March 8, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Switching from slides to electronic images has helped the New York Foundation for the Arts save money and improve its grant-making review process.
The foundation awards grants of $7,000 apiece to roughly 120 visual, literary, or performing artists in New York annually.
Until last year, visual artists were required to send in slides of their work as part of the application process. Foundation employees then had to assemble the slides — as many as 5,000 each year — into carousels, which they would use to project the images onto a wall for art experts to evaluate.
Now, using a software system developed by the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, the foundation is able to accept online images as an alternative to slides.
The new system has made the process easier for the experts who review the applications, for foundation staff members, and for the artists themselves, says Michael L. Royce, executive director of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
During the review process, he says, evaluators have laptop computers they can use to view the digital images, allowing them to see smaller details they wouldn’t have been able to see previously. What’s more, the foundation has been able to eliminate the time between rounds of reviewing, when it sometimes took staff members more than an hour to assemble carousels of the slides to be viewed in each round. “Panelists can now spend more time talking about the work,” says Mr. Royce, “because there’s less time involved in putting up the work.”
The foundation estimates that the switch to digital images saved $15,000 to $20,000 in staff time and postage and handling. It has also made the process easier for artists.
“Before they had to pack up everything, and go to the post office and send it to us, and then worry whether or not it got to us,” says Mr. Royce. “Now they just push a button on their computer and it’s done.”
For grant-application information: Go to http://www.nyfa.org.
