Fundraising in Finnish arts and culture organizations - How is it done and what challenges and development points are there?

Abstract

In Finland, the arts and culture field has through decades been funded largely by the public sector, unlike in the USA and the UK where fundraising from private sources have always been part of the main operations in arts and culture organizations. However, for example due to uncertainty around public funding, Finnish arts and culture organizations have noticed the increased pressure for additional funding, and recently started to broaden their funding base. Arts and culture organizations have followed Finnish universities by starting active fundraising and increasing company cooperation. The topic of active fundraising in the arts and culture field being relatively new in Finland makes it interesting to study. This study examines how fundraising is currently done in Finnish arts and culture organizations and what challenges and development points there are related to fundraising in the arts and culture field in Finland. Fundraising is examined from a broad perspective including all sources of private funds - individuals, foundations and companies.

This study is a qualitative interview study consisting of 10 interviews. The interviewees consist of 7 professionals of arts and culture organizations, 1 individual donor, 1 private foundation representative and 1 expert in economics. The empirical data was analyzed with thematic analysis. The empirical findings are also discussed with organizational translation theory.

The main findings indicate that Finnish arts and culture organizations are doing active fundraising and company cooperation to different extents, but overall, many are in the beginning of planning and starting active fundraising operations, meaning that the operations include experimentation. Fundraising is seen as more and more necessary to ensure the competitive edge for the arts and culture organizations. It is seen necessary and beneficial not only because of the monetary objectives - need for more funds and broadening and diversifying the funding base - but also because of the communicational and organizational benefits it creates for the arts organizations. The findings also suggest that fundraising from private sources is often done for enabling new initiatives and interesting content. The main challenges or development points the findings suggest are the need for broadening the currently narrow philanthropic culture in Finland, and the need for further developing the public support mechanisms to ease fundraising operations for arts and culture organizations. Other development points include organizations understanding the investment perspective in fundraising and making fundraising operations a more long-term and strategic activity in the organizations, and making companies see the value of arts organizations as beneficial partners, as currently the company cooperations done do not turn into enough funds for the arts organizations.