Guidance

When your group decides to perform a piece of music there will be copyright laws, permissions and licenses to be aware of. Part 5 of our guidance looks at how that applies to making and using a recording of the music you perform. 

What is Indian classical music and how is it different to Bollywood or Indian folk music? What are all the different instruments used and where can you go to try listening to it or playing it yourself? Seetal Kaur of member group, the Sitar Music Society, gives us an overview.

Your group's website may have been up and running for some time, or maybe you're looking at creating a new website. Either way it's always a good idea to step back and see whether it's still working well. Here are a few pointers from our youth volunteers to think about.

Our youth volunteers have been taking a look at member groups' social media to see how they measure up when it comes to engaging young people. Here are some tips they passed on to us that you might find useful.
 

Posting on social media can be overwhelming and leave one feeling like Alice down the rabbit hole. What to post, when, how often, how much of other people's content should you engage with? A simple tactic to keep you on track is to follow the rule of thirds: promote, share, interact. After all, three is the magic number! 

Your local community is your biggest and best source of new contacts, whether that’s members, audience, sponsors or funders, patrons, volunteers or just general supporters. Many of our most successful groups are those who have a strong engagement with the people living and working in the surrounding area. But how do you build these relationships?

The role of your group’s committee or management team (or whatever term you use to describe the group of people who volunteer their time to run your group) is to organise and facilitate the activities of the group, whilst supporting and protecting the reputation of the group and ensuring that legal responsibilities are met.  The role of the chair within this, is to oversee the work of the committee and the everyday activities of the group to ensure that these aims are achieved.

Demonstrating that music-making has an impact seems to be a much talked-about topic these days. Whether that’s to do with increasing audience size,  attracting new members to your group, having a greater profile in the community or undertaking outreach activities, it can feel as if producing numbers and evidence to show impact is a growing (and possibly unwelcome) additional demand on a leisure-time music group’s time. Indeed, if you have secured some funding, reporting on impact is often a standard requirement.

Applications  for the 2018-19 projects are now closed. 

From May 2018 the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will be in place, replacing the current Data Protection Act. The new regulations will apply to all types of organisations – including small charities and leisure time music groups. This toolkit brings together guidance, tools and resources for groups to use to prepare for the changes.

GDPR: What you need to know

An overview of GDPR - the background, what is changing, what you need to do to prepare and why Brexit won't change the outcome.

Our Charity Registration Service is designed to make the process of registering as a charity as simple as possible. Find out how we can help you.