‘People want to support things they love’: Paul Smith on funding the VOCES8 Foundation

Paul Smith is clear that the VOCES8 ensemble could operate perfectly successfully as a commercial performing group. It tours internationally, records, publishes and has built a substantial audience of its own.

‘We could run a very successful VOCES8 as a commercial entity,’ he says, ‘and it would probably make more money than our charity does.’

The ensemble, though, is only one part of the wider VOCES8 Foundation. Around it sit other performing groups, education programmes, recording and publishing activity, and charitable operations in the UK, US and France.

That wider structure allows the organisation to do work that a single commercial ensemble, however successful, would struggle to sustain.

‘It would not have anything like the global impact that we are able to achieve.’

Smith says the three foundations together now have at least three times the turnover that the VOCES8 ensemble alone would generate and are putting on more than 600 concerts and workshops this year.

‘We work much harder, all of us in the whole team, to generate a much bigger pot,’ he says. ‘And with that pot, we can do so much more than if we just had eight singers going about their daily business and singing concerts.’

Balancing commercial activity and charitable purpose

Combining substantial earned income with charitable purpose inevitably raises questions about how the organisation should be structured and where the boundaries should sit. ‘There are natural tensions to this kind of thing,’ Smith says.

What began as what he calls a ‘shoebox organisation’ run by him and his brother Barnaby is now supported by executive teams and trustees with experience from different fields. The balance between commercial and charitable activity is something they continue to revisit.

‘The discussion around where we sit as a commercial entity, and where we sit as a charitable one, and how that is balanced is a nuanced one. We look at it every year, and it’s never straightforward.’

The charitable purpose has remained the constant, even as the structure around it has changed. ‘There’s always been a sense that we want to create something that changes lives, doing something good long into the future.’

Operating across several countries has made those structural questions more complicated. Different legal systems, funding traditions and expectations all come into play, and Smith describes himself as a ‘constant student’ of the subject, listening to people who know far more about it than he does.

The underlying question, however, remains fairly simple: what structure allows the organisation to achieve most?

Three countries, three funding cultures

A large part of the Foundation’s income is earned directly. ‘A lot of our income is generated from concert fees and from our digital platforms and all the various other income streams that we’ve set up.’

Alongside that, philanthropy, sponsorship and grant funding have become increasingly important, although the balance varies sharply between the UK, US and France.

Smith has spends a lot of time leading projects across France, and alongside his work with the VOCES8 Foundation in the US he now divides much of his time between the Foundation’s work in France, Britain and the US. That has given him a particularly direct view of the different attitudes towards giving in each country.

For him, the pandemic accelerated the organisation’s development of philanthropy, particularly in the US. ‘The US is a very strong market for individual philanthropy,’ Smith says. ‘The UK is a bit behind, but slowly catching up.’

France presents a different picture.

‘In France, corporate sponsorship, we find, is more normal than individual giving, and there is more a sense that the arts should be state supported rather than by individuals other than those with major foundations.’

For the Foundation’s French activity, which Smith says is predominantly charitable education work, roughly two-thirds of the income comes from sponsors and funders, with about a third generated through earned activity. In the UK, he describes the balance for core work such as concerts differently, with earned income ahead of charitable giving, while the US operation relies more heavily on donor support. But organisations vary, he says, and what works for one may not work for others in the same way.

Moving between the three has made him particularly aware of how attitudes towards money and giving change from country to country. ‘You see how different people expect their money to be spent, or expect to spend their money.’

Those differences affect more than the balance sheet. They influence how organisations talk about support, how comfortable people are discussing money and the sort of relationship a donor or sponsor expects to have with the organisation they are supporting.

Learning to ask for money

The American approach required a considerable adjustment. ‘I found it so hard as a British person to start getting used to the American way of asking for money and talking about money.’

One donor helped change Smith’s thinking by paying for the Foundation to work with a fundraising specialist rather than simply making a conventional donation. He describes it as ‘one of the best gifts you can possibly get’.

The arrangement began with an American fundraising coach and eventually led to a more developed fundraising operation; the US organisation now has its own development director.

More significantly, it changed Smith’s attitude towards asking for support. ‘I have spent time really understanding  what it means when people want to support things they love and care about’, he says.

He no longer sees fundraising as an awkward transaction in which an arts organisation has to persuade somebody to part with money. ‘Asking for money isn’t a bad thing. It’s showing people how the opportunity to do something good exists, and then helping them do it.’

It is a deceptively simple idea, but one that required him to unlearn some fairly deeply rooted British instincts.

Corporate support in France

The French operation provides a rather different example of adapting to local funding conditions.

There, the work is presented under the name Sing’In rather than VOCES8 Foundation. Smith says the choice reflected the fact that a French education ministry was less likely to engage with an organisation presented primarily through the name of a British performing ensemble. A broader identity centred on singing and education made the nature of the work clearer.

‘We’ve come up with a brand that we think works more strongly in that kind of government partnership space,’ he says. ‘And it’s the same for the companies that support us as well.’

Direct government funding remains modest. Smith jokes that receiving even €500 in the previous year would have felt like ‘a big success’, while corporate sponsorship and other external funding play a much more substantial role.

The two identities serve different purposes. VOCES8, the ensemble, brings international artistic recognition; Sing’In presents the education and participation work in a form that makes more immediate sense to French public bodies and corporate supporters.

Finding the right balance between the two, Smith says, is something the team is always working on. ‘Above all’, he says, ‘I’m passionate about the work that we are doing in these different regions in France – it’s uplifting and inspiring in so many ways.’

What the wider structure makes possible

The Foundation’s model is not based on a choice between commercial success and charitable purpose, but about growing an eco-system that can have the biggest positive impact, far greater than the sum of it’s parts. ‘One of our former VOCES8 Scholars recently described our work as creating the VOCES8 Universe, akin to the Marvel Universe’, he recounts with a smile. Its earned income is part of what makes the wider charitable activity possible, while philanthropy, sponsorship and grants allow the organisation to reach beyond the work that would make commercial sense for a single performing ensemble, and partnerships blossom all over the world.

The comparison with VOCES8 itself is striking. As an eight-voice group, it could concentrate on an international career built around performances, recordings and related activity. The wider Foundation chooses to use the reputation, income and infrastructure built around that ensemble to support something much broader.

That brings greater complexity and requires more money to be raised, but Smith sees the result in terms of what the organisation can put back into the world.

‘We could run a very successful VOCES8 as a commercial entity,’ he says, ‘but it would not have anything like the global impact that we are able to achieve.’

His experience in the US has also changed the way he thinks about those who choose to support that work. ‘People want to support things they love and care about.’

For Paul Smith, fundraising is increasingly about making that opportunity visible. ‘It’s showing people how the opportunity to do something good exists, and then helping them do it.’

Paul Smith

Paul Smith is co-founder of VOCES8, CEO of the VOCES8 Foundation, and a performer, conductor, composer and educator. He is the author of The VOCES8 Method, published by Edition Peters in four languages and used in thousands of schools internationally.

A former chorister at Westminster Abbey, Paul has performed with VOCES8 since its foundation in 2005 and has worked extensively with choirs, schools, universities and communities around the world. His work explores the role of singing and the arts in education, creativity, wellbeing and community building.

As a composer, he writes for vocal groups, choirs, orchestras and soloists, while his collaborative projects have involved artists including Paul Simon and Eric Whitacre. Through the VOCES8 Foundation, Paul has also helped develop major international education, outreach and digital initiatives reaching hundreds of thousands of young people.