Grant Application Recharge

This space has been a little quiet lately because I've been almost exclusively focused on meeting the application deadline for the Sprout Fund's Seed Award grant. Sprout is a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that supplies funding to local arts initiatives that stand to improve the city's image, culture or general creative resources. Considering we're Pittsburgh's ongoing comedy web series, filmed all around town and featuring local businesses, restaurants, actors and (next season) bands, we figured we'd be eligible.

The deadline is the first Friday of every month.

Like, today.

How long have I known about this? Months. Almost a year. I even had an informal meeting with one of Sprout's principals back in September to discuss how STBD factored into their lens of local artists.

When did I start completing the application? Monday.

Ann and I took a first draft pass at it back in August / September of 2005, and then it sat untouched until last week, when I started revising the ideas, making notes and gathering related budget-oriented resources. For some reason, considering the application is relatively short, I figured it would be easy to improve what we'd initially written and polish it off well in advance.

The catch is, the suggested word limit for the descriptive elements of the application is 2,000. My draft from mid-week was at 3,600, and I hadn't even assembled the budget, timeline or references yet. Those didn't count toward the word count, but they did count toward my dwindling hours.

So I spent the past couple days editing the final word count down to 2,400, creating additional Appendixes to hold some of the information that couldn't be fully excised, and figuring out what the official budget would be if I actually had more capital than what I usually have in my pocket.

Man, business planning is an eye-opening experience. It really clarifies a lot of presumptions about funding, expenses, expected revenues and likely growth -- all the things you're supposed to think about when you start a business, but which I never really paid attention to when I first started STBD as an experiment. Now that we're making the move from pastime to business, I don't want to lose the DIY "guerrilla" approach when it works in some cases (like marketing and honest discussions of the show), but I do need to improve a lot of our scheduling and structure so I don't go insane while trying to grow.

I'll know how the grant application review goes sometime next in the next two weeks. I'll post any updates here. Hopefully they're positive.