As someone who has bandied the ‘social enterprise’ term about for a while, someone who likes to ‘work on projects’ and give back, but also has a commercial and/or corporate mind, my introduction to the third sector has been a bit of a culture shock.
The mentality of those leading arts organizations has at times been incredible — and not always in a good way.
Art organizations should adopt a startup mentality to survive.
It’s not often you hear the words startup and art in the same breath. It’s funny because the low cost, stretched budget and creative use of favors is something common to both worlds. Also, the severe cuts to (public) arts funding and talk of a focus on corporate and private individuals for donations suggests there are more links than one might expect.
But how many arts organizations take the real startup approach? The examples of crossover in other parts of charity and public sector life are plenty, for example the Government Digital Service’s blog, which chronicles attempts to bring a startup mentality to the [UK] government’s web offering.
A recent wave of crowdfunding sites for charities and non-profit (AngelShares, WeFund, Sponsume and PeopleFund to name but a few) has encouraged arts organisations to utilise astute marketing techniques that the average startup also needs to leverage.
In startup land, KickStarter has recently hit significant milestones — notably $1.6m raised in 24 hours – with the exceptional Double Fine Adventure project demonstrating what is possible when crowdfunding is done well.
[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]
From: Guardian Professional / Culture professionals network — Why Arts Organizations Should Act More Like Startups
Anne-Marie Imafidon discusses the ways you could be using the web in a modified funding landscape.
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