Making Friends, one at a time

(Publised in Raisor's Ask - South Asia's Fundraising Magazine, Jan-Mar 09)

The melting iceberg of the financial market has hurt everyone, including foundations like the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). Our reserves lie invested in financial instruments and our faith lies in what we can raise every year from foundations, corporations and generous individuals. Last week, when we were working on our financial plans for the year ahead, we realized that one of the things that might keep our morale afloat this year is donations that we receive from individuals whose passion for the arts may well overcome their caution in a tight, speedily declining financial tornado that we are currently subjected to.

However, organized fundraising from individual donors is new at IFA, started only about a year ago. The seed of the idea lay in the minutes of a Board meeting many years before I joined IFA, in the late nineties. A trustee had raised the question, “Why doesn’t IFA raise small amounts of funds from individuals who appreciate our work, have faith in what we do and would simply like to support us?” The idea always got paralysed with the question – but what do we give them in return? Digging up a question like that demands you find an answer to it. We searched for any research primary or secondary that could give us a clue as to what people expected from an arts foundation for small contributions. In a country where more than 90% of donations went to religious institutions, we found nothing that could help us.

At this point we came to know that one of our key funders, the Ford Foundation was making technical assistance grants available to its long time grantees to use it to upgrade their systems and processes and help with their fundraising. We applied for the grant for four different projects, one of which was to support a research across the country to be commissioned to AC Nielsen ORG MARG to find out people’s attitudes towards contributing to the arts and what they expected from it.

The study was done across middle and upper middle class individuals in 5 metros through group discussions and in-depth personal interviews. The highlights of the study had many startling revelations. The first of course was the overwhelming response that people did care about the arts and wanted to help in return for timely reporting on how their money was being spent and face to face meetings with the artists they were helping to support. Placing them on a matrix of their basis of engagement with the arts and their relationship with the arts, the study broadly divided the audience into three segments – ‘missionaries’, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘pleasure seekers’ (for want of better words!). The missionaries were those that had a serious and enduring relationship with the arts and believed strongly that they should support traditional and classical art forms helping them survive. The intellectuals on the other hand, while having a serious relationship with the art, were more interested in the advancement of the arts and believed that contemporary arts should be supported. The pleasure seekers had a rather casual and transient relationship with the arts and for them the arts were just a way of enjoying life. The study laid down the motivations for each of these groups to support the arts and made recommendations on how they could possibly be brought to support IFA.

Supported by the findings of this research, done for the first time in India, IFA conceptualised the ‘Friends of IFA’ initiative which was launched in February 2008. Through this initiative you could become a ‘Friend’ of IFA by donating Rs 2500/- a year (US$100 if you were abroad) in return for which you would receive the quarterly IFA e-newsletter, the biannual art magazine ArtConnect, our annual report and priority invitations/ discounted tickets to all our arts events. You could choose to contribute to any one or both of the two art funds we created – The Art Legacy Fund which would support the conservation of our cultural heritage and The Arts Innovation Fund which would support cutting edge contemporary art projects. We already had grant programmes that artists could apply to like Arts Research and Documentation Programme, Arts Education Programme, New Performance Programme etc., but we felt while these made sense to artists, the donors would require categories they could understand, realte to and support. Most grants we made could be divided up into the two categories we created - Arts Legacy and Arts Innovations. This we did keeping in mind the interest of the missionaries and the intellectuals that came through our research. We decided we were not ready to target the pleasure seeking of the pleasure seekers yet J

We have spent the last one year making a 100 ‘Friends’. Yes, the number is small. The universe of people who do donate in India is small and to find among them those that would consider the arts worthy of support is really small. However, we are now successfully creating partnerships with other cultural organizations to use their database to send out our appeals, making ourselves visible in various art festivals across the country and promoting this initiative at our own events, website and publications. Our current ‘Friends’ are championing our cause and slowly bringing in more ‘Friends’. So for us this is worth more than the money they have brought in – this means a 100 new people out there spreading our message and convincing more people to believe in what we do. To quote one of our ‘Friends’, Bunty Chand, The Excutive Director of Asia Society, India “Based on its stellar track record, I can count on IFA supporting first-rate and innovative work. IFA’s grants are a window to the energy and vitality of the contemporary arts scene.” When that’s how people believe in you, you just have no option but to keep your morale high even in troubled times.