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Aug. 18 - Sept. 22, 2025
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This course focuses on the most important tool for managing finances in arts projects and organizations: the budget. Designed for arts professionals—whether you’re an independent curator launching an exhibition or already handling budgets in an art institution—you’ll acquire the skills to budget effectively.
Over five weeks, you will learn how to work with the two main types of budgets: general and project. To ensure your projects stay on track, you will also discover strategies to develop financial indicators and deal with unexpected budget changes. After the course, you will have the know-how and tools to draft, plan, and control budgets at all stages, from planning to execution.
Course Outcomes
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
Who Is This Course For?
No prior knowledge is required, though experience working in or with arts organizations can be beneficial. A basic understanding of spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or Google Sheets, is recommended.
How It Works
Each week combines expert-led sessions with individual or group activities. Optional assignments and additional materials, including budget templates are provided for you to use in your professional work. Collaborative exercises will be conducted using Miro, an online whiteboard tool. No prior experience is needed, but we recommend exploring it briefly beforehand here.
Image credits: rc.xyz NFT gallery via Unsplash
Session 1. Introduction (18 August 2025)
This session introduces you to how finances work in arts projects and organizations.
● Introduction to budgeting, accounting, controlling, and funding
● Types of financial budgets (general, project, non-financial budgets)
Session 2. The Project Budget: Bringing Your Visions to Reality (25 August 2025)
This session introduces you to project budgets and how to build and draft them—whether you’re working on an art exhibition, a festival, or another creative event. This session includes free-to-use templates for exhibitions and events that you can adapt to your projects.
● Purpose, function, and structure of the Project Budget
● Building the Project Budget: defining costs and income positions
● Drafting a Project Budget
● The essentials of Exhibition Budgets: common categories, and best practices.
Session 3. Planning a Project Budget for Grant Applications (1 September 2025)
A Project Budget is not only necessary for producing a project but also for winning grant applications. This session equips you with the skills to adapt project budgets to apply for grants.
Session 4. The General Budget: Keeping Things Running (15 September 2025)
In this session, you will understand how project budgets contribute to a general budget and explore the key components of a general budget for arts ventures, from project spaces to independent curating. You will learn to review expenses, revenues, and contingencies, and understand the big picture for better decision-making. We will work with a real budget template that you can adapt for your freelance work or business planning.
Session 5. Planning and Controlling (22 September 2025)
Budgets are flexible documents that will change as your project progresses. In this session, you will learn how to create a long-term plan, adapt a budget over time, and develop indicators informing you about your budget’s health. As project budgets are usually short-term, we will continue working with the General Budget example from Week 4.
Live captioning will be available during the video conference.
Tom Koch
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