What If We Made Money at the Intersection of Art and Technology?

Perhaps my hottest take at GFSC is that the revolution needs a business plan. Money in activism is like cars: no-one has one, everyone moans about them, but everyone needs a lift. Almost every organising meeting I’m in, someone will say “someone should do a funding bid” – ok, so who? And for what?

Injecting money into often-fraught social contexts sometimes feels akin to turning on the big light: it’s so much easier to bitch about problems in the dark than have to start actually making a plan to clean up the empty pizza boxes and upturned ashtrays. If we are going to develop commons though, we just kinda need to get on with it, and face the uncomfortable conversations it brings.

Currently I feel we have a sort of magical thinking in leftist places when it comes to building the world we want to live in, as if somehow, if we organise just right, do the right kind of outreach, get the right kind of donations page up, that somehow things will Magically Change and the resources will materialise. Despite the fact that almost everyone is dealing with extreme levels of multi-year burnout, the cost of living crisis, and more and more of our lives being rented from billionaires, there’s just a weird lack of pragmatism when it comes to getting things done.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any clean answers for you on how to get it for your project. No money comes entirely without strings and all of it requires a commitment to a certain path. I’ve explored a ton of these over the years and personally raised over half a million in funding bids and invoiced hundreds of thousands in client work so I do know a little what I’m talking about: but these are rookie numbers in the grand scheme of things. So please enjoy a listicle of some methods out there I’ve explored, with an enormous grain of salt.

Table of contents

1. Arts Council England Project Funding
2. Arts Council England: Develop Your Creative Practice (DYCP)
3. Community grant funding
4. Community share offers
5. DAOs / Cryptocoins
6. Direct donations and memberships
7. Innovation / business funding
8. Private philanthropy
9. Research funding
10. Selling goods
11. Selling services
12. Social investment
13. So what should I actually do?
14. Tech grant funding
15. Venture capital (VC)

Venture capital (VC)

• Goal: creating a business backed with technology that can be sold in 3-5 years, at which point you will cash out
• Pros: a lot of money and enough time to do something properly from the start
• Cons: you are mainlining capitalism in its purest form with all that goes along with it
• Examples: YCombinator, Bethnal Green Ventures, Sequoia Capital
• KPIs: users, monthly revenue, app installs
• Money: ££££££

Let's start with the big one. “The Startup” is the business model that changed the world but gets little critical analysis. A startup, in its purest form, is a high risk high reward engagement in rawdogging capitalism. The goal is to take a small team of highly paid engineers and produce a vertically integrated company and app that has the potential to scale into the next global phenomenon, like WeWork or Uber.

Rather than a traditional business model where the business provides a job for life for the founders, the goal is to sell the entire company after a few years to a big-five tech company via an IPO and at that point, get extremely rich. WeCrashed is a great dramatisation of this.

What this means for you is that you need to find a suitable VC fund and make a convincing pitch deck that tells the investors why they should invest in you. YCombinator, one of the most infamous funds, give every startup a $500k initial investment for example. Once this money starts to run low you can go for additional investment rounds that are called Series A, B, C and so on.

In terms of access to capital and potential for growth there's nothing quite like it. You can expect to be massively resourced and have access to very qualified people and have dedicated time to work without worrying about funding. The flip side is though that the only reason anyone is here is to make money, with any social benefit being almost irrelevant outside of its ability to make money, so you can expect to be working with the worst scumbags out there. You can also expect to be working all hours as you now need to worry about things like quarterly reports and monthly active users. The flip side is that you will be in a cohort with lots of peers and have a ton of support to make a thing.

Personally I'd love to give this a go one day despite all this so I can give more qualified feedback!

