IdesTap: The creative network
IdeasTap is an arts charity set up to help young, creative people at the start of their careers.
Whether it’s funding, career development, advice or creative collaborators you need, we can help – whatever field you work in.
We’ve partnered with some major arts organisations – Old Vic New Voices, the National Youth Theatre, Magnum Photos, the British Film Institute, National Student Drama Festival, National Skills Academy Creative and Cultural, HighTide and Midlands Arts Centre – to bring our members some incredible exclusive opportunities.
Did we mention that membership is free?
We help in a number of ways:
AKA cold, hard cash. It may sound crass, but we know that money is often the missing piece of the puzzle when trying to get a creative project off the ground. With our Ideas Fund we’ve tried to make the process of applying for funding as simple and low-hassle as possible. Of course we can’t fund everyone, but you don’t need a PhD in form-filling to be in with a chance. See the Ideas Fund page for details and to apply.
We work with our partners and other organisations like the BBC, RSC and Barbican to offer you some pretty awesome opportunities. We’ve sent our members on creative assignments to Dubai, Shanghai, New York, Tokyo, Siberia, Iceland and Dhaka (as well as Scarborough, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Edinburgh). We’ve organised productions, exhibitions and events. And we’ve awarded prizes including laptops, Flip cams and graphics tablets. Keep an eye on the Opportunities section for our latest offerings.
We fill our jobs section with all the arts jobs and creative industry openings we can find that we think might be of interest to our members. We upload around 15 new jobs every weekday. If you’ve got a job you want to advertise on our site, just fill out the simple form at ideastap.com/upload-a-job and let us know about it – we don’t charge.
IdeasTap is a network of more than 60,000 young, creative people. One of the more lasting contributions we think we can make to your creative careers is to help you meet suitable people to collaborate with and learn from. We want this to be a community where people come to ask (and offer) advice and find people to work with. Our focus is exclusively on professional networking - we’re not another social networking site. IdeasTap is about your creative passion and career, not your personal life.
The site offers a wealth of tools to help you promote yourself, your projects and your events, find likeminded people, communicate and ask advice. From portfolios to forums, blogs to our Collaborators tool, give the site a whirl to see what it can do for you. And if there's anything you don't understand, check out our Help Centre.
IdeasMag is where we bring you interviews with successful figures from the creative industries – people who we hope you can learn from and be inspired by. But it’s also where we highlight the successes of our members and promote their projects. We can’t cover everything, but if you’ve got something you think the community should know about, we’ll do our best to point them in the right direction.
Hopefully that makes our purpose and what we can do for you a little clearer. But the best way to get to know more about us is to use the site. Sign up. Create a profile. Upload to your portfolio. Enter a brief. Join a group. Attend an event. Find collaborators. Ask advice on our forums. It’s your site – we hope you enjoy it.