1) To what extent have you been involved in the Arts Council’s Resilience programme. If so, what have the outcomes been of this work?

Six of the eight organisations in the national arts companies group are participating in Arts Council’s Resilience programme. This is ACW's strategic programme, which is available for its portfolio organisations to apply to join. The programme aims to help organisations adapt for changing circumstances, including to review business models, build skills and capacity, and so on. These programmes of change are currently underway and necessarily long-term, and therefore it’s challenging to predict what the outcome will be, but for example, for NDCWales, the programme includes building a greater market focus internally. For National Theatre Wales (NTW), the Resilience programme is assisting the organisation in developing a company-wide Income Generation Strategy, linking fundraising, marketing, asset exploitation, business modelling from start-up to established, second life touring and international profiling.  In addition, it is also starting the journey of mapping the company’s social, political and economic impact over its first seven years of operation to help promote and advocate within national and international contexts.

2) To expand upon the joint action plan the National Companies have created (you describe this plan as “focused in part on developing new sources of joint funding and diversifying those who engage with culture”). Is this plan sufficiently resourced?

We have just completed phase one (scoping and facilitation) of the joint action plan, which will see us identify collective areas of interest, including skills, audiences/public, international and more. Work to date and to cover the immediate next steps is resourced through the eight organisations making financial and other contributions on a sliding scale according to their turnover. However, further development and fundraising will be needed in the medium to long term to support any larger ambitions, which are identified as a priority by the group. This will likely be confirmed after our upcoming away day in November. For instance, the skills programme, which focuses on diversifying the workforce, will seek to offer new apprenticeships/internships to people from different backgrounds to the norm, and will require input in terms of training resources; the diversification of audiences and participants will require deep understanding of who is and is not currently engaging, through research and piloting different approaches; and the joint international presentation of the companies’ work will entail supporting their presence in a particular marketplace with promotional and branding support.

3) Theatr na nÓg has suggested to the Committee a capacity review of fundraising ability within small arts organisations. Do you think this would be beneficial? If so, who should carry it out?

We could recommend that you review evidence already sent to the committee by Emma Goad, a freelance fundraiser, who has done some preliminary work in this area as commissioned by ACW. Her work, commissioned by ACW, is a scoping exercise and review into fundraising, mainly focused on smaller organisations, in which capacity is one of a number of common themes emerging, addressing which would enable the sector to be further supported; it is a complex area of need. We understand she is due to present to the committee in one of the coming sessions. We might also reference in this questions the Arts Council England scheme - Catalyst - which has sought to raise the skills and capacity of the sector in development terms, across organisations at a range of scales. 

4) What potential is there for Creative Wales to help arts organisations generate additional non-public funding?

We are aware of discussions around the creation of Creative Wales and are interested to hear more about it as it emerges. We will willingly work collaboratively with CW once formed, in appropriate areas of synergy. We hope that Creative Wales might help raise the profile of arts and cultural work in Wales to all of our benefits.

5) Is there any other activity you have planned to help arts organisations generate additional non-public funding?

 As stated in evidence to the committee, the issue here is that most organisations see development and fundraising as competitive to some degree, though there are some things which can be seen to have wider benefit. For example: an upcoming meeting in Cardiff with Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (EFF) to which current grant holders can nominate attendees not known to EFF; and possible ways to share knowledge, skills, etc with artforms and sectors, re donor programmes.