Culture Rise

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Culture Rise

We support the development of vibrant cultural places where people live and work. We Help Creative Business, People & Places to Thrive.

Culture Rise’s mission is to support the development of vibrant cultural places where people live and work. We collaborate with artists, communities, cultural organisations and local councils to develop thriving arts and cultural businesses, projects and spaces. Our support improves the financial sustainability, efficiency, inclusivity and overall health of arts organisations so their creative wor

k has a greater impact on individuals, communities and place. We work with clients to create a bespoke service that helps them achieve their ambitions. Whether that’s creating a business strategy, writing a fundraising bid or developing a creative project that impacts space and place. Get in touch for an informal chat about your needs and how we might be able to help.

29/11/2024

Why every creative business needs a Fundraising Strategy

As a creative business, your focus is on impacting your audiences in creative ways whether it’s a new product, visual art project, festival, community event, or performance. But to be able to turn your vision into reality, funding is key.

That’s where a solid fundraising strategy comes in.

A fundraising strategy is a clear, structured plan to raise the money you need to grow your business, whether through grants, crowdfunding, sponsors or partnerships. It’s about knowing who to approach, how to pitch your ideas, and setting realistic, achievable financial goals.

Why is it so important?

Clarity and Focus: without one you risk going from one project and funding application to another with no roadmap to help you stay on track and reach your long term goals

Building Confidence: When you know exactly how and why to approach certain backers, you’re more likely to secure support.

Scaling Your Impact: With the right funding sustained over a longer period, you can take your creative projects to the next level, expanding your reach, and impacting more people with your creative work.

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to expand, don’t underestimate the power of a strategic approach to fundraising. It’s the backbone of sustainable growth for any creative business!

Need help creating your fundraising strategy? Get in touch to find out how we can help.

08/11/2024

Ever wondered how you can harness the power of data in your fundraising?

Think about it like this: data isn’t just numbers. It’s a game changer for your fundraising efforts!

By utilising key insights into donor behaviour and trends, you can make educated decisions that will truly optimise your fundraising campaigns.

Here’s how you can make data work for you:

💫 Informed decision making
Understanding the needs of your audience and the impact of your work is really important when it comes to fundraising. So spend time gathering up feedback and insights about your organisation to inform your future work. By understanding what your audience requires, your future plans will resonate with those you set out to serve.

📈 Performance tracking
Set yourself clear goals for fundraising campaigns and monitor them with key performance indicators (KPIs) e.g. are you making good progress? These metrics will help you assess the success of your strategies and keep you on track.

🤝 Relationship building
Taking the time to build relationships with donors is essential. By keeping track of their engagement and their giving history, you can strengthen those connections and maintain opportunities for their future support.

Get in touch if you’re stuck with how to implement this in your business, we’ll show you how!

25/10/2024

At Culture Rise, we offer a variety of different types of business support for arts and culture organisations.

Let’s take a look at the differences between the help we offer.

💫 Business training
This does what it says on the tin! Our business training focuses on upskilling you so you can improve how your business operates day to day.

We design and deliver one-to-one and group training online and in person in developing strategy, business planning, fundraising, and arts producing to name a few. So if your team or clients want to develop new skills we can design a training programme tailored for their needs.

💫 Coaching
Business Coaching is more personal and typically done on a one to one basis. A certified coach will support you to achieve specific goals relating to your business.

Coaching isn’t about telling you what to do, your coach will help and empower you to find your own solutions to the challenges you face.

💫 Consulting
Consulting is about providing specific advice and carrying out work that solves a business problem. For example, our consultants often work with organisations to develop business and fundraising strategies and write funding bids.

A reminder that at Culture Rise, we offer all of the above options, depending on what is most useful for your business, charity, or organisation!

If you're interested in speaking to us and finding out the right option for you, send us a DM to get the ball rolling!

30/09/2024

What does strategy mean?

The word 'strategy' isn't just a buzzword, it's an absolute essential for your arts organisation.

