When mixed-media artist Rita Robillard prepares to apply for a grant, she doesn’t start by browsing the Internet or the public library; she starts in her studio. She looks at her work and asks, Where can I take this next? Where can I go from here? She pores over her notebooks and scrapbooks of ideas as she considers where she wants to expand her work. She’d probably do this even if a grant deadline weren’t looming, but a deadline compels her to sit down and let her work speak to her. “To win a grant, you must have a vision of what you want,” she said.

The first step in articulating that vision is career planning to ensure that you’re applying for a grant that will help you get to where you want to go. Because the grant-application process is so time intensive, you need to make be sure that you’re applying for a grant that’s in alignment with your career plans. Your planning will help you envision where you want to go next, how to build that bridge into your future, and how grants can help you get there.

Before you start surfing the Web in search of organizations or individuals ready to write you a check, set aside time to contemplate where you want your career to go in both the short term and the long term. What are you creating right now that could benefit from writing a grant application? What aspects of your creative projects need support? What does that support look like?

Monica Miller, former director of programs at Washington’s Artist Trust, has led workshops for artists on the business of art, including grant writing. She tells artists “to think about what they’re making and then to daydream and brainstorm all the things associated with making their work. Is it a residency they need? materials? subcontracting a portion of the project? Is it time or a studio rental?” She encourages them to free-associate and think as broadly and as loosely as possible.

The artists in her program also make long-range plans. Miller urges artists to envision beyond their goals for this week or this year. She urges them to imagine a scenario in five or even ten years. “What’s a typical day? Who are they talking to? What comes up in that day? If they’re in New York City at a gallery opening, they need to hold that big picture. Then connect the dots between now and then.”

What’s your big vision? Is it a New York City gallery or a studio on Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle? Between now and there, what are some of the baby steps you’ll have to take?

Your career planning also may involve studying the careers of artists who are further along than you and talking to artist friends about their plans. (See Appendix C: Additional Resources to Support Your Career for books that will help you dig deeper into your career plans.) If you want to get to a Manhattan gallery opening, of course you won’t know every step of the way, but by envisioning that mile marker, your path will become clearer—whether your next step is mounting another performance piece, spending a month at a residency, or hiring a mentor to learn a specific skill.

After you’ve spent some time envisioning your art life down the road, make a list of all your projects, large and small. Include every project, from the ones in those mental folders labeled TOO WEIRD TO CONSIDER and WHEN I WIN THE LOTTERY to your dream projects. Then for each project, list all of its separate parts, the actions you’ll take, and the materials needed.

If your project is a performance piece, for example, the list might include items such as time to write, studio space to rehearse, a choreographer, and fabric for costumes. To write your historical novel about nineteenth-century Russian royalty, you might need a research trip to St. Petersburg. To finish your memoir, you might need a one-month residency that pays a stipend. To bring the first draft of your play to its final form, you might need to stage a public reading with professional actors. To launch a new series of paintings, you might need to hire a studio assistant to organize your workspace.

Your list also may include items needed for your own professional development. For example, to launch a national career, you need a professional website; to get more radio gigs, you need to hire a voice coach; to advance to the next level in your career, you may need to attend that $1,000 writing conference to meet agents and mingle with the literati.

Chances are, many writers and artists have found grants to pay for endeavors that are similar to those on your list.

Years ago, after I made a similar list, I realized that one of my goals was to build a website. I needed the site because I wanted to be published at the national level in a book or a magazine. Without a professional-looking website, I couldn’t compete. I searched for a professional development grant that would pay for marketing materials that included the creation and launch of a website. I applied for the grant, won the money, built and launched the site, and within short order was published in a national magazine and landed a book deal.

Another time, when I was doing solo performance work, I applied for a professional development grant that would pay for me to assemble a press packet so that I could book more performance gigs. That time, I didn’t receive the grant and when I called to follow-up, the grants officer told me that the panel didn’t feel that I was ready for marketing materials yet. She said that they thought I still needed to build a bigger body of work before focusing on marketing. The truth stung. But in the end, I realized they were right. At that stage in my career, I was better off working in the studio than marketing. If I’d received the grant, it would have been more of a hindrance than a help to my career. So, in a funny way, the rejection was the best outcome for my career.

Create Your Organizational Headquarters

Once you have a solid idea for the project you want to fund, you’re ready to research grant possibilities, fill out applications, track deadlines, follow up, and so on. The better organized you are, the smoother this process will be. I recommend that you create a filing system to organize your research on granting organizations and a calendar to track grant deadlines. You don’t want the information you collect to end up in one big pile on your desk or computer desktop, leaving you feeling overwhelmed. At a minimum, you need a calendar to record deadlines and file folders to organize information about each funding source.

The reason the grant process can be confusing and sometimes daunting is because each organization that offers grants has different rules for applying. Some don’t even have an application—just a list of items they want you to send; others have a ten-page instruction manual on how to apply and offer workshops on the application process.

