crowdfunding for culture - the case of being there for the arts · crowdfunding platform dedicated...

The case of being there for the arts

voordekunst

https://www.crowdfunding4culture.eu/

https://www.crowdfunding4culture.eu/

2 | Case study voordekunst

Name of platform Voordekunst

Geographical focus The Netherlands

Active since 2010

Crowdfunding model Reward based crowdfunding

Platform website https://www.voordekunst.nl/

Executive summary

Case study voordekunst| 3

Voordekunst is the biggest Dutchcrowdfunding platform dedicated toarts and culture. In the past six years itraised some €12,9 million donated to2.219 projects through 128.477donations (numbers retrieved on 19-12-2016).

Voordekunst takes a lot of effort toguide applicants for crowdfundingprojects towards a successful campaign.This has resulted in a 80% successpercentage of the campaigns on theirplatform, which is very high comparedto most crowdfunding platforms. Theirknowledge on setting up campaigns hasbecome a source of income in the formof selling counselling, workshops andmasterclasses.

These features have made themattractive for partnerships. At themoment they show 18 partners on theirwebsite. Most of them are public fundsand regional governments, others areprivate funds and there are also somecompanies involved.

Voordekunst has recently developed apartnership model that distinguishesfour kinds of partnerships:

1. Network partner: these formchannels to reach a wideraudience and broaden theirnetwork. For the network partnerstheir alliance with voordekunstprovides an affiliation withcrowdfunding as a part of culturalentrepreneurship and providingaccess to finance.

2. Matchfunding partner: thesepartners provide funds forcrowdfunding campaigns that fittheir criteria. The emphasis can beregional, talent development orreaching new target groups.

3. Knowledge partner: these partnersprovide knowledge, either to theartists for their development or forthe development of voordekunstas an organisation;

4. Platform partners: they supportvoordekunst financially becausethey find its existence important.

Most partnerships fall into one of thesecategories, some have traits of morethan one. In the near futurevoordekunst will further develop thispartnership model. Importantchallenges are to find good knowledgepartners and to keep companies aspartners for a longer period of time,since their involvement seems to besmall and not sustainable.


Voordekunst (For the arts) started inNovember 2010 as a project developedby the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts. TheAmsterdam Fund for the Arts is an armslength organisation of the city ofAmsterdam which distributes a largepart of the Amsterdam arts subsidies toartists and projects. The fund started thecrowdfunding platform voordekunst as apossible additional source of income forthe arts sector. The launch ofvoordekunst happened just before bigbudget cuts in the arts sector wereannounced by the national government,and was soon seen as one of theanswers to these budget cuts whereartists could present themselves andaudiences could contribute to artprojects, and help the cultural sector todevelop more cultural entrepreneurship.

Since then voordekunst grew steadily,became an independent and nationalplatform and is now the platform fordonation/reward campaigns in theNetherlands for creative and artprojects. In its business plan 2015-2018voordekunst presents the ambition to bethe connector between the arts andaudience; they consider the relationbetween maker and audience to bepivotal. It is about the people behind theproject and the person behind thedonation. Financing is a means toestablish that relationship, not a goal inin itself.

Until now €12.967.448 has beendonated to 2.219 projects through128.477 donations (numbers retrievedon 19-12-2016). 80% of the projects onvoordekunst are successfully funded.This high percentage is the consequenceof screening projects and guiding projectholders through the setting up of theircampaign. A process which has beendigitized and automated as much aspossible, since an average of 75 projectscan be live on the site at any time andthey reached the number of 800 projectsgoing live in 2016. If artists want moreintensive counselling they have to pay amodest fee (€28,50).

Voordekunst has an all-or-nothingmodel, with one exception. When thefunding has reached the 80% level at theend of the campaign period, the projectholder has to ask all funders if they stillwant to maintain their donation. If sothe project holder can adapt his plan tothe new level of funding at 80% andcontinue.

Every project has to pay a starting fee of€100 ex VAT and 5% (ex VAT) on theamount of funding after reaching thegoal. From the amount over 100% theplatform takes 10% (ex VAT).

About the voordekunst crowdfunding model


Partnerships and income

At the start of its existence voordekunstdepended on the contributions ofpartners for 100% of its income. Thiswas reduced within two years to 70%and has at the end of 2015 beenreduced to 40% of its income comingfrom partners and subsidies. Theambition is to reduce that percentagefurther (they expect 35% at the end of2016). The turnover of the organisationwas €570.000 by the end of 2015. Theplatform employs 5 people and hasusually about three or four interns.