Social investment

• Goal: creating a social business that produces social outcomes
• Pros: Potentially highly sustainable Realpolitik
• Cons: Most of your KPIs require you to do direct surveillance of poor people
• Examples: Big Issue Investment, Key Fund, UnLtd
• KPIs: Weird measures of sociability, health, happiness, etc
• Money: £££££

Quantifying social outcomes is fucking brutal. We all know social outcomes are important but the exact accounting for them always just sounds super weird. For example, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations value "Talk[ing] to neighbours regularly" at £4,511 per person per year. So theoretically if you start a WhatsApp group for your street and get 9 other people in it you've just created £45,110 of social value. Well done! Can I get my cheque please?

The social investment world sits in this odd space between charity and business. You're expected to make money, but also prove you're making the world better. A consultant at a big charity thinktank once told me that said thinktank had been around for 40 years but still had no idea how to marry these two models. This means you need to spend a lot of time measuring and quantifying your “impact” on society which is as vague as it sounds.

The upside is that once you're in this world, the money can be quite stable and the investors genuinely do care about outcomes beyond profit. The downside is that proving those outcomes often means collecting data on vulnerable people in ways that can feel pretty uncomfortable – do you want to be asking people for their postcode and to fill in an evaluation form all the time?

Community grant funding

• Goal: Delivering an on-the-ground community development project
• Pros: Once you have the funding it's very hard to lose it
• Cons: Writing them is an art in itself, very low acceptance rates, very long turnarounds, boom and bust
• KPIs: Generally annual social impact reporting to funder
• Examples: National Lottery Community Fund, Comic Relief, Esmee Fairburn, Paul Hamlyn Foundation
• Money: ££ - £££££

This is what most people think of when they say “someone should write a funding bid”. The National Lottery Community Fund is the big one in the UK, handing out around £600m a year to community projects. Comic Relief and various other trusts and foundations sit alongside them.

The good news is that this money is genuinely meant to help communities and the reporting requirements, while annoying, are usually reasonable. The bad news is that acceptance rates are extremely low at the moment – under 5% is typical. The application process can take months especially for larger amounts, and you're competing against organisations with dedicated bid writers. It's also boom and bust – you get a big chunk of money for 2-3 years, then you're back to square one scrambling for the next grant while trying to maintain continuity for your staff and community.

To be successful you need to thoroughly read the specific funders’ guidance and write it in their language. I really value funders I can reapply to, and am increasingly unlikely to apply for one-off funds as they can be very disorganised and fickle. A lot of funders are now moving to a 2-step process where there is an initial expression of interest then a longer process with full budget if you get through that – I think this is great and is another green flag for me.

Tech grant funding

• Goal: Improve or create open source software
• Pros: Funders understand importance of fixing tech debt etc
• Cons: Funders don't understand or care about (non-tech) community, like, at all
• KPIs: Software user stories
• Examples: NLNet, Sovereign Tech Fund, Prototype Fund, Nominet
• Money: ££ - £££

Tech funders fund the kind of software that gets loads of stars on GitHub: developer libraries and open source versions of commercial tools. NLNet and The Sovereign Tech Fund, for example, have funded a huge amount of important open source infrastructure and seem to understand what it takes to maintain software over time.

The catch is that these funders generally only care about tech tools for tech people. They'll fund you to build things of interest to software developers, but not to do any outreach, training, or relationship-building, or to make things aimed at the general public.

For example, we’ve struggled to get any interest in our PlaceCal tech, even under callouts about expanding access, because we are willing to interface with closed source software and support people where they are right now. These funders would rather we insist that every community group in Moss Side migrates to Mobilizon or whatever. We’ve found this disappointing and hope to create a cultural shift here but obviously understand that every funder is limited in its remit and it’s good to have a clear focus.

However: if you’re making a small reusable tool for tech people that a lot of people are already using do go for NlNet specifically, its a quick application and you can reapply – we have deffo heard of some success stories on our Discord. I love the prototype fund too but you need to be a Berlin resident for it – if anyone reading this wants to partner with us to expand PlaceCal to Germany do get in touch!

