Mission, Models, Money
Over the next twelve months Mission, Models, Money is going to be working in partnership with ArtsProfessional to
disseminate information emerging from its national action research programme and to stimulate sector-wide debate
about key issues. Clare Cooper and Roanne Dods explain the context.
Frustration, Passion, Vision, Mission
Clare Cooper and
Roanne Dods
Co-Directors of Mission,
Models, Money
ission, Models, Money (MMM) is a national
M action research programme and campaign
for change that aims to engage the leaders
and funders of the not-for-profit arts and cultural
sector to address the challenges of developing
mission-led, financially and organisationally
sustainable businesses. The campaign is motivated
both by frustration and passion. The frustration is
with the seeming intractability of a leitmotif of
issues that appear to dwell at the heart of many arts
and cultural organisations – issues that replicate
themselves in crisis after crisis. And the passion is to
catalyse debate about issues of organisational and
financial sustainability, leading to changes in mind-
set, approach and working practices in arts and
cultural organisations, and the infrastructure that
supports them. These changes have the potential to
release ever greater creative and artistic activity.
MMM is also driven by a vision to ensure that artistic
and cultural endeavour thrives in the UK at a time of
accelerating social, demographic, technological and
economic change.
History and development
MMM started as a conversation between Clare
Cooper, then at Arts & Business, and Roanne Dods,
Director of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, in
the autumn of 2003. Now in a third phase of delivery,
it has already made its mark.
The first MMM conference, MMM1, was held in
June 2004. Its aim was to sharpen the quality of
debate about mission, models and money and to
encourage a more honest conversation in the arts –
one that recognises weaknesses and that accepts a
need to adopt new methods of operation. Unlike
similar events, which often conclude that the
solution can principally be found in increased public
funding for the arts, delegates recognised that arts
and cultural organisations need to collaborate and
work on solutions themselves.
MMM1, and the period immediately following,
resulted in participants agreeing on key issues and
priority areas for action that could usefully form a
programme of further work. Issues were clustered
around three themes:
• Deepening our understanding of the changing
“The arts sector urgently needs transforming –
not the snail-paced professionalisation of a
dysfunctional system that we are currently
witnessing. (from ‘The Art of Dying’
provocation paper commissioned for MMM2)
”
John Knell, Founder, Intelligence Agency
8 ArtsProfessional 17 July 2006
“
“Perhaps we have been more radical in
searching for new art forms and new art than
we have in finding new ways of managing the
arts. If so, we need now to learn from the
best art… and change arts management as
”
radically as we have changed art itself.”
Ruth Mackenzie, General Director,
Manchester International Festival and
MMM Action Group member
environment and its implications
• Developing financial sustainability
• Developing organisational capacity
Eight teams were assembled, comprising
members of an Action Group – all leading
practitioners in the field – supported by fellows
from the new Clore Leadership Programme. Each
team was charged with researching one key issue.
Research findings formed the core content of the
second MMM conference, MMM2, which was held in
February 2005. The outcome of this was twofold –
an improved understanding of the challenges and
opportunities facing the sector and a mandate for
further action-based research which has resulted in
the current third phase.
The 21st century challenge
The proposition underlying MMM’s activities is
neatly summed up in a Provocation Paper written by
Adrian Ellis for MMM1:
“The arts sector in the United Kingdom is over-
extended and undercapitalised, with cultural
organisations trying to do more things than they can
possibly do well, with both human and financial
resources too thinly spread… Additional resources
secured by the sector are generally more likely to
result in further under-funded expansion – whether
of programmes or buildings – than in doing core
things better. Lacking liquidity or reserves, cash
strapped and thinly spread between ever more
diverse, fragmented pools of funding, arts
organisations find it easier to secure the marginal
costs of marginal activities than the core costs of
core activities. The result is a hyperactive sector that
responds with Pavlovian urgency and enormous
ingenuity to the imperatives of funders but that has a
decreasing capacity to hear, or at any rate listen to,
the voice of mission.”
All of us in the sector know that these internal
schisms are growing wider as we attempt to navigate
a new landscape in which demand for the arts has
shifted in response to leisure time becoming more
fragmented, populations growing more diverse, and
competition from the burgeoning leisure industry
intensifying.
We need to be able to respond effectively to
many changes: distribution patterns and channels
stemming from emerging technology; organisational
ecology that is blurring the distinction between the
commercial, non-profit and public sectors; public
and private funding patterns; and the very nature of
public funding itself with all the signals of reducing
levels, juxtaposed with a prevailing attitude which
emphasises accountability and empirical justification
for public support.
Responding to the challenge
The principal issues key to developing organisational
and financial sustainability have been identified
during the first two phases of MMM. Our work
during this third phase is to gather further
understanding and insight into each of them:
• How could we, as a sector, better engage with
the changing demographic, technological and
social environment?
• What can be done to improve the capabilities
of arts organisations to develop both new and
“It is time to move ourselves away from short-
term obsessional behaviour around money
and on to longer term vision around purpose.
New models to make money follow mission!
”
Dawn Austwick OBE, Director, Esmée
Fairbairn Foundation and MMM Action
Group member
editors@artsprofessional.co.uk
 Mission, Models, Money: the action plan
Exemplar projects
Working in partnership with others,
MMM has commissioned seven
‘exemplar projects’ with small- and
medium-sized organisations in the
sector. The objective is to invest
support and funding in order to
enable them to make radical
changes to their business practice,
and in the process demonstrate best
and emerging new practice. These
projects will be evaluated over a 14-
month period and the results will
generate case studies which will be
shared via the MMM website.