Rationale for partnerships

In the course of the years voordekunstdeveloped a number of partnerships,currently having some 18 partnerspresented on the website. Therelationships with those partners arevery diverse. Therefore voordekunstdeveloped its own model to categorizethese relationships. Voordekunstproposes now four different kinds ofpartnerships:

1. Network partners

2. Matchfunding partners

3. Knowledge partners

4. Platform partners

Ad 1. Network partners are partnersthat share their network withvoordekunst to offer more visibility tocrowdfunding as a possibility forfinancing in the arts and to voordekunstas thé platform in the Netherlands. Onthe other hand voordekunst providesvisibility to these partners. Examples area regional platform for amateur art andart education or a provincialgovernment

Ad 2. Matchfunding partners arepartners who will provide matchingfunds to artists based on their criteriafor funding art projects. Those criteriaare different for each partner and alsothe amount of funding and the phasewithin the campaign that the fundingtakes place. Examples are a provincialsupport structure for the arts that has abudget to support projects in theirprovince, a province that has suppliedbudget to support projects in theirregion, and a national patronage fundthat wants to reach target groups withinthe arts that they do not reach withintheir work.

Ad 3. There are two kinds of knowledgepartners. The first kind are knowledgepartners that can provide extraknowledge to artists onentrepreneurship, marketing,copyrights, etc. The second kind areknowledge partners that provideknowledge to voordekunst for itsdevelopment as a platform, for exampleon customer relation management, asvoordekunst sees the relationship withthe donors as one of its most importantassets.

Ad 4. Platform partners are supportingvoordekunst financially as acrowdfunding platform. While in thebeginning of voordekunst most partnerswere of this kind, it is now a smallcategory. voordekunst welcomesfinancial support but prefers partnerswith whom a reciprocal relationship canbe established. Existing partnerships canfall in one or more categories.voordekunst wants to develop themodel further to clarify existing andfuture partnerships.


Partnership modelWe will describe the relationship with three partners here, each quitedifferent. Two of them are mainly matchfunding partners (Amsterdam Fundfor the Arts and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds), one is a network partner(Deloitte).

Model of cooperation

The first partnership is with the foundingorganisation of voordekunst, namely theAmsterdam Fund for the Arts. It is partlya platform partner, it pays a yearly fee tovoordekunst, but it is mainly amatchfunding partner.

The fund wants to provide differentfinancing mechanisms for art projects,because the grants they give out are onlyone way of financing the arts. They alsoprovide loans up to €10.000 (TheAmsterdam Culture Loan) with a lowinterest (in cooperation with anotherpartner) to finance projects and smallcultural firms that cannot be financedthrough grants but are valuable to thecity.

For crowdfunding it provides a yearlybudget of €50.000 to be paid to projectsthat fit the goals of the fund and are notgetting a grant by the fund.

Voordekunst selects projects from itsplatform which they think fit the criteriaof the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts andask the fund to approve them. There is amaximum contribution to thecrowdfunding project of €2.500.

Another criterium is that the projectsfunding goal is higher than €3.500,because the administrative costs are toohigh for each crowdfunding grant forlower amounts.

Another matchfunding tool they haveused in the past is called: the doubler.During one week they would double allprivate contributions to a selection ofcrowdfunding projects based inAmsterdam. In 2015 this became sosuccessful that it took a too large part oftheir budget and they stopped using thedoubler.

The main goal of voordekunst isestablishing relationships betweenartists and their audience. With theirbusiness partner Deloitte, theaccounting firm, they developed anotherform of audience building.

Deloitte organises many events throughthe year for (future) clients andstakeholders. It took some convincing ofthe partners of Deloitte to take thedecision to enrich these events with art.The goal was to achieve a differentstorytelling and branding of Deloitte. Themain result was that events becamemuch more lively and surprising, theatmosphere was more relaxed whichmakes it easier to entertain guests andhave better and more personalconversations, which in turn could leadto new business for Deloitte.

Voordekunst selected artists from theirplatform to perform on these events.There were musicians (classical, jazz andpop), theatre performances or eveninstallations by visual artists. Theseartists were also given the opportunityto pitch their work before the audienceand thus ask for attention for theirproject or work. Sometimes thatproduced more work for the artists,commissioned by members of theaudience. Once a CEO donated €5.000 toa band for recording a CD.

Deloitte and voordekunst closed acooperation agreement where Deloittewould pay the artists. There was no feefor voordekunst. This agreement lastedfor two years. Unfortunately this kind ofcooperation depended very much on theperson from Deloitte that initiated thecooperation. He has now left Deloitteand the cooperation is lackingmomentum at the moment. It is hard tobring in creativity into a firm when it isnot their core business.



This fund exists for 75 years andsupports culture, nature and sciencethrough grants, bursaries, commissionsand prizes. In 2015 it supported 3.500projects and spent €33 million. A largepart comes from lottery funds, anotherpart from fundraising. It has 20.000donors and some 400 Personal Funds(private funds which are managed by thePBCF). It has a regional structure workingwith volunteers who decide on 75% ofthe small grants. The national office is incharge of the other, larger, grants.

