What is a Director of Development? Art Fund's Alice Regent explains
- maxwell museums
- May 1
- 9 min read
Have you ever wondered what the role of Director of Development actually is? Heck, you might even have wondered what 'development' as a job even means!
One of my aims here and in my newsletter is to demystify the world of museums — and some of the jobs within it.
And there's a role I’ve long wanted to shine a light on, one that feels more vital than ever to the museum sector. The role of Development Director.
Most museums, galleries, charities and non-profits have one, although sometimes the title differs. At the Courtauld for example, they have a Director of Advancement.
Whatever the title, it’s a little-known and understood job to the wider public. But without giving too much of this interview away, development simply means fundraising, and directors lead that important task. (Yes, the euphemistic job title makes sense when you know it’s a role asking people for cold, hard, cash.)
With cash in short supply for cultural institutions right now, it’s overdue that I pulled back the curtain for you to find out more. So, I’m delighted to say that my latest interview is with Alice Regent, Director of Development at Art Fund.
Art Fund is the UK’s national art charity that raises millions to give to Britain’s museums to help them buy and share works of art, and for them to connect with their communities. While a fair chunk of those millions comes from the National Art Pass membership scheme, the rest has to be raised by Alice and her team.
Here we chat about Art Fund’s unique relationships with donors, how the fundraising landscape has changed since her career began, and she tells me whether fundraising is really just a succession of long lunches.
Hi Alice. Let’s start from the top, as I think many people don’t really know what ‘development’ means. So tell us, what actually is a Director of a Development and what do their teams do?
It essentially means a director of fundraising. When we're talking about it in museums and galleries and charities, it tends to mean a focus on the high net-worth fundraising side of things.
As a development team, we raise funds from a number of different channels. It's individuals and philanthropists, with patrons in that pot, as well trusts and foundations, corporate fundraising and legacy gifts. And what we do is we essentially work to bring money in and to keep that group of supporters engaged.
What that looks like for Art Fund from the development team in particular, is that we raise £8-9m a year that we then give away to museums and galleries across the country.
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How did you get into fundraising?
I did a history degree in London. I would have loved to do a Master’s degree, and couldn't afford it. So I thought: how do I start work and learn about things that interest me at the same time? I wrote to the British Museum and said to them exactly that.
I went to the British Museum for two weeks as a volunteer in the development team. Someone left, and I moved into a temporary role, which turned into a permanent role, and I was at the British Museum in the end, for about four years.
And then I moved over to Art Fund because I loved working at the British Museum but I had a real curiosity about the museum sector more broadly, and what was out there, and I wanted the bigger picture of all of these individual, unique organizations doing very different things. So the role at Art Fund really interested me in fundraising for this much bigger landscape of projects, activities and acquisitions. I've been at Art Fund now for 11 years.
Has the fundraising landscape changed since you started at Art Fund 11 years ago?
I think there's been quite a big shift, particularly since the pandemic in how museums and galleries — and Art Fund — articulate the impact of what we do to donors.
A long time ago we might have fundraised based on the quality of an artwork — “it's so rare, it's so beautiful, it's so extraordinary” etc. But now we also talk more broadly about the value of museums and galleries for communities, for education, for well being, and for society, and that’s mirrored in the type of projects that we support, and it's mirrored in how we talk about acquisitions.
Now we think ‘how do we articulate the really important role that museums play?’ It's not just come and look at a collection, it's actually what is the ripple effect of all of these projects? What can a gift spark? Hanging a work of art on the wall is step one. What happens next?
I'd also say a big shift has been there has tended to be reliable ‘Old Guard’ philanthropists for the arts. There's familiar names, and I think many arts charities are thinking we need to diversify our sources of income. We need to reach individuals or organizations or funding bodies who might not have traditionally supported museums. The pressure really is on to look to new sources of income.
The flip side of that is the challenges: the increased scrutiny on funding for the arts. You've got this double edged sword of the pressure on museums and galleries to find new ways to fund their programs and stay afloat and bring in income, versus this increased, really intense, view on where this money should come from and who the right funder is. And that, the right funder on Monday might not be the right funder on Friday.
Right now it’s a tough financial landscape. Do you worry that Art Fund’s support programmes — such as for collecting — are becoming just ‘nice to have’ but not really priorities? Can Art Fund really help museums when museums struggle to even keep the lights on?
We'd love to do everything, but we can't do everything. It's really important for us as a charity that we have clarity of where Art Fund makes a difference. We have a very clear strategic mission about funding collections, building audiences and amplifying the sector. And across those three areas, we have clear funding programs that do that.
But lobbying for the sector and speaking out and being a voice is hugely important for us in terms of rallying wider philanthropy. But it's a really good point, and our eyes are open to these challenges. We want to support museums in raising awareness of those challenges however we can.
To your point about collecting being ‘the nice to have,’ it goes back to the storytelling. What is the ripple effect of that acquisition? What is the effect for the local school, for the local community, for the wider collection, for the curator, for a new partnership, and it's down to us to work with the museum or in our own fundraising for that object, to talk about that ripple effect, because that also then helps understand the value of museums. That's just the key thing we need to be articulating.
