Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
Arts Hub Australia, 19th May 2008
Prior to speaking with Frankie Airey, I had been advised that what she doesn’t know about fundraising is not worth knowing. Whilst I’m hardly equipped to play quizmaster in this area, it would be some task to formulate a question she could not navigate smoothly in her residual motherland lilt.
Airey is both founder and Director of Philanthropy Squared, a Melbourne-based management consulting firm trading in the creation of organisational structures conducive to sustained, generous private funding in the non-profit sector. Through a series of lectures continuing throughout mid-2008 in association with the Australia Business Arts Foundation, Airey is imparting her knowledge and experience of the critical requirements for successful long-term philanthropic support, with specific reference to the arts and creative sectors.
The emergent theme throughout discussions with Airey is that of sustainability. In opposition to the all-too-frequent curative capital campaign, in which an organisation will attempt to build relationships over a short period and often come away with significantly less revenue than hoped, Airey’s approach concerns the strategic, in-depth restructuring of an organisation to allow for carefully considered campaigns and the incremental development of strong, mutually beneficial relationships, both with other organisations and with individuals.
Having got in on what was then a barely-constructed ground level, Airey’s career has grown along with a business she “just kind of slotted into”.
Following the completion of a degree in Russian, Airey had spent eighteen months performing routine research for a management consulting firm in London before landing a role in what was initially a development office of four people, to raise funds for Oxford University. One year and forty-three more staff members later and a new strategy campaign had ballooned into a £240 million launch. It was at a time when British universities were undergoing a governmental belt-tightening similar to that which Australia is now witnessing.
“Oxford was the first to recognise the need to invest properly in long-term sustainability for fundraising rather than just looking for a short-term injection, and McKinsey were in there doing a feasibility campaign and the strategy for it,” Airey recalls. Six years on and the campaign closed with £342 million in the bank.
Although strategic fundraising is an ever-expanding focus across a range of industries, for many philanthropy is still a dirty word, and the procurement of it an even dirtier chore. In Airey’s opinion, this distaste in Australia’s formerly government-funded institutions is an echo of the cries of horror that resounded throughout British university and concert halls not so very long ago. When Oxford engaged the services of US management consulting firm McKinsey as well as independent representatives of select American tertiary institutions, the initial response from locals was that of people who had just been hit by a blast rather than a breath of fresh air.
“At Oxford it was Americans from Stanford and Harvard and Princeton who were coming over and teaching us how to do it,” says Airey. “At the time we were all saying ‘Oh that works over there, it won’t work here’. But of course it did$$s$$ you applied it, you did it with an English accent and you might use different language but the same techniques apply.
“It is a generational shift and a culture shift. Twenty or thirty years ago, the government paid for an awful lot more than they pay for now, so there was [a] resistance to [philanthropy] and the kneejerk into ‘Well let’s just keep working on the government to put the money back in’. It happens in universities, in major charities and any organisation where there’s been a significant slice of government funding.
“What we need to find is an Australian way, because we do have more of that egalitarian culture and we do have a different view of where government should stop and therefore where philanthropy should start… It hasn’t settled, but I think we’re about twenty years into a thirty-year shift.”
Given the youthfulness of most strategic philanthropy ventures, the Australian arts sector has caught on with reasonable speed, says Airey, who spent three and a half years at The Arts Centre in Melbourne after arriving in Australia in the late nineties.
“The arts sector is becoming much more sophisticated now than it was even five years ago,” she says. However, an estimate of ten years’ growth makes for a long road still to travel.
“There are the two sides of the coin: one is the need for funds, and the other is the opportunity available in the marketplace. It’s like any strategic marketing job, you’ve got to balance what the organisation’s needs are with what the market will pay for,” Airey continues. “There can still be a tendency to say ‘But this is what we need’. That’s fine but it’s no good if people won’t pay for it. There’s no culture of asking here$$s$$ we think it’s a bit mendicant and a… necessary evil, instead of seeing it as an honourable and powerful thing to be doing, because we [do] rely on it for the regeneration of our institutions.”
