reaching creative, social, environmental and economic benefits, but they can be very difficult to coordinate and fund. The responses we received revealed some significant hurdles:

• Lack of core and unrestricted funding. Respondents described using project-based funding to run successful one-off programmes but then struggling to finance their continuation or expansion. Others found it difficult to develop project ideas to funding application level because they could not afford to pay people for the upfront time and effort involved. As one respondent put it: “the project-based funding model has become part of the problem because people only want to fund great ideas but not the operations and overheads that allow ideas to be realised by overworked and underpaid arts workers, at all levels (directors included!).”
• Limited and restricted funding. Some organisations had to drop outreach and sustainability efforts to focus on core programme delivery due to funding restrictions. Others had to discontinue projects, losing valuable networks, knowledge and expertise.
• Upfront costs. We saw great ideas for brand new community hubs and programmes, but the costs of launching such projects – such as finding a venue, hiring staff and marketing – can be prohibitive and early support can be hard to come by.
• Gaps in the funding network, particularly for organisations pursuing innovative and cross-disciplinary models. One workers’ cooperative specialising in games design for the sector felt they were ‘falling through the cracks’ because their creative practice and non-profit business model were unfamiliar to funders. Another group supporting environmental sustainability in the sector “consistently struggled to attract funding as we don’t interact directly with the public.” Organisations experimenting with new technologies, or mixing digital and analogue activities, also struggled to find suitable funding pots.
• Difficulty aligning creative or impact outcomes with funders’ interests or requirements. One respondent noted “funders’ reluctance … to invest in undefined outcomes” on a programme supporting young people to develop community initiatives. A consultant in the sector commented that “it’s incredibly hard to get funding for arts activities which are high-impact but low reach,” adding: “what has more long-term effect – giving 100 kids six trumpet lessons or 10 kids three years of lessons?”
• Lack of impact measurement support. This sort of work is increasingly important but demands time, resources and expertise. One interesting idea to tackle this was to set up localised research centres “where artists, researchers and social activists can work together to understand how creative processes can contribute to social impact within communities.”

Figurative’s next steps – championing change for the sector

The responses to our question showed just how much enthusiasm there is for new, impactful creative initiatives in the UK, and how much thought and effort is going into developing them. There are urgent conversations to be had about the limits of traditional funding methods, the necessity of impact measurement support, the importance of forging links with other sectors and funding partners, and the huge potential of the arts for economic, social and environmental impact.

We’re extremely grateful for all the insights people shared, and we hope to use the information to support other organisations in turn. Here’s how can help:

Direct support
We’ve been through all the responses submitted and will contact any organisations who we think we might be able to help or advise directly.

Impact investment
We hope some participants will consider our impact investment fund, the Arts & Culture Impact Fund, which offers repayable loans to organisations with strong social or environmental programmes that also generate income through trading and are looking to grow or build their financial resilience. Loan finance can support a range of purposes, for example to launch new products and services that can provide long-term sources of sustainable income, to provide working capital or to get capital projects off the ground. We work closely and flexibly with investees throughout the loan period and channel the money repaid back into other impactful projects. Impact investment is not intended to replace grant funding, but we do think it’s an important additional tool for organisations to get on a stronger, long-term financial footing.

Place-based networks
We also have experience developing place-based cultural and philanthropic networks, connecting arts organisations with local individuals who want to support good causes.

New initiatives
We’re in the process of developing new funds and programmes that we hope might address some of the issues raised. These include:

• Theatre Tax Relief funding: Loans to not-for-profit theatre organisations to cash flow Theatre Tax Relief (TTR) claims, enabling borrowers to focus on delivering their strategic objectives rather than short-term cash management.
• Decarbonisation support: Establishing a vehicle offering long-term loan finance and support for cultural organisations looking to decarbonise their venues and operations.
• Social impact measurement: A programme to help cultural organisations translate their social impact into quantifiable metrics that speak to public service commissioners.AI opportunities and risks: Convening conversations on the impact of AI on the cultural and creative sector.
• Resource-sharing initiatives: A working group exploring how cultural organisations can pool resources and expertise effectively.

If any of these are of interest, please get in touch or sign up to our newsletter for updates.

Sector support signposting
If our initiatives aren’t a good fit for your organisation, we’ve compiled a list of other sources of funding and support in the sector that might be of interest.

Advocacy and research
Finally, we’ll use the findings to help us advocate more effectively for the sector at large. We work closely with policymakers to explore and design new funding models and communicate the impact potential of the arts. We are also leading efforts to attract more money from philanthropists, corporate funders, impact investors and social foundations into the cultural and creative sector. We can do so now armed with more knowledge about the support organisations require to turn their most promising ideas into reality.

Keep an eye out here or sign up to our newsletter to follow our progress and continue the conversation!