This means you can’t send the same application to every organization; each one has to be customized. The more grants you apply for, the better and faster you will get at tailoring your applications to meet the unique and sometimes idiosyncratic instructions from each funder. Once you craft a few core components—like your artist statement, project description, résumé, and bio—you’ll be able to use them as a starting point for each application.

It’s easy for beginning grant writers to get overwhelmed by the research and what seems like a mysterious process. When I started, I became convinced that grants were for artists smarter than I was who had discovered some secret key I would never find. The good news (which is also the bad news) is that there is no secret key. Grant writing is a skill like any other. It requires time, practice, research, and hard work. But as an artist, you already know how to work hard, and you’ve mastered other skills in your career that once seemed mysterious and unattainable.

Schedule a Research Day

Step one is to organize is your time. When author Cheryl Strayed started applying for grants to support her writing, she set aside one day a month as Research Day. She didn’t worry about grants all month long except for that one day. Since then, she has won sixteen grants totaling more than $30,000. The funds have bought her time to write and paid for a research trip, childcare, and travel expenses to attend a writing retreat and have partially covered the expenses to build her website.

Before you embark on Research Day, you will need the following supplies:

When you find information about a grant that seems like a good match for you, download both the application and the guidelines. I recommend printing all the pages and stapling them together for each granting organization. Later, as you read the guidelines, highlight the criteria and the deadline.

On your calendar, note both the deadline and two months before this date; that’s when you’ll start working on this grant. Now make a file folder for this granting institution. If it’s more than two months from the deadline, file this material in the “Grants” section of your filing cabinet.

Enlist a Research Buddy

To make Research Day more fun and productive, team up with another artist looking for similar grants. You can research solo and then convene at the end of the day to share what you have both found. With teamwork, you’ll learn about more opportunities. Plus, if someone is counting on you, you’re more likely to do your homework.

You may be thinking, Why would I want to share my research with another artist? Don’t I want to keep my findings to myself? After all, the fewer artists who apply, the better my chances of winning—right? Yes, you take a chance if you team up with Suzy Brilliant, find a wonderful grant, and share the good news with her. Before you know it, she applies for it, wins the grant while your application gets rejected. If only you hadn’t told her about it, you might have won. It’s possible.

“I’ve given people tips and then they’ve gotten the grant and I haven’t. But that’s life,” says actor and playwright Aaron Landsman. “There’s both a perceived and a real scarcity of resources, so I understand the impulse to hoard, but I don’t see it as being particularly successful. My friends who are more successful than I am tend to be more generous people who are always willing to give you a tip. I never see that keeping it private works better than generosity.”

Based on my experience and interviews with dozens of artists, I’ve found that teamwork helps more than hinders. You’ll discover more opportunities and prepare stronger applications with advice and support from a fellow artist, and the camaraderie will keep your morale up. Also, a dose of healthy competition may inspire you to work harder. In the end, you have more to gain through partnering up than you have to lose.

Start Small and Local

Many an artist dreams of that one big grant that will enable her to quit her day job and make art full-time, without interruptions. Unfortunately, those big grants are few and far between. If you’re just starting to apply for grants, you’ll increase your chance of success by targeting a small one close to home.

The first grant that artist Mira Bartók won was a professional development grant from the Illinois Arts Council. The grant provided $1,500 for Bartók to professionally photograph her paintings. Although the amount was small, that documentation was crucial to her career. With good-quality slides and transparencies of her work (the standard format at that time), she went to New York City and found a gallery to represent her. She used the same set of slides two years later to secure a one-person show in Italy.

Small, local grants tend to be easier to apply for—the applications are simpler and shorter, and the competition is less intense—than national grants. Winning small grants also looks good on your résumé and future applications, because it shows that another organization already believes in you and that you’ve been responsible and successful with the funding.

To start your local search, locate your city, state, and regional arts associations and find out what grants they offer individual artists. For a listing of the fifty state art commissions as well as regional artist organizations, consult the state arts agency directory on the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies website (www.nasaa-arts.org). You’ll find an interactive map of the United States that links to the nation’s state and regional arts organizations. For example, clicking on the state of Oregon brings up contact details for the Oregon Arts Commission.

Venture Beyond Your Backyard

To begin researching nationwide grants, check out the free listing of almost three thousand opportunities for individual artists on the Source at the New York Foundation for the Arts website (www.nyfasource.org). The list can be sorted by type of award, artistic discipline, location, deadline, and other criteria. So if you’re interested in awards for musicians, you can limit the search to Music entries and, within seconds, view a list of 1,034 opportunities from 755 organizations. (Note: Other disciplines include Dance, Design Arts, Folk/Traditional Arts, Literature, Media Arts, Performance Art, Theater, and Visual Art.) Further refine your search by subdiscipline, which in the Music category includes Blues, Jazz, and Opera, among others. Other limits on the search include location, deadline, and even the type of award.

