Finance tool for the cultural sector has been officially launched!

 Finance tool for the cultural sector has been officially launched!

Culture and creative professionals face several challenges when looking for finance, such as the difficulty of finding their way in the highly fragmented market of finance providers or the financial jargon being used. The newly developed So You Need Money tool aims to mitigate these challenges and facilitates the search for finance, while at the same time strengthening the financial literacy of cultural and creative professionals.

The new online tool has been developed in the context of the EU funded project Creative FLIP, with the aim of complementing the So You Need Money guidebook (2021). It helps cultural and creative professionals to better understand the language used by financiers and gain an overview of the different types of finance they can access or that are most suitable for their ventures. Multiple user testing sessions with cultural and creative professionals across Europe, sectoral representatives and policy makers were organised, to ensure that the tool is developed in a user-centred manner.

The web-based tool provides an overview of the most relevant private finance and public funding providers for the cultural sector. Based on users’ answers to one or more of the following questions (filters), the tool navigates users to the most relevant finance providers for their ambitions:

  1. Why do you need money?
  2. Who are you?
  3. Which life-cycle phase are you in?
  4. Where are you based?

The tool contains information of over 600 private and public finance providers clustered per type of finance:

  • Donation and reward-based crowdfunding
  • Philanthropy
  • Public funding
  • Microcredit
  • Impact investment - Venture Philanthropy
  • Crowd lending
  • Business angel finance
  • Crowd equity
  • Loans
  • Venture Capital.

By providing a tailored overview of various finance sources, the main message that the tool wants to convey is the importance of developing a healthy financing mix combining different sources, rather than focusing on a single type of finance. The tool aims to broaden the perspectives on the financing opportunities for cultural and creative actors.

In addition to gathering more than 600 different private and public finance providers, the tool also provides capacity building, in the form of useful tips, inspiring cases and in-depth sections on the different financing instruments. The tool is also fully complementary to the CulturEU guide by the European Commission, that offers an overview of European funding opportunities for cultural and creative ventures.

The So You Need Money tool is integrated in the Creatives Unite platform and will remain operational there as a unique one-stop-shop point dedicated to national finance and funding opportunities and financial (literacy) capacity building for cultural and creative actors even after the Creative FLIP project ends.

Do you want to know more or are you interested in a demo? Contact Isabelle.devoldere@ideaconsult.be

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