Does ACE know or care about failed grants applicants?

I asked Arts Council England a while back whether they had ever surveyed failed grants applicants:

I'm looking at whether the Arts Council ever surveys GFA funding applicants who are unsuccessful. For example, do the Arts Council England ever look at levels of satisfaction among the artist population regarding availability of funding from ACE?

I've been trying to work out whether the funding that ACE gives out comes anywhere near satisfying demand, and what percentage of applications are funded. If you don't know what effect failed funding applications has on projects and artists, then you can't know whether there is more or less demand out there. If you don't talk to people who apply and fail, then you are effectively ignoring your key constituency.

Anyway, I finally got an answer to my question today:

Regarding our surveying of unsuccessful Grants for the arts applicants, we don’t currently have a set survey for unsuccessful applicants. However, all applicants are very welcome to contact the lead officer assigned to their application to get feedback from the Arts Council and to discuss the application process. The changes we made to our Grants for the Arts application procedures in April 2008 came after we listened to feedback from the arts debate and directly from applicants and artists’ networks about how we could improve the application process. This consultation led to significant changes such as the simplification of the Grants for the arts application form and changes to the criteria we use to assess applications.

What's interesting in this reply is that not only have they not surveyed failed applicants, they don't even ask them any questions on telling them they failed. Surely it would be the most obvious thing to send out a questionnaire to all rejected funding applications:

• Do you feel your application has been fairly assessed
• Will this put you off applying again
• Do you understand why your application failed
• What is the likelyhood of your project going ahead without this funding
• etc

(I've put up a database of three years worth of failed applications for you to look through)

Comments

[D'log]

I calculated the odd here...

http://www.d-log.info/?p=1478