Artist Republic Launches Annual Charity Partnership
A good number of the events we are asked to play each year are raising money for something. Charity balls, hospice fundraisers, memorial nights, gala dinners for a cause close to somebody's family. They are often the best rooms our bands play, and we want more of them. Today we are setting out how we intend to support them properly.
Almost every charity enquiry arrives with the same question attached, and it is a fair one: can you do us a discount? Our answer has always been no, and it is worth explaining why rather than leaving people to guess. The fee we quote pays the musicians standing on the stage and covers the cost of getting a full band, with all of its equipment, to the venue. Those costs do not change according to who the night is for. A discount on a charity booking does not come out of a marketing budget somewhere. It comes out of the pay of the people performing, which is not a decision we are willing to make on their behalf.
So we are doing something else instead. Each year Artist Republic will choose one charity to support, and the bands we partner with will get behind it alongside us. Rather than shaving a little off dozens of individual invoices and achieving very little for anybody, it concentrates what we are able to give into one cause for a full year.
Applications are open now, and any charity can apply whether or not they have ever booked one of our bands. The form is short and takes a couple of minutes to complete: https://wkf.ms/4x8HicO. We would far rather hear from a small local organisation that nobody outside the county has heard of than only from the national names with a fundraising department behind them.
From now on, anybody who enquires about one of our bands for a charity event will hear about this as part of our reply. The quote they receive will be the normal quote, carrying exactly the same figures we would give anybody else, alongside an invitation to put their cause forward. We think that is a more honest answer than a token reduction, and a considerably more useful one.
