Measuring the Size and Concentration of Business Funding of Culture in the UK: Closing the Gap between Advocacy and Theory

Abstract

In the past few years, UK public bodies have increased their calls for cultural leaders to diversify even further their funding sources and exploit the dynamics of the mixed-economy. So far only major cultural organisations in London have been able to successfully diversify their funding portfolio. A drop in public funding is likely to make it even more challenging for a large proportion of cultural organisations to close their income gap. To ensure the successful development of policies of funding decentralisation and inform organisational strategies, more theory-based empirical research on trends, drivers and motivations, and models of funding sustainability is needed. One of the many factors preventing the development of this line of research is a wide gap between research conducted for advocacy purposes and academia in the UK. This paper illustrates the extent and implications of this gap by providing a brief summary of the academic literature in the field and reviewing methods and results of existing data collection efforts by advocacy organisations, in particular the Private Investment in Culture survey by Arts & Business UK (A&B). The scope of this paper has been limited to business funding in the form of cash and in-kind sponsorship, donations and membership, since there is relatively more cross-sectional time series data and academic and advocacy studies of this form of funding than of individual giving and trust and foundation support. The paper proposes recommendations on ways of closing this gap, in particular by improving existing sampling methodology for this type of data collection and expanding and strengthening the existing academic research on motivations, market dynamics and concentration of business funding.