Growing your group and audiences

Did you know you might be able to claim Gift Aid on membership subscriptions paid to your group?

Gift Aid allows charities to claim 25p on every eligible £1 donated to them - which is a great boost to your income. But in many cases the membership subs paid to your group can qualify for Gift Aid too. So, if you collect £6,000 in Member subs, you could get a payment of £1,500 from HMRC.

About the event: 

Scientific research by neuroscientists and psychologists proves that learning and playing music is good for your brain, whenever you start. But how can we use the science to persuade more people to take part, or to draw in the support our groups’ need? Our guest speaker Dr Anita Collins will talk about neuromusical research on the benefits for adult musicians, and how to use this information to boost our advocacy.  

Your Making music membership offers a wealth of benefits. They are designed to support you running your music group, to save time, effort and money, as well as offer ideas and inspiration.

But are you making the most of your membership? In this event we will explain what you have access to - and how we can help.

We'll talk about some of the main benefits:

To fully include everyone in our music activities, we need to understand the barriers that stop people from attending, taking part or progressing. In the Conversation about inclusion series of events, hear about the issues from the perspective of those who directly experience barriers and discuss what we can do to change things from within our own music groups.

If you’d like your group and your audience to be more diverse and inclusive, thinking about how you recruit and welcome people is crucial. And if you want to increase your membership and your audiences, recruiting and welcoming new people in a way that is inclusive means you’ve more chance of success. Whatever your driver, there are actions you can take that will remove the barriers to joining your activity and provide access to more people. 

Over the last 20 years governments have introduced various creative tax reliefs to enable organisations to claim back some of their production costs. Two of these – Orchestra Tax Relief and Theatre Tax Relief – are already being used by Making Music members to claim back an average 23% of their concert and event costs. Especially now that a higher rate of relief has been made permanent in the spring budget, these tax reliefs can make a significant contribution to groups’ budgets and facilitate growth and activity.