Strategy generally refers to how a business or organisation will achieve their short and long term goals. It can include how your business is going to grow, what resources you're going to use and how, and what help you need to get to where you want to go.

It may feel counterintuitive to apply a concept like strategy to a creative business, but having a strategy is the key to making sure everything you do in your organisation can have the biggest impact possible!

Having a strategy in your business isn't just about planning, it's about making moves that are intentional and that lead to your long-term success as an organisation.

A reminder that Culture Rise can help you build your strategy if you need some support with it! It can feel like a big task, but once you start building it, it'll help your short and long term growth hugely.

How do you feel about strategy? Does it feel overwhelming, or do you have your strategy sorted? Let us know!

24/09/2024

Interested in what Culture Rise do and want to take the next step?

Here's how you can work with the team to support, elevate, and grow your business, no matter what stage you're at.

STRATEGY
Nailing that all important business strategy by yourself can be tough. We offer business strategy development so we can set you and your organisation on the right path.

FUNDRAISING
We can support you on the whole fundraising journey - from crafting your winning funding strategy to finding suitable grants for you, all the way through to writing winning bids, we've got you covered.

BUSINESS COACHING
Calling founders and executives: we offer one to one tailored support so we can work on reaching your goals.

TRAINING and MENTORING
We offer expertly designed and delivered training in arts producing and creative business skills, suitable for any organisations at any level.

If you're curious and want to chat to us about any of these options, get in touch, we'd love to chat!

16/09/2024

Got a funding bid to write but have no idea where to start with your budget? Creating a budget can be a great way to make a start with writing a new bid. It will help shape how much money you want to apply for and plan what you’re going to spend it on.

So here are some tips for getting your budget written:

💸 Start with your income! It’s rare you can ask for 100% funding for a project from one funder. By demonstrating that money is coming from other sources, you show that others have faith in you and your project. It also proves it's not as much of a risk for funders to invest in.

💸 Not sure what to list for your income? Your income can include funding from partners or other funders, support in-kind (time and resources offered for free), and revenue from any ticket sales and general sales.

💸 When it comes to your expenditure, each funder is different so be sure to check what expenses they will allow you to include. You might include direct project costs, capital costs, overheads and core costs. Always include a contingency of around 5% of your full project cost to account for any risk.

💸 Speaking of core costs, note that a lot of funders won't cover your core costs. But you can often put in a percentage share of a project cost - this means you can then recover the full cost of your project.

💸 A very important thing to remember is that your income and expenditure amounts must always match!

Hopefully these tips have given you a starting point for getting your project budget sorted and application started! If you're struggling and need some more targeted help in getting your bid written, get in touch with us!

09/09/2024

“Culture Rise fully understood our project and the organisations involved, it felt like they were really speaking our language. The whole process was a breeze, we'll definitely be back in touch.” Director, Soundwave

Thank you, Soundwave, for the kind words!

Soundwave are a wonderful charity based in Cumbria, bringing music making to everyone in the county.

We recently supported Soundwave by writing their successful funding application to Arts Council England. With the funding, they were able to help emerging musicians to develop their music careers and talents by providing support and exposure.

During their work, Soundwave collaborated with Generator, another fantastic organisation also dedicated to providing much needed support across music, creative, and tech. Together, they developed an emerging music venue on site at this year’s Kendal Calling Festival.

If you want to check out more of the work that Soundwave are doing, you can find them here - https://www.soundwave.org.uk/

And if you’re curious about how Culture Rise can support you and your organisation to do brilliant work in your community, get in touch!

16/08/2024

This week saw the last mentoring session of our work with 5 creative businesses.

Our director Lindsay has been working with 5 amazing creatives on business planning, branding, marketing, and everything in between as part of Business for Creatives programme! It's been such a pleasure to support them all and see their businesses grow.

The mentoring has taken place over the last 9 months, so of course, it's been both a sad and happy goodbye! It's going to be really exciting to see what the mentees get up to in the future.

