Business investment in the arts has dipped slightly to £111m in 2001/02, according to the annual Arts & Business report, published on February 28. A&B believes that while major lottery and millennium projects began to generate large investment opportunities for business in 1998, the market now is settling down to pre-1998 levels of between £96m and £115m.
In 2001/02, corporate membership of arts institutions increased by a value of £3.6m, with the Royal Opera House,Tate in London and Glyndebourne sharing the largest part of this income;
corporate donations increased by more than half (55%), for which the North Music Trust in Gateshead, Foundation and Friends of Kew Gardens, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra were the top three recipients;
crafts, photography and film/video reported increased levels of investment, while drama/theatre, visual arts and music reported an overall drop in funding levels;
investment in London, which still accounts for over half of the total business investment, saw a 5% increase at £53m, while investment in the South-West increased by 142%, in the East of England by 98% and in Northern Ireland by 63%.
BP is supporting a pay what you can scheme for three years to involve local people in a theatre that provides West End quality in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Working in partnership with the Arts & Business New Partners investment scheme will enable BP to use the combined talents and experience of its staff from across the company and the theatre to create an arts club. The club will run activities aimed at confidence building and will provide a background to organised arts visits.
The oil major also recently announced that it is to sponsor three big screen relays of live opera and ballet performances from Covent Garden to venues across the UK this summer. The company is making a five-year commitment to widen access to the arts, following the success of its threeyear partnership with the Royal Opera House, which first began in July 2000. The live broadcasts will be combined with education activity in the regions. Contact David Nicholas, BP, on 020 7496 4708 (http://www.bp.com)
Arts-based training
Software company SAP and London’s Donmar Warehouse theatre are embarking on the second year of their multi-year partnership, with plans to expand and develop current activities. The company is opening up its arts club and family workshops to their partner community, and rolling out arts-based training to call centre staff and high potential employees, approximately 15% of SAP‘s UK workforce. They are also expanding their work with local schools and colleges. Funding from A&B New Partners will be used to support a family workshop, two Write Now workshops for 60 high potential employees, and a presentation skills workshop for 30 call centre staff. Contact Kirsten Mason, A&B, on 020 7378 8143 (http://www.aandb.org.uk)
Re-writing learning
Birds Eye Walls is undertaking a creative reading and writing programme for its staff as part of its enterprisewide strategy of creating behavioural and cultural change using the arts. The Words matter programme will be run in conjunction with Arts & Business, the Reading Agency and a nominated library service, which will involve a workplace library, reading in schools, workplace reading groups and creative writing sessions, and two literary events. Children’s stories written through the creative writing sessions will be broadcast on BBC radio later in 2003. Contact Kirsten Mason, A&B, on 020 7378 8143 (http://www.andb.org.uk)
Trading places
The London Stock Exchange is forging its first association with the arts by sponsoring the City of London Festival, taking place from June 23 to July 10. The central theme of the festival is Trading places: exploring the cultural exchange between the City of London and the cities with which it trades (particularly London, Shanghai and New York). The Exchange is sponsoring one of the Festival’s concerts, and supporting a series of imaginative Chinese music and visual art-based workshops taking place in two Southwark secondary schools, culminating in a performance at a central London venue The LSE is also inviting children from the schools to visit the LSE, give them a tour of the building, then give them a talk about the Exchange, what it does, and what it is like to work for. PWC is principal sponsor of the Festival. Contact Tania Robinson, A&B, on 020 7378 8143 (http://www.aandb.org.uk)
Exhibitions of support
Ernst & Young is sponsoring the Art Deco 1910-1939 exhibition, which opened at the V&A museum on March 27 and runs until July 23. This will be the company’s eighth sponsorship of a major exhibition since they began their arts sponsorship programme ten years ago.
JP Morgan is to support the Hayward Gallery’s autumn exhibition “Saved! 100 years of the National Art Collections Fund”, it was announced on March 18. The exhibition will include 300-400 works drawn from over 70 museums and galleries throughout the UK, including works by Rembrandt, Picasso, Leonardo and Michaelangelo. It will run from October 23 – January 18.
Epson and Olympus are co-sponsoring a retrospective on the early work of the royal photographer the Earl of Lichfield at the National Portrait Gallery between May – August 2003. Consultants Towers Perrin and investment firm Clayton Dubilier Rice are the first two companies to join the National Portrait Gallery’s new Regency partners scheme, celebrating the opening of their new Regency Galleries.
