Fundraisers report ongoing woes with ‘hideous’ Grantium system

Users of Arts Council England’s much-maligned Grantium platform have been expressing their frustration after the system went down last week due to heavy traffic.

Posting on LinkedIn, fundraiser David Burgess said he tried to access the platform on 20 May, but was met with the message: “We are currently experiencing some issues with Grantium due to high traffic on the portal. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible.”

Burgess said he believes the issue may have been caused by the scheduling of deadlines for two major ACE funding programmes on the same day.

“The worst bit is, this isn’t even deadline day! This is crashing under the weight of people who know just how time-consuming and unreliable Grantium is and are trying to get their proposal in early,” he added.

“People shouldn’t need to block out two to three full working days simply to upload the form (let alone the time taken to write it). They shouldn’t need to cancel other meetings, or log on late at night or in the early hours to be able to submit their proposal. Yet those are all real examples from people I’ve spoken to today.”

Arts fundraising consultant Clare Norburn said she got up at the “crack of dawn” the following day (21 May) in the hope that it would be working, but found it was still down.

First launched in January 2016 at a cost of £930,000, Grantium was originally developed to meet government cost-saving requirements. Since then, it has received sustained criticism from users for being counterintuitive, using incomprehensible language, and having a confusing design.

‘Hideous experience’

Posting about the latest issues, Simma Gershenson, who works in fundraising and charity development, said: “Many, many years ago, I was part of a group of fundraisers and charity IT folk invited to look at Grantium. Nobody in that room recommended that ACE go forward with it – and look, here we are.”

Susie Batchelor, a cultural heritage leader, added, “It’s a hideous experience even when it’s allegedly working.”

Plans to improve Grantium were shelved due to the Covid pandemic. In May 2022, ACE told Arts Professional it was testing new versions of the system and hoped to be able to confirm a launch date “in the near future”.

At the start of this year, ACE pledged that changes to the Grantium user experience would be revealed in spring 2025, but that announcement has now been pushed back.

An ACE spokesperson said: “We are conducting development work on Grantium, and whilst we were hoping to announce our plans in spring, this will now be summer.

“We are sorry for the delay and recognise the interest in this forthcoming announcement.”