Thoughts on where arts marketing and fundraising meet

How does fundraising fit into marketing in arts organisations? We all have to make that judgement, so not surprisingly it was a popular topic at last month’s Arts Marketing Association (AMA) annual conference in Glasgow.

Once my after dinner speech slot as the representative of event sponsor Blackbaud was over, I was able to reflect on how the conference had grown in the 13 years since I first attended. This was a measure both of how the AMA team had developed the conference and of how the confidence of the sector had expanded. Glasgow was yet another tour de force with lots of excellent key note speakers as well as interesting breakout sessions.

Nicole Newman, Development Director at English National Opera (ENO), and I were hosting one of the roundtables and around 50 delegates joined us to discuss the blurring of roles between marketing and fundraising. The majority of the people we met were from organisations where fundraising and marketing are two separate teams and functions, although one or two had combined operations.

The main thrust of the discussion was that marketing and fundraising are two halves of the same whole – and when working well together the output is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. In the same way that in a commercial business the mantra is that everyone is involved in sales, within the not-for-profit arts sector everyone in the organisation should see themselves as a fundraiser. This means not only the board and the chief executive, but everyone from the person on the box office phone to the person on the door.

In order to be successful at fundraising, from the outset there needs to be a combined marketing and fundraising communications strategy. There needs to be a clear message about charitable status and the costs of putting on the performance/exhibition as compared to the ticket price. For instance, ENO explain to their ticket buyers that the cost of their seat is subsidised by up to 75% of a full price ticket to put the performance on. When people have this explained to them it makes them much more ready to help.

Good messaging will mean that by the time that that the fundraising team are involved with audience or visitors they will be more prepared to make a donation. Within the communications schedule it is important to agree in advance when a fundraising ask (via a membership/friends scheme) can be in put into the schedule. This should not be too often, maybe one in every three or four marketing messages.

It makes a big difference to make sure that customers are given the ability to make donations with every ticket purchase, whether online or at the box office, and to top these up. It is also very important to say thank you for these donations, and for larger gifts to be passed straight on to the fundraising team. At ENO any gift over defined limits gets a different kind of thank you letter, and these come from different people in the company depending on the size of gift.

We all agreed that stories are very important in explaining the charitable impact of the organisation – a person’s life transformed by visiting, a successful educational outreach project, a dancer being able to use decent shoes thanks to a donation.

Many organisations we talked with were already mining their database, but some were concerned that this was an invasion of privacy. The overall conclusion from the delegates was that in addition to segmentation it is important to do this and identify possible major donors to cultivate, but that as always it needs to be handled correctly and tactfully.

The most important aspect is that having identified the potential donors, they need to be invited to develop a relationship with the organisation before any ask, and that this can often be over a period of years. Successful relationships with fundraisers can often mean that these donor become genuine friends, and that their links to the organisation are so strong that they include the fundraisers in their private and social circles.

Based on these conversations, the relationship between arts marketing and fundraising is truly blurred and long may it be so.