The main goal of the fund is to promoteand develop all kinds of patronage. Intheir view crowdfunding is another wayof patronage. They made an agreementwith voordekunst in the summer of 2016to support voordekunst for one yearwith a fee, with the possibility ofprolonging the agreement for anotheryear. They want to experiment withcrowdfunding and reach forms ofculture, such as starting groups in popmusic that they do not reach on theirown. They pay a fee to voordekunst andthey support matchfunding.

The matchfunding: voordekunst presentsa selection of projects from different artdisciplines they think will fit the goals ofthe PBCF.

First PBCF checks if these projects arenot already being funded. Then thisselection is discussed by the group ofgrant advisors and the final selection isapproved. PBCF provides a fixed grant of€750 per project which is given when thecrowdfunding campaign reaches the 75%goal.

Another process runs through oneregion, where the volunteers selectprojects from their region to besupported. This process is still underdevelopment since the volunteers needmore time to select projects and gettingused to crowdfunding as a way ofpatronage, since they have noexperience with crowdfunding so far.

Partnerships in the future

Of the 18 partners presented on thewebsite of voordekunst seven arematchfunding partners. Three are privatefunds (including PBCF) and four areregional governments or funds fundedby regional governments.

Voordekunst has a different process foreach of the matchfunding partners,because they all have different criteria,different amounts of matchfunding anddifferent phases within thecrowdfunding campaigns that theycontribute. This consumes aconsiderable amount of time of two ofthe account managers of voordekunst.

Another form of partnership is done byBKKC (a culture support structure fundedby the province of Brabant), whichfunctions as a regional entry point tovoordekunst (and other platforms).Artists approach BKKC before theirproject goes live and if they meet thecriteria they will get guidance by BKKCon their crowdfunding campaign. Theseprojects receive matchfunding up to 30%of the goal (with a maximum of€30.000), which will only be paid if 70%of the goal is reached. Artists can choosetheir own crowdfunding platform andapply for matchfunding, but most of theprojects go live on voordekunst.

According to the director of voordekunstthey are moving in the direction ofclearer relationships with their partnersand looking for new partners. Especiallythe knowledge partnerships are hard todevelop. They have partnered first withthe ING-bank, hoping that INGemployees would counsel artists in theirentrepreneurship. That was hard toorganize and when their contact personleft the partnership also broke down.Subsequently, voordekunst set up apartnership with ABNAMRO, another bigbank, where they intended to do thesame. However, the bank has recentlydecided to end the partnership becauseof budget cuts and layoffs, before theknowledge partnership could reallybecome mature. Within the partnershipwith Deloitte there are also knowledgeaspects, for the organisation, forexample on handling big data and on taxissues.

And also within the partnership withPrins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds knowledgeissues are part of the partnership, forexample on customer relationshipmanagement and legal issues.

Voordekunst is now looking for smallerand regional organisations to developknowledge partnerships to guide andcounsel artists on entrepreneurship.

The voordekunst partnership model canbe used very well to clarify therelationships with partners. Somepartners will fit well into one kind ofpartnership, other partners might fulfilmore than one role in the partnership.But it seems recommendable to clarifythe kind of partnerships thatcrowdfunding platforms develop.


Impact on the uptake of crowdfunding

It is hard to estimate the effect ofmatchfunding on voordekunst on theamount of crowdfunding. In the annualreport on 2014 two examples ofmatchfunding are mentioned. The first isfrom the Amsterdam Fund for the Artswhich spent €48.483 on 61 projectswhich in total raised €332.689. So thematchfunding accounted for 15% of thetotal. The second is the private fund VSBwhich contributed €33.803 to 33projects which raised €130.075. Thematchfunding of the VSB-fundaccounted for 26% of the total raised.

Until spring 2016 matchfunding partnershave contributed around €350.000 toprojects which resulted in around €1,5million in project funding. This is aconsiderable amount, keeping in mindthat the vast majority of projects do notreceive matchfunding but reach theirgoal on their own. Voordekunst alsostates that the success rate ofmatchfunding is some 10% higher thanfor other projects.

Impact on the project holders

The effect of the matchfunding onindividual project holders is of coursequite different, since the amount can bebetween 10 to 30% of the total. Theseare quite important chunks of fundingwhen campaigning is hard to reach theirgoal. The matchfunding also functions asa stamp of approval or as a statement onthe quality of their project if a fund orgovernment backs them. It can give aboost to their campaign and attractother backers, especially since thesematchfunding grants often come at two-thirds or three-quarters of the campaignand help to realize more buzz andpublicity around the project.

Impact on the backers

In 2015 there were 40.107 backers ofwhom 56% donated for the first time.For the first time backers the primarymotive (60%) to donate was knowing theartist, for backers who donated morethan once the primary motive (59%) wasthe content of the project. There are nodata available of the impact ofmatchfunding on the backers.

