Guidance

This resource is part of our ‘Increasing your income’ guidance, which looks at ways to find and grow sustainable and diverse income for your group. It will focus on how to make the most of your event and ticket sales income to help put your group on a secure, long term financial footing.

This resource is broken down into two main sections:

This resource is part of our ‘Increasing your income’ guidance, which looks at ways to find and grow sustainable and diverse income for your group. It will focus on how to make the most of your membership subscriptions to help put your group on a secure, long term financial footing.

Many music groups choose to assess potential members in a variety of different ways – from a simple voice test, to a trial period or a full blown audition. The benefit of these approaches is that by ensuring certain levels of ability are reached, your group can aspire to a performance of a higher standard, and this in turn presents a challenging and rewarding experience for your members.

In October 2016, we ran the Festival of Making Music - a weekend of music-making workshops in Scotland aimed at exploring shared concepts of rhythm, melody and harmony using simple tunes as a basis for improvisation.

Following the success of the workshops (conducted by award-winning educator Professor Richard Michaels BEM), we have created a video series to allow everyone to benefit from his top tips on improvisation.

This session demonstrates how to make use of different modes, like the Dorian, Ionian and Myxolydian.

In the final part of our three-part guide on creating a website, we'll cover ways to increase the visibility of your website to bring in more visitors; something worth thinking about before you start to build your site, as well as when you're looking to make ongoing improvements to it in the future.

We'll start by looking at how to make sure your pages are appealing to search engines, move on to using social media and inbound links, then cover how you can apply for free advertising from Google and finally look at ways to monitor your progress.

Now that you've worked out what you and your users both need on your website (see part 1), you're ready to move on to what it might look like and how you might display your content to users. Whether you're creating it from scratch, choosing a ready-made template or paying a professional, these tips will help you evaluate your design options and make your site as effective as possible.

A poster isn’t just for showing the details of an event (often it isn’t even mostly for showing the details of an event): it’s for enticing people into wanting to go.

This guidance will explain how to manage your group contacts through the Dashboard area on our website, including inviting new people and setting website permissions.

This guide explains how to update your personal contact details and mailing preferences through the ‘My Dashboard’ area of our website.

‘My Dashboard’ is your main admin area of the site – it is where you can view, add and update details about you and your group.

The majority of our member groups are run by a committee - a group of enthusiastic people who care about their group and are willing to take responsibility for running it. Even if you don’t have something formally called ‘a committee’ it is likely that you have a group of people who work together to run your group and so the overarching themes in this resource will still be relevant. 

Similarly whilst the resource refers to constitutions and charities, if your group is not a charity or does not have a constitution the main themes are still applicable.