Board Member
Thrive

COULD YOU BE OUR NEW BOARD MEMBER?

Before going out to recruit new Trustees, we complete a skills audit of the Board. This helps us understand where our gaps are, and will be, as Trustees come to the end of their tenure. It also gives us a chance to reflect on the current context for thrive in delivery of our business plan and reflect the conversations that happen at Board level.

These are the skills that we are seeking to recruit in this round.

Financial Understanding and Experience

• Experience of creating or implementing financial procedures
• Experience of reading and interrogating a charity's annual and management accounts
• Experience of charity- specific accounting concepts - restricted v unrestricted funds, reserves, fund accounting and SORP
• Experience of audit processes - as an auditor, audit committee member or someone audited at senior level
• Experience of assessing whether internal controls are proportionate and effective (eg segregation of duties, authorisation limits)
• Experience of VAT

Policy Expertise and Knowledge

• Experience of policy making in arts or heritage sector in Northern Ireland
• Direct relationships to those setting policy in arts and heritage in Northern Ireland

Data Security Expertise

• Experience of data security e.g. cybersecurity and data protection
• Experience of overseeing or advising on AI adoption and its risks (data handling, quality control) in an organisation

These are the priorities for this recruitment, but should you be interested, and not have experience in these areas, we would still like to hear from you.

About the Organisation

Based at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast, thrive started out in 2004 as Audiences NI a member-based organisation with a focus on collecting ticketing data in Northern Ireland. In 2017, we rebranded as ‘Thrive Audience Development’ and moved away from a membership model to be more accessible and to help a struggling sector to know and grow its audience.

We are a small team of 7 staff (3 full-time and 4 part time) and 10 Board members and our purpose is to better tell the story of cultural engagement in Northern Ireland.

We work with both public and private clients to support the sector in Northern Ireland through research, evaluation and marketing. Our free resources and tailored support give organisations the tools to understand their audiences and help their organisation thrive.

We build and strengthen relationships within the sector by running research programmes to better understand the public and their relationship with art and creativity. This insight is then fed back to the sector to ‘close the loop’ and drive individual and collective action for the benefit of Northern Ireland.

Cultural organisations are often small and under-resourced. So being able to provide them with information, resources and insight is a key priority for us to effect change within the sector. 

We receive our core funding from Arts Council NI which means we are able to provide much of this support for free. We do however have a significant income target each year which we meet by providing services to a wide range of clients.