Fundraising: Finding connection, creating empathy

Lucie Davies writes

When I first started at Heart of Glass six years ago, I remember being told that every project could be traced back to a ‘conversation over a brew’. I thought our CEO Patrick might have been pulling my leg. But it rang true. 

There was an unhurriedness I hadn’t witnessed in arts organisations I’d previously worked with. That’s not to say big ambitious programmes didn’t happen – in my first year we gained NPO status, led on St Helens Borough of Culture programme and delivered a three-year Ambition for Excellence project. 

Rather, at the centre of everything, there was a slow, careful process of developing a relationship between an artist, a community and a producer, usually over cups of tea. 

A process that puts individuals’ needs and comfort above all to create spaces where people can bring their different lived experience, knowledge and perspectives to understand the world differently, together. 

Ideas emerge collectively

As a communications professional with a social media calendar to fill, audience targets to hit, press interviews to plan and websites to launch, this approach took some getting used to. 

It has often meant living with uncertainty about how a project might evolve, how a resulting artwork might look and be placed. Adjusting and readjusting plans, flexing, evolving and always having several back up ideas. 

Projects pivot for lots of reasons. An artist might be unwell; a community hub might lose its funding. Sometimes we step away from a partnership if values don’t align. More often than not project ideas emerge collectively. 

Capturing this process-based work for storytelling and advocacy has been essential to our communications strategy. Alongside the carefully selected artists we collaborate with, we’ve sought out partners in whom we have absolute faith to help us storytell and evaluate projects as they evolve. The process is as important as the final artworks.

How can we prescribe impact?

This process of co-creation makes predicting outcomes difficult. If a community and artist are to go on an open journey of discovery together, how can we prescribe impact in advance? 

And all this is against a backdrop, as evaluator Dawn Cameron says in this article, where organisations “are increasingly expected to deliver an array of public policy imperatives” which can “lead to increased pressure to develop projects that deliver to funders’ priorities rather than to organisations’ strengths and individuals’ needs and interests”.

After years of working in some of the country’s most deprived communities, we can – with some certainty – predict that projects will lead to new and sometimes unexpected friendships, community pride, decreased isolation, new knowledge and improved mental health. 

But what about the unexpected stories and longer-term ripple effects? How can art support us to experiment, to learn and – most importantly – to imagine new futures?  Like those participants impacted by suicide who are using art to unveil grief and shift conversations around a subject still very much taboo. 

In her article for Pendle-based NPO In Situ, Cathy Hopley asks: “What is more valuable: a brief visit to a gallery by a few hundred people or a three-day experience for ten people?” I don’t know the answer, but it’s my firm belief that projects will be the most ambitious and meaningful they can be if we create the right space – and time – for them to happen. 

Continues…

The Clookroom by Jenny Gaskill, produced by Heart of Glass for Take Over 2022. Photo: Radka Dolinska

Alex Mayer writes:

When I started out as a rookie arts fundraiser 20 years ago, I was tasked to work on a substantial, multi-year participatory project – one that would see arts practitioners embedded in local communities facing multiple hardships and creating safe spaces to share and reflect on their experiences through creative work. 

A pilot had demonstrated profound and evolving outcomes for individuals and provided compelling case studies which I thought would provide a sound basis for fundraising. But the reality was wholly different and rather unsettling for an early career fundraiser.

Despite harnessing every insight and emotive story from the pilot in my carefully crafted funding bids, the programme wasn’t connecting with potential supporters. The feedback was clear: stories were no match for data. 

Demographics, deprivation statistics, beneficiary numbers (the more, the better…) and a clear framework of outputs/outcomes/indicators would robustly evidence impact. Conversely, the unique voices of participants, a vivid picture of each community – its distinct colour and energy, its challenges and perspectives – would not. 

Depth as important as breadth

This was the first of several instances in my career where I have had to negotiate the challenges – and opportunities – of fundraising for process-driven art. The context has, of course, changed over time. 

As Heart of Glass has found, funders like Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation increasingly understand the breathing space that projects need to take root and yield meaningful, sustained impact. Bold, brilliant programmes like The Suicide Chronicles demonstrate that depth of impact is as valid as breadth. 

But the basic tension endures. How do we as fundraisers articulate outcomes and forecast impact if they evolve and unfurl organically? More destabilising, what if the crystallisation of clear outcomes is simply less important and/or meaningful than the personal experiences of participants? 
 
There are no easy answers but there are tactics, approaches and perhaps a particular mindset that help to ease and inspire fundraising for this type of work. To some extent, it is about going back to fundraising basics, finding connection and creating empathy. 

There are many ways we can shine a light on process-driven art and share authentic, honest accounts of the work to help potential supporters understand and relate to it. For example, compelling personal testimonies documented in a blog or social media post, ‘behind the scenes’ content capturing participants’ feelings and experiences in the moment, invitations to pop-up exhibitions in hyperlocal community spaces. 

Our superpower 

Simply, fundraisers are better equipped to tell the story of a community, a project, a life-changing creative experience, and make the case for process over product. It is also important to remember the value of experiencing the work to strengthen how impact is evidenced and expressed. 

We all know the rather tired fundraising adage that ‘you can’t raise money from behind the desk’. This doesn’t just mean taking a proactive approach to meeting donors and nurturing relationships, it can also mean deeper, first-hand engagement with the project: observing the process of co-creation and collaboration, interacting with artists and community, attending events. This not only develops robust knowledge and understanding of impact but lends an honesty, clarity and integrity to donor interactions and project proposals.

I urge my fellow fundraisers – somewhat counterintuitively – to lean into the protean nature of process-driven art. A few months ago, I spoke to a major grant maker who praised arts fundraisers for their ability to encapsulate projects and their impact evocatively. To go beyond data and nurture real connection and understanding. This is our superpower! 

Prescribed outcomes and planning triangles are neat, but they don’t convey the vast spectrum of personal lived experience, insight and impact – both anticipated and unanticipated. Process-driven art does. 

We have such rich reflections and journeys of discovery to share with funders; extraordinary accounts of how making art changes lives in powerful and unpredictable ways. And rather than being unsettled by this open-endedness, I feel excited by it. It remains challenging, of course, but I think funders are more receptive to, and convinced by, this model of arts practice than ever before. 

Lucie Davies is Head of Communications at Heart of Glass.
Alex Mayer is an independent fundraising consultant.
 heartofglass.org.uk/   
 @TheHeartofGlass  
 heart-of-glass-st-helens-ltd/ | alex-mayer-99137927/

This article, sponsored and contributed by Heart of Glass, is part of a series exploring how, by building deeper relationships with communities, the arts can create fairer futures and act as a positive force for change.