Enthusiasts donate on website to artists in the wake of funding cuts

10 April 2011

Enthusiasts donate on website to artists’ appeals for projects as Arts Council funding cuts begin to take effect on the creative sector

Ireland’s culturati are joining forces to buy artworks for museums, fund plays for a theatre festival and finance the latest film from the makers of Pyjama Girls. The country’s first “crowdfunding” website, fundit.ie, has received donations of almost €14,000 for nine projects in less than three weeks. As of last Friday, 37 people had pledged €1,857 towards the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s (Imma) purchase of four drawings by Bea McMahon, a Dublin-based artist. The Irish Architecture Foundation had received €3,607 towards the publication of a souvenir book for the annual Open House Dublin event.

Fund It was devised to support ventures that might otherwise not go ahead. Donors can give as little as €5 and each venture has a set number of days to reach its target donation. If it fails to do this, none of the pledged money can be drawn down. Imma has raised over a third of what it needs, while the architecture foundation has secured a quarter.

Similar websites are already popular in America and Britain. Duke Special, a Northern Irish singer, used PledgeMusic, a British site, to fund the production of three records.

Fund It was set up by Business to Arts and itself received a €20,000 grant from the state. Stuart McLaughlin, chief executive of Business to Arts, said the initiative would not have worked as well during the economic boom because creators were less inclined to use new funding mechanisms when the traditional platforms were still fruitful. He said increased use of personal and social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, made it easier for creators to publicise their projects.

“One of the roots of this idea would have been looking at how many people ‘liked’ something on Facebook, and is there a latent value in that,” he said.

Still Films, the producers of Pyjama Girls, are trying to raise €6,500 to make a documentary and publish a book about Irish youth culture from the 1950s to the 1990s. The project is based around photographs of teenagers from public and private archives. Sinéad Ní Bhroin, a producer on the film, said Fund It worked well for them because it could engage with people in the photographs. Some of the €1,910 raised has come from the subjects, and their children.

“The money will pay for a researcher so we’ll be able to get in contact with individuals and find the best possible stories and piece together a story and a documentary that will really draw people in,” said Ní Bhroin.

Kaz O’Connell, an archivist at the Irish Film Institute (IFI), gave €50 towards the film. She had already contributed several photographs of herself as a Goth, taken between the mid -1980s and the mid-1990s.

“Being an archivist, I thought it was a really worthwhile project that people could tell that sub-culture story through their own stories and recollections,” she said.

“Initially I wasn’t sure [Fund It] was something people would buy into, but I think it can work if they have a personal connection or some sort of connection to the project. Obviously not every project will work but it’s a way of gauging if there’s an interest.”

McLaughlin said several projects had applied to Fund It and been refused because they were not well-devised. He said ventures needed a great idea, a network and a plan to engage a crowd. As of Friday, €525 had been raised for an Irish-Polish film festival, and €2,410 had been given towards staging The Year of Magical Wanking, a play from Thisispopbaby theatre company, at this year’s Dublin fringe festival.

Donors have already contributed more than half of the €3,000 needed to stage The Blue Boy at the Dublin theatre festival. Garry Keegan, the play’s co-director, said the money would allow them to train for two weeks with a movement director.

“There has to be more imaginative and entrepreneurial ways of raising funds for projects. Everyone knows there’s been cuts from the Arts Council, and if you look at it in a bigger picture that makes sense,” he said.

“We need to look beyond the state-funded market because there’s no guarantee that the cuts will stop next year.”