ZEN IN THE ART OF GRANTSMANSHIP
(or, This Ain't About Money, It's About Attitude):
A GRANTSEEKER'S GUIDE
Forget yourself.
Be where you are.
Listen.
Forget yourself.
Grants are audience subsidies.
By subsidizing audiences (for performances, workshops, etc.), they indirectly
subsidize artists.
This is as it should be.
Be where you are.
If what you offer is good, you will not need to seek grants. They will find
you.
If you don't have an audience already, grants will subsidize your initial
contact with one.
If you don't have an audience because people don't want what you have, grants
won't help much.
If you don't have an audience because people don't understand what you have,
write for grants to educate them.
It is your responsibility to make people want what you have.
This is as it should be.
Listen.
Grants are like pay.
People give you grants to do something they want done, not to do something
you want done.
Listen to them. Learn what they want done.
If you want to do what they want done, you can take their money without
compromising yourself.
Don't compromise yourself.
If people don't want what you have, don't argue. Educate.
It is better to have an audience that supports your work than to have a
grant that supports your work.
This is as it should be.
The word "artist" is meaningless when we apply it to ourselves.
It has meaning only when it is applied to us by someone else.
ZEN IN THE ART OF GRANTSMANSHIP
(or, This Ain't About Money, It's About Attitude)
A GRANTSEEKER'S GUIDE
(part 2)
What You Should Know - A Pre-Ramble
What I've got to say you can take or leave; it's all personal impressions.
It's personal, dogmatic, and more concerned with attitude than with grantwriting
secrets. It's also intentionally hardnosed -- whether that means realistic
or pessimistic -- much of the time. When I write a grant, I know the odds
are three to one that it will be rejected. That's why attitude is important.
If you want to live with grants, you have to live with rejection -- over
and over and over again. If you equate rejection with failure, or if your
belief in your project if weak enough that a rejection can shake your faith
in it or in yourself, you're going to have an emotionally rough and rocky
grantseeking experience.
On the other hand, getting a grant is a confirmation that someone out there
believes in you or what you're doing, and it will permit you to keep on
doing it. And some things can't be done any other way. If you really believe
in what you're doing, and if grants are necessary to do it, you'll put up
with all this.
I've personally written maybe $600,000 worth of successful grant applications
and assisted in writing maybe $2.5 million more, but I've been turned down
on more. I've written both individual and organizational grants. I've served
on or observed more than twenty grants or festival judging panels and participated
in grant policy discussions.
My grant-seeking ratio isn't bad, about one in three, especially when you
consider that two-thirds of my grants were received while I've lived and
worked in Alabama, where there just isn't any money to get. At least my
ratio's good enough that I can do what I do -- make films and work with
non-profit organizations.
But I don't know any secret success tricks for getting grants. Volume has
a lot to do with my luck. I write a lot of grant proposals. I also write
fairly well, I'm a good planner and researcher, and I believe in the projects
I write grants for. All of these things help. But none of them are anything
special. Anyone can do them.
Attitude. Zen is the art of grantsmanship. Zen in the art of grantseeking
will keep you sane.
Recognizing Who You Are
First and not so obvious, decide whether grants are necessary to do what
you want to do. They may not be. If you can accomplish the same thing with
audience income, contracts, sales, or other earned income, these are much
less frustrating alternatives to grants. If your project has reasonable
potential for earned income at some future date, investors are another less
frustrating alternative that permits you to get money up front.
But if grants are really necessary for you to do what you want to do, admit
that grantseeking is a part of your work, not a prelude to it. Until you
admit this, you are adding unnecessary frustration to what you have to do.
All work or craft has some odious elements. Grantseeking does not have to
be one of them, if you consider it as challenging, hard work. But if you
truly find grantwriting odious, or if you have no skills at it, hire a writer
to do it for you just as you would hire a roadie, a typist, an assistant
editor, or a props and wardrobe manager to assist you with your work. What
you cannot do, if grants are really necessary for your work, is pretend
that grants are not a part of your work.
(And a note, briefly: if you hire someone to write grants for you, hire
someone good but give him or her the license to fail. If they are good,
they will succeed often enough to make them worth your while, but they will
fail -- regularly! The odds are against them.)