Innovation / business funding

• Goal: Boost your country's economy
• Pros: Will fund business development and bottom line
• Cons: Need to be able to speak Bullshit Business English to get anywhere and may struggle if you're not a white man in a suit
• KPIs: Turnover
• Examples: InnovateUK
• Money: £££ - £££££

InnovateUK is the government’s official innovation agency. They hand out a lot of money to businesses in an effort to make the UK competitive domestically and internationally – you can think of them as a soft power agency. This is very competitive and the applications have to be written to a very high standard – but they give some of the best feedback anywhere with each answer you submit getting a rating out of 10 and feedback from up to 5 reviewers on a question-by-question basis, and you can reapply.

The downside is that you need to present yourself as a Serious Business with Growth Potential and Line Go Up On Graph: this might come as natural if you’ve been to business school but for the rest of us it’s a bit of a crash course in business bullshit. This means pitch decks, five year projections, risk matrices, and a lot of language about "market opportunities" and "competitive advantage". As a result it can feel like an old boys’ club, not helped at all by recent controversies around a bungled fund specifically aimed at women innovators. I applied twice over the years and came close but didn’t get it, but honestly it’s hard not to chalk some of this up to structural transphobia in UK government. I know some (cis) people who have got it, though.

The upside is that they understand what it takes to make a successful business and so will fund things other people won’t like feasibility studies and business development – just some solid R&D time. If you can code-switch into this mode without cringing too hard, give it a go. Again – the feedback was very good as a critical read on a business plan and I would apply a third time if I had the energy and a Business Bullshit translator.

Arts Council England Project Funding

• Goal: specific artistic output(s), ie. a new body of work, a book, exhibitions, events, workshops, and they REALLY want community engagement
• Pros: you can fund new artworks (development time + materials), put on events, exhibitions, for both yourself and others, pretty unlimited shapes and themes in theory, rolling deadline
• Cons: 10% match funding needed (in-kind funding accepted but not for the whole sum), competitive (18% success rate for the Under 30k),
• Examples: look around and you will see the ACE logo everywhere
• KPIs: art?
• Money: ££?

Through ACE’s Project Grant scheme, you can apply for funds for a project costing £30,000 or under; or between £30,000 and £100,000. The spirit is similar for both categories, but the over 30k application asks more questions and demands more details.

The Project Grant is for a specific project (duh), which could take many shapes. A very common shape may be for an artist or artists to make new artworks (time, materials), for those artworks to be then exhibited in one or more locations (installation and transport costs), maybe also to publish a book to go along with the theme of the artworks (editing, printing), run some workshops (time, materials), for someone to manage all of this (their time paid). Many galleries apply for Project Grants, but so do many individuals, usually for projects spanning many months to even a couple of years. One can apply at any time, decision takes 12 weeks. If you have a condition that may warrant it (chronic illness, neurodivergent, disabled etc) you can likely qualify for an access worker to help you write up the application, funded by ACE.

The hard parts:

1. You need match funding for AT LEAST 10% of your project budget, as in money from some other source. Maybe a gallery involved in the project can pay artists’ fees for the exhibition, or there’s an install budget, which is direct cash money (ideal). Or there may be in-kind funding, which is when no money is changing hands but some things are provided for free. (An example: the gallery gives you no money, but their technician installs your show for free over 4 days. If a technician’s day rate is £350, then that’s £1400 of in-kind funding from the gallery.) In-kind funding can be part of your match funding, but not all of it – ACE wants evidence of some cold hard cash.
2. They really, REALLY want community engagement, and ideally they want it in their target areas of the country, the postcodes for which you can hunt down on the Arts Council website. This usually comes in the form of creative workshops with i.e. youth groups, doing activities with an organisation’s education programme, or public workshops. They will ask about the demographic you plan to engage and how you will engage them.

The good parts:

1. In my experience, ACE are actually quite lenient with changes in timeline, changes of partners (one gallery pulls out but another org steps in for example), and changes of the project elements as long as it’s all within the spirit of the original application.
2. You set up the budget, so you have decent control over the funds, and can pay people at Artists’ Union rates, which are pretty great.