How we use our trading to fund our community outreach

Written by John Maguire, Creative Director of Arts Groupie CIC.

ArtsGroupie is a Liverpool based community interest company that is promoting and providing access to the arts. We achieve this through developing our own touring theatre and music productions, and by facilitating educational workshops for both adults and children in drama, creative writing and spoken word.

Where we started to develop income

We initially started to develop a heritage walking tour to help raise funding for a children’s play called The Liver Bird with wraparound workshops to encourage creativity and literacy in young people. The production took place just after the pandemic and we could only perform to audiences of 15 -25 in outside areas. As we needed to increase income as ticket sales around the theatre event were low. We started a walk that highlighted the liver birds all over Liverpool City Centre. This unintentionally created a funding and marketing model for us to use.

We informed walking tour customers that their ticket price helped us to achieve our missive of making the arts accessible to all by helping fund the community outreach. This created a new avenue of income for us with walking tours. We now have several heritage trails under the umbrella of Merseytrails.

Reinvesting in community

A percentage of the income generated is put aside to go towards FREE workshops in the community and can be used as match funding if we seek relevant community grants and funds. We have also partnered with a number of key organisations that we can offer FREE workshops throughout the year. What we have found is by doing so, we have then been asked by a number of those organisations to develop projects/ workshops for them when they receive funding.

Alongside allyship, when we have people on our heritage tours we have been able to nurture our customers and understand what exactly they look for in a walking tour. This has allowed us to generate invaluable insights and also grown our customer database. We communicate by sending a monthly newsletter informing about all the creative projects we are involved with. Many people who have engaged then come to our theatre productions, workshops and book for other walking tours. We are proud to have developed and nurtured a strong loyal audience database.

Key learnings

Finding our unique selling point and how to measure your social impact were the two key takeaways from my time at SSE. But also, the importance of really nurturing meaningful relationships with the community and organisations. We measure our impact by monitoring how many people engage further with our work, the postcodes that they come from, how they  offer feedback about how our work should develop and there engagement before participating in one of our activities. Powerful Beyond all Measure CIC came on a private walking tour, we then delivered a family Shadow puppetry arts workshop at their weekly community meet up (as part of a funded project with Stop the Loan sharks, to deliver monetary education around loan sharks). One of their directors sat on the board with Friends of Everton Park, so we were then commissioned to research and write a bespoke history tour of the park with historical characters for a family fun day. Also, the publicity and marketing materials generated around this event, helped to win a contract with the major commercial retail organisation Liverpool One. The profit from this funded a series of writing workshops aimed at children.

How the SSE programme helped us

Indeed, the emphasis on networks and keeping links with organisations came as a natural reaction to having been on courses with SSE. The Trade up and specific Heritage Trade up programme built on the start-up foundation and the alumni links are a ongoing valuable asset. Several of my peers have booked onto our walking tours with their companies as part of team building days.

The initial start-up with School for Social Entrepreneurs course really helped me to shape our organisations vision, our unique selling point and gave me the techniques and strategies to grow. It also allowed me to build a business toolbox. These resources helped me to feedback the knowledge I gained on the courses to our team, so that we all had a clear objective of what we wanted for our social enterprise.

The action learning sessions that I undertook have been key in how we approach problems. There is no problem only a solution yet to be found and action learning has helped us to find the answers within our own organisation.

SSE helped to boost our business and to see our social worth. I loved being able to work on the business and not just in the business.

Trading for Good: funded programmes for people who want to improve our world

Gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence to develop and grow projects that tackle social and environmental challenges through strong trading income streams.

Trading for Good provides funding, education and support for social entrepreneurs and community businesses across England. It consists of three programmes aimed at different types of projects at differing stages of their journey.

Each programme has the following specialised support:

• Learning and development programme.
• Match Trading Grant™.
• Ready-made network of people like you. 
• Expert insights. 
• Peer-to-peer learning. 
• Join our community of 3k+ SSE fellows.

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