Hartford Stage has launched a fundraising campaign to boost its endowment by $20 million, and it’s already nearly halfway there.
The Set the Stage fundraising campaign began quietly last year and has raised more than $9 million, according to Cynthia Rider, managing director for Hartford Stage.
“We spent about the last year in a kind of quiet phase doing a pre-public launch, and so we’re very pleased that we’ve had a couple of really important, large business gifts from companies like The Hartford and Travelers and lots of individuals,” Rider said.
Stanley, Black & Decker also made a significant contribution, she said, noting that Don Allan, the company’s president and CEO, is serving as co-chair of the campaign and along with his wife has also made an individual donation.
More than 30 other individual donors have contributed as well.
Rider, who has been with Hartford Stage for five years, said an earlier plan to strengthen the organization’s endowment was proposed around the time she arrived but was derailed by the pandemic.
“There had already been a lot of conversation, over many years, about the need to grow the endowment,” she said. “So our endowment is about $6 million-ish, and for an organization with a $10 million budget that’s not particularly large and doesn’t provide a large percentage of annual support.”
About 60% of Hartford Stage’s annual budget is funded from donations, Rider said. “If we had no contributed income, and we had to support ourselves on ticket sales alone, we would have to charge $175 for every single ticket.”
Other arts organizations have done a better job enlarging their endowments, she said. “The endowment is one really important leg on your financial stool.”
In the wake of the pandemic, the endowment has become even more important, since subscriptions and individual ticket sales have not yet returned to where they were before 2020.
“Our subscriptions are down 50% post-pandemic,” Rider said. That’s equal to about $1 million in revenue, according to the organization’s website.
She added that subscriptions and ticket sales have been “slowly building back over the last three years. It’s just not a fast process.”
There is also greater demand for Hartford Stage’s educational programs, as is the requests for additional support for scholarships, she said.
A fundraising campaign that meets the $20 million goal will help fund all of that and more, Rider said.
“It means that we’ll have a larger percentage of our budget that is supported by the earnings off of the endowment,” she said. “That helps you do work at the size and scale that people come to Hartford Stage to see.”
Allan, the Stanley, Black & Decker CEO, said he believes Hartford Stage is worth supporting because it is unique to the city.
“They create and produce their own plays in new ways that are relevant to the world today,” he said. “Everyone who lives or works in Hartford should know Hartford Stage, the value of the organization, and its cultural and economic impact on our city.”
For information on the Set the Stage campaign, visit the website here.
