A guide to growing your Heritage Organisation’s income

The third a series of guides published to help you run a successful and sustainable heritage organisation.

This guide builds upon two other publications: Shops and cafés: pathways to profit? and Grants and grantmakers: insight for Heritage Compass participants.

It looks at how your organisation can grow its turnover. It highlights routes to consider for teams that want to see their heritage organisation expand its reach. For those not yet ready to grow their organisation, the benchmarks in this report can help you compare your income streams to similar-sized organisations.

The benchmarking data in this report is drawn from Heritage Compass participants so that the learnings are as directly relevant to you as possible.

The data is sliced into small, medium and large organisations so that you can pick the size that most directly compares to your own.

The guide is based on an analysis of publicly available financial data provided to regulators in England. The data in this guide offers valuable guidance if you ask yourselves questions such as ‘Do we want to grow our organisation’s income?’ or ‘What would a larger organisation look like financially?’. The guide points to advice on how to get there.

As with the previous guides, you’ll need to use this as a starting point, supplementing our data with your own knowledge and experience and that of your peers or advisors.

Contents include:

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Our data
• Donated income: starting up and getting established
• Growing with grants
• Trading up: earned income as a driver of growth
• Trading and commercial organisation
• Discussion: getting the most out of growth
• Conclusion: five valuable questions to ask yourselves
• Resources

Go to the Guide (PDF)