2.6: Arts Council Applications and Business Plans

In this section we introduce the concept of a business plan. If you have applied for public funding, or perhaps a loan for your business, you will have had to provide information about you, your practice, and what your intentions are with regard to the money you have asked for. These are all elements of a business plan.

Now that you know about copyright and licences and how they are relevant to your work, you will be able to talk in more depth, and with more authority, about your plans and how you intend these to be sustainable over the longer term.

The objective of this section is for you to have completed, in part, a business plan template.

Income streams

While you are going through this section one of the things that we ask you to focus on is how you might develop income streams from your dance based on exploiting copyright in the dance.

As you will now be able to appreciate, layers of copyright subsist in each of those recordings (including the dance, the music, the lyrics, the recording).

The owners of the copyright need to give permission for the recordings to be uploaded to the web as that is a reproduction (one of the exclusive rights in copyright), and the recording is communicated to the public over the web (another exclusive right), and a reproduction made each time the recording is downloaded (another reproduction and therefore exclusive right).  

These are the types of exclusive rights that the copyright owner needs to give permission for, and therefore ones that could be the subject of an income stream.  In the advert featuring Bill Shannon, for example, a typical income stream for Bill would be for Visa to pay him royalties each time the advert is shown, and each time that a user clicks on the YouTube recording.

Read this guide to earning money from YouTube and write think about the most appropriate approach for your work.

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When you post content on YouTube you can choose whether to allow adverts to be included. If adverts are included YouTube are obliged to pay you commission.

This is one way that you can make revenue from sharing your dance online. YouTube also offer other incentives, depending on how many viewers you have. 

Arts Council England Application

But before we look at business plan templates, think about the applications that you might have made for funding from the Arts Council England (ACE) – or other similar funding body.

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The following headings are taken from this form:

“Artistic quality”

“Please provide a brief summary of your/or your organisations recent relevant artistic work, experience and achievements.”

“What is your proposed artistic activity, and what do you want to achieve by doing it?”

“Why is this activity important for your artistic development?”

“Please list the main additional artists involved in your activity using the table, up to a maximum of 10 artists.”

Task (I)

Think back to what you have learnt in sections 1 and 2 and in particular 1.2 Virtuosity, 2.1 Describing your Practice and 2.2. Copyright: Ownership and Authorship.

Now, in no more than 2000 words, describe your practice as if you were applying to the Arts Council, incorporating what you have learnt in these sections.

How does this description differ from the last one that you did? What is the place of copyright in the description that you have drafted?

Task (II)

Now consider the following headings, also taken from the aforementioned Grants for the Arts form:

“Public engagement “

“People who will benefit from your activity”

“Results of your activity”

“Participants”

What will the wider impact of the project be? Please include reference to sector development, artform impact and legacy where appropriate.

Reflect on what you have learnt about authorship, ownership, copyright and licensing. What sort of activities could you include in these sections that are made possible through copyright and licensing? Might it be possible for these activities produce a revenue stream?

Business plan

Business plans come in all shapes and sizes. For some, the term ‘business’ can be really off-putting. So instead of the phrase ‘business plan’ a more user-friendly way of thinking might be to focus on ‘a plan for my practice’.

While applications to the Arts Council are mostly for one-off projects, a ‘plan for your practice’ can challenge you to think about your practice over the longer term (5 years is normal) and in that, where the revenue streams will come from. Revenue from licensing copyright arising from your practice may well be one of those.

A plan for my practice

There are common elements that are found in the overwhelming majority of business plans. These are:

  • Mission statement and/or vision statement so you articulate what you are doing and creating
  • Description of who is involved in the development of your project and what the project is
  • Description of how your project is different from what exists
  • Market analysis that discusses who you believe will be interested in your project
  • Description of your management team, including the experience of key team members and previous successes
  • How you plan to market your project
  • Analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of your project
  • Develop a cash flow statement so you understand what your needs are now and will be in the future;
  • Revenue projections
  • Summary/conclusion that wraps everything together (this also could be an executive summary at the beginning of the plan)

Perhaps you can see from these headings that then information that is required is really not so different from what is required to complete an application form for the Arts Council.

Task (III)

Have a go at completing the information required by these headings, focusing in particular on new and different types of income streams that might be possible and how copyright might help you to achieve those aims.

If you want to delve more deeply there are some much more detailed business plan templates on the Prince’s Trust website. The ACE report mentioned earlier also provides in-depth information about creating a business plan.

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Don’t be put off by the terminology – keep focusing on ‘a plan for my practice’.