Session caller: Susie and Amy
Participants: Joanna Rosenfeld, Claire Morse, Dylan, Lucille, Pat, Anastasia, Vicky
Nikita

Report:
Susie is a finance professional with a creative twist, and Amy is a theatre maker with enviable management skills. Together, we founded Pinecone Performance Lab in 2016. We have been senior professionals in the arts for over a decade now, and have accumulated mountains of knowledge on how to effectively create, fund, pay, and manage your own creative work.

In late 2022, we committed to creating a series of online courses where we would be able to download all of our detailed knowledge and tools, and make them available and accessible to theatre makers, arts freelancers, and creatives.

The courses will include videos, transcripts, templates, and resource banks for people to have lifetime access to. The courses will be aimed specifically to artists and theatre makers that need practical guidance on what to do to make their own work. Our target audience wants to produce their own show, create their own company, and build on their organisational infrastructure, but don’t have the staff and/or enough resources and knowledge to delegate these tasks to someone else.

In the session, we discussed the importance of creating tailored how-to / DIY courses on arts management, which include:
How to file your Self Assessment
Why/when/how to incorporate into a limited company/CIC, and all of what that entails (governance, responsibilities, corporation tax return)
Differences between various un/incorporated entities (LTD by guarantee/by shares, CICs, unincorporated entities, charitable status)
Creative project management (assembling a team, contract and policy templates, company and people management)
Budget building for live performances
Fundraising essentials for theatre and live arts
Theatre Tax Relief guidance

Vicki suggested reaching out to the leaders of performing arts organisations and asking for their support on building a syllabus for their area of expertise.

Amy and I were relieved and excited to hear that these courses are needed and wanted. In the weeks to come we will develop a plan and a timeline to develop this idea into a product. We have already thought about using Kickstarter to get some initial resources to build a very high-quality product. We will create an email list for anyone who is interested in getting updates on where we are with it, and being the first to know when we’re ready to go live with the next stage.

Thank you to all who came! And if you’d like to be kept in the loop, do sign up for our newsletter here, and tick the box for “online courses”: http://eepurl.com/iim5vP