Saving Yourself Unnecessary Frustration
I started to call this section "Saving Yourself Frustration" and
then thought better of it. Grantseeking is by definition frustrating. Someone
else has money you want and you'll only occasionally be successful at getting
it. Resign yourself to that. But there are some frustrations that can be
avoided.
Learn these three points by heart:
First, READ! Virtually every funding source provides guidelines on
what they give money for. If you don't research the funding sources you
apply to, you are setting yourself up not only for rejection but also for
failure. More on this later. And MAKE PERSONAL CONTACTS. Every grant
you submit should be preceded by a personal call to the grants officer who
will actually by responsible for your grant. Keep this call short and to
the point, explain your proposal briefly, and ask for suggestions that would
improve your likelihood of success. And whatever you do, don't come across
as hostile or a flake. Lack of staff support shouldn't hurt your chances,
but the active support of a funder's staff can do wonders to improve your
chances. A staff person can also frequently keep you from making really
stupid mistakes, and will also try to inform you if your project does not
fall within their funding guidelines; sometimes they will even help you
revise it so that it does.
Second, don't invest emotional energy railing against the funders.
It is their money after all. They can do what they want with it. If you're
an arts organization and a funder wants to give his or her money to legal
services for the poor, or a tenant farmers association in Mississippi, or
even to another arts discipline, can you really make a good case that your
work has a greater priority? Even if a funder's priorities are really squirrelly,
don't let them upset you. Will it gain you anything? Zen. Remember Zen.
Most funders are working just as hard as you trying to make the right judgments.
If they weren't trying to be good people, they wouldn't be giving away their
money in the first place. It's ironic and a bit sad that funders frequently
catch more flack from the people they try to assist than do all those greedy
people out there who are holding tight onto every penny they have.
Always keep in mind, because it's necessary for your sanity and emotional
well-being as a grantseeker, that you aren't the only deserving recipient,
nor is your cause the only deserving cause. Many grantseekers have trouble
remembering this. Don't be one of them, unless you want to court frustration.
Third, government agencies are an exception to the previous point. It
is not their money. If you think government money is being misspent or funding
priorities are askew, LOBBY! Lobby both through your professional and trade
organizations and directly as an individual. You not only have a right to
do this, you have an obligation to do this, for your own good, for the good
of your field, and for the good of the general public. (And, if you don't
do this, you have no business feeling frustrated at how money is spent.
It's partly your own fault.)
This should also be done, in a slightly different manner, with private funders,
only then it's called "education" rather than lobbying. Private
givers have no obligation to spend their money according to your interests,
but they also need to know the needs of the communities they serve. Teach
and inform. You can do this by letter, by talking with staff and trustees,
and by participating in their and your own professional organizations. Most
are open to constructive criticisms and will listen to your opinion. Some
may even change.
What Happens When A Grant Panel Meets
What I've found out is that, regardless of the discipline being reviewed,
the panel experience if pretty much the same. Grant panels are hard on both
the applicants and the panelists.
Peer panels are not an ideal judging situation, but they're far better than
any other means I know of for awarding most grants. Every peer panel I've
served on or observed has tried very hard to be fair, sympathetic, and open-minded.
Most have tried to make special allowances for new and emerging artists
or organizations. Almost all have looked for demographic diversity among
the grants they awarded. But they've been handed an almost impossible task
by the funders (to distribute fewer grants than there are deserving applicants)
and two truly impossible tasks by the applicants themselves (to be inhumanly
objective and to satisfy everyone.)
Some panels are better than others, and some judging situations are better
than others, but I personally have never seen either to be genuinely bad.
Much as we all would like to feel that the reason we didn't get a grant
is because the selection process was lousy, that generally isn't why we've
been rejected. Almost always, either it's our own fault, or the odds meant
even deserving applicants didn't all get funded, or our luck was bad.
What usually happens at a panel meeting is this: the panel looks at an incredible
number of applications, or an incredible amount of applicants' work. I've
looked at as many as eighty films/videotapes in two days. Some panels may
have better schedules, but many have worse.
Each grant category has its own liabilities built into the judging process.
