Try your luck

October seems to have been competitions month. We’ve just received a very polite rejection and some general feedback from The Design Council, for a competition we entered last month with a couple of partners to design services for the elderly. Like four hundred other hopefuls we await the NESTA Innovation in Giving decisions; and we’ve just finished submitting an application to a Big Lottery competition, Silver Dreams. We chose not to even submit to the NESTA pilot digital capacity-building fund in the summer, despite attending an informative briefing day on the scheme. Whether we would have been one of the lucky few or one of the unlucky four hundred and ninety we’ll never now know, but we took the decision that it would not be worth the staff time to prepare a bid compared to other calls on time.

Almost all funding is in some way or other competitive. Even on those rare occasions where someone rings up and asks you to do something (and that has happened to us very recently), it is still their choice to pick up the phone to you and not someone else. The word ‘competition’ is, however, one which many of us who work in the arts are still not that comfortable with.

What then makes a competition different? Getting turned down by a funding scheme is surely just the same. In competitions such as those I’ve mentioned, it seems to me that your proposal can only pass or fail, and that passing depends not just on the strength of the one you’ve submitted, but on the strength of all the others. This is very different from a scheme like Grants For The Arts. With G4A an idea with some worth can be further developed on its own merits following feedback and re-submitted. The money is still available, if the timescale may slip. There is much less sense that one is directly competing against other community arts providers for a limited pot. Then there is a sense of partnership – that you and the funder are both on the same side, trying to see if an idea is really relevant and worthwhile and developing it together. With some of the competitions I have mentioned such partnerships are only offered to those who pass the initial ‘Round One’ set of hurdles.

Many of these competitions set out an overtly levelling process: that anyone can apply; that they are only looking for the quality of the idea and not the application and so on. All this is well and good, and may encourage a wider spread of applicants. But until you pass Round One there’s no partnership on offer. You are an applicant in the truest sense of the word.