I have read many DGArtes applications. As a jury member, as a consultant, as someone who has accompanied organisations through application processes over the years. And there are mistakes that repeat themselves with a regularity that has long stopped surprising me. They are not mistakes of incompetence. They are mistakes of perspective. The good news is that they are avoidable.
The most frequent mistake is writing inward. The application is written as if the jury already knows the organisation, its history, its context. Acronyms are used without explanation, previous projects are mentioned without situating them, familiarity is assumed where none exists. A jury reads dozens of applications in a matter of days. What is not explained is not inferred, it is ignored.
The second mistake is the confusion between activity and project. Describing what you do, how many performances, how many sessions, how many participants, is not the same as arguing why that work deserves public support. DGArtes funds projects with demonstrable artistic and cultural relevance, not work schedules. The application must answer the question “why does this matter?” and not merely “what are we going to do?”
The third mistake is a budget misaligned with the narrative. It is common to find applications where the text describes an ambitious project and the budget does not sustain that ambition, or the reverse, a high budget for a poorly justified project. The jury reads both documents in parallel. The coherence between them is itself an argument.
The fourth mistake is underestimating the evaluation criteria. Each DGArtes programme has published criteria and defined weightings. Many organisations apply without reading them carefully. The result is an application that may be artistically solid but does not respond to what is being asked. This is not about formatting the project to fit the criteria. It is about ensuring the application makes visible what the project already has.
The fifth mistake is leaving the application to the last moment. Writing a good application is a process of clarifying the project itself. Organisations that leave the drafting to the week before the deadline arrive at that week without having resolved fundamental questions, about objectives, about partners, about sustainability. The application ends up paying for that postponement.
There is one mistake running through all of these: language. Applications written in excessive sectoral jargon, with long passive sentences, with adjectives that substitute for argument, lose force regardless of the project’s merit. Clarity is not simplification. It is respect for the time of the person reading.
A DGArtes application is not a form to be filled in. It is an argument to be built. The difference between those that advance and those that fall short rarely lies in the project itself. It lies in the ability to make it legible, coherent and convincing to someone reading it for the first time.
Photo: © Glenn Carstens-Peters
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