Start That Grant Early

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If you are considering applying for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Humanities, or any program run by the government, you will have to go through Grants.gov. My last grant application went in just before they implemented this new program through which all US government related grant applications must pass so I haven’t had to negotiate the system myself.

I did try to get the registration portion of the process out of the way when I got the email telling me that my next grant would have to go through that process. The complexity made my eyes cross and I decided to forgo my usual “get it done well in advance” ethic.

A couple days ago I saw an account of the hair-tearing frustration a woman at Hood College went through trying to assist a colleague submit a grant. I figured maybe I should warn others about what is involved as well.

If you go to the applicant FAQ page on the Grants.gov website you can start to see where the problems arise. First, you can only use Internet Explorer and Windows operating system as that is only thing the grant application software runs on. (Didn’t the government sue Microsoft for monopoly practices?) Firefox is out. If you have a Macintosh, you need to log on to an emulation program that only accommodates so many people at once. (They suggest logging on between 10 pm and 10 am.)

Then you need a DUNS number, register with the Central Contractor Registry from which you will get a Marketing Partner Id Number and will be able to designate an e-Business Point of Contact. Then you need to register with the Credential Provider who will give you a username and password so you can register with Grants.gov as an authorized organization representative.

You may feel lucky if you discover your organization has already acquired all this information. Of course, now you have to discover who it is that has all this information and who Grants.gov recognizes as the person authorized to authorize you as a user. And pray that they have saved all the usernames and passwords for the hoops mentioned above.

All this before you actually get to fill out the grant application. The government really doesn’t want to give you any money. Now I understand better why the United States Artists group I mentioned previously is focusing on funding individual artists. It is said that the best artists are troubled and tormented to some degree. This application process will push those artists over the edge and make mediocre artists better.

Something In the Water in Minneapolis

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In the course of writing my entry two days ago, I noted that the Theatre Communications Group had hired Teresa Eyring as the new executive director just before Christmas. Teresa was most recently the managing director at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis and will take up her new role in March.

Given that TCG’s previous executive director, Ben Cameron, had worked as a director of Target Stores arts philanthropy efforts, also in Minneapolis, you have to wonder if there is something about that city that makes it a finishing school for executive directors of national arts organizations.

Well, you don’t have to wonder, but it is fun to do so. In light of the new gorgeous facility the Guthrie Theatre just completed, there definitely is something intriguing going on with the arts in the Twin Cities areas.

I kept poking around the TCG website looking for interesting tidbits as I am wont to do. I found one survey about the benefits (health, dental, life, retirement, vacation) theatres give to their employees. Not surprisingly the people working for organizations with budgets of $10 million were better off than those with less than $500,000.

The report provides a reference if you want to cross reference what you might get from your job with the trends in the same budget group. It also mentions some of the non-traditional benefits some places give that might be adoptable to make life more pleasant at your place (Subsidized Yoga, etc).

The other thing on the TCG site that caught my eye was a link to the United States Artists, a joint venture of Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmuson Foundations. The organization was formed from the realization that while support for arts organizations waxes and wanes with the times, the individual artist is never funded very well. Every year they plan to give $50,000 to 50 artists based on the idea that “$50,000 is a common entry-level salary for art college faculty in America today. Hopefully, this funding will enable some artists to pursue their art full time.”

If you are thinking “Oooo, how can I get one of those,” the only way is to work hard at being good at what you do. USA solicits nominations from a group of people whose identities remain secret. Not even the nominators know who else is nominating. The $20 million from the aforementioned foundations is just seed money to start the program. With additional fundraising, they hope to increase the number of awards per year.

Check out the 2006 Fellows awarded last month.

It’s Called Contextomy…

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..and it is one of the many reasons I have a rule against quoting review blurbs provided in press packets. Contextomy is the practice of quoting people out of context. (The term caught my eye while I was brushing up on logical fallacies.) It has found applications in many arenas, but is widely practiced with movie and theatre reviews as noted in this Wikipedia article.

If you don’t like Wikipedia as a source (though most of that article is footnoted and cited pretty well) here is an article from Gelf Magazine on the subject with many amusing examples of the lengths publicists go to in order to make a dud sound great.
(Added: This article is actually the inaugural entry for a continuing series where the magazine tracks misleading quotes. Didn’t realize that when I first posted.)

I have a suspicion that this practice which is already being recognized by an increasingly skeptical audience may be approaching its final days. The difference is that in the past audiences were suspicious. Now they can access information on the web via their cell phones. As people walk out of movies and performances thinking “Geez, that was godawful, how could she say it was a cinematic tour de force?” they are going go online with their cell phones and search (reviewer) (show name) and discover that the reviewer said the show made Teletubbies look like a cinematic tour de force.

