"Sponsorship Keeps Us On Our Toes" - Viv Groskop

Viv Groskop, journalist, broadcaster, comedian, director of the Bath Literature Festival -  and host at this year’s UK Sponsorship Awards, stresses just how vital sponsorship is to an arts organisation.

‘Is sponsorship getting more important in your world?’

I've been the Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival for the past four years and I've seen the huge difference sponsorship makes to these major not-for-proft arts events. Bath is one of the biggest literature festivals in the UK, alongside Hay, Cheltenham and Edinburgh. Now in its 21st year, it runs over ten days, has an audience of 20,000 and features over 300 authors and performers at around 150 events. Like many of these festivals it operates on a mix of ticket sales, fund-raising, arts council funding and sponsors of many different kinds (from hotel partners and local schools to the headline sponsor, investment bank Baillie Gifford, and the festival's media partner, The Independent). A growing part of all these arts festivals is sponsorship, whether it's small local businesses looking to connect with new customers or multi-nationals looking to show their support for the arts and reach new audiences for their brand. 

‘What would life be like without sponsorship? What would we forego?’

The easy answer is that there wouldn't be enough money for a lot of important and meaningful things to happen. There are so many sectors of our lives that need sponsorship and patronage to survive: huge swathes of the arts, fashion, sport, the media, even politics. But it isn't just about money: when someone sponsors you, it automatically makes you up your game and think about what you're delivering. Sponsorship forces an organisation to have a proper strategy, to articulate exactly what it's for and to clarify the change it wants to make in the world. If it can't answer those questions, it won't attract sponsorship in the first place and, arguably, doesn't deserve it. So sponsorship keeps us all on our toes, justifying our existence. And rightly so. On a personal level, I wish someone would sponsor my hair as it is extremely expensive to maintain. Maybe I'm not making its ambassadorial qualities clear enough to potential sponsors. I need to work on that.

Viv Groskop is available for other hosting and speaking events, please check out her corporate profile Viv Groskop, Specialist Speakers