Funding entertainment content: six things funders need to know

Imagine that you’ve just funded the best podcast your team has ever listened to. It combines deeply personal stories with cutting-edge research, is smartly-edited and thoughtfully scored, and makes an urgent case for social change.

There’s one problem; hardly anyone has listened to it. Your grantee has pushed it out on all of their social media channels and newsletters, but without much pick-up. You, as the funder, have tried to help – but your network is full of organisers and policy wonks, rather than the target audience of savvy young consumers.

It’s a classic case of failing to insist on a distribution plan up-front, which creates a problem that no amount of social media amplification or email blasts will ever solve. Anyone you fund should have a robust distribution plan from the outset, such as demonstrated interest or commitment from an entertainment distributor – like a streaming service, podcast network, or games publisher.

Whether it’s the latest blockbuster game, art-house documentary, or gritty serial, we often only see the glitzy, glamourous outputs of the entertainment industry. But there’s a very long and winding supply chain that leads to those polished end-products. Without understanding the complexity of that path from concept to content, social funders can find themselves accidentally competing with commercial interests, instead of widening a funding bottle-neck.

Pinch-points differ for different media, but by identifying them, funders can maximise their influence. It could be that your funds are most effective far earlier in the production cycle than you might expect – supporting script-writing, or networking, for instance. You might even re-evaluate your goal; would you rather commission content, or successfully diversify the people & perspectives across an entire industry?

There’s a natural temptation as a funder to be proactive and hands-on when commissioning something as high-profile as a piece of public-facing entertainment, which you hope might reach millions. But when working with industry experts, it’s better to be hands-off; if you can set a goal, decide a budget, and pick the right partners, you’re most of the way there.

But we’ve seen many people make the mistake of starting the creative process with a fixed idea of what the end-product should look like. This invariably ends up failing to create fresh, innovative content that appeals to audiences. If things end up going seriously awry, the answer is to reassess your criteria for finding experts, rather than trying to micro-manage them.