Funding Your Festival

Abstract

Every organisation needs money to get going, and this includes non-profit ventures. The reasons why they need it may vary, as may the sources. To get a venture off the ground it generally needs ‘start-up funding’, whether it be borrowing £50 off your auntie to pay for the costs of printing some flyers, or maybe setting up a limited company, or borrowing £250,000 from a bank or financial institution to open several shops and an office. Whichever it is, you will have costs. So, unless you have a large sum of cash lying idle, you will need to find a way of raising money to get things started. Another reason for needing cash is if you know your venture, be it a new festival or a community arts venture, will not generate enough box office or other earned income to cover its costs, meaning you will be making a loss from the outset. In this case, if your project meets a well-articulated social need you will be able to make a case for start-up funding and money to cover its running costs. How you make the funding approach very much depends on your festival’s ethos and its legal structure. We covered the first of these in Chapter 2 and the legal issues are covered in more detail in Chapter 6. This chapter will give you the framework that ties together your festival objectives, its legal structure and the potential funding sources as well as some of the techniques you will need for raising that all-important cash. This chapter focuses mainly on fund-raising for not-for-profit or social enterprise festivals. The principles of persuading donors or bodies like an Arts Council are not that different from those of persuading commercial investors, other than that the return you would promise commercial investors would be financial rather than social or artistic objectives. The chapter starts by looking at those differences.