ACE annual survey on hold due to technical difficulties

Arts Council England (ACE) has waived a condition of payment of its grants to National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) following IT problems.

NPOs are normally required to have responded to ACE’s Annual Survey before their July payments are released, but “capacity issues” with the new portal have made it impossible for them to save and submit their responses online.

“Given this delay, we will push back this deadline so that [it] applies to a future payment,” ACE said.

The Annual Survey requires NPOs to submit details of their finances, their workforce, their artistic activities, their digital engagement and their touring.

The data entered by those who had fully completed and submitted their answers has been saved, but ACE is telling others “don’t log into the portal and attempt to submit the survey at this time”. They will be asked to complete the survey “using a combination of both the portal and spreadsheets”.

ACE told NPOs: “We are very sorry for the frustration this has caused, and are continuing to investigate the issue urgently.”

The problems with the new portal, which was designed to make the survey “more user friendly”, have been compounded by ACE’s new requirements for data. More details are being requested from NPOs, especially in relation to diversity. The survey includes questions on the ethnicity and sexual orientation of permanent staff, contractual or freelance workers, volunteers and trustees.

ACE has said that it wants the data to be “as accurate and usable as possible” to enable organisations to benchmark against their peers and use the data for self-evaluation. But one senior arts professional told AP: “We are expected to report on whether people are bi, gay, lesbian, straight, or prefer not to say. We don't collect this information having not previously been asked to. We are also expected to report on whether people are any of a wide and startling variety of ethnicities – but the only data we collect on this has been done as people joined us as employees, when they filled in forms with far fewer and different options. As for volunteers, it’s pure guesswork.”

This is the third time this year that ACE has had to take remedial action in relation to its online communications. Its new grant application system, Grantium, was branded “inaccessible” by frustrated applicants who took to Twitter to share their views. Its new website provoked similar anger when it was discovered that ACE’s archive of research reports and documents had been removed from the site.