How should heritage be funded? What are the opportunities and challenges around public, private and philanthropic funding models? These are some of the key questions underpinning the 2024 Heritage Debate. This year the The Historic Environment Forum worked in partnership with The Heritage Alliance to produce a series of case studies which will contribute to the debate – sharing different models of funding heritage, as well as a diversity of views on the subject.
Lisa Westcott Wilkins, Managing Director of DigVentures
What type of funding has been effective in supporting your work?
Our organisation, DigVentures, is a mixed revenue model of crowdfunding, grants and commercial contracts. Each of these funding streams have a distinct value proposition and customer base and sit within different projects across our institutional profile contributing equally to annual turnover. Delivery expectations for each funding stream are quite distinct, ranging from experiences and educational activities through to impact evaluation, technical reporting, research designs, academic publications, statutory documentation and delivery of archaeological fieldwork.
We also receive Innovation funding, which is a funding stream not available to charities – interesting in the context of the heritage sector where charities are the most common organisational form, alongside persistent issues of financial resilience and stability. Expectations for this funding are geared towards scalable project models and sustainable business propositions, usually tied to comprehensive market research that is far beyond the audience development/growth focused models that are most common. Currently this type of activity is discouraged (in practice, if not in their stated intentions) by heritage sector grant funders.
Our most successful funding stream in terms of growth is crowdfunding, which we see as the true source of our organisational legitimacy: direct support from the people who honour, support, appreciate and directly benefit from our work.
What setbacks have you experienced related to funding?
The biggest setback we have encountered related to funding is the recent change to the National Lottery Heritage Fund policy in stepping back from funding Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise’s that are not constituted as regulated charities. This change was brought in without sector consultation and introduced quite suddenly, and has had a major impact on our operations.
We have also perpetually struggled with Procurement process. No matter the intention, commercial contracts always favour the lowest common denominator of low cost over social value. Even tenders that are pitched as design contests are generally scored to favour low-cost applicants. Because archaeology has an unsophisticated and underdeveloped understanding of how to express its value to purchasers, these contracts are generally awarded by uneducated buyers who struggle to tell the difference between good marketing (eg firms that say they do social impact work) and meaningful, evidenced impact. This has created a chronically competitive sector, where even grant funders such as Historic England underfund projects with low impact expectations.
What solutions are required to address funding challenges in heritage?
Prioritising data collection and evidenced-based discussion of the impact and social value of our work, in terms that are linked to similar work in adjacent sectors, is essential to change how the sector model is funded and what kind of work is rewarded. To that end, DigVentures produced (funded by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists and Historic England) a Public Benefit Toolkit designed to support the promotion and delivery of public engagement in developer-funded archaeology.
Adoption of this guidance should naturally lead to the next most essential step, which is changes to how archaeology is procured – so that the process requires evidenced public impact and social value (in line with the Social Value Act), and does not favour bidders who are unable to deliver this work.
Additionally, the major grant funders of the sector need to be truly innovation-friendly, rather than shying away from models that allow funded projects to leverage grant support into financial stability. At present, this activity is penalised ,which perpetuates dependency on grants. Within this final point is also nested a greater acceptance of alternative finance, such as crowdfunding, as a distinct and resilient form of organisational support.
