In the U.K., touring has always been dominated by exhibitions of modern and contemporary art so, to introduce more balance, TEG's approach from the outset was deliberately multi-disciplinary, embracing archaeology, social history, science and technology, etc.
To regulate how an association would function with a membership across this range of scale and variety of disciplines, its founding members drew up a constitution which was formally adopted on 18 February 1985 and which, with relatively few amendments, still defines how the organisation is run.
In large part this continuity is because TEG has not attracted regular support from grant-aid sources and has consequently not been deflected by the priorities and pressures of these organisations.
The Committee meets four times a year and comprises around 12 elected members, plus people co-opted for needs not provided through the ballot, and observers from public agencies with an interest in touring.
Jasleen Kandhari managed the seminars for two of the three years of the EFF programme, and her replacement during 2010-2011 was Paddy McNulty, thanks to sponsorship by TESS Demountable .
This small, part-time secretariat provides the necessary continuity in membership records, financial control, managing the website and organising seminars.
Its aim was two-fold: first, to lobby H.M. Government to replace the funding whose withdrawal had led to the closure, and second, to represent venues’ needs to potential alternative sources of exhibitions.
The closure of the MGC's travelling exhibitions unit in 1993 – and, more importantly, the withdrawal of government funding – effectively blocked any further national initiatives in touring by museums.
In addition to the remaining national provider (at the time administered by the Arts Council of Great Britain, but now run by the Southbank Centre), museum services and galleries were gearing themselves up to tour their own exhibitions.
Even during the life of the MGC's travelling exhibitions unit, TEG had given a lower priority to what a national museum was prepared to make available (usually not primary material which would normally be on display).
Many museums and galleries were beginning to tour their exhibitions, but they needed to locate venues as early as possible in the planning stages in order to set their budgets.
In many cases, their existing contacts were informal and unstructured and they did not know the staff in more distant venues where their exhibitions might be better placed in the interests of the widest possible distribution.
Networking face-to-face at a Marketplace might be the best way to buy and sell exhibitions on the circuit, but not everyone can get to a one-day event that takes place only once a year in a different part of the country.
Subscriptions provide the financial bedrock on which TEG's structure and activities stand, and maintaining and expanding the membership base is a constant pre-occupation of the Executive Committee.
It was only when Panelock Display Systems Ltd (a manufacturer of movable walls for museum and gallery use) took over sponsorship that the event had the financial backing which guaranteed its continuity.
Other, more flexible forms of support have been tried, e.g. a corporate member sharing a stand but paying the costs of TEG's attendance at a trade fair.
Between 2004 and 2008, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (EFF) gave the Touring Exhibitions Group a total of £103,245 for a three-year programme to develop the organisation.
One of the less expensive items in the EFF package was the opportunity for a structured review of the organisation, which allowed a committee which often was not able to “see the wood for the trees” to step back and take a hard look at what it was doing and how it was doing it.
Sally Fort carried out research over three years, and the full text of her report is available on the Group's website, with an executive summary, Mapping the Touring Landscape, available in hard copy.
[10] Unfortunately this valuable report was obsolete within a couple of years, as a result of the seismic shift caused by H.M. Government's Comprehensive Spending Review in 2010.
There is the opportunity at Annual General Meetings for members to question and challenge the outgoing committee on its achievements and failures, but an AGM is retrospective, only once a year and attended by a small proportion of the membership.
Ten years later, monthly e-newsletters, simple and inexpensive to produce and distribute, provided a regular channel of information to the membership.
By 2003, this structure (with its superstructure of add-ons) was creaking at the seams, so a radical overhaul and redesign by the website designers, Red Leader Industries, became one of the stand-alone projects funded by EFF.
Indeed, EFF agreed to fund the restructuring of the website - which included the redesign of the manual as a resource available on-line - partly on the basis that the Arts Councils supported the textual revisions.
After all, limiting access has made the commercial exploitation of a downloaded version more likely, and it might have been better to maintain the Handbook as a free resource but subject to registration.
From its inception, the Touring Exhibitions Group had organised workshops, seminars and conferences, sometimes to do with practical and technical matters and at other times as part of its lobbying role.
Her departure put the brakes on the programme just at the time when it ought to have been building up momentum and even becoming self-financing, and it was not until 2010 that TEG was able to appoint a replacement, in this case with sponsorship from TESS Demountable.
[11] This appointment was not renewed after the first year, in large part because cutbacks in public spending appeared to undermine the viability of the seminar programme.
Local authorities are reducing programmes, cutting staff and even closing whole services, and the situation might be equally bleak for a membership organisation that depends so much on subscription income.