A major milestone

December 3 marks a major milestone for The Big Idea Charitable Trust. It is ten years to the day since past Prime Minister Helen Clark officially launched The Big Idea website in Auckland at a celebration breakfast for arts sector leaders.

They say a week is a long time in politics, well, a decade is a long time in the creative sector. For a Trust that receives no recurrent funding, survival and a strong belief in how greatly the creative sector needed the resources that the website offers, served to sharpen the collective mind.

Walking the talk

One of the Trust’s core beliefs is that creative people get ahead faster when they engage their entrepreneurial drive with an eye to thriving in the creative sector long-term. In 2006, the Trust decided to ‘walk that talk’ by progressively decreasing its reliance on grant funding through developing new revenue streams. This decision is one of the things that enabled The Big Idea to survive turbulent economic times and still deliver a seamless service to the thousands of people who use The Big Idea website as a crucial resource.

“We’ve had to cut our suit to suit our cloth, to quote a cliché,” says the Trust’s Executive Director, Elisabeth Vaneveld “and we have geared ourselves to be a strong social enterprise. Currently we generate 83 percent of our gross income through service contracts that we deliver on and offline. We still look for funding to maintain the online community and to move some of our other projects forward however for every $1 of grant income that we receive, we generate $5.30 through our own efforts.”

A growing story

Recently described as an institution, The Big Idea website initially launched in 2000 as an email job listing service.

“By 2001, we were confident that New Zealand’s creative community wanted all that we envisaged The Big Idea website could deliver online. Time and a lot of hard work by The Big Idea team has proved us right and our community members continue to grow as does the sheer amount of content they submit,” says Elisabeth Vaneveld.

“The website has also enabled us to work with partners to address some of the more challenging issues that many creative practitioners and businesses face. With Creative New Zealand we worked to explore philanthropy, branding and web-marketing. And when the ASB Community Trust was doing a funding review and wanted to hear from the creative community their views on funding, we were able to help them too. In both examples, by working with specialist content providers, we are able to share their knowledge with our community. “

The success of The Big Idea website is proved by the numbers. Right now The Big Idea online community has over 30,000 members and the website has over unique 50,000 visitors each month. And The Big Idea recently celebrated having over 1,000,000 visits in twelve months.

There is more to the story than the numbers however. Recently, a community member had this to say about The Big Idea website.

“The Big Idea helped me network before Facebook, find cast before StarNow, and still helps me find potential work, projects, crew and employees as well as get some pretty cool news.

"It confirms my suspicions that there is both creative industry and emerging creatives out there in New Zealand still beavering away whenever times are tough.

"More importantly when I was starting out it let me know that I could become part of this creative industry before I was already a part of it, helping break that Catch-22 that used to seem so hard for up and comers to get past, but now seems a lot less difficult since The Big Idea sprung up.”

And ten years on, that is cause for celebration.