14:30 – 16:00

 Though the Irish arts sector has long been aware of the need to develop sources of funding and support beyond those upon which it depends, the current economic climate may not seem to present an opportune moment in which to identify these alternate possibilities - commercial sponsorship, partnering with business, philanthropic giving - and to build them into a strong foundation for the future. 

However, the opposite may in fact be the case. Many corporations and financial organisations are currently looking to rebuild their public reputations and to renew their social identities by finding the right kinds of projects with which to become very visibly affiliated. Philanthropists, too, are looking for new, and high-profile, ways to give back to the community.
It's a time of new models, of new windows of opportunity, and of emerging trends of which everyone in the performing arts must be aware. Our panel will identify those new realities and will advise on how best to make them work for the arts. 

 Note: This session is one of a choice of sessions running in the same time slot . For more information please refer to the schedule. 

Biographies 

 Sarah Dempsey is Group Head of Sponsorship and Corporate Responsibility in Ulster Bank Group. Since taking up her position four years ago, Sarah has led the Ulster Bank sponsorship team through the acquisition and development of an award-winning portfolio which includes the RBS 6 Nations Rugby Championship, The GAA Football Championship, the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival and the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival. 

 Sarah joined Ulster Bank from a leading Dublin based PR agency where she was Director of Consumer PR. 

 Stuart McLaughlin is Chief Executive of Business to Arts, having joined the organisation in February 2007. A native of Worcestershire in the UK, Stuart graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a BA in Business Administration and Marketing. After graduation, Stuart spent a number of years working for Fujitsu in the UK undertaking a variety of customer facing roles culminating in his appointment as Commercial Director for a 1,000-person business in 1999. 

Stuart moved to Ireland in early 2001 to join CapGemini as Head of Outsourcing and then moved to Accenture in December 2003 as Business Development Director. 

He is also an adjunct lecturer at Trinity College (MSc Management of Information Systems), and has co-authored degree courses for Oscail, the
 National Distance Education Centre of Ireland, based at DCU. Stuart is a passionate supporter of the arts and is on the board of the Lewis Glucksman
Gallery and Fishamble: The New Play Company, and has recently stepped down from the board of Common Ground. 

 Dr Tony Meenaghan is Professor of Marketing at the Smurfit Graduate Business School in University College Dublin. He is the author of Commercial Sponsorship (MCB University Press, 1984), which was the first major publication in that field and editor of Researching Commercial Sponsorship,
published in 1995 by ESOMAR (the Representative Body for Marketing Research in Europe). Other international publications include Commercial Sponsorship (1998), Ambush Marketing (1998), Sports and Marketing (1999) and Commercial Sponsorship (2001). He is also the author of numerous international journal articles on aspects of sponsorship and is among the most widely cited authors internationally in this field. 

He has worked with the International Advertising Association (IAA, New York) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA, Brussels), the world bodies for advertising agencies and clients respectively, in preparing their position papers on the subject of sponsorship. 

At its inaugural awards ceremony in Spain in 2005, the Noos Institute honoured Professor Meenaghan for his contribution to the development of the field of corporate sponsorship. He has been chairman of Adfx, the advertising effectiveness awards in Ireland since 1996 and in 2006 was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI). In 2007 he was invited to join the Management Committee of the GAA. 

 In 2009, he was invited to become a member of the Judging Panel for the ESA (European Sponsorship Association) Awards. He is listed in the 2007, 2008 and 2009 editions of Who’s Who in the World for his expertise in the sponsorship field. 

Professor Meenaghan is an active consultant to both corporate sponsors and sponsorship property owners and he has been an invited guest speaker on various sponsorship-related issues at some 50 sponsorship conferences worldwide.