Road shows
Two road shows are being
delivered, one on governance and
one on developing financial
capacity. These are taking place in
different locations around the UK.
Events
Two symposia are being
developed. One will focus on new
and alternative financial
instruments and their potential
for the arts and cultural sector;
the other on intelligent funding of
arts organisations, which will
target public and private funders
and investors, with the aim of
encouraging them to consider how
changing their investment and
funding practices will enable
better sustainability of the sector.
A final conference, with possibly
other associated events around
the country, will be held in the late
spring of 2007. Here, the findings
of the whole initiative will be
shared and debated and a national
action plan for the future will be
launched.
Case studies
Four different levels are being
developed, ranging from short
advocacy case studies of existing
best practice, through to deeper
case studies of the exemplar
projects and other congruent
initiatives being undertaken
elsewhere. These will be shared via
the MMM website and used in the
content of the road shows, the
symposia and the closing plenary
conference.
Provocation papers
Further provocation papers are
being commissioned on topics
linked to the activity programme
and of relevance to promoting the
MMM agenda.
Advocacy
A range of ‘advocacy for change’
work will underpin this activity.
Website
The website will be developed as
the principal tool whereby the
results of the programme are
shared.

more collaborative approaches to sustaining mission-led strategies that are successful both explore each of these issues further. We will be
their customer/visitor base, develop new in terms of mission and financial sustainability? reporting in more detail, via ArtsProfessional, on our
markets and build engagement and • How can we expand the financial capacity of findings during the course of the next 12 months.
participation in the arts? arts and cultural organisations – for example,
• What strategic alliances could be developed by creating reserves and/or developing new What does MMM hope to achieve?
between organisations to achieve back office financial instruments, and once created and/or MMM aims to create a tipping point for change. We
cost efficiencies, and how could these be developed how do we manage and control hope that by assembling a critical mass of relevant
extended ‘front of house’ to include more them? information and by encouraging debate about the
collaborative business models that, for • What new methods of operation, business need for change, we will help the sector embrace the
example, enable new kinds of artistic models and infrastructure will deliver necessity for new and irreversible developments.
collaboration, better connections to culturally sustainable, vibrant and cultural endeavour? By June 2007 we aim to articulate:
diverse communities and organisations, or new With a major award from HM Treasury’s Invest to • A set of results that illustrate the disabling and
income streams? Save budget, together with significant financial enabling behaviours and the current business
• What are the priority issues with regard to support from the public and private sector – development needs of arts and cultural
governance in the not-for-profit arts sector Accenture, Arts Council England, Deutsche Bank, the organisations, infrastructure agencies and
and what changes need to occur to reflect the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn funders
changing landscape arts organisations are Foundation, the Rayne Foundation, the Governance • Proposals for new approaches and solutions to
operating in? Hub – and with the continued support of Fellows from organisational and financial sustainability
• What are the key competencies that arts years one and two of the Clore Leadership Programme • Recommendations on how the current
organisations need in order to manage we have devised a programme of work which will ‘ecosystem’ needs to change in the short term
to enable this to happen
• A blueprint of a new ‘ecosystem’, articulating
What does the sector say…? how the sector could operate in the future.
• There are huge challenges around the changing external environment – is our current response MMM is led by sector practitioners. It offers a
adequate? Are we, for example rising to the challenge of the ‘on demand’ age? coalition approach: a collaborative ‘open source’
• Many of the barriers to adaptation to this changing external environment lie at the top end of enquiry, which we believe is contributing to the
the food chain at Chief Executive Officer or Trustee level. Leadership is trapped in old ways of development of an intellectual commons around the
thinking ‘fixing not transforming’ – rooted in the past, not the future. very significant challenges that face us. This, together
• Governance behaviours have not changed and are not changing to reflect new operating contexts. with the project’s status as a ‘public good’ initiative
• There is a necessity to actively encourage the development of reserves by arts and cultural not owned by any one institution, is a central and
organisations, and for public and private sector funders to reward development of reserves, not hugely motivating factor. It is only through all the
penalise them for doing so. players changing their roles that we can re-write the
• New skills are needed, not least because new professions are emerging, particularly around script. We look forward to sharing our findings and
education/marketing/audience development/fundraising. hearing your responses through this debate, and in
• Too many organisations rely on a single creative leader – indeed on a single leader per se. With moving together towards a stronger, long-lasting and
an absence of career paths and the resources to support middle management positions, there thriving arts and cultural sector. I
evolves a ‘missing middle’ and an over-stretched and under-resourced top level.
• Succession planning is almost non-existent and nearly impossible. Clare Cooper and Roanne Dods are
• There is a desire for the development of different organisational and business models that Co-Directors of Mission Models Money.
would better address the changing environment. The dominant paradigm of ‘charity limited by e: clare.cooper@jerwood.org;
guarantee’ is being seen as more and more of a hindrance to developing adaptive flexible roanne.dods@jerwood.org
behaviours, often because of mind-set issues at governance level. Outcomes of MMM’s work undertaken to date,
• Both public and private funders need to examine their behaviours and understand better how including research findings and ‘provocation’
these behaviours are impacting negatively, as well as positively, on organsational and financial papers by leading cultural commentators, can
sustainability be found on the MMM website at
www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk
editors@artsprofessional.co.uk ArtsProfessional 17 July 2006 9