Creative Scotland Mistakes We Made (so you don’t have to
So you submitted a Creative Scotland bid – congrats! That’s huge! Take a second to feel proud for managing to get 28 pages of funding jargon, in-kind support and project planning over the finish line and under the character count – that in itself is a huge fucking achievement, most people don’t get that far.
Now you’ve spent 10 weeks in bureaucratic limbo, manifesting, itching to get going, imagining how cool the project will be, fantasising about being able to pay everyone for their time, dreaming of booking the days off work at your minimum wage rent-paying day job – only to get the email saying that you haven’t secured the funding (this time.) Shit. That sucks. That’s ~100 hours of work and a dozen people’s hopes and dreams down the drain. So what went wrong? Here’s some mistakes we noticed ourselves making along the way (mostly when CS sent us emails asking for clarification - oops!) :
SILLY MISTAKES WE MADE:
Checking Word Count instead of Character Count. For maximum collaboration we drafted the bid in a shared Google Doc we could all collaborate on. CS has very strict character and word limits – if you focus on word count as you write, you’ll most likely end up WAY over the character count and then have to spend aaages cutting stuff down which is a boring and annoying task.
Not accounting for where our income from projected ticket sales was being SPENT in the budget. AKA not understanding that you cannot take profit on a creative scotland funded project – any and all income made through the project has to be spent and accounted for in your budget.
Collaborating with a creative who was in full time education. Creative Scotland does not fund projects where there is anyone in full time education on the budget. Makes sense – now we know.
Not having enough time. Not submitting the bid early enough. Think submitting four months in advance is enough time? Think again. CS most likely won’t give you the money any closer than a month to the very first day of the project, but they’d WAY rather you had a few months spare before you get started. The tighter the timeline, the higher risk the project seems.
Not naming which individual would be responsible for marketing and not allocating enough (any) expenditure for marketing in the budget (oop). This also meant CS thought our projected income from ticket sales was over-optimistic and doubted our ability to fill as many seats as we said we thought we would.
Big hiccup: not having a named actor on board to play the eponymous Nose character of our show Nose Job. We knew this was a hole when we submitted, it but timing was tight and finding trained full body mask actors in Scotland is harder than it sounds. Pretty niche stuff. Luckily, Ruxy Cantir is busy training up the next generation of actors in Mask at RCS so there is hope for the future! We also didn’t make our recruitment process for finding someone for the role clear enough.
Not explaining our rationale for including a curtain raiser and what it would add to audience experience. It’s super commonplace at gigs to see a warm up act on before the main ticketed event to a) get the crowd hyped and b) showcase new local talent. We’re super keen to bring back Curtain Raisers in theater for the same reasons. An extra amuse bouche of theatrical fun for an audience, and a chance for another company to showcase their work. We thought this was kinda self-explanatory – we thought wrong.
Another black mark against us was not including clear enough methodologies for how we would solicit audience feedback after the sharing.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
– Have a specific person named for each and every role within the project
– Explain everything. In detail. Be as specific as possible. Assume nothing is obvious.
– Expand your risk register!
For Context: Heads on Crooked submitted a bid to Creative Scotland’s Open Fund For Individuals through a member of the collective’s individual account in the over £5,000 below £20,000 range.
OUR OFFICIAL FEEDBACK:
“We recognised your commitment to engaging people who do not usually go to the theatre and your success in doing so with your first production. We considered that your project would offer learning opportunities for your collective and project personnel. There was a lack of information in several key areas of your project. It was unclear who would be responsible for marketing and we noted that there was no marketing expenditure in your budget. We would have welcomed more information on the methodologies you might use to solicit audience feedback and which industry practitioners you would invite. We were unsure if you would secure your projected generated income as sharings of work are usually offered free of charge. We considered that this might affect the numbers of audiences you would engage. It was difficult for us to fully assess the likely quality of the work without knowing who the established performer might be. It was unclear to us what the rationale for the curtain raiser performance was and what you intended this to add to the audience experience. Your application would have benefitted from an expansion of your risk register, more information on evaluation and on recruitment processes. Should you wish to reapply we recommend that you request your full assessment.”
FURTHER RESOURCES:
To learn from some successful funding bids (there are so many!) the White Pube have an open acess e-library of successful applications you can browse through and add to:
https://thewhitepube.co.uk/funding-library/
There’s not a ton of Creative Scotland specific ones in there, so if you’re sitting on a winner - add it to the pile!