Grants to organizations are frequently dependent on only the information
that can be set down on paper and the personal knowledge of the panelists.
In the arts, rarely are the actual artworks seen; usually only slides are
used. Film, video, and music tapes must be seen/heard in real time; as a
result, frequently works are not seen or heard in their entirety. Often,
the sheer volume of submissions often precludes careful reading of any but
the finalists. Since you can't do much about these problems, it is very
important that you know what panel problems exist when you start grantseeking!
The rest of the news doesn't get any better. For grants to individual artists,
for instance, once the panel starts discussing the applications, 50 per
cent can usually be dismissed pretty easily because they don't qualify or
clearly aren't competitive. Another 30 per cent represent new and emerging
artists, the fresh new faces in the field. Generally the panel would like
to fund some of these. Generally they don't. Why? Because if you take out
the above eighty per cent of the applications, you still have twenty per
cent remaining, and these are strong, well-thought-out, and clearly desirable
proposals that ought to be funded, and the panel only has enough money to
fund maybe 2 per cent of the applicants. This means that 90 per cent of
even the really good proposals must be rejected.
Okay, so maybe the arts are particularly competitive and/or particularly
underfunded, and grants to individuals almost always have LOTS of applicants.
Unfortunately, other project types can be equally as bad. I just sent in
an application for a CivicNet network demonstration site, to the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting. CPB received about 170 letters of intent to file,
and 114 actual applications. They plan to award six grants.
Your goal as a grantseeker is to consistently get into the final twenty
per cent or so of the proposals that the panel believes ought to be funded.
After that, you might as well relax. The rest of the process is a crapshoot,
dependent on the makeup of the panel, the subject matter of the other applications,
the demographics (geographic, racial, sexual, etc.) of the other applicants,
even whether your proposal is considered right after lunch when the panel
is drowsy or late in the day when the panel is tired. So you might as well
practice your zen consciousness, or hum a few bars of "All God's Children
Got Wings," or whatever makes you feel good. In any case, don't send
off a grant proposal with your pride, self-image, or emotional future riding
on it. Even if everyone on the panel agrees you ought to be funded, the
odds are still 10 to 1 against you. Relax and go on about your work.
For grants to organizations, the panel process is a little less bleak than
it is for grants to individuals. There are fewer organizations than there
are individuals, so there are fewer applications to consider. On the other
hand, there are fewer applications from organizations that can be dismissed
as junk. If an organization has managed to survive at all, it must be doing
something right. In any case, the ratio of projects that ought to get funded
to projects that actually get grants is probably about 5 to 1 or even 3
to 1. While that's a lot better odds than the odds for individuals, it's
still a crapshoot, and what I said above still applies. Write the best proposal
you can, assume the odds are against you even if it's a great proposal you've
written, then relax and go on about your business.
The panels mean well and they try hard. If they're peer review panels (as
many are), the panelists will be people more or less like yourself, and
they will understand what it is like to try to survive as an artist or to
run a non-profit organization. They will review your proposal sympathetically,
they will understand as best they can your needs, and they will make the
best choices they can. Unfortunately, no matter what they decide, they will
make most of the applicants unhappy.
HOW TO GET GRANTS!
(part 3)
"Aha," you think, "at last he's finally getting around to
spilling the secrets." I'm sorry. There aren't any.
Write the best proposal you can. Write clearly, in plain English. Keep it
simple and clear. Don't use jargon. Don't be vague. Above all, don't pad.
Unless you're writing HEW or the Defense Department, your proposal will
not be evaluated by weight. (If you were a panelist who had to read and
evaluate eighty proposals, how would you feel about that two-inch-thick
one looming halfway down your stack of proposals?)
Actually, there are two secrets, even though they're really only common
sense. The first has to do with what every good proposal should contain.
The second has to do with statistics and perseverance.
What Every Good Proposal Should Contain
A proposal does not have to be long. My personal record for shortness is
$25,000 for a two-page narrative plus the required form. But regardless
of its length or the agency to which it is submitted, every grant proposal
should contain the following four elements. They are listed in the order
of the relative importance a panel is likely to give them.
