Component 1.5 Blog Post 4 – Effective budgeting

Back in November I reached out to Shona Thomson (Creative Producer & Curator), who gave a seminar to our course on project management that included delivering projects, addressing risk, managing budgets and timelines. Shona helped me to set up an initial budget tracker using excel for our group project. Starting with the basics, we considered an initial shopping list for equipment, research into potential public speaker/artist commission costs and resources for accessibility. I learnt that the budget is easier to manage through breaking into categories of spending in order to work out where money could be potentially be invested as well as recorded, i.e. for an exhibition the aesthetic appeal needed is quite high on the list and therefore a generous amount should be allocated for graphic design/production. Environmental considerations are also important – using natural, reusable or recyclable materials, sourcing things locally and hiring instead of purchasing, are all ethical practices to follow where possible to reduce the environmental impact of an event.

Once we had confirmation of our collection selections and agreement on how they should be exhibited, our original budget started rapidly changing from projections to actuals. I found it a tricky but ultimately rewarding experience to manage quickly evolving ideas and changes to plans into the budget and gather quotes. Positives included attaining an in kind donation of headset rental from Silent Knights worth £90 on the basis of supporting an interesting project, whereas an area of learning came from attention to detail and rechecking my formulas regularly to catch errors I had made early on, which fixed an inaccurate budget estimation of approx £500.

When it came to start processing payments we had a group meeting with Michelle Christie (External Relations Coordinator), who from then on I co-ordinated with following payment procedures for the library. Here, I gained experience about specific procedures, as well as the timescale things usually take to get processed. We really tried to keep non-essential costs down, keeping a healthy surplus and adding an internal contingency of 3% for any issues on the day. This helped when, with just over a week to go before exhibition set up, a disaster struck over missing parts vital to the exhibition design. Here, having a healthy but accurate budget and knowledge of options to cut enabled me to advise on an decision to purchase a certain amount of parts, including expedited shipping and credit card charge costs, on the basis that the exhibition design was paramount to the exhibition’s success and therefore worth the emergency investment.