What would you say is the Art Fund-supported acquisition you’re most proud to have worked on and achieved over the years?
Well, there’s saving the Wedgwood collection, our fastest ever campaign. That was a £14m campaign, and the public element [was completed] in a month. It was unexpectedly quick, and the incredible support for that from the Midlands was amazing. The V&A Wedgwood Collection in Stoke-on-Trent has just celebrated the 10th anniversary of that acquisition. It looks fantastic.
I think my proudest project is I led the campaign to save Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, which was one of the most nail-biting but energizing projects I've ever worked on.
We ran a campaign to save Prospect Cottage from being sold into private ownership, and to protect it as a space for creativity and activity in Folkestone for a really wide audience. It's now positioned Jarman, quite rightly, as an extraordinary 20th century British artist.
We had amazing advocacy for it. Those who worked with and knew Jarman got on board and joined in, helping us rally support from Tilda Swinton to Sandy Powell to Isaac Julian to Dexter Fletcher. The other thing was the public response to it. We had donations from 42 countries. The press pickup was beyond anything we'd had before. I think it was something like 8000 donors in total, and we went over target. The pace and the energy of it was amazing.
Wow. So how do you approach a campaign like that? Is there a strategy?
There is no one-size-fits-all for a fundraising campaign, especially for an acquisition campaign against a deadline.
I think across all of our campaigns, something that's been really important is asking donors, kind of behind the scenes, to help us get off the starting blocks first. You don't want to go live to the public at zero. Having nothing in the bank is a really challenging place to fundraise from. We work with donors first to say: help us get off that block. It’s really important for the momentum.
We will think really carefully about how do we reach the target and what does that breakdown look like? And through doing that, you see where your gaps are.
The PR and the communications around the campaign is so important for bringing people out of the woodwork. We had a six figure gift for Prospect Cottage that came off the back of a comment on Instagram. I don't think I've ever worked on a campaign where we've set out and thought we will do it. There's always a mystery element.
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I’ve always wondered how you actually get high-net-worth donors to sign the cheques. What’s the formula? Are you taking them to five lunches, and on the fifth one you're saying, can you please give us £100,000?
Oddly enough, no. Individual giving is interesting because everyone is so different in their motivation for being a donor to a museum. You might be a donor because you are a frustrated curator — you pursued a career in a hedge fund, but you think, ‘Oh, I'm so passionate about history’. You might be a donor because you grew up in Wakefield, and you feel really strongly about the Hepworth there, and you want to give to your local area in some way.
Some individuals just want to give and be left alone. Others want to really be in the project. Some want to have quite an informal communication such as we'll just do it by email, or do it over the phone and meet the curator, and have a nice time. Some want funding reports.
So it's all about reading what the situation is with the individual. Sometimes it's a long, long game. Sometimes it can take years to get that gift from an individual, and sometimes they might spring out of nowhere because they met your director at an event and they invite them to something, and suddenly you're in a rhythm.
But presumably both parties know what is the end goal for everyone? So how do you know whether a donation is going to come down the road? What keeps the relationship going?
It's a great question, because you're right, how as a fundraiser do you protect your time? I have finite hours in the day, so what am I pursuing?
It's relationship management. You usually get quite a good read for it. It’s a bit of a cliché, but sometimes it can be quite difficult to talk about money and actually being comfortable having the conversations quite directly helps.
It's quite rare to be engaging with a development team and feeling that there is no impetus for you to give.
Fundraising can get a bit of a bad rap of being just lunches and schmoozing. The word schmooze is just the worst! And don't get me wrong, there's always an element of that in every job, but actually it's about long term strategy. It can be about chess pieces. It's about timing and intuition, and it's about telling a really strong, compelling argument at the right moment, and sometimes it's about knowing when to call it quits.
Is there ever any sense of competing with individual museums for donors? Because they could just go to the institution’s directly, no?
It's really important to us and to our trustees that an Art Fund grant can help a museum leverage other funding. So for example if you want to buy an object, and you're coming to Art Fund for a chunk, we want to see the fundraising plan so we can understand how we fit in that picture. And we want you to say “Art Fund have given a grant” to your other funders.
I think that element of competition is an interesting point because actually, we fundraise in order to give the funds to museums. And if a donor called me and said “Should I give it to you for that? Or should I give it directly to them?,” I'm not going to say no, please give it [to us]. The common goal is to motivate and encourage funding for UK museums, be it through us or be it through others.
Finally, what’s your focus for the (financial) year ahead?
We're fundraising for an initiative called Empowering Curators, which is a fellowship program for mid-career curators from diverse backgrounds, working with museums across the UK to really create new professional development opportunities and accelerate career development opportunities there.
Another big project we're fundraising for is called Going Places, which is an initiative about touring exhibitions and networks across the UK.
Alongside that, every week we are receiving applications for objects and works of art to be acquired by museums — and [new] commissions too is a hugely important thing for us at the moment. So all of that we are fundraising for. We we try and be as flexible and as adaptive as we can.
More interviews with leading cultural figures:
Somerset House's Jonathan Reekie on 25 years of making their own money
Turmoil at the British Museum explained by the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins
Compton Verney's Director celebrates 20 years with a sculpture park
