2024 Application Instructions
You can do this!
Before you begin to fill out your application in the Submittable platform here, we suggest you sketch out your idea offline, determine your project’s budget, and fill out the application and budget form to copy and paste into the online application.
We’re offering two different types of application files for you to download. Each file contains the same information, so you should download one that matches the software to use. We recommend the .doc format.
We recommend using the Excel budget form to help determine your project’s budget before applying. This budget is easier to fill out because it will do the math for you!
PLEASE NOTE: If you do receive funding for your project, you are encouraged to keep good records and to keep the money separate from your regular expenses. If you fail to complete your project, you will be asked to document all expenditures and return monies that cannot be accounted for. This allows us to reallocate funds to other deserving projects.
Finished with your application and budget worksheet?
Tips for filling out your budget
Learning how to prepare a realistic and persuasive budget will enable you to apply for larger grants, public art projects and other career development opportunities. The selection panel will review your budget carefully to make sure that you have budgeted enough money to carry out your proposed budget, while making sure that you have not over-inflated any of the sums.
Do some research…
In order to make this kind of accurate assessment, you first need to research your materials, processes, venues and so on. One of the best ways to plan a project is to sketch out all the steps that will be required - from drawing up initial plans to carrying out the final presentation — with a rough timeline. Then you can go back and try to imagine all the expenses that you might incur along the way.
Be thorough. You can find information by calling vendors and requesting an estimate for a material or a process, or you can search online. Once you think you have a good plan, try to find someone who has done something similar before and ask them if they think you have missed something important. Common items that are often forgotten for public art projects, for example, are insurance, permits or engineering stamps. Planning for these expenses ahead of time will not only demonstrate that your project is believable and doable, but will also prevent you from having to pay for surprise items out of pocket.
Expenses
Artist Fees
In the process of your planning you should be thinking a lot about time, not just in terms of a realistic schedule, but also how much time the project will take you as an artist to complete. Power Plant and other funding bodies expect you to pay yourself as a professional artist for your work. Normally this represents about 10% to 15% of a budget. Obviously, this will not be a lot of money on a grant of this size, but will increase as you progress to larger funds. Also, if you are engaging in extremely time consuming processes or performance of some kind, the artist fees may be expected to be a much higher portion of your overall budget. If you have a collaborative group with multiple artists, you could also budget more for artist fees. Use the notes section to explain ($200 lead artist, $100 for all others, for example).
Contractor Fees
You should include costs here if you are paying someone (other than yourself or the members of your group) to carry out professional services that are essential for the project (e.g. a musician to record a sound track for your video).
Production and Marketing Costs
These are quite straightforward predictions of the costs associated with carrying out your project. The suggestions you can see on the Word and Excel documents are not exhaustive and might be quite different for your project, so think this through carefully. It is a good practice to enter a line in one of these sections for “contingencies”, which allows for unexpected problems that occur. But, if this is too large it will raise a red flag with the jury. You may find that for some kinds of projects you will have almost no costs in Production, but many in Marketing (e.g. you are running a series of newspaper ads throughout the year to invite people to share stories with you...).
Total
Make sure that you total up all your expenses so that you have a realistic sense of what the project will cost to accomplish. After you have gone through the next step to assess your income, you may be faced with the need to raise additional funds or to reduce your expenses in order to make your budget balance.
Income
Power Plant Award
The first sum you should enter here should be the Power Plant Grant funds you are requesting.
Tickets, Merchandise etc.
This is where you would list other forms of income you anticipate receiving, both from carrying out your project and from other sources. You should be realistic here. If you already have a thriving business practice as an artist, then $500 in CD sales may be a likely scenario, but if not then this may look unreasonable. You are also encouraged to consider that one of the goals of Power Plant Grant projects is to be accessible to the public (‘the public’ meaning your target/chosen audience, which we hope will be an expanded or novel one compared with a typical studio practice). If you charge a lot for tickets, classes or other forms of participation, this may place your project out of the reach of your audience (and will not therefore meet our priority of accessibility).
There are several things you might consider if you do not have enough income to pay for the project you have planned AND maintain accessibility:
Redesign your project to a more manageable size. You can always expand your project after the Power Plant Grant presentation/production etc. and plan to make more income from it;
Hold multiple presentations, only some of which are free or low cost, or give some items away for free and sell others etc.;
Use the Power Plant Grant funds to leverage additional funding from other grants, or from Kickstarter, fundraising events and so on (the receipt of a prestigious award is in many ways seen as a “stamp of approval” and often can help raise more money);
Ask for individual donations from patrons or supporters. A fiscal agent such as Fractured Atlas can make such donations tax deductible for your contributors;
Solicit in-kind donations of food, venue, materials, volunteer labor and so on that match an expense in your budget. (See next)
In-kind income
In this section you would list anything anyone will give you for free, that would be equivalent to money, and that would help to balance out the expenses in your budget. For example you might list volunteers who have offered to donate their time to cover the labor costs for printing your zine, or the space that a group has offered to you for use as a venue. In all cases you would need to estimate the dollar value of such a donation in order to offset it against expenses. Please note that these must offset real costs/needs in your budget. In the future you will likely apply for grants that require ‘matching funds’, and all the items in this category will fit that profile – so it is good practice to learn to identify in-kind donations.
If you have any unusual expenses or income that you feel would be more persuasive with an explanation, please use the space provided at the end of the budget form.