(Jon Parrish Peede, Amy Stolls) Staff members from the Literature Division of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will address your questions and provide a status update on agency policies, programs, and initiatives that can have an impact on individuals and arts organizations. Topics covered will include grant opportunities and their deadlines, eligibility, applying online, the review process, and tips for more effective proposals.

Published Date: March 11, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Washington, DC on Friday, February 4th, 2011. The recording features Amy Stolls and Jon Peede.

Amy Stolls:

My name is Amy Stolls. I'm the Literature Program Officer with the National Endowment for the Arts. And this is Jon Peede, the director of literature. We're going to talk today about some of the grant opportunities at the NEA and with a focus on some of the changes and stuff happening this year with the guidelines and policy and hope that you'll get something out of it. It's a different year.

This is our hometown, but our phone numbers and our emails are all listed on our website and we'd love hearing from you, and particularly if you're of an organization that has not applied to the NEA before, we'd like to hear from you so that we can talk to you before you apply.

So we're mostly going to spend this session talking about changes, the policies, and guidelines for organizations. That said, I'm going to start with a couple minutes about the fellowships, our individual fellowships, and start by telling you about the grant opportunities at the NEA. Let me just start by saying we have opportunities for both individuals to apply for fellowships and opportunities for organizations in literature to apply through two deadlines that way.

So starting off, I am assuming that most of you know what the National Endowment for the Arts is, your federal agency that supports the arts. Our mission is to support Artistic Excellence, to bring arts to all Americans, and to provide leadership in arts education. And we are located here in Washington D.C. We award more than a $100 million annually to arts organizations in all 50 states and US territories, reaching rural areas, inner cities and military bases. We're the largest annual national funder of nonprofit social organizations in the United States. This is particularly true for literature. We are the largest funder of nonprofit literature in the country.

Jon, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, although we talked about this. Annually, roughly, we give about $2.5 million to literary organizations, $1.5 million through Big Read, which is a separate program, and a little over a million dollars to individual prose writers and poets and translators through our fellowships program. You can apply in several different disciplines including dance, design, literature, vocal arts, arts communities, arts education. We're here to talk obviously about literature.

So I'm going to start and spend a couple of minutes talking about the fellowships for individuals and a couple of things to pay attention to if you're an individual who's going to apply to us this year. So we give out literature fellowships in fiction, creative nonfiction, in translation, and poetry. Translation is every year, although the deadline has passed. The deadline is in January, so the next deadline for translation fellowships is next January. The deadline that's coming up is for prose, for fiction and creative nonfiction, and we give out fellowships every other year for prose and poetry. So the deadline for fiction and creative nonfiction is March 3rd of this year. Poetry is not until March of 2012.

We give awards to published writers in the areas of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation, and they enable recipients to focus on their writing, perform research, travel, generally advance their careers. With creative writing, they're not attached to a particular project. With translation they are. The NEA Literature fellowships range from 12,500 to 25,000 in translation. In creative writing, there are $25,000 awards.

Since the deadline for this year is for prose, I'll tell you that eligibility-wise, to be eligible to apply, you have to have either a book or five short stories or essays or the genre that you're applying in at least two different places, journals or print or online that mostly publish in the genre that you're publishing, that they do publish prose. I can say a little bit more about eligibility, but this is all on our website, so at arts.gov. A-R-T-S dot G-O-V. So you could look on our website to see, and I suggest you do if you want to apply, more about our eligibility requirements, to see.

If you are eligible and you want to apply, there are a couple of things that I would just say. Apply early. You have to apply through a system called grants.gov and you have to register, and then you have to apply. And sometimes there can be troubleshooting. You want to allow time for that because you don't want to apply at the last minute, get an email back saying something was wrong for some reason, and you not know this until after the deadline, in which case we can't really help you. So do apply early. Try, if you can, at least 10 days early.

I would say... Here are a couple of things that we've noticed in prose. I would suggest that you generally don't submit more than two pieces. You are allowed to submit a manuscript that is an excerpt from a novel or a short story, or two short stories or many short stories. Unless you're doing flash fiction or there's a reason why you're doing different pieces, we find since we've been through this system, see how the panel works, that they often respond better to a fuller piece than little excerpts from... If you're going to submit a page or a paragraph or a few pages from here, a few pages from your novel here, and a few pages just because you think that's your best writing, it's not cohesive. We, in prose, require a 30-page manuscript.

