Ethical Fundraising Toolkit

Together with our friends and colleagues at Geese Theatre Company, Fierce, MAIA, Open Theatre and Ort Gallery (all small – and brilliant – arts organisations in the Midlands), we’ve created this Toolkit through a series of frank, and sometimes uncomfortable, conversations over a number of months.

Why this Ethical Fundraising Toolkit came about

As a group we’ve all had experiences of making decisions about whether to accept funding or commissions from sources that were questionable, or just unknown to us. In those moments, many of us reached out to find expertise or guidance from others who’d been in this situation before – but couldn’t find anything relevant.

This toolkit is our attempt to make those decisions easier for ourselves and others in the future, and it is available for free for anyone to download and use.

We hope it will help you make decisions about whether to apply for, or accept, funding or commissions in the future; equip you to have these conversations with your stakeholder communities; help you to shape your own Ethical Fundraising Policy; and perhaps even prompt you to open a dialogue with your funders.

**NEW** Accessible version of the Ethical Fundraising Toolkit created by our friends at Open Theatre

We welcome your thoughts and feedback on the toolkit

We’re interested to know what you make of this Ethical Fundraising Toolkit: if you’ve found it useful and easy to follow (or not), and whether it has affected the way you, or your organisation think, or talk, about fundraising and applying for, or accepting, commissions.

We’d really value your feedback – please send this to the group via talkingbirds.co.uk/EFT

Talking more about Ethical Fundraising

We don’t believe Ethical Fundraising has to be oppositional or judgemental. We hope that this Toolkit will help start (or add to) conversations around the issue – to enable organisations to more confidently apply their values to their fundraising, but also to encourage organisations to talk with funders about where their money comes from – in the hope that this might lead to greater transparency and more ethical investment across the funding landscape.

Download the Ethical Fundraising Toolkit

Ethical-Fundraising-Toolkit-1.1-190924 Download

This Ethical Fundraising Toolkit was produced through a series of conversations between members of Geese Theatre Company, Fierce, MAIA, Open Theatre, Ort Gallery and Talking Birds. It was designed by Andrew Moore at Pixeltrix.