Funding Fallout - Crowd Funding

Funding Fallout - Crowd Funding

06 April, 2011

As part of our series on the fallout from from the Arts Council's funding decisions, we hear from Michael Troughton, founder of crowd funding website WeFund.co.uk.

I think that the approach taken by the Arts Council (essentially, cull the weak and strengthen the strong) was the right one. If they’d simply passed on the cuts equally to everyone, we’d have ended up with an anaemic arts culture with everyone not quite getting what they needed. Or, I think they’ve arbitrarily cut some excellent programs and they should have said, “it’s the government’s fault, everyone should make do with less”. I’m undecided. Regardless, they’ve put themselves out there and allowed people to blame them (instead of just the government) by actually making choices, which was brave.

Anyway, I’ve been asked to write a few words on arts funding because I run wefund.co.uk, which is the UK’s largest ‘crowd-funding’ site for creative projects. Here, in true Dragons’ Den style, the public gets to make its own choices about who to support. Some projects fail to receive the support they need (and might well deserve), others actually raise more than they were looking for. Last week 'wefunded' four plays.

Wefund receives about five proposals a day from people seeking support. We generally don’t say no – if it’s ‘creative’ it goes up. So, if you’ve got a project, you can put it up on wefund and have a go at finding the cash from the public. In return, you offer up a set of perks to incentivise them. These range from tickets to the show, to a gig in their house – it’s up to you. If you're successful, you get the money, do the project and then stay in touch with your new cadre of supporters. If you don't hit your target, the money recedes back into their pockets and you try to figure out what to do better next time.

We’ve tried to create something that isn’t simply a reflection of what’s happening in the real world. So, there is no curator to convince, no committee to lobby, no form to fill in and no waiting for months to hear if you’ve been successful. We hope that this has the effect of dramatically increasing the number of creative projects going on. The Arts Council is a bottleneck on the creative life of the nation. We’re trying to loosen up the neck so that more grain can course through it and fatten our collective liver.

The Arts Council fund something like 4000 projects a year. We currently have about 100 projects in our system and aim to have over 4000 within a couple of years.

If we manage it, we’ll have created something pretty awesome: a place where artists and their audience meet up in order to get things done.

So, much as I feel for those who lost out last week, I am actually optimistic for the future.

Michael Troughton, WeFund
www.wefund.co.uk

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