Leadership in Arts Fundraising (FutureLearn)

Effective leadership is vital for successful fundraising in the arts and culture; a sector that heavily relies on external funding as part of its income mix. It’s not just about meeting immediate financial needs, but also about fostering an innovative fundraising culture.

Discover how to analyse your organisation’s fundraising and make it central to its operations

To lead innovative fundraising, you will need to evaluate where it fits in your organisation.

You’ll learn how to identify key internal and external relationships and be introduced to models to help you assess their effectiveness. You’ll review industry examples and consider how you can put fundraising at the heart of your organisational structure.

Understand your organisational culture and how it affects change in fundraising

On this course, you’ll examine how your organisational culture and your stakeholders’ roles affect the fundraising performance and what you can do to change it.

To help you lead change, you’ll be introduced to tools that identify attitudes towards risk and innovation. By exploring case studies, you’ll explore techniques that aim to make your organisation resilient and adaptable.

Lead successful fundraising while navigating change and crisis

Unplanned change is inherent in the arts and cultural sectors. You’ll explore how to distinguish between crisis-led change and longer-term realignments that require changes to your fundraising approach, as well as how to deal with unforeseen changes to avoid disruption.

You’ll also consider emerging trends in fundraising and giving, and explore alternative approaches from around the world.

Syllabus

Week 1: Aligning fundraising aims and resources

Week 2: Embedding a fundraising culture

Week 3: Crisis, change and future evolution

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Understand their role as a senior executive in developing and maintaining their company’s fundraising strategy and culture.

- Identify and enhance fundraising processes in their organisation through clarification of senior leadership roles in building an effective fundraising culture and supporting key relationships.

- Identify and assess the implications for fundraising performance of their organisation’s cultural mission and key stakeholder relationships, by using a range of strategic and analytical models and techniques.

- Investigate strategies to support and enable the development of fundraising through the enhancement of the organisation’s learning culture and evaluation practices.

- Identify organisational attitudes to risk and innovation which can impact fundraising practice.

- Evaluate the value of different strategies which draw inspiration from international examples and trends in giving, in mitigating the impact of recent economic and social changes and disruption on fundraising performance.
Who is the course for?

This course will be of interest to leaders in the arts and cultural sector. You may be working or aspiring to work as an executive or an artistic director, a CEO, or a general or a financial manager.

It may also interest you if you are a board member or senior fundraiser throughout the arts and cultural sector.

Whatever your specific role, if you are a senior cultural leader this course is for you.