So we're just suggesting that if you have a 30-page manuscript from a novel, it doesn't have to be from the beginning. It could be from the middle of your novel. I would do one excerpt. I would also tell us if it's an excerpt from the novel, where it's appearing in the novel. Let us know that it's the first chapter or let us know that this is from the middle of the novel. That's often helpful.

We made one small adjustment to the guidelines this year and that is that we ask you to identify the genre. This is an anonymous process. Your name is not anywhere on the manuscripts for a reason, because you are judged blindly and just purely on the Artistic Excellence and merit of your manuscript. That said, it's helpful to know we don't want to know who you are or your address or any identifying marks, except it's helpful to know what is it that you're submitting. If it's nonfiction, creative nonfiction, let us know it's creative nonfiction. If it's a short story and it's complete within itself, let us know that. Okay? And let us know the genre.

The last thing I'll tell you is that you should have evidence readily available in terms of your eligibility. When we ask you to apply, we ask you to let us know that you are eligible. So in other words, if you've had five different short stories published in two different journals, we're going to ask you what the title is of the short stories, what journals they've been published in, what was the date. We used to require you to give us actual evidence, actual printouts of the page and the table of contents. We don't do that anymore because it's an online process.

But if we can't find your journals or we can't verify what you're saying, we're going to actually call you and you have to have it ready to send us. So if you are submitting eligibility saying that you've been published in this online journal, but the online journal is defunct now, we feel for you. But if you don't have evidence, if you don't have a printout to show us when it was published, and you just tell us that, "It really was published, but it was some time ago and I can't tell you because the journal doesn't exist anymore," we don't have any evidence. So this is always good, particularly for online journals, to keep a printout for things like this.

I might stop there. So those are the things that we've been noticing, a couple of hints for prose fellowships. I think it's probably easier for us to hear some of your questions. Okay. Yes.

Speaker 3:

The application says something like if you receive fellowship, when do you want the period to begin and how long does the period of the funding extend? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Amy Stolls:

Yeah, we're loose about that. We work a year ahead. So you apply in March, you'll probably hear whether or not you receive the grant sometime at the end of November and your grant will technically start January 1st, although sometimes a little bit earlier. It's technically for the year after. So you apply in 2011, it's technically a 2012 grant. So we're assuming that the bulk of the work you're going to do is in 2012.

That said, sometimes you need to extend the grant. I often tell folks who've received fellowships that they can ask for the money all at once or if they need to receive the $25,000 and extend it over past the January date because maybe for tax reason, you pay taxes on it so maybe for... So if you get that wrong, we're not going to dismiss you or call you ineligible. We'll probably, if you are recommended for a grant, we're going to call you and say you need to fix this. But it's for that year. Yeah.

The question was if you had a page on the publishers, they vet you so that you have to have a certain thing published and then you get on their website, could you use that to show that you're eligible? And we're saying that we need the originals. We love poets and writers, but we need the original stuff. Yes.

Speaker 4:

I'm just wondering in terms of selecting a single piece to be excerpted from a larger prose or nonfiction book, I would be hesitant to submit anything that's not the beginning, concerned that maybe loose ends or gaps or how does the...

Amy Stolls:

Give us a little press, give us a little-

Speaker 4:

So we do a little explanatory, before reading, I would say you're going to need to know that this is this narrative.

Amy Stolls:

If you need to.

Jon Peede:

I would say the question was basically about if you're submitting... I think it was about creative nonfiction, but it can be either way. If you're submitting a later chapter, how will that work? Because it isn't properly framed. It's going to depend on the individual piece, but I'll say quite often chapter three is your best writing. That's the power of it.

