How Watershed works

Watershed had three core strands of business when it was set up. The cafe bar was always seen as an essential part of the organization. It's the place where people meet, where ideas are hatched and it's continued to be a hub of the organization as well as revenue generator for the cultural production. The second strand is the renting out of our building as a place for other people to hold events such as conferences, meetings and presentations, which is a very strong source of income. But the core of the business has always been film. And while film, especially world cinema, is a difficult market place, we've always stuck to our guns and said we’re going to show what you cannot see elsewhere. What we've always offered is an extension of choice, a breath of choice and over time we've built up a very strong, loyal and adventurous audience – it takes time to build up such an audience. We've worked very hard to connect with that audience, we always try to bring the film makers and to create workshops around the films. We do an awful lot of work with schools, we have a very strong educational programme. It is always about being very active in the promotion of the content, when you seek to get an audience for it. It does not suffice to just put it on and hope the adverts will do the job. I think it's precisely this very active approach that Watershed has that brings so many people to come to work with us, because we're an agency that tries to say „yes.“ If you've got a good idea, we'll go and try to find the money. Over the years as we developed our production strand, we found many different sources of income. Three years ago we even bought our building. Now the bars downstairs pay us rent rather than us paying the landlord. We recycle this income into our production activities. We also raise money from charitable trusts and corporate organisations and we get some public money from the UK Arts Council. But that accounts only for about 10% of our income, the rest of the income we generate ourselves. Last year, our turnover was 5 million Euros.

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Dick Penny, MBE

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