The Need - You must demonstrate that the proposed activity is needed
and that this need is not being met elsewhere. Who is the potential audience,
what is the geographic area to be served, why is this need not being met
already, how many people will be served, etc.
The Plan - You must explain how you intend to meet this need. What
you will do, what is your timetable, why is this the best way to do it,
how it will be promoted, what criteria will you use to determine if it was
successful, etc. You should be clear and SPECIFIC! Your goal is to prove
your project is fail-safe. Anticipate and propose solutions to the potential
objections and problems.
Why You? - You must demonstrate why you are the most logical means
by which this plan can be carried out. Even if the granting agency accepts
that there is a need and your plan can meet it, why should they believe
that you are capable of carrying it out successfully? What are your special
skills and resources, what is your past history of activities in this area,
how successful have you been in the past, what has been the size of your
past audience, how many people have been involved in your activities in
the past? Be especially sure that you identify the particular personnel
who will have primary responsibility, and provide resumes if appropriate.
If you are applying as an organization, include an organizational history.
Include a list of your board members and officers and their professional
roles, if this is helpful: "Jane Smith, Red Cross; John Doe, community
volunteer," etc.
Budget - You must demonstrate that this plan can
be carried out (by you!) at an acceptable cost. This means a detailed budget,
providing both income and expense projections. The more detailed and specific
you are (within reason), the better.
A couple of notes about budgets:
-- A good panelist can determine a lot about your project and
about your organization from your budget. Do the figures make sense? Are
they reasonable? Do they include the things that need to be included? Even
such things as, does this budget suggest that the organization is professional
in its approach to its work, and does it suggest that the person who wrote
it knew what he or she was talking about? You should assume that the person
reading your proposal has some experience with projects similar to what
you're proposing.
-- I rarely make guesses in my budgets, or generalize from "rule of
thumb" ideas about costs. I know what things costs and how many of
them I'll need, I calculate the costs realistically, and I put that number
in my budget. "In-state travel, 1,400 miles at 28 cents = $392"
or "Commercial conference meeting space for 300 people with six break-out
spaces = $1,200 per day" or "box lunches x 40 students at $7 =
$280" This looks professional, it IS professional, and it protects
me. It's part of my job as a grantseeker to know what things cost.
-- Grant budgets are pushed two ways. You want as much as you can get, so
you can do a good job, and the review panel has a limited pool of money,
so it's more sympathetic to projects that are highly cost-efficient. What
this means is that you've got to make an informed guess as to what budget
figure will fly. Try to determine the typical grant size for the place you're
applying. You can do this two ways. The best way is to simply ask. Most
funders will tell you what they would normally give to a project similar
to yours. Another way is to look up the funder's grantmaking history. The
Foundation Center's local collections are a good place to find this information
-- more on them later.
-- When I'm on a grants panel, the first thing I look at is the "one
paragraph" summary of the project, then I look at the budget, then
I look at the organization's history. These three things strongly influence
how I look at the rest of the proposal. They aren't ALL I consider, but
they're VERY important!
One more thing on the proposal itself: Neatness counts. Be orderly; make
sure you include all the things they ask for, in the order they ask for
them; make things attractive and easy to find. If the proposal is long enough
to warrant it, include a cover page and a table of contents.
Statistics and Perseverance
If there is a secret to grantseeking, this is it. You must submit a lot
of grants. The reason is mathematical.
Assume you are writing for funding for an organization that needs to raise
$40,000. Also assume that the odds against you are averaging 5 to 1, and
that the average grant from the places you are applying is $5,000 -- pretty
typical for smaller foundations or community funds. If you want to treat
the financial needs of your organization as a business rather than a lottery,
you should expect to submit forty (!!) proposals to raise your $40,000.
The math is simple, $40,000 equals 1/5 odds x $5,000 average grant size
x forty proposals.
You can juggle the numbers around, but if you want to be realistic in how
you support your activities financially, and if grants play a part in this,
the math is right there. Determine how much money you need, make an intelligent
guess at your odds from the agencies you're applying to, calculate their
average grant size for projects like this. Then multiply it out. That's
all there is to it.