And if you just bracketed and you said Ellen, who you're about to hear of is a seven-year-old girl, and she's had her grandparents in Wisconsin, her parents died last year and you bracket that, that's fine, and that moves us on. Whereas quite often, in the first chapter of a book, you're setting up so much background and you hit page 30 and the panelist is sitting there going, "Well, if they continue that story arc about Ellen the girl, then I like it. But if it's about this grandmother... Oh, the dialogue's flat and it's terrible," and they're sitting there and they don't know where it's going. That's why, frankly, a lot of times short fiction or a complete essay or complete memoir chapter works better 'cause at least there's a full story arc and they're not sitting at the table trying to guess you. And if they start guessing, Amy and I will insert ourselves and say, "You cannot create a conjecture of what might happen. You only go with what they gave you."

The only thing I will say when we say to you, "Tell us about Ellen," periodically, they'll say that and they'll say, "And I would use the money to go to Poland or to really meet that grandmother, and I really need the money..." And if you start that stuff, we're throwing the whole page away or we're opaquing it. So don't write a letter to the panelists, okay?

Amy Stolls:

It's anonymous so they can't know that. Yes.

Speaker 6:

[inaudible 00:12:50].

Amy Stolls:

Okay. So you need to think about this as separate pieces. There's what you submit to establish your eligibility. That's the first piece and that's simply to show us what you've published. And is it the seven years? You guys? In the last seven years, what you've established or published. The second piece is what you're choosing to submit as a manuscript. The manuscript does not have to be something you've had published. It should be something you've written in the last, hopefully in the last seven years. But it doesn't have to be something that you've just declared, written that you've been eligible. It can be as new piece, or it can be, it should be typescript. So we don't know. And then the third piece of this is if you get a grant, what do we expect you to be working on? Does it have to be an extension of that manuscript? No. We're giving you money to write and if you decide to do something new, that's up to you. Yes.

Jon Peede:

We can, but we're going to be quite brief because it's a deadline that is...

Amy Stolls:

More than a year away.

Jon Peede:

... 13 months away. And these organizations that we're trying to get to have a deadline in about six weeks and the significant changes are to the organization, there are not significant changes to the fellowships in any way.

And the only thing I might say specifically about poetry is that there are those who wonder, okay, should I give a couple of free verses then a sonnet, then show them? Should I show them I can do everything or do I give them 10 pages from a 40-page narrative work? And we tend to come back to saying, do your best. But as they try to remember you, in a field of a thousand applications, we're funding, historically, 42 applications. So about 4%. And sometimes yes, it's quite easy to remember an overarching narrative that follows a narrative voice through 10 pages of poetry. And sometimes that's two five page points or sometimes it's 10 one page points. We are not finding that one approach works better than the other, so we do tend to fall back on do your best work.

Amy Stolls:

Well, Chloe just reminded me to tell you that on the application, it's a two-page application form, we ask you things about, for example, your education and what you would do with the project money if you got it. None of that appears in the judging. The panelists don't see any of that. Yes.

Speaker 7:

If you had a story accepted and it hasn't been [inaudible 00:15:23].

Amy Stolls:

It has to be published by the deadline. Yeah.

Speaker 7:

If you had a novel independently published that's won awards, national awards, could you send that eligibility and also the same [inaudible 00:15:36] as your third page.

Amy Stolls:

What do you mean independently published?

Speaker 7:

Published by yourself.

Amy Stolls:

We don't accept self publication as... Because of issues with federal government, there's some vetting. So a publisher that's acceptable and eligible-

Speaker 7:

So you need a traditional publisher.

Amy Stolls:

It's not a traditional. There are a lot of non-traditional... All you poets know there are a lot of non-traditional publishers out there. It's that a publisher has selection criteria. Okay. Thank you. All right, I hand you over to the very capable Jon Peede.

Jon Peede:

We'll talk about literature and that's where our focus is going to be. I know some of the organizations here are involved in writers in the schools, and I would note there are probably three other areas in the endowment where you might possibly seek funding. One would be arts education and some of the statements we'll make will very much apply there. Also, artist communities, if you're involved in a residential artist communities that has in the last two years become a separate category and a very capable director that oversees that. And also we'll touch on Challenge America grants and that is a separate category of the endowment. But basically let's go over the requirements.

I want to linger here because I know there are a number of new arts groups. Again, one-to-one match to the budget. Federal matching rules are quite clear on our websites. You can't use other federal dollars or other government dollars to match, but you can certainly use in-kind funds.

