Comprehensive Guide to Securing Music Project Grants: From Government to Private Funders
Learn how to navigate government and private funding sources for music projects, including eligibility, award sizes, and strategic search tips for optimal results.
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How to Search GrantStation - Mission Focus Music
Added on 09/07/2024
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Speaker 1: Music We always encourage grant seekers to start their research by looking at government funding sources, as these sources can often provide most, if not all, of the funding you'll need. Go to the U.S. States page, then select New Mexico. You'll immediately see the state offers a grant program under Arts. Click that, and then scroll down the page. You'll see some art grants, which clearly give to both Arts and Social Service and Arts Learning in Communities and Schools. This source is well worth more investigation for our project. Now let's look at federal opportunities. We all know there's one main agency that would fund this project, which is the National Endowment for the Arts. Now we can see there is one listing for Grants for Arts Projects. This source might work for our project, but just to make sure we're eligible. The federal government often has extensive eligibility requirements, so it's pretty smart to look here first. Also look at their award information. We need $80,000 for this project, and they give between $10,000 and $150,000. It does note on this page, though, that their grants cannot exceed 50% of the total cost of the project, so we can only ask for $40,000. We'll need to find another funder or two, but we can save this to our dashboard, and we can do that by clicking on the Save button to the left of the announcement right here on GrantStation. Let's go ahead and look at private funders. We're going to move into the U.S. Charitable Giving Database. For this music project, you may want to start your search by looking at both national funders – those that give in all 50 states – and funders that give specifically to New Mexico. From here you can select, under Areas of Interest, Arts and Culture, and Music, and we'll get about 80 funders. This is way too many to review. Your time is precious, so we may need to narrow our results a bit. For Targeted Populations, let's select Children and Youth, and that narrows our field down to 27 funders. It's still a fairly large list, but it's one worth reviewing. Now let's take a closer look here at Classics for Kids Foundation. As you can see, this funder is just about a perfect fit. Their mission is to empower young people to shape positive futures through music, build sustainable stringed instrument music programs, and provide grants for high-quality instruments. Note that their total giving, though, is $148,000, so clearly they give small grant awards, but to make sure we're understanding their giving pattern, let's look at who they've given to in the past and the size of those awards. If you scroll down this list, you'll see they've given two awards in New Mexico in the past, so that's a good sign. Now, how much do they give? Well, we're already on their website, and you can see that they give in the range of $1,000 to $3,000. So even though they're a perfect fit for our funding needs, they will only be one of the investors in this project. Now you're going to want to save this grantmaker to your personal dashboard so you can revisit them and determine where they might fit in your overall funding plan. But of course, $3,000 isn't going to be enough, though it could well be part of our overall strategy. Let's check out another funder, the Sheila Fortune Foundation. Now it appears they may be a good fit, so let's look at their grants awarded. Now this looks fairly good, they might actually work for us. Let's take a closer look at how much they might award by going to their FAQ page. We can see who is eligible for grants from the Sheila Fortune Foundation. Now you'll note that their awards start at about $4,000, so we could probably ask for around $10,000. This way we're chipping away at the funds needed. You'll also want to look through all these profiles, identifying the funds you need to support your program. Always look for about 25% more than you need so you can absorb any rejections you may get. But if you don't come up with a strong set of potential funders, what do you do? Now the initial search we did combined the obvious search terms, music, children and youth, national and New Mexico. To find additional funders, look at your project from a different angle, not using music as a major search term. Ask yourself, why are you doing what you're doing? In other words, what community need are you attempting to address? In this case, the symphony is offering these programs because the youth they're targeting are underserved and are at risk of going down the wrong path in life. Knowing this, your search criteria can be adjusted like this. Let's choose New Mexico under geographic scope. And then under areas of interest, let's click on the social services drop down box and then select at risk youth. You may want to look at all of these, but perhaps we can narrow it a bit by also adding in arts culture general. Now we have a more targeted group of results that are all new funders from what you found based on your previous search. Now a number of these are community foundations, so you can quickly eliminate those that don't serve the exact area where you're located and then review the others. Another search might include looking under education in the areas of interest and selecting after school, out of school programs. Now combining this with New Mexico gives us five results, again, several new ones different from the previous two searches. Now another interesting way to search is by keyword. If we type in music instruments in the keyword search box, we'll come up with about 12 results. We can narrow that down by adding national under geographic scope. And now we have about three new funders to check out. Finding and finding new grant opportunities on GrantStation is easy and quick and fun. This initial search is what we call primary research. As a member of GrantStation, you'll learn all about secondary research, which is the next step in this efficient research process.

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