Impact of voordekunst’smatchfunding partnerships


Impact on the partners

The partners have very different motivesfor their partnerships. For most of thepublic partners (either regionalgovernments, public funds or supportstructures) the main motive issupporting cultural entrepreneurshipand promoting access to finance. Forthem it is important they can show theyare affiliated with a new form offinancing. And with relatively smallamounts of money they support artiststo achieve larger amounts of fundingwho can also show through theirbackers that they have public support.

For private funds the motive is often toreach target groups they do not reachthemselves. We saw that for the PrinsBernhard CultuurFonds, but this alsoapplies for the VSB-fund which supportsNew Makers (talent development)through crowdfunding, which are artistswho cannot apply for funding directlywith the VSB-fund because they justgraduated from art education.

For network partners the impact is thatthey are associated with crowdfundingand they can refer artists to voordekunstfor project funding if a project proposaldoes not fit their own criteria.

The motive and impact for knowledgepartners is less clear. If they arecompanies the partnership can be partof their corporate social responsibilitypolicy or of their branding.

Impact on cultural funding

The impact on cultural funding is smallon the one hand, but big on the other.Related to the overall amount of publicfinancing of all forms of culture in theNetherlands (national, regional, local)and including cultural education,libraries etc., which is estimated at some€2.7 billion in 2015, it is a very smallnumber. It is important to rememberthat this is a reduction of more than20% compared to 2012 (Cultuur in Beeld2016, OCW). But related to the numberof projects that have been realized in sixyears (2.200) and the number of artistswhich were supported (2.100) theimpact is huge, because most of theseprojects would otherwise not have beenproduced. Especially because a lot ofthese projects would have been toosmall to receive grants from public fundsand are done by young artists. Theimpact is also big because almost130.000 people donated to the arts insix years and are a considerableaudience for the arts who have a directimpact on cultural funding through theirdonations.


Platform model

Voordekunst has become a strong brandconcerning crowdfunding in the culturalsector in the Netherlands through itsconsistent approach as a link betweenart and audience. It screens all theapplicants, 70% of the applicants make itto the platform, and they are guidedthrough all the steps of setting up acampaign. Voordekunst also providestips and guidance during the campaignson their site. This has led to a 80%success percentage of projects which golive, which is higher than most platforms.

The knowledge they acquired over timecan now be sold to other interestedparties. Voordekunst organizesconsultations, workshops andmasterclasses all over the country forartists who want to test their idea.Selling their knowledge on crowdfundingcampaigning is becoming a growing partof their business model. Voordekunsthas also turned its knowledge intoexplicit and visible knowledge on theirplatform to minimise the number ofquestions by the artists. This makes itpossible to accommodate a growingnumber of applications and projectswithout growing in staff.

Critical success factors of the platform and partnership model


This platform model makes themattractive for public and private partnerswho want to be associated withcrowdfunding for different motives:among which networking andmatchfunding are the most importantones.

Diverse partnerships

While voordekunst needed partners inthe beginning to survive, they are nowexpanding the reciprocal nature of theirpartnerships and the majority of theirincome is from the platform. Theyinvolved public and private funds andgovernments from the beginning, firstmostly as network partners to be able toreach more artists and audiencesthrough the channels of the partners.Now many of them are matchfundingpartners which has a multiplier effect forthe budget these partners invest incrowdfunding. Voordekunst also looksfor regional diversity. To spreadthemselves to all the regions, they havea partner in almost every region of theNetherlands. They have also involvedcompanies from the beginning, butthese are hard to keep involved for alonger period of time.

Duration of the partnerships and sustainability

Some of the partnerships have beenstable for a number of years, some haveended after the first few years.Voordekunst has been eager to developnew partnerships and to further developits partnership model. The currentmodel of four kinds of partnerships willprobably need some more years to befully developed and implemented, butoffers enough possibilities to establishpartnerships with clearer roles for bothsides of the partnership. To find theright knowledge partners, both for theartists and for the organizationaldevelopment, turns out not to be easy.

Involving companies for a longer timeremains a challenge. The involvementseems to be dependent on the initiatorwithin the company. When this personleaves, the cooperation often comes to ahalt. When culture is not a part of thecore business it remains a too smallaspect for the company to keep involvedfor a longer period. Also it might play arole that voordekunst is a smallorganization compared to the bigcompanies they have been partneringwith and are not of big interest forthem.



Case study author: Joost Heinsius, Values of Culture & Creativity

Layout: Jessie Pieters, IDEA Consult

Photos: Shutterstock

This case study is part ofthe EU funded projectCrowdfunding4Culture

Project partners:

Do you have questions after reading this case study? Contact the Crowdfunding4Culture project coordinator: Isabelle De Voldere (IDEA Consult), [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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