Silver Linings
The silver lining is the creative industries continue to grow and employ more and more of us. Made all the richer by the diversity of our population, social mobility and our collective heritage.
Our industry won’t just sustain our collective growth as a nation, giving us jobs as automation continues to replace blue – and white – collar jobs, but it will vitally be the glue to bring our communities back together once we get all the bulls out of our china shop.
This has led us to work twice as hard to try and best protect our community and in turn, the sustainability of industry.
Celebrating Emerging Talent
The government often cites the increasingly growing value of our industries as the driving force of the future of our economy; but often forgets that these successes are fueled by the rich pool of emerging talent coming through the ranks.
The turbulence facing the UK compounds the challenges already faced by emerging talent (being priced out, challenging business environment) and is putting the UK at risk of losing the next generation of creators, which in turn will erode our industry. With no one representing emerging talent across the creative industries, we thought we would rise to the challenge!
We created the Emerge Awards to shine a light on the importance of emerging talent across the creative industries, celebrate the many of you that are in the early stages of careers, give the 12 winners £1,000 to sustain their craft, and importantly, allow us to compile a report giving you all a voice to share your journeys and how you feel about the UK as a creator.
Our first ever awards got 2,200 submissions from across the UK with 1,800 of you sharing your inspirational work, as well as the challenges and opportunities you have faced on your creative journeys. Watch out for the report in 2019!
Double the Opportunities
Our remit has always been about generating more opportunities for the creative community. We do so by simplifying the submissions process for organisations, so they can save time, money and in turn reinvest it to increase their support for creative talent.
This year saw 90+ organisations simplify 10,000+ submissions using our services (double from last year). We’re also thrilled to be seeing many of our clients come back to manage their submissions through us, a real measure of success!
During this period, we put your work in front of some great companies – spanning commissions for Canary Wharf Group, redesigning the DPWorld offices (previously P&O Cruises), supporting Women founders through the We in Social Tech accelerator programme, putting your work in galleries and much more!
Ever Evolving
You’ve given us some great feedback on how to best support you across the year which has led to lots of positive changes being made to our services.
With new functions for taking and selecting entries for your opportunities (e.g. judging by category) as well as improving your way of discovering new opportunities based on your skills, the platform has never looked better. You can see a breakdown of all the changes, and the changes we are currently working on, on our roadmap page.
We’re always happy to hear from you about how we can better serve you, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have a suggestion!
Focusing on Sustainability
History is littered with organisations that rose to support creative talent, did an incredible job doing so, but eventually just burned out.
The disappearance of organisations supporting the creative industries leaves big holes in the creatives’ ability to sustain themselves, so it is our responsibility to be sustainable. Serving you as best we can, whilst ensuring we’re able to sustain ourselves and scale our ambitions to support more people has always been a necessary and delicate balancing act.
We’ve never charged the creative talent on the platform, and we never will – talent should always have access to seeing what opportunities are out there without needing to pay us a monthly fee. This allows us to do our bit in supporting you and help social mobility. We’ve also been very careful in minimising any need from public funding – since we understand full well that takes resources from others and depends on an increasingly tight public purse.
For those reasons we have been delicate in crafting new packages making our services as affordable as possible for the organisations starting out in taking submissions (from £5 a month) and scaling with your success through increased submissions and additional functionality. You’ll also get the first 12 submissions free, so you can have a taster of our service.
No matter how many submissions you take we’ve kept the price per submission as low as possible, ultimately saving you money by simplifying your process. You can find more about our pricing packages here.
In 2019
Whatever destination the UK is heading for, the only thing we can guarantee is that when the dust settles work will need to be done in bringing our communities back together to share a common vision of the merits of our nation. This will go a long way in mending the way our nation is portrayed globally – and in turn play a big part in sustaining trade with other nations. We know the creative industries have a big role to play in taking on these challenges.
For us it has never been more important to provide you with as much stability as possible in the year to come – so you can continue to thrive and make our society worth living. But until then, thank you all for joining us on our journey! Have a wonderful festive period and we’ll see you all in 2019!
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