Arts Impact Fund: Insights from the First Year

This insights paper was written with a commitment to sharing the learning of the pioneering Arts Impact Fund – a pilot, multi-stakeholder initiative that exists to test social investment as a way of supporting organisations in the arts and cultural sector. It was motivated also by our desire to see a transparent social investment sector that fosters knowledge-sharing, trust and understanding.

Key findings:

• The Arts Impact Fund has attracted a diverse range of applications in its first year of operation, in terms of business models and art forms – from organisations largely grant-funded by Arts Council England to charities cross-subsidised by commercial activity, from grassroots community-led charities to household names with a national reach.
• There is a distinct trend towards the development of cross-subsidy models within the sector, in which some commercial activity subsidises organisations’ social and artistic impact – with initiatives such as cinemas, restaurants, and IP licensing businesses featuring as the commercial ventures driving charitable activity, with varying levels of alignment with organisations’ core arts and culture operations.
• Robust theories of change and logic models around specific social outcomes remain unusual in the arts and culture sector compared with other social sector organisations. However, there are some great examples of best practice in this respect, that the sector should be incentivised to share.
• There is an opportunity to develop metrics for articulating artistic impact that can fit into existing frameworks for measuring social and financial returns.

We have provided anonymised information on the nine approved loans in the period in the appendix to the report.