ABN-Amrois sponsoring the Royal Academy’s spring exhibition, Masterpieces from Dresden, which opens on March 15. The bank is organising a series of education workshops to involve a London primary schools, which the bank supports in engaging with the arts.
AT Kearney is continuing its sponsorship of the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy which opens on June 3. The company will be running its fourth annual “portraits of business” programme, whereby ATK commissions works from four leading Royal Academicians to create visual impressions of well known businesses. The aim is to help inspire greater dialogue between the arts and business communities, and past examples include impressions of Unilever and Rolls Royce.
Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein is continuing to sponsor private views for teachers at the RA.
Barclays is sponsoring the major Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, running from February 19 – May 18. UBS is to sponsor Tate Modern’s exhibition Cruel and Tender: The real in the 20th century photograph, between June – September 2003.
Unilever is sponsoring Playmates, a youth access scheme at the Royal National Theatre, offering affordable tickets to young people between the ages of 16-26 least likely to attend theatre. Standard Life is sponsoring a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, it was announced on March 28. BT is sponsoring Derry’s theatre The Playhouse in 2002/3, supporting audience development initiatives. The investment will enable the theatre to commission a piece of public art to be situated in BT’s Derry offices. Contact Raemond Charles, Standard Life, on 0131 245 6467 (http://www.standardlife.co.uk); Thomas Lingard, Unilever, on 020 7822 6582 (http://www.unilever.com); Heather Carr , A&B, on 02890 664 736 (http://www.aandb.org.uk)
Music to my ears
Sponsorship from Ulster Bank will enable the Orchestra to host a special Chamber Concert in Enniskillen on 11 June 2003. The New Partners investment from Arts & Business will enable the orchestra to run an educational roadshow for schools in the Enniskillen area, encouraging them to explore music and instruments in a fun and educational way. The orchestra will organise and co-ordinate the educational roadshow, visiting a total of six schools over three days in the week commencing June 9. Tennant Caledonian Breweries supported an educational strand of tripTych, Scotland’s annual music event which involved up to 100 separate shows over 3 days in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen from 25-27 February. The company sponsored a series of workshops, offering young Scottish musicians and filmmakers the chance to work with world-leading artists, access to the best available equipment, and a real insight into how to develop a career in the music industry. Contact Heather Carr from Arts & Business on 02890 664 736; Jeanie Scott, Tennant, on 0121 220 2499
Comment
Total arts sponsorship in the UK may be well down on its peak of £150m in 1999/2000, but there is life in the old dog yet. When Arts & Business was founded in 1976 (predating BITC by five years incidentally), recorded contributions amounted to barely half a million pounds. Since then, corporate support for the arts has not just grown dramatically but also managed to reinvent the concept several times over. The two are not coincidence. What started as pure art for art’s sake soon evolved into widening access to new audiences, especially towards young people and into schools. Then the reaching out went further, to new places and people, demonstrating the powerful role arts can play in urban regeneration and in overcoming social inclusion. Along the way, the need to show the business case and repay the investment caused a few bust-ups, notably about over-prominent placement of sponsors’ products and pushing name recognition.
Today, there’s still plenty of this ‘arts plus social impact’ about, but the focus is increasingly on earning the business pay-back by going into the workplace, as the stories we highlight above show. Companies such as Lever Fabergé, Allied Domecq and Marks & Spencer have pioneered ‘Arts@Work’. The end result is a historically strong level of investment, at a time when some feared the CSR juggernaut would push the artistic luvvies aside. So art sponsorship can combine hard commercial edge and social impact.
Given its success, let’s look wider at the big picture: in 2001 arttook just 15% of the UK’s total £781m sponsorship spend, with sport and broadcasting sponsorship taking the lion’s share. The latter is growing especially strongly. As we went to press, for example, Nestlé announced a £6m sponsorship of ITV’s Pop Idol and Woolworth’s a £8m deal with the Network Chart Show. Sport has made a start in linking social objectives to high profile sponsorships – youth outreach and anti-racism, for example. But it’s time to extend cause-related marketing’s ‘win-win’ concept into all areas of the sponsorship spend.
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