Airey views the current spectrum of services available to the non-profit sector as being divided into somewhat uneven thirds. On one side are the serried ranks of management consultants, whose expertise lies in management and organisational behaviour but not in fundraising or, often, the requirements peculiar to non-profit companies. Perched on the opposite bank are fundraising consultants, who are called in to advise organisations on how to secure a quick hit of funds but do not enter an organisation with the aim of implementing a sustainable, self-maintaining structure.
“I would call them contract fundraisers – they’re outsourced… so it’s give-a-man-a-fish,” she explains. Flanked by them both are Airey and her cadre: “I’m more teach-a-man-how-to-fish. Clients contact me because they have what they define as some kind of fundraising need, [but are looking for more than a quick fix], so it has to be about sustainability.”
Recently compounded by budget disappointments across a swathe of the Australian arts sector is the creeping conviction that organisations can no longer afford to rely on the cash cow of federal funding.
Airey’s mission is to first modify industry attitudes to the notion of philanthropy and the long-haul commitment of relationship building, followed by the successful and widespread organisational restructure of much of the non-profit sector in order to sustain progress made and to maintain momentum.
One point that she is keen to stress is the importance of individual relationship-building: “When you come to philanthropy you are predominantly talking to individuals – [this is] the real growth potential for the arts sector,” she states. “Everybody sets out to fundraise, because they want the major gifts$$s$$ what they don’t realise is that any one of us can be a philanthropist. [They] don’t have different DNA to the rest of us$$s$$ people who do make major gifts make them to organisations that they know well and that they trust.
“Many organisations want the $10 million – they don’t want the ten years it takes to get it. Unless you put into that relationship side of things – particularly with individuals – then the returns [just] aren’t there.”
Finding the right people to build these relationships is only a fraction of the challenge$$s$$ having the right structure in which to place them can make all the difference.
“If you see revolving doors in fundraising jobs, if you see people coming and going and if that’s consistent in your organisation over a time, then look at your organisation. The approach of the lecture is [to] look at the orgnisational success factors that need to be in place for sustainability.”
In order to boil down this success to its key ingredients, Airey and her former Oxford boss and then-business partner took on the task of a wide-ranging survey of organisations whose fundraising growth had been consistent over a period of only five or more years, given the relative immaturity of strategic philanthropy campaigns as an organisational component.
“We didn’t care whether it was incremental growth or substantial growth, it just needed to be consistent,” Airey says. “Not just, ‘We did a capital campaign for three years and now our revenue is back to where it was before the capital campaign’. That’s not growth, that’s an injection of money$$s$$ it’s not showing the sustainability factor.
“We looked at those organisations and what emerged is that there are five critical success factors. Each of the organisations that showed sustainable growth over five years or more had five key ingredients in place.”
Airey’s lecture series centres on these five key components: the way in which they interact, the manner in which they are employed, and the critical fact that only one and a half of them are the fundraising team$$s$$ the rest of it is the organisation.
While Airey’s expertise applies to all organisations and can be as helpful to smaller companies as to their larger counterparts, her principal targets are the Chief Executive Officers and board members of medium to large non-profit organisations.
“It is always difficult to get board members of any non-profit$$s$$ it’s not their day job, it’s not their profession. So it is very difficult to get them to come out and listen to something, particularly the fundraising message – which is the catch 22,” she laments.
Despite the challenges of reforming long-stagnant attitudes and entrenched structural inadequacies, Airey’s outlook appears overarchingly optimistic: “What we’re trying to do in our own way is to change the landscape of asking and giving – to change the landscape of philanthropy, and we want to make fundraising an honourable profession.”
Given the ever-shifting sands of government support and the encroaching shadow of privatisation, philanthropy may increasingly become one of the arts’ last refuges. One would hope that it will take less than an earthquake to shift that particular landscape.
Upcoming lectures:
Darwin: Wednesday 2 July 6pm-7.30pm
Perth: Wednesday 23 July 6pm-7.30pm
Canberra and Melbourne dates tbc