For more listings, log on to the Foundation Center website (www.foundationcenter.org). You’ll find many resources for the individual grant seeker, including a comprehensive database called the Online Directory of Grants to Individuals (www.foundationcenter.org/getstarted/individuals/). For a fee, you can use this database for a month or more. You can sort the list by type of art, area of interest for the funder, and other criteria. If your library has a subscription to this service, you may be able to access it there for free.

Appendix A: Where to Find Grants and Residencies lists many grant and funding opportunities for artists. Many but not necessarily all of these grants also are listed on the NYFA site or the Foundation Center database. It’s always a good idea to check several sources that relate to your discipline and not rely on one single list. Grants come and go, so check lists frequently for updates, or sign up for mailing lists from organizations in your discipline.

You may find the number of granting organizations and the many types of grants available overwhelming at first, but you’ll soon realize that because different grants apply to different artists at different times for different projects, you’ll be eligible for and interested in only a handful at any one time. It might take only a few hours to come up with your short list.

Find Help from the IRS

Many foundations are small and don’t have elaborate websites to provide all the information you need. Fortunately, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) offers another resource. All nonprofits (including foundations) must file a Form 990, which lists all the information you want to know—who has been funded in the past, current board members, officers, and trustees. Peruse online 990s databases at no charge through the Foundation Center (www.foundationcenter.org/findfunders/990finder) or Guidestar (www.guidestar.org).

Think Beyond the Arts

After you’ve investigated what’s available for funding artists, consider whether your project touches on any subjects outside of the arts. If so, seek funds beyond the art world, where competition may be less intense.

Does your work deal with any scientific subjects? Artists have landed grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for works with a scientific theme or that made an abstract scientific concept accessible. For example, the NSF Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings funded the stage adaptation of the film Stand and Deliver, which depicted minority students excelling in higher mathematics. The money enabled high school drama clubs across the country to mount the production, which was seen as a motivational tool for educators. In another example, digital media artist Andrea Polli received a grant from NSF’s Antarctic Sciences Division to interpret and present weather and climate data using sound.

Play the Matchmaking Game

You’ll increase your chances of landing a grant if you find the right match. First figure out whether the funder shares your values and is interested in the type of art you create. This work lays the foundation for writing a successful grant proposal.

Carefully study the grant guidelines that describe the funder’s criteria to determine exactly who the funder wants to fund. Is this you? Sometimes the answer is clear. (Are you a feminist poet—yes or no?); sometimes the answer is less straightforward. Maybe you don’t know whether you’d be considered an “emerging” artist or a “midcareer” artist. If you’re not sure about your eligibility, ask a colleague or your artist support group for help.

If you still are unsure, study the list of past award winners. This is the best way to assess whether your project would be of interest. Sometimes who the funder says they fund is different from who they actually fund.

As you research, match your needs and interests with the funder’s criteria and passions. Reread the mission statement. What might make your project irresistible to the panelists who will review your application?

As you read, highlight the words and phrases the grantors use to describe their interests and mission. They choose their words carefully to reflect their values. You may want to use these words or synonyms later as you compose your answers. Echoing their language shows the grantor that you understand their mission and values. This can be tricky because you don’t want to parrot back their language, but you do want your answers to show you profoundly understand their mission.

Jot down any questions that come up while you investigate. Then when it’s time to have a conversation with the granting organization, you’ll have a list of intelligent questions ready. Don’t make the mistake of asking about an issue that is clearly stated on the website or in the application guidelines.

Your goal at this point is to assess whether the grantor is worth pursuing—is it worth your time? Your project does not need to be identical to other projects that the grantor has funded in the past, but it does need to be in the spirit of projects they fund—is your project worth their time and money?

Use the matchmaking process to help you decide both what to apply for and what not to apply for. As you discover organizations that fund artists, be your own best investigator. Uncover what makes the organization tick. Do you think they could love your project? Or would you have to tweak your project so much that it wouldn’t be your project anymore? Do you think you could love them? Gather your prospects. Write down questions. Keep looking for the perfect match.

When I research grants, I hunt for the most obvious category for a writer—literature—and then, for each entry within that category, I determine whether the funder is interested in creative nonfiction. Then, if a funder is especially interested in work with a feminist bent, I have to decide if my project makes a statement about being a woman that might be considered feminist. Perhaps the funder is also interested in work with Jewish themes. The more my interests match up with the funder, the better.

During this process, I also need to decide what kind of grant is the best match for me right now. Am I looking to take a workshop or launch a big installation project? What kinds of projects does this funder prefer? Some grants are clearly for “emerging” artists, while others are for “midcareer artists”; which category describes me? I also assess how long and arduous the application is; do I have the time and energy to devote the next month to a mammoth application, or can I ace it in a few days?

If you’re still unsure what a particular funder is interested in after doing plenty of research, call the funder and ask. But make sure you prepare for this phone call; first develop your elevator speech in chapter 10 (this page) so that you can describe your project in a couple of pithy sentences.

Imagine a perfect day in your near or far future when you’re doing exactly what you want and being exactly who you want to be. Grab a notebook and a pen or sit down at your keyboard and record your vision by answering the following questions: