An IDA grant writing workshop at the 2019 Southern Documentary Convening.
Grants can be a sizable source of revenue, whether you are applying for film funding or on behalf of an organization. They often lend credibility in addition to monetary support, so they can be instrumental in the success of the project. The name recognition from receiving grants can help expand your network and build up your reputation. Grant writing is quite different from other types of writing, but the skill is directly transferable to other realms of a filmmaker’s life. If you are approaching an application for the first time or would like specific advice on crafting a proposal, see these “5 Tips to Perfect Your Grant Proposal.”
For some organizational and stylistic tips, Documentary spoke to IDA’s Grants Manager Melissa D’Lando, who has been a grant writer for organizations small and large, as well as for her own projects. Melissa’s experience has taught her that sometimes grant writing is more project management than writing and that here, too, passion matters. Read on for her five tips for better grant writing.
1. Start Early
Especially if you are applying for a project with a large team, it is sometimes important to prepare your material much earlier than you think you would need to. While the process ranges significantly depending on the application, you may need to submit several sets of materials and thoroughly delineate your plan of action for government-funded or larger grants. It just isn’t possible to pull all of this together at the last minute, especially when working with other people on whom you are counting to get various pieces of information. Melissa’s advice? Start months in advance of the submission deadline.
“It’s especially true if you’re working within the parameters of an organization,” she said. “If you’re doing it for yourself, the only person whose time you’re managing is your own. That’s a different story than when you’re working with other people’s time, other people’s space, other people’s needs.”
Melissa suggested two concrete immediate steps: (1) Make an outline of the different questions and documents you will need to assemble and (2) familiarize yourself with the key players. Melissa advised that this initial connection makes it much easier to ask others for favors when the time comes to round up necessary application materials.
2. Practice Brevity
Grant writing is challenging primarily because of the space constraints imposed by many funding organizations. Provide a detailed description of your proposed project, including its objectives, and the specific activities you will undertake in no more than 2,000 characters. Great. Easier said than done. Applicants face the daunting task of distilling complex ideas and compelling justifications into a limited number of characters.
Precision is key during this process. “I’ve been doing this work full-time for about seven and a half years now,” Melissa mentioned. “For me, it involved a lot of unlearning the way I’ve been taught to write and removing unnecessary words.” Grants should still balance creativity with clarity, so they can read beautifully as well as practically. Suppressing the instinct for flowery prose over informational text might be best when you have to prioritize succinct communication.
3. Return to the Basics
When Melissa worked as a grant writer at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, she was writing proposals for an institution with several hundred employees. With IDA’s smaller scale, she has carried over the organizational and collaborative skills she picked up from this experience. Collaborating with several colleagues means your project is likely to get messy or overrun with competing ideas. Teamwork can get even trickier when it’s digital—unsaved progress is just as quickly made as lost, and small errors might slip past you unnoticed when your eyes are glazed over from looking at a screen all day. Focus on getting the clear ideas down first, so you don’t end up in a never-ending cycle of editing and rewriting. Once you are in the final stages of proofreading your proposal, sometimes the old-fashioned approach with a pen and paper ends up being most efficient.
“If there are many people contributing to the grant you’re working on, and the more people are dumping text and ideas and notes into a digital document, the likelier the tone is going to be inconsistent,” Melissa acknowledged. “Or if you’re scribbling notes really quickly, there might be typos, and you’re just constantly editing. Edit for grammar last when you’re ready to go print it out and look at a hard copy because everything else is ideally correct at that point.”
4. Crunch the Numbers
While you are caught up in conveying the impact and process of your project, it can be helpful to remember the objectivity of the numbers. After all, you are applying for an amount of money, so it’s important to either establish that you’ve had previous success managing your finances effectively or demonstrate that you’ve used the money given for previous projects well. Numbers are not just supplementary.
“Making sure that the narratives of a grant communicate with the numbers is really important because budgets and financial reports tell a story as well,” Melissa recommended. “I’m not really a numbers person, I’m a words person, so that’s been the harder portion of doing this work for me. But it’s an essential part of grant writing and reporting. It’s important to ensure that the two pieces of any proposal or report are telling the same story and are not telling opposing stories.”
5. Have a Vested Interest
It might be an obvious point, but believing in the words you’re writing is definitely useful in ensuring your application’s success! You cannot always control on whose behalf you’ll be writing the proposal, but having a vested interest in the project’s success adds a palpable sense of sincerity. For Melissa, “To enjoy this work and be really good at it, I value the personal connection and interest and investment in the work going on. I’m sure that a lot of people who do this work would probably say the same.”
Arushi Khare is a writer from Los Angeles and the Summer 2024 publications intern at IDA.