There are 4,000
corporations in America that have a “corporate giving” program.
In the U.S. alone, there are about 100,000 people who are in the high-worth bracket called “25m dollars or up wealth".
70,000 of these people give cash to artists.
Are any of them sponsoring your practice?
If not, let’s change that in 2024!
To help you with this, I want to introduce you to John Halpern. We had him as a guest expert in one of our Artist Roundtables (which are weekly panels for Praxis students).
His brother does “prospect research” for major institutions, that is, he researches who would be the best people to ask for financial support. He gets paid over 6 figures to do this research, and has helped find over 200 billion dollars for 609 non-profits (think: museums, universities, zoos, hospitals etc) over the last 25 years. No joke.
“Prospect research” is the powerful process of finding the right people to contact and ask them to support your idea or project.
In the professional fundraising world, institutions hire a “prospect research” person or team to do this important research.
One of the things these professionals do during prospect research is something called “wealth screenings”. For example, they can find out what Michael Bloomberg’s wealth is, and where he donates.
You can, and *should*, do this too, as an artist. Because, as John points out:
“At
this time in our society, more than ever, there is a lot of ‘loose money’ that’s looking for important projects… projects that allow the donors to have satisfaction that their money is going to a place that will change a certain part of society or community they want to see changed."
So your objective is to find out where your mission links up with their mission, that is:
where their money can be invested in your project in a way that satisfies both missions.
If you’re a serious artist, but you’ve struggled to get funding for your projects in the past, this is a useful technique to learn. And I will teach it to you:
On Monday the October 14th at 1:00 pm
EST, I will teach a free workshop on our proprietary Praxis Artist-Patron Matchmaking Method that students have used to raise more than $169,852 - yes, you read right $169,852 - to date.
