Adventures in Growth: Creating success through a 9-month collaborative journey

Here at Growing Circles, we love our longer-term collaborative partnerships. It is really rewarding for us to see the level of growth that can be achieved working with an organisation and how that can continue to grow in the time following. It’s hard to snapshot a collaboration with so many different aspects so we thought we would share with you our case-study of our time with Artful - Make it Happen, a Community Interest Company (CIC) based in Rotherham.

In 2022, Artful – Make it Happen CIC worked with Growing Circles to submit a Social Enterprise Support Fund (SESF) grant. This was successful and enabled them to contract us to be their business growth partner for nine months. The goals of the project were designed to grow Artful towards becoming a sustainable social enterprise and included aims to: 

• Generate new revenue of £3k per month by September 2023 

• Increase trading income to represent 60% of revenue 

• Develop a five-year plan with local communities and the creative sector to establish a creative hub including workshops, a community event space and studios. 

One of the perks of working with Growing Circles, as opposed to employing an individual Business Development Officer, is that we have a full range of skills and experts amongst our team. This meant that when we created our areas of focus to meet the above goals, we were able to provide a relevant team member for the job.

Generating New Revenue

Jo Purseglove, project manager for Growing Circles, would create a monthly report on suggested funding opportunities for Artful. Identifying funding opportunities would involve looking for opportunities that aligned with current and future Artful projects, which we would assist with a project outline for, in addition to considering the organisation’s upcoming long and short-term aims.

These would then be reviewed between Vicky Hilton, Artful’s Creative Director, and Kris Mackay, Growing Circles founder, on a regular basis as part of their business planning sessions.

At the time of writing, we are pleased to report we have:

• Achieved £19k of new income for Artful

• Are awaiting the outcome on various other funding bids and opportunities, amounting to £90k

Increasing Trading Income

Following market research into competitors and the industry, we discovered that most arts organisations rely more heavily on funding as opposed to trade to build the majority of their revenue. Reflecting on this, we focussed our efforts to funding bids, including developing a strategy to move the organisation towards becoming a National Provider Organisation for the Arts Council England. 

We also created, designed and launched a new website; created sales and marketing strategy and plans; in addition to designing an end-to-end sales and delivery process and associated assets, including: 

• Sales Process 

• Contact / Mailing List 

• Product Development: Carnival and Creative Workshops 

• Product Campaign Materials 

• Artful Brochure 

• Sales Scripts 

• Creation and template design for mailerlite account 

Develop a five-year plan

Artful’s 5 year plan included creating a plan with local communities and the creative sector to establish a creative hub including workshops, a community event space and studios. This was supported by Growing Circles through:

5 x 2 hour development sessions and weekly growth meeting which have led to the production of a detailed 3-year Business Plan including: 

• Business Model Canvas  

• Mission and aims  

• Values  

• SWOT analysis  

• Pest Analysis  

• Product list  

• Organisational Structure  

• Targeted growth Strategies, Objectives and Tactics

Market research and reports which have been built into the 3-year business plan to achieve NPO status in 2026:

• Relationship building 

• Relationship developed with Flux Rotherham, local Creative People and Places. 

• Relationship developed with Children’s Capital of Culture 

Created and implemented business processes and structures including: 

• Project Design Template 

• Project Pricing Template 

• Pipeline Tracker 

• Associate contract and Task Order 

• Kris met with UNLTD Business Growth Support Offer. 

What Challenges were faced?

• Originally, the contract was due to run for 12 months, but this was reduced to 9 months to align with the grant funding cycle. This meant that a number of funding bids were still awaiting outcome by the end of our contract period. 

• As the Artful team are so passionate about their organisation and how it is represented, they wanted to retain control of some of their marketing aspects which made some parts of our delivery more challenging. This was really useful learning for us when considering how best to support clients in the future. 

Project Highlights

Our collaboration with Artful has been filled with great moments of pride and achievement for all of those involved. Here are some of the highlights for us:

• We received very positive feedback on the creation and design of the website. 

• The relationships developed have led to further projects and revenue opportunities for Artful. 

• Artful have the business processes and structures in place to enable them to apply for a wider range of funding. 

• Growing Circles are continuing to support Artful to develop and grow a number of the projects we’ve developed. 

Quick Statistics: 

Over £320k of potential funding identified by Growing Circles team as part of their horizon scanning. 

• £19k amount of successful funding vs £0 amount of unsuccessful applications giving a 100% success rate (fingers crossed for the outstanding bids!). 

• 915 visitors to the new website since its creation until the end of July (when Growing Circles sent their last Artful newsletter). 

• 145 page views for recent Healthy Holidays project page on website. 

• 442 subscribers opened Artful newsletters created by Growing Circles 

One of our favourite parts about longer-term collaborations that aim to improve an organisations long-term business plans is that we will see the effects of our recent collaboration over the coming years. Some of those changes, we’re pleased to say we will continue to be a part of but others we will happily cheer from the sidelines as we see them unfold.

If you’d like to chat about whether your social enterprise, charity of business could work with Growing Circles in a similar way, we would love to hear from you! If you would like to look further into ways we can work together, check out our What We Do page here. Alternatively, you’re welcome to have a chat with us directly by filling in this form!