Oh fah-de-dah, why would anyone in a small arts organisation need a business plan?
1. To establish what your small arts org is doing
So what is it? Promoting its members? Putting on shows to promote its own members? Helping each other make work? Getting funding to make work? Making space to show work? Sharing skills, equipment, contacts? Could be any or all of those things, and/or more. Or just one or two of them. So define, and then share. Some people will disagree with what you think is perfectly obvious. The unspoken becomes spoken. Soon the air will clear and you’ll have something resembling a mission statement. Maybe even a constitution. Woah!
2. To work out the nuts & bolts
How much everything is going to cost, and how much income there might be coming in to pay for it. Basic spreadsheet stuff, income, expenditure, assets, liabilities, cash and cash flow. Do you know how these things work? Do you know how to set up a budget; run a petty cash account; work out how much there is to play with on a quarterly, a monthly, a weekly basis? If someone asks you ‘how much?’ on behalf of your organisation, can you tell them? Honestly?
3. Transparency
The money’s got to be coming from somewhere. Whether it’s membership fees, sales, grants, loans, whatever, there are stakeholders, and stakeholders, for their stake, are going to want to know what’s going on for their money, what’s happening as a result of their £10 or their £50 a year or their day-a-week volunteering or whatever. Can you tell them?
If you’re getting grants, you’ll need to produce accounts, and a report of how the money was spent, and what is was spent on. In a way, that’s far easier. It’s an external force, co-ercing you to do something that you arguably should be doing anyway.
4. Communication
Internal, and external. Your business plan will drive your marketing effort and your customer/client/buyer feedback will in turn drive an internal discussion about what and where you go next. You’ll be having regular meetings, possibly some task groups, some short-life project groups, lots of informal chat in cafes and pubs. Dynamic. You’ll be energised, you’ll have a grasp of what’s at the core, what your capacity is, what you’re capable of, individually and as a whole. people will be talking about you, there’ll be a buzz. Won’t there?
That make sense?
In other news entirely, my Sinar is out of the box and ready for some action. A new tripod awaits at Eldon Sq, so it’ll be permanently working. There’ll be a post about how to load a dark slide (to remind me, because I’ve forgotten), and you’ll want to see some results, yes?
Someone said the other day that MF/120 is the sweet spot between the portability of 35mm and the detail inherent in a 5×4 neg. I don’t know, but that sounds about right. Winter plan is to dust down the 6×6 for daytime/outdoor and get these scanners working to share some results from both formats.
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2 Comments
Organising artists? It’s easier to herd mercury.
You make it all sound so easy.
A small arts organisation should employ someone like you to keep ‘em on the right track.
Far, far harder than it sounds, indeed.
A small arts organisation that doesn’t recognise it needs to do these things is headed for the expense of legal bills sooner or later, so it would be worth employing *someone*. Not me though, those days are far behind. The occasional blog post is as far as I go, and yeay – it’s free!