It’s a struggle raising money for the arts. Just ask Contact Photography Festival

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When guests gather for the Contact Photography Festival’s 30th-anniversary gala at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday, they’ll have a chance to snap up works from the likes of Carrie Mae Weems and Edward Burtynsky – photo artists who’ve shaped Contact into a world-renowned festival over three decades.

The money Contact hopes to raise by auctioning work from those beacons of its past is crucial to securing its future. Since the Bank of Nova Scotia began winding down its longtime title sponsorship two years ago, the festival has struggled to replace the roughly half-million dollars the bank gave it each year. Darcy Killeen, Contact’s chief executive, hopes to raise at least $150,000 this week through both silent and live auctions of photo prints and other artworks.

Mr. Killeen has managed to recoup a small amount of Scotiabank’s annual funding through smaller corporate sponsorships over the past two years, but has struggled to make up the whole amount. “This fundraiser will allow us to have a festival and hopefully lay the foundation for future growth,” Mr. Killeen says, “but it’s not going to fill the void of our title sponsorship.”

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Both sponsorships and philanthropy have been harder for cultural organizations to secure over the past decade; the early 2020s deepened those woes, adding to the shock through COVID-19 lockdowns, surging interest rates and rising inflation.

Organizations such as Scotiabank, Bell, TikTok and Netflix have in recent years abandoned high-profile arts sponsorships for reasons as varied as changing corporate priorities to dissatisfaction with the Online Streaming Act to shifting national-security priorities. Scotiabank itself faced years of pressure for its arts sponsorship from pro-Palestinian activists and artists over a subsidiary’s investment in a major Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Two years after Scotiabank walked away from Contact, there are signs of some renewed interest from companies and donors to invest more deeply in the arts. But they come with a lot of caveats.

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The most recent Canadian Sponsorship Landscape Study, authored by Norm O’Reilly, a partner with the T1 Agency, found that brands’ investments in sponsorship rights fees grew 58 per cent in 2024 over 2023. But other long-standing trends cloud this picture: Brands now primarily see these kinds of sponsorships as marketing investments, not philanthropic causes, and expect a greater return on investment. “The CFOs are paying attention,” Mr. O’Reilly says.

That makes sense in the world of major-league sports, where marketing opportunities abound – and are growing, thanks to significant interest in women’s professional leagues. A title sponsorship at an arts festival, by contrast, might not get a company’s logo in front of as many potential customers, especially without comparable broadcast rights and venue activations.

Pro sports sponsorships are also becoming more expensive, Mr. O’Reilly says – meaning they’re eating into the total dollars that brands can spend on other partnerships.

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The survey of 149 companies also asked for the sector where they invested in their biggest sponsorships – which ranged in value from $15,000 to $35-million. Arts sponsorships made up 0.9 per cent of these. Put another way, only one in 100 brands have made artistic organizations their top priorities for sponsorship investments.

Arts philanthropy has taken some big hits lately, too. TRG Arts, an analytics-focused consultancy, said that, through mid-2025, it’s found a 14-per-cent increase in the number of gifts to performing-arts organizations across North America, and a 12-per-cent increase in total gift value. But adjusted for inflation, that value is actually down 11 per cent from 2019 fiscal years, just before COVID-19 lockdowns.

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In Canada, TRG Arts has anecdotally found that the number of people donating to the arts is flat while gift revenue is growing, said Jill Robinson, its chief executive.

And while TRG Arts’s research covers until about mid-2025, other data, from the cultural-sector advocacy charity Business / Arts, suggests that Canadians hope to give more. A national survey conducted on its behalf last October by Nanos Research found that culture fans planned to donate $200 to the sector by the end of last year – up from $120 in 2024.

But Business / Arts also found that cultural organizations get only a small amount of donors’ total giving – receiving just 12 per cent of its survey respondents’ budgets in each of the last year, with a recent drop in younger donors.

That figure is close to what CanadaHelps, Canada’s biggest online donation platform, found went toward arts-and-culture charities in 2025: 7.2 per cent. The organization has, however, been seeing increases in both arts-and-culture donations and the value of donations on its platform over the past year, says Julie Fiorini, its General Manager of Charity and Donor services. (The group will release more figures when it publishes its annual giving report in the coming months.)

Nonetheless, Aubrey Reeves, Business / Arts’s CEO, says that the sector continues “to be in a precarious situation.” She’s crunched figures from CADAC, a Canada-wide database of financial data from organizations that apply for government funding, and has found that sector expenses have increased 46.4 per cent since just before pandemic lockdowns. That uptick, she says, exceeds growth in sponsorship income.

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Contact is still trying to make the most of a shrunken budget. Its revenue was $1.2-million in its final year partnered with Scotiabank, according to its most recent Canada Revenue Agency filings; Mr. Killeen says it’s fallen to $700,000 this year. The festival has cut staff by 35 per cent, reduced salaries for remaining employees, dropped its international advertising campaign, cut back on its public-art programming and stopped printing a catalogue.

“Culture is such an important part of a vibrant city, of our livelihoods, of our happiness, I don’t think we can lose complete sight of it,” Mr. Killeen says.