How the SKKG Foundation developed its grants projects with Optimy

SKKG was founded in 1980 by Bruno Stefanini, a Swiss property owner and art collector. At the core of SKKG’s values lies the promotion and preservation of culture among every layer of society. Culture is a democratic field, everyone should get access and participate in the promotion and preservation of cultural heritage. SKKG is always transparent and tries to find partners to whom they can relate. 

As far as SKKG sees it, culture is the cement of society. It encourages diversity and democracy. They deliver these values by providing opportunities for participation in cultural heritage. The Foundation is structured by a 9-member committee presided by Dr. Bettina Stefanini since 2018. Dr. Bettina Stefanini is the founder’s daughter and aims at pursuing her father’s values and ambitions for culture and preservation of cultural heritage. 

SKKG supports institutions, empowers programs and projects which themselves promote participation in cultural heritage. The Foundation needs to give its support to cultural institutions whose values and goals match SKKG’s.  The grant support allowed is meant for museums and cultural organizations that want to set up projects to strengthen people’s participation in the work of collection, preservation, and cultural mediation.

The Grants projects launched by SKKG are recent and ambitious. When they started to consider the grant management program, the SKKG’s team was pragmatic about the number of administrative tasks that such a program required. This is why they decided to look for an online tool, software that would help them to do it all.

SKKG’s ambition to create a grant program didn’t start in 1980. At the time, the founder was mostly focused on the collection of arts and the preservation of cultural heritage. Before his death, in 2018, they didn’t pay that much attention to building strategic support to culture. With the leadership of Bettina Stefanini, they all started to empower their common values of democracy, transparency, diversity, and tolerance regarding the cultural field. As soon as the strategy was defined, the SKKG team was convinced that it was important to have a tool to back them up for the management of all the grant management steps. As they want to pay attention to the projects submitted and to make sure that they fit with the Foundation’s values, it was also very important for SKKG to make their life easier by choosing a tool that could prevent them from multiplying the sources of information. As a grant manager, it is tough to manage all the applications and the whole process from the completion of the application and the reviewing. It is also very important to keep in touch with all parties involved in the project, from the institutions that applied to the committee that has to review the applications. There are specific elements that were expected from the all-in-one platform chosen, among which:

Optimy is a flexible tool that answers SKKG’s needs quickly and easily. Since the project is rather new for SKKG, having a tool that can easily adapt to the evolving project is a great advantage from Optimy for the Foundation. 

Clear dashboard, easy reporting

Reporting is never an easy task. It’s time-consuming, it’s a lot of data to deal with. It is easily feasible in Optimy: in one click, the admin user gets an Excel sheet with all the information needed to report on the Foundation’s activities and status. Plus, the information added in the reporting is flexible: the user can just adapt which data needs to be exported in one click, by choosing the necessary elements. This way, she can easily build different reports for different committees.

Kultur Komitee: culture for everyone

The Kultur Komitee is a brand new project that aims at giving the opportunity to randomly people from Winterthur - where the Foundation is based -  to join a cultural committee. By launching this project, the Foundation aims at showing that they do what they preach: they want to give power to citizens and encourage them to make decisions in the cultural field. The people elected and appointed to join the Cultural Committee get to decide which cultural institutions  and projects deserve grant support for their cultural activities. The local community received random invitations to join the committee sent by the city of Winterthur. These people, if they agree to join the committee, will then be able to review the cultural institutions’ applications to receive grants. This project underlines the importance of culture as a democratic field, a domain opened to everyone, showing the values of diversity, transparency, and accessibility promoted by the SKKG Foundation. Cultural institutions and projects can then apply via a customized Optimy Form for a grant. The applications are then reviewed by the Kultur Komitee. 

This insightful and inspiring project comes at a troubling time for cultural institutions since they suffered a lot from the pandemic but it also shows that nothing is impossible and that the Cultural field still has a bright future when it is supported by people. Find out more about the Kultur Komitee on the official website of the project. 

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