Check out the 5 wonderful businesses brilliant work, and drop them a follow here:

Lindsay is a trained and certified business coach, who loves nothing more than to work with businesses to help them achieve their big dreams and visions.

Get in touch if you'd like coaching and mentoring support to help your creative business grow.

09/08/2024

Since November 2023, we've been very lucky to have been involved with the amazing Business Skills for Creatives programme, run by @‌Mastered.

Business Skills for Creatives is a training bootcamp for small creative businesses and self-employed freelancers. So far, they've supported over 5000 creatives, how brilliant is that?

During our time together, we've helped design the programme from scratch, and supported them with lots of different mentoring activities. We’ve been delivering workshops for creative businesses up and down the country as well as recruiting and organising business mentors for cohorts in each region.

The best bit about our work in this project is how many awesome businesses we've got to meet along the way during the last ten months! We’ve met some brilliant creative people doing wonderful things in their businesses, and it’s been such a joy to support them to make their business dreams come true.

Business Skills for Creatives is completely free to get involved in, and we couldn't recommend it enough. If you're loving the look of what we're doing and how to get involved, sign up! Follow the link here: https://join.mastered.com/business_skills_for_freelancers

26/07/2024

We’ve loved working in Cleethorpes recently collaborating with From The Fields (fromthefieldsuk) and North East Lincolnshire Council (). Working with the team, who champion and advocate for the local creative and heritage sector, we’ve been finding out what local people want in their area and working out how we can make it happen.

Our journey so far has involved community-wide surveys, focus groups, and lots of one-to-one interviews to truly understand what an arts festival in the region could and should be to enhance the area and provide opportunities for local people.

The Creative Director at From the Fields had these kind words to share:

‘We worked with Culture Rise to engage the community of North East Lincolnshire and co-create a festival strategy that was relevant to local people. This will be hugely beneficial when we apply for funding to make the festival happen, which Culture Rise will support us to do. Their work will help us deliver a festival that’s specific to the place and local people and that extends the impact the festival can have on our audiences'

If you're curious about how we can help you to get your project going, get in touch!

There's lots of ways we can help from strategy development to support with funding applications, and we'd love to hear from you.

19/07/2024

Our first port of call when we work with creative businesses is to look at their business plan. But you’d be surprised how few few businesse have one! And if they do, they’re often gathering dust having not been looked at for a long time.

Being creative entrepreneurs can sometimes make the practical planning and strategic bits of our businesses difficult.

But business planning is something that can have a massive impact - here's why you should be doing it ⬇️

Makes bid writing/grant applications easier. Knowing the past, present, and future of your business inside and out means that when it's time to apply for funding, the process will be so much easier.

Keeps you motivated and focused. Having a plan, and creating goals as a result, will keep you on track, especially on days when running your business or project feels difficult. It'll provide you with an essential North Star and support you and your team to think short-term and long-term. Business planning is also a great way to ensure that your resources and cash flow are all taken care of.

Frees you up for the more creative stuff! Once you've taken care of the practicalities of your business or project, it'll give you some energy back to use on idea generating, creating, and the more fun parts of your business!

How is your business planning going?

12/07/2024

It's all too easy when writing your case for support in a funding application to make it all about the facts and the figures. And of course, it's really important to use crucial data and statistics to get across to the funder that you know what you're talking about!

But what about the emotional side of things? Well, this is also a vital element that you need to have in your case for support.

After all, a case for support needs to convince a funder that they should be supporting you, but it's also a chance for you to tell your story. A good case will be convincing, consistent, but also emotive - it should show how important your work is and the change and difference your project will make.

So when writing your case for support, you might want to think about the following:

⭐️ Can you describe who experiences this work and what impact it has?

⭐️ What is going on in the world or with you that makes this project so important right now?

⭐️ Is there a change that you're hoping to make to people's lives?

⭐️ What makes your work unique or different to what others do?

⭐️ Why are you the person/people to do it?

Remember to focus on benefits over features and outcomes over outputs - this focus will give your bid the edge!

Address

Bristol

Website

http://www.culturerise.co.uk/

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