Bang for bucks

I have just heard the most precise and graphic new expression about businessmen who sponsor the arts and I plan on using it at every possible opportunity. It is American, it is self explanatory, I think it may be a little rude but I am sure the robust readers of this magazine will cope. It is simply that arts sponsors are people who want bang for their bucks.

Businessmen who involve themselves in this kind of financial giving - I hesitate to call it philanthropy - have always, perfectly reasonably, wanted to have some sort of return for their money whether it is specific profit, burnishing the company image or straightforward glory. But times have changed. Back in the high spending days of the late Eighties and early Nineties there was a benefit to companies, especially growth companies, to be seen to be doing a lot of corporate entertaining. The arts were a perfect vehicle for such displays of conspicuous consumption and there was a growing corporate benevolence that benefited both the company and the theatre or orchestra or dance group or whatever.

But the annual figures recently published by ABSA, the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts, which carefully monitors how much corporate spending is going to the arts, both reveal and hide what is actually happening. Baldly, last year's funding total of just below 80 million was down slightly from the previous year.

There seem to be two factors at work here which are going to make the growing hordes of people who are involved in raising money for the arts fundamentally rethink their strategies. First of all, while there may have been much corporate benevolence among both growth companies and the established ones in the Eighties, it is now clear that this is not part of the culture of today's new growth companies. Everyone is working flat out. The chief executives are coming from a younger generation in a tougher world and they do not see the long game in the way their predecessors might have done. It has become a culture where you are only as good as your next set of annual figures. This is a problem when it can take three, four, five years to develop a profile alongside an arts company. A classic example is Allied Domecq's sponsorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company now heading for its fourth year. And in the longer term, Booker and Whitbread get real bang for their bucks in their relationship with the literary prizes.

Colin Tweedy, who runs ABSA, is not shouting it from the rooftops but he is finding that when he talks to potential sponsors he is not getting the cultural receptiveness from the young turks in the new growth companies. What he is up against is their fierce philosophy that their job is to return wealth to their shareholders. They are not interested in what might be regarded as conscience money for the arts.

The second factor to think about is the juggernaut otherwise known as the Lottery. At one time, leading arts sponsors as well as arts administrators repeated endlessly and quite correctly - that it was not the job of sponsorship to fill in the holes left by inadequate government funding. Now the feeling in the corporate and foundation world is that, indirectly, the Lottery is dictating what corporations and foundations should give their money to. The bulk of appeals for help they receive are for matching funding to bolster Lottery applications. There is a great sensitivity about this and it is dramatically reflected in Colin Tweedy's figures which show a huge drop in the sponsorship of capital projects.

In spite of all the advice given to the Government not to include a matching funding element when the Lottery was being set up, it found its way into the regulations. Many of the rules have since been modified and I have no doubt this will eventually disappear. Given the possibility of a Blair administration in the future, much of the Lottery money going to the arts may be redirected anyway.

Like everything else, arts sponsorship goes in cycles and it may be that levels here have peaked for the time being. Sponsors are becoming very interested in education and community projects as well. But, however they spend their money, these people do not want anyone else, especially the Lottery, dictating the rules of the game.

I am reminded of a recent occasion at the Royal Opera House where Virginia Bottomley launched the Year of Opera for the east of England. She declared that loving the arts was good for business - a passion for the arts was good for human beings and human souls. She would not have found many takers among the young turks I have mentioned.

Copyright Spectator Feb 22, 1997
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