Leadership in Arts Fundraising

Explore techniques to lead effective arts fundraising

Effective leadership is vital for successful fundraising in the arts and culture; a sector that heavily relies on external funding as part of its income mix. It’s not just about meeting immediate financial needs, but also about fostering an innovative fundraising culture.

This three-week course will help you understand your role as a leader in developing and embedding fundraising within your organisation.

Discover how to analyse your organisation’s fundraising and make it central to its operations

To lead innovative fundraising, you will need to evaluate where it fits in your organisation.

You’ll learn how to identify key internal and external relationships and be introduced to models to help you assess their effectiveness. You’ll review industry examples and consider how you can put fundraising at the heart of your organisational structure.

Understand your organisational culture and how it affects change in fundraising

On this course, you’ll examine how your organisational culture and your stakeholders’ roles affect the fundraising performance and what you can do to change it.

To help you lead change, you’ll be introduced to tools that identify attitudes towards risk and innovation. By exploring case studies, you’ll explore techniques that aim to make your organisation resilient and adaptable.

Lead successful fundraising while navigating change and crisis

Unplanned change is inherent in the arts and cultural sectors. You’ll explore how to distinguish between crisis-led change and longer-term realignments that require changes to your fundraising approach, as well as how to deal with unforeseen changes to avoid disruption.

You’ll also consider emerging trends in fundraising and giving, and explore alternative approaches from around the world.

This course will be of interest to leaders in the arts and cultural sector. You may be working or aspiring to work as an executive or an artistic director, a CEO, or a general or a financial manager.

It may also interest you if you are a board member or senior fundraiser throughout the arts and cultural sector.

Whatever your specific role, if you are a senior cultural leader this course is for you.

• Aligning fundraising aims and resources
• Welcome to the course
• Analysing fundraising and leadership in your organisation
• Exploring your organisation’s key fundraising relationships
• Summary
• Embedding a fundraising culture
• About Week 2
• Assessing your organisation’s cultural mission and stakeholder relationships
• Developing strategies for change and sustainable development
• Summary
• Crisis, change and future evolution
• About Week 3
• Assessing the impact of disruption and dealing with change
• Learning from global fundraising trends and models
• Summary