Without the drive home with a stop at Starbucks to buffer the disgust that will inspire them to go online and check things out, the distrust level could skyrocket. That is assuming people weren’t skeptical enough to check things out in advance.

And hey, if I am wrong and the practice flourishes for years to come, at least you have a fancy vocabulary word with which to impress your friends as you mutter “‘Superb and invigorating?’ Bah, it is probably just another case of contextomy..”

Why Don’t The Arts Have This?

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Over Christmas Break my theatre was more or less empty so in the interests of not turning on lights I didn’t need, I pretty much ended up eating lunch at my desk. On a whim I started perusing the Chronicle of Higher Education’s forums.

It wasn’t long before I was asking myself why there was nothing like this in the arts world. These forums are a great resource for people in higher education. It is mostly geared for professors, but grad students and administrators have their places too. The different areas deal with various issues from how people spend their free time to thorny ethical issues over student cheating and plagiarism.

One of the areas I think is strongest is jobs. The posters pose and answers questions about interviewing- how to dress, what to expect at a conference interview vs. campus interview, what a job talk might entail, what foods you should avoid during a meal interview- it really runs a gamut. People even solicit advice about particular towns and institutions.

What really impressed me is that there seem to be a couple of Wikis created by the forum members rather than by the Chronicle staff. One is essentially a collection of the basic wisdom covered in the forums about where to find a job and what to do when called for an interview.

The other, quite interestingly, acts as a status board about what stage different jobs are at. Since many institutions are pretty bad about communicating where a job search is at and may not even start committee review until months after the deadline, the forum members make notes about when they hear anything about a job. If there is a note saying they are calling for interviews and you don’t get a call, at least you know where things stand for you.

If one of the prominent arts entities hosted these types of forums, it would be fantastic. There could be discussions about everything-advocacy, marketing tips, law, unions, interviewing tips, technology, audience relations, fundraising, board relations, philosophy. I could really go on and on. In addition to helping arts organizations make their external relations more effective and efficient, it might bring about an improvement to employee relations too. After some posts saying “you ain’t going to be paid well anywhere in the arts so if you gotta starve, you couldn’t find a nicer group to starve alongside,” some places might experience a little bit of a brain drain.

Some of the large entities like Americans for the Arts and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters do have listservs but they are only open to the membership. I have access to a couple and they are like ghost towns. I have more discussions with people who comment on my blog. I think part of the problem is that access is closed. The other is the old chicken and egg thing. There is no discussion because nobody posts and nobody posts because there isn’t enough discussion to get them visiting.

It won’t be long though before the up and coming youth who are used to holding long conversations online start showing up and looking for some place to talk. Absent any place to do so, they will start creating their own discussions. The problem with that is the discussions will be decentralized. I can start a forum right now. The software comes with my blog account. My forum would add to the conversation and be an improvement over the present status, but not as much as one at a more highly trafficked site would.

A central forum should be started now and all the bugs ironed out so that it is ready for when the next wave of artists, managers, designers and technicians arrive on the scene. They will have a certain set of expectations from their experiences with MySpace, YouTube, internet chat, texting and whatever else may come next. If they are disappointed in what they find and go elsewhere, an opportunity to harness their energy is lost.

Whatever organization creates a good forum for discussion can have a hand in directing the energies of artists. I understand that these things take resources and that is why some of these organizations are limited access to dues paying members only. Whomever does this well will gain at the very least tacit recognition of leadership. Giving it away for free could garner greater membership and support than keeping it locked away will. Which is why I think a group like Americans for the Arts should do it. Though I wouldn’t discount ArtsJournal.com from stepping up and making a success of it.

Maybe there are highly active forums out there and I missed them. I would love it if someone could point me in the right direction. Before writing this entry, I checked out Americans for the Arts, the NEA, TCG, ASOL, DanceUSA, and Arts Presenters.

I also hit regional presenting conferences and the regional arts granters- NEFA, Mid-Atlantic Arts, WESTAF, and Southern Arts.

(All of these have great resources to check out though which is why I am going link crazy here.)

I even checked out the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carniege Mellon University. They will license forum and listserv software to you, but they don’t actually host any public forums that I can see.

On the other hand, they don’t list Butts In The Seats as an arts management resource, so really, how good can they be?!

Anyhow, I really feel strongly about this so I am going to ponder a little more, put together a nice letter making my case and contact some likely hosts suggesting something like what I am proposing. I might enlist some of my gentle readers to lobby alongside me if I discover any promising opportunities.

I know that all solutions do not solve the problems of all people. What is creating great discussion for educators may not work for the arts world. But seeing as how no one has really tried it yet, it is worth turning over the stone and seeing what we find. Maybe there are forums in Butts in the Seats’ future.