There seems to be a lot of mystery and confusion surrounding the process of applying for and receiving grants. Here are some basics to make the process less intimidating.
What is a grant?
A grant is a chunk of money that is earmarked for a clearly specified purpose. Unlike a loan, it does not have to be paid back. Unlike a gift, it comes with strings attached. The person or organization providing the money gets to decide what it’s allowed to be spent on, as well as what isn’t allowed. While these designations may seem specious, they are out of your control. If you don’t like the terms of a grant, don’t apply for it. When you accept a grant, you become contractually obligated to meet the requirements and implement what you outlined in your application.
Supplement vs supplant
Depending on your field, this issue may be more or less relevant. For arts grants, the it is generally not a concern. In education, however, grants are almost always required to supplement or add something extra to an existing curriculum, program, or district. This might be a field trip or a guest speaker connected to a unit of study. It could be additional books to expand a library for new or struggling readers. Grants are not permitted to supplant, or take the place of funding that the school or district should be providing. Using a grant to implement the necessary components of a required curriculum would be supplanting, which is not allowed.
There are many school districts, especially in the inner cities of the US that are chronically under-funded. These schools may routinely budget for the bare minimum of the required elements and then use grants to add the engaging bells and whistles.
What is the narrative? What purpose does it serve?
A grant narrative is the description of the project or activity you want funding for. Your goal is to explain what you would do with the money and what outcomes you are hoping for. Different grants require different levels of detail, but in most cases you will provide a summary of the project, a list of planned purchases, an explanation of why the project is needed, and information on how you plan to identify the success of the project. While most school or education grants focus on a measurable outcome, many arts grants tend to focus on an end project or performance rather than something measurable.
To ensure reviewers are able to compare the proposed projects, all applicants answer the same series of questions to build up the narrative. It is common to have paired questions, one that may ask what or why, while the following one asks how. The required questions may be specific or broad. The result is that all applications provide similar information in the same order.
Narratives usually have a word or character limit for answers. It is far more important to write clearly for an outside perspective than it is to write grandly. Elaborate or dramatic writing often eats up your character limit without providing value.
Identifying the right grant program for you and why this matters
Grant programs are often very specific, and it’s critical that you focus your efforts on grants that fit your situation. If you want to take a group of students to an event where they can experience culture and language, applying to a grant program focused on books and libraries doesn’t fit your need and you will not get funded.
Look at who the funder is aiming to help. Are they looking for individual projects or organizational partnerships? Does this match your project or activity? If the funding is for a specific focus area, does that match your project or activity?
Too much effort goes into developing and writing a grant application to waste it on a program that doesn’t fit your need or your project.
Project development
This is the planning stage of a project, and some degree must be done before tackling the narrative in order to sound cohesive and unified. I’ve worked with many people who try to do the development when they are writing the narrative, which often results in something that feels somewhat incomplete.
For small projects, you may do all the planning before applying. This could include defining the need you have and exactly what activities, goods, or services will address the need. It could involve planning out the rough dates for something to happen, getting a quote for a service, or planning an itinerary.
For larger projects, development may involve defining the need and describing the big picture components. In this case, you would assemble more of a framework for the project. If you receive the funding, your first task would be to use that framework to plan out the details you glossed over as being too much information for the application stage.
What is the review process and why is it used?
Most grants use a review process to choose which projects to award funding to. Each grant is read and scored by a set number of people. They may use a guide or rubric for scoring. In some cases the applications are read or discussed by a committee before determining a collaborative score. For many arts grants, you can watch your application’s review meeting through teleconferencing, but don’t expect to be able to interact or offer clarity. This is observation only.
Reviewers may be experts in the field associated with the funder (arts, education, science, etc.), but it’s also just as likely that they are volunteers who are unconnected with the field. The Minnesota Arts Board draws in reviewers from all over the state, and they may simply be interested in participating in the process, without having any arts experience.
Whatever the process for reviewing or the makeup of reviewers, the goal is to ensure that the selection process is unbiased and provides funding for the best projects.
What is a match?
A match is an amount of money the awardee needs to provide to the project in order to receive a grant. For example, in order to receive a $10,000 grant for a project, you might need to promise to contribute $2000 to the project, giving the project a total funding of $12,000. Many grants that require a 1:1 match, which means the organization must provide an equal amount of money as is received in grant funds. So that $10,000 grant example above, would be for a $20,000 project and the grant recipient would be responsible for finding $10,000 to match what they receive from the grant.
Not all grants require a match, and the match amount or percentage can vary significantly. The idea behind requiring a match is that it if an applicant will be more invested in a project’s success if they have invested some of their own money to the project. Many of the big National Endowment for the Arts grants have a 1:1 match.
Some groups will not apply for programs requiring a match because finding funding for the match can be incredibly difficult. Going back to the under-funded school district example, they may not have $2000 to contribute, and they may have no way to fund raise for that. Many school districts and organizations may adopt a policy that doesn’t allow grants with a match requirement.
You can’t use funding from another grant to cover the match.
What if I use a grant award in a different way?
Remember, if you are awarded a grant, you are contractually obligated to implement the program you applied with. If something happens that makes your project or event no longer feasible, you may be able to modify the grant or you may have to surrender the funds. During the pandemic, many education programs allowed some leniency. Some extended the project deadline. Others had staff work with the grant awardees to come up with a project they could implement through a virtual process. So instead of a field trip to the International Wolf Center, a science teacher may have run a virtual field trip, where the center provided the same program but through teleconference.
If you have no intention of implementing the program as described and lie about your use of the funds, you are committing fraud. Depending on the grant this could bar your organization from applying through the funder again. An organization would have a legal right to demand their money back.
What is reporting and why does it matter?
Reporting is the final stage of a grant process. The money has been spent, the program or event has been held, and you are now telling the funder how things went. For research grants this is where the metrics are compiled and presented. For many education grants it is where you describe the starting point and the outcomes, ideally demonstrating change. For many arts grants, it’s a description of the final project, event, or fellowship.
In many cases these reports are necessary for funders to report back to their organizations (or their funders) on how the grant money was distributed and used. The Minnesota Arts Board, for example, needs to report back to the State of Minnesota. This ensures transparency and prevents money from simply going missing.
Grants are intimidating, but they aren’t rocket science. Make sure you’re applying for programs that fit your need, and give yourself plenty of time to plan your project and write out your narrative. It can be tough to say what you want under a word or character limit.
Check out Navigating Narrative Pitfalls for information specific to writing your application’s narrative.
Note, this was initially written in 2023, when I was working in the grants office of a major metropolitan school district. It was updated in 2025, after a year of working on grants for a small cultural arts organization.
The Write Mann, LLC 