ACE Catalyst Funding confirmed for BDF
Brighton Digital Festival awarded £24k to develop fundraising capacity and diversify income streams
We are delighted to announce that Brighton Digital Festival has been successful in its application for Arts Council England’s highly competitive Catalyst: Small Grants programme and will be awarded £24,070 over the next year to develop the organisation’s fundraising capacity.
This new funding will power Augment, a new project for us that will allow our core team to focus on building relationships with private sponsorship, trusts and foundations, growing strategic partnerships, research, and bid development. We are honoured to have been selected as one of the 117 small - medium sized organisations that this grants programme has supported through a total investment of £2,869,493 to help create a more sustainable and resilient arts and culture sector.
BDF is a grassroots organisation and as such has been able to grow over the past 7 years largely through the goodwill of people sparing their time, hard work, office space and networks so that the festival has been able to flourish. Year on year BDF has grown in size and scope, though capacity of the tiny core team has remained the overstretched.
This funding therefore comes at a crucial time for the festival and will be used to develop the organisations credibility, capacity and assests. It will be used to secure new office space, hire a new member of staff, increase the working days of the existing core team and produce a suite of fundraising materials.
Current funding is split three ways between Arts Council (30%), private sponsorship (40%) and other public funding, such as University of Brighton (30%). Over time, we expect to see a further squeeze on public funding and so we are planning on continuing our successful track record of raising private sponsorship, £180k to date from companies like EDF Energy and American Express, by exploring funding opportunities with trusts, foundations and individuals for the first time.
We are so looking forward to building relationships with new partners and sincerely thank our current and previous supporters for their continued investment in BDF. If you are interested in getting involved in BDF18 as a business, trust or foundation, please contact Laurence Hill, Festival Director on laurence@brightondigitalfestival.co.uk. For a full list of current sponsors, funders and partners, please visit our website.
