Institute of Contemporary Arts

Starry, starry night...

Date: 25 May 2007

Last week, Thursday to be precise, we held a gala fundraising event for the ICA. This event took the form of a celebrity "Pecha Kucha" evening, with a dinner and an auction thrown in for good measure. For those of you unfamiliar with the format, Pecha Kucha ("chit chat" in Japanese) involves having around 10 -12 people prepare and talk about 20 slides on the topic of their choice. They are allowed only 20 seconds per slide, which are on an automatic timer. Each speaker therefore has just under 7 minutes to rattle through his/her slides, which makes for a quick-fire, exciting and entertaining evening. Pecha Kucha audiences are also notoriously critical - if they think the speaker is performing poorly, they will let him/her know. The Pecha Kucha format was devised by Klein Dytham, a firm of British architects working in Tokyo, in part as a response to overlong, uninspiring business presentations. We have been lucky enough to be allowed to use this format as part of the ICA Club's programme - this is our creative networking activity - and it has been phenomenally successful for us.

However, the event last Thursday was something of a departure. The speakers on this occasion were all well-known figures from the worlds of art, publishing, television and entertainment. The co-hosts for the evening were our chairman, Alan Yentob and Simon Amstell, and the line-up of star speakers included Rageh Omar, Joanna Lumley, Johnny Vegas, Jefferson Hack, Simon Schama, Jon Snow, Kathy Lette, Grayson Perry and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham. We also had a "surprise" speaker - the incredible Beardy Man. Also, unlike our regular programmed Pecha Kucha events, the purpose of this evening was to raise funds for the ICA, both through the sales of dinner tables and the auction that took place during the evening.

The good news (good news for us, anyway) is that the evening was a success on every level. We raised a very useful amount of money and we made a lot of new friends and contacts. It was also an exciting and highly visible way to kick off our 60th anniversary. Importantly, with this gala evening, I think we've got something now that, assuming we can secure permission from the creators, can become a regular fixture in our annual fundraising calendar. As we struggle, together with other publicly-funded institutions, to find ways to secure sustainable revenue in the coming Olympian years, that has a real value for us. In a sense, this represents the "Holy Grail" of any fundraising activity, namely the identification of a project that can generate attractive commercial returns, is repeatable, is integrated into the overall cultural agenda of the institution, and creates a certain "buzz".

Preparing for this event turned out - surprise, surprise - to be much more difficult than we had ever imagined. That was partly because, with an almost entirely new team here at the ICA, we had little recent experience of organising an event of this size, nature and complexity. When we first thought about holding this event, I naively and arrogantly assumed that organising it would be only slightly more challenging than organising my 8 year old's birthday party: just pick a venue, send out some invites, book the entertainment and - hey presto - you've got yourself a gala fundraiser. The idea that we would need almost 7 months (and that probably was too short) and more resources than you would require to mount a respectably-sized military campaign would have seemed laughable. But - you've guessed it - it did. The wilier hands on our team did say that we were biting off more than we could chew with this first foray into the glamorous but perilous world of fundraising - we should have stuck to a simpler format, something that would be easier to organise, they warned. They said we should expect only to break-even with a first event, and that we would only actually make money in subsequent years. But the young (in my case, middle-aged) Turks of the ICA said no - if we're going to do something, let's do it big. So, with a Fitzcarraldo-like sense of determination, off we went.

I won't bore you with the challenges and difficulties we faced in pulling this event together. At various times in the process, we thought we would have no venue, or raise no money, or have no speakers, or have no auction prizes, or have an empty room with no guests - or all of the above. It was much harder to sell tickets for an event that was still quite new, and needed a degree of explanation. Securing the speakers was a real challenge, since we were working on what turned out to be a very short timetable. Even when we had secured them, we had to explain the concept to each of them, and then assist them in preparing their presentations. Luckily, we have a great team here, and we were very ably assisted by Act IV, specialists in arranging this kind of event so that, as with many of our events, it was much more than alright on the night.

By lunchtime on the day, I was starting to feel unusually nervous. When I walked into the venue at around 4:30 pm (the guests were due to start arriving at 7 pm) I found a scene of great activity - a polite way of saying it was chaos. But then, just like one of those speeded up nature films that show the blossoming of a flower, or clouds rolling across the sky, in a few seconds, everything fell into place. By 7 pm, the only thing left for me was to enjoy the evening.

And that wasn't too difficult. In a strange way (and with apologies to my wife), it reminded me of my wedding reception, in the sense that we had a room full of guests, all of whom wished the ICA well, and I didn't have nearly enough time to talk to everyone. But I did get to meet famous people. I'm still relatively new to this job and I'm not embarrassed to admit (OK, I'm a little embarrassed) that meeting celebrities does give me quite a thrill. What was particularly rewarding was that these were all people for whom I have great respect and who were famous for actually doing something. Given current notions of what constitutes "celebrity" it was truly refreshing to see and hear individuals who have constructed careers based on achieving something of cultural interest and worth. Each of them gave us a lot of their time, and each delivered an excellent presentation - amusing, informative, passionate and entertaining. We were very lucky to have secured them for our event, not least because performing at a Pecha Kucha is quite a challenge: you don't want to let the audience down, you don't want to let the other speakers down, and you don't want to let yourself down. So if any of them should read this by any chance - once again, we are very thankful to you.

Coming back to work after an event like this is somewhat anti-climactic. Fortunately, there is never such a thing as a dull day here, and it's never too long before the next big event comes along. In fact, already this week we've opened our new exhibition Memorial to the Iraq War and next week we open another important exhibition, All Tomorrow's Pictures. It's been a busy month, with lots of events happening in quick succession, leaving little opportunity for me really to savour each of them as long as I would flish. But last week's evening was a real treat, and one I will remember fondly for some time. In fact, the memory of the evening will be enshrined for posterity: one of the auction prizes on offer on the night was having a character named after you in a Kathy Lette novel. I was delighted to bid on this, and even more delighted to win. So when you read Kathy's next book, and the cast of characters includes an overweight, middle-aged, balding man - you now know where she drew her inspiration !!

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