Hot take: most emerging artists programmes don't actually care about most emerging artists

So many young artist programmes will state that their mission is to 'help emerging performers', then only provide value to the 3% or fewer applicants that end up getting through their extremely competitive, lengthy, and often highly subjective application process.

Meanwhile, the 97%+ people who went through a lot to put together good applications get nothing. 🫠

I strongly feel that the best recruitment processes deliver value even to applicants that are not selected. Because they are, after all, the majority. 🤷‍♀️

And I don't mean value in the form of stuff that people don't really care about, like 'tips to improve your social media presence as a professional musician', which they could easily get from a 5s Google search. 🙄

Yesterday, I sent out a survey to the nearly 100 people who applied to perform at Oxford Concert Circle, asking them DIRECTLY what we could do to make the application process more valuable to them, even in the event that we are not able to offer them a performance slot.

Whether it'd be sharing their details with other concert series, sharing a list of other paid performance opportunities, receiving individualised feedback, or a completely different idea, I gave them the opportunity to give me *their* side of the story. Because what you DON'T want to do as an organisation is to spend time and resources offering things that will make you look like you're doing something but that are actually irrelevant / not so useful to your target audience.

This, alone, creates a dynamic which I so rarely encountered in my path as a pianist, in which an organisation that claims to care about emerging musicians... actually cares. How many emerging artist schemes *actually* ask emerging artists what they think? 😶

Of course, you can't provide the same level of benefits to large numbers of people as you can with a small number of selected candidates. But entirely disregarding all the people who have come to you for help seems like an inefficient use of resources, especially if your organisation cares about scalable impact. 📈