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 in a Word/Google Doc to copy and paste into the online application. All of these application components are available to view and fill out on Submittable.
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.
Tips for filling out your budget
Tips for filling out your budget
Learning to prepare a realistic, persuasive budget will help you apply for larger grants, public art commissions, and other career opportunities down the road.
Three things to know before you start:
The award is $12,000. It's fixed — you can't apply for more or less.
Your budget must balance. Total income, including the award, has to equal total expenses.
The award is taxable income. See the Guidelines for how payment and W-9s work.
The selection panel reviews budgets carefully, checking both that you've budgeted enough to actually carry out your project and that you haven't inflated any of the numbers.
Do some research…
To make an accurate assessment, you first need to research your materials, processes, and venues. One of the best ways to plan is to sketch out every step the project will require — from initial plans through final presentation — with a rough timeline. Then go back and work out the expenses you'd incur along the way.
Be thorough. Call vendors and ask for estimates, or search online. Once you have a plan, find someone who has done something similar and ask whether you've missed anything. Commonly forgotten items on public art projects include insurance, permits, and engineering stamps. Planning for these ahead of time shows the panel your project is believable and doable, and keeps you from paying for surprises out of pocket.
Expenses
Artist Fees
As you plan, think hard about time — not just a realistic schedule, but how many hours the work will actually take you.
Power Plant Grants and other funders expect you to pay yourself as a professional artist. There's no fixed percentage, but a budget where artist fees are a very small share of the total usually means someone has undercounted their own labor. For labor-intensive work, performance, or a collaborative team, fees can reasonably be a large portion of the budget.
Use the notes section to show how you arrived at your figure and how it divides among collaborators — for example, "$3,000 lead artist, $1,000 each for two collaborators, based on approximately 120 hours of work."
Contractor Fees
Costs for anyone outside you or your group carrying out professional services essential to the project — a musician recording a soundtrack for your video, for instance.
Production and Marketing Costs
Straightforward predictions of what it will cost to carry out and publicize your project. The suggested line items in the template aren't exhaustive and may look quite different for your project, so think it through.
It's good practice to include a line for contingencies — unexpected problems. Somewhere around 5 to 10% of your total is reasonable; much more than that raises a flag with the panel.
Some projects will have almost no production costs and heavy marketing costs, or the reverse. A project built around a year of newspaper ads inviting people to share their stories, for example, is almost entirely marketing.
Total
Add up all your expenses so you have a realistic sense of what the project will cost. After you work through your income, you may need to raise additional funds or reduce expenses to make the budget balance.
Income
Power Plant Grant award
Enter the award first: $12,000. This figure is fixed and can't be adjusted.
Other income
List any other income you expect, whether from the project itself or from outside sources. Be realistic. If you already have a thriving sales practice, $500 in print sales may be plausible; if not, it will look like wishful thinking.
Keep accessibility in mind. One goal of Power Plant Grant projects is to reach the public — meaning the audience you've chosen, which we hope is broader or more unexpected than a typical studio practice reaches. Charging a lot for tickets, classes, or participation can put your project out of reach of that audience, which works against our priority of accessibility.
If you don't have enough income to cover the project and keep it accessible, consider:
Redesigning the project to a more manageable size. You can always expand it after the Power Plant presentation and plan to earn more from it then
Holding multiple presentations, with some free or low cost, or giving some items away and selling others
Using the award to leverage additional funding — other grants, Kickstarter, fundraising events. A competitive award often works as a stamp of approval that helps raise more
Asking for individual donations. A fiscal sponsor such as Fractured Atlas can make those donations tax deductible for your contributors. Fiscal sponsorship of your own fundraising is not the same as a nonprofit partner receiving grant funds, so this doesn't affect your eligibility
Soliciting in-kind donations of food, venue, materials, or labor that match an expense in your budget
In-kind income
List anything someone will give you for free that's equivalent to money and helps balance your expenses — volunteers donating time to cover the labor of printing your zine, or a group offering space as a venue. Estimate the dollar value of each donation so it offsets the matching expense.
These must offset real costs in your budget. Many grants you apply for later will require matching funds, and everything in this category fits that profile, so it's worth learning to identify in-kind support now.
If you have unusual expenses or income that would be more persuasive with an explanation, use the space at the end of the budget form.