If the idea of writing forty grant proposals is a bit daunting (it would
be for me!), STOP. That's not what I said. You only have to write one proposal,
if it's good. But you do have to send it out to more than one place. In
fact, you send it over and over until you get the money you need. If you
only send it to one place, you're not involved in grantseeking. You're involved
in a lottery. That's not the way to support yourself or to support your
organization's activities.
Grantseeking is perserverance, and perserverance doesn't mean sending off
one really good proposal. Perseverance is the ability to send out the other
39 copies of your proposal. Perseverance is the ability to accept (not necessarily
like, but at least accept) that you will get four rejections for every grant
you get. Perseverance is what determines whether you are a professional
or a hobbyist.
Grantwriting isn't voodoo and, if you care about your organization and its
programs, it isn't a single proposal crapshoot. It's zen: detachment, perseverance,
and realism in the face of adverse conditions.
SUMMARY (or "You asked for it, didn't you?")
None of what I've said is likely to make you want to be a grantseeker. But
if you read past the first paragraph, I assume that you have already decided
that you want to get grants. Maybe you've rethought that and decided it's
not worth it. There are, after all, alternatives. Grantseeking requires
the same professionalism that you already recognize as an integral part
of your other work, and what determines professionalism is as much attitude
and perseverance as it is innate talent and training. No musician expects
to be hired every time he or she requests a performance booking; no artist
expects to sell every painting, no teacher is successful with every lesson
plan. Those who succeed as musicians and artists and teachers are those
whose professional talents are matched by their professional stamina.
Sure, luck has something to do with all this. You may write one proposal,
submit it to one funder, and hit right away. But the information in this
diatribe, or whatever it is, is for the organization that wants to be an
organization in five years, in ten years, and needs grants to accomplish
this. Over a lifetime career as an individual grantseeker or over the life
of an organization, grants have much less to do with luck than they do with
statistics, or "fate" if you wish. Luck is determined by the frequency
with which you make yourself available to it. If you average one grant for
every three proposals you submit, and if you submit five grant proposals,
your chances of being "lucky" are greatly increased.
Nor is grantseeking the same as gambling. Sure, you're playing the odds,
but what do you lose if you don't win? In gambling, you normally have a
finite amount of resources to commit to taking risks, and each risk reduces
those resources. In grantseeking, your resources don't decline in relationship
to the number of risks you take; they increase. Furthermore, the cost of
submitting five copies of a proposal is only insignificantly greater than
the cost of submitting one proposal. All that is at risk is ego. If you
eliminate the ego, you eliminate the risk. Zen.
Zen in the art of grantsmanship is essentially the same thing as what we
in the West would call professionalism in attitude and perseverance. It
is the ability not to fear failure, since we know it must come periodically,
and it is the ability to continue a right course of action even when it
does not produce immediate rewards. This is a professional approach, and
this is a zen approach.
The choice of a zen metaphor was not flippant.
Forget yourself. Be where you are. Listen. Good luck.
Grantwriting and Fundraising:
The Business Side of the Business
An Outline for a Workshop on Grants and Grantseeking ....
Magic City Film Festival
August 1994
Wade Black, Workshop Leader
Welcome and Introduction
A Quick Look at Grantwriting
Organizing Your Business (and the alternatives to grantwriting)
Sole Proprietorship
Partnership
Corporation
Limited Partnership
Non-Profit
Fiscal Sponsorship: Working with a Non-Profit Organization
How to Find Where the Money Is
Alabama Fundraising Directory
Foundation Center Collections
Grants, Fellowships, Contracts for Services
Steps in Grantseeking
Research (if your time is valuable, this is where to spend it.)
Contact (guidelines, encouragement, how much?)
The Proposal (generic)
The Cover Letter (individualized)
Follow-up ("It doesn't matter if you win or lose. It's how you look
playing the game.")
What a Good Proposal Includes
The Need
The Plan
Why You?
The Budget
This is a work in progress. More to come. #8->
Return to Wade's Construction Site
or go to Non-profits, Foundations, and Grantseeking
Send comments, corrections, and suggestions to wadeblack@mindspring.com
Copyright © 1996 L. Wade Black. All rights reserved.