Let’s talk about feedback

Most of my work comes from conversations, or from self-made opportunities, or from people approaching me with projects they think would suit me. I’m fortunate in that when things are trucking along nicely I don’t have to put myself through the mill of constantly applying for advertised calls for artists. When things are trucking along nicely.

Sometimes though, the momentum stalls and I do find myself hunting through Arts Jobs or similar, composing expressions of interest, hunting out the relevant images that represent my work and wrangling proposals in under application form word limits. I could probably write pages and pages about the investment of time and emotion that goes into each of these applications, but for this blog post I want to try and think a bit about a different type of investment; a longer term one.

Let’s talk about feedback.

Let’s talk about how practitioners can get better.

I’ve had many rejections for things I’ve applied to over the years, but what I rarely get is any sort of understanding as to why. …and this means I have no understanding of what I might change in order to get a different result with the next thing I try. And that feels like stagnation.

Is it that my idea was poorly matched to what the organisers were looking for? Did I not articulate my proposal clearly? Is my CV presented in an unhelpful format? Was my application nowhere near as strong as the others received, or did I make it through several rounds of shortlisting only to not quite fit into the final curatorial selection of a coherent programme from a group of submissions?

Some of these could be fairly easily addressed from my end, whilst others are completely out of my control. But the knowledge I could leverage to move my practice (or my admin) forwards remains elusive.

 

Let’s hop over to the other side of the fence…

 

You want to put out an open call for the exhibition/conference/commission you’re running. You’re probably horribly over-worked as it is, how do you efficiently deal with the couple of hundred applications you get for the dozen or so places you’re curating?

For the two Bees in a Tin conferences I’ve co-organised for the Many & Varied project, I took the approach of offering feedback to those who got back in touch and requested it. It turns out not many people took us up on that offer, even out of the 150 or so applicants we had last time around. Still, it’s a fairly hefty drain on resources when you’ve got to crack on with organising the event.

A lot of organisers take the approach of either stating up front that if you don’t hear anything back assume you’ve not been successful, or of sending out a bulk generic “thanks, but unfortunately…” email. Sometimes these are accompanied by a line something along the lines of “due to the high number of applications, we are unable to offer feedback”.

This got me thinking: the implication here is that, if there were far fewer applications for the opportunity on offer, the organisers would be happy to offer feedback to everyone. So what’s the cut-off point? What’s a manageable number of people to give feedback for their applications? And could we pledge to give at least that number of people feedback, rather than a blanket silence to everyone?

It turns out giving good feedback is hard though. So maybe thinking about it in terms of numbers alone isn’t a fair representation of the amount of time it takes to structure some constructive criticism to someone you don’t know, on the basis of a few hundred words written on an application form?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how to reconcile my desire as an artist to be able to get better at what I do, and my need as an organiser to do what I do as efficiently as possible. I think the solution I’ve arrived at is something like this (and I’m sharing it here in case we can maybe act together to move our sector forwards a bit):

What if, as organisers, we pledged to offer feedback to whatever number of applicants that is manageable for us. But what if we pledged to make that meaningful feedback. Maybe to the people who were close, but not quite there. Not necessarily the ones that didn’t make the cut due to curatorial decisions, but the ones who you think could improve their chances of success next time around if they made a few changes. Maybe it’d only be to six people out of the 150 who applied, but that’d be better than nothing, wouldn’t it? Better only half a dozen people getting some insight into how their proposals are being received, than everyone being left none-the-wiser and puzzling over how to improve?

Can we do that? Can we make a small change like this that might just make a difference to a few people at a time, but cumulatively help move our sector forwards?

Comments are open for a while if you’d like to add any constructive feedback…