Notice that of course you have to be a 501(c)(3), don't commingle the first and second point here. You could have started an organization that has existed for at least three years and run it for-profit out of your house, what have you, and then you file for 501(c)(3). And long as you're a 501(c)(3) at the time that you make the grant, even if those three years of programming were before that, that's fine. Okay? Does that make sense? That subtlety? Okay.

Next, the review process. One of the most essential things we do is put together panels, panels of your peers. And so if you're in publications, you're going to be reviewed generally by a fiction writer, a poet, a marketing person. Increasingly somebody involved in social media or online communications or somebody who has an awareness of the digital world will have a lay person and that's congressionally mandated.

That means somebody doesn't make his or her living in the arts. So that might be a lawyer who loves the arts and is a patron of the arts. That might be a general circulation librarian. What that means though, when that person gets your proposal, if you're talking with a jargon of in the group and you didn't fill out the details because you think your journal is so famous that everybody knows about it, guess what? That person's going to have a problem with it. I would hope all the panelists would have a problem with it and certainly I'm going to have a problem with it. It's about putting on the page what you are not asking us to fill that out. And I might linger there on that moment. I think, as many as we see, it's wonderful when we see a well established organization that's existed for decades and they just pour themselves into that application.

They have enthusiasm and drive and specificity and they know that we fund projects, not organizations. So it's not about just, yes, the organization gets its money regardless, but on occasion we do see those who rest back and they think the NEA knows us. We know them. We all socialize at things like this. We don't have to work so hard. And then they get half of what they're asking for or they get rejected. And I usually blame it on Amy. Amy blames it on me. But the truth is they dialed it in and there are consequences. And I'm here to say this year in particular, some of the changes we're making are going to make those consequences more sharply defined. It won't necessarily mean that you just received 10 or 20,000 less than you wanted. It may be more likely that you're rejected. So I don't mean to be gloomy, I don't mean to be Eeyore.

So meet us halfway, fulfill the request. When the panel makes its recommendations for support, it's our job to review that, affirm that, amend it if we believe it needs to be done and assign the dollar amounts. Then the National Council on the Arts votes, that's a presidentially nominated Senate confirmed body. And then the chairman of the NEA has the sign-off on all recommendations. And again, works are judged on the Artistic Excellence and merit and those details are well-defined on the website.

Going quickly to the next step, I think this is generally known to areas we do not fund. I'll make two quick points, particularly about general operating or seasonal support. Sometimes people hear that and they think that means you can't ask for any administrative calls, you can't ask for stamps, phone, copy and paper. It doesn't mean that. What it means is you cannot, if your organization, the entire everything and every single cost you have is a $100,000, you can't come to the endowment, ask for 50,000 and then match it with 50,000. And essentially if you received your grant, it would've been every bit of expenses, but rather you have a project and your project, if you're a quarterly journal, your project might be that you want all four issues of the journal supported for artist fees and direct mailing costs, but you're excluding staff salaries. Or it might be that you do salaries or it might be every single cost related to the special anniversary issue on a topic that means a lot to you.

So it is your decision to define the project. Just know that again, that's what we mean by operating costs. Okay, so we'll stop here. This is where the changes start to come into place. This should not concern or surprise anyone. This is simply a change in terminology. Where many of you heard access to Artistic Excellence, that rather long word is now replaced with the word Artworks. And again, the two categories that we had under literature for a number of years still exist and Challenge America still exists.

But as you apply, and let's talk about publishing here, you will talk about which one of these outcomes. And one thing I'll say is in terms of what's behind these changes, the agency has a responsibility to Congress, to the administration to talk about how these public dollars are being used. And to help assess that information better, we need to say what are the projects and how are they tied to these outcomes? What are the deliverables? What are the achievements? And so you will decide which one of these categories fit. Most of you will probably end up under the headings of creation and engagement, but literature has literature specific examples under all four of these areas. And livability in particular has some very precise guidance there. So this is something where you do want to talk to us, particularly Amy Stolls. So call or email and realize that we're taking hundreds and hundreds of these calls and it's going to take a little while to get back to you.

This is something that really needs to be clear. Everything that was eligible for is still eligible. So no need to say, but I used to do this. Well, it's still eligible. And again, the point to that is select the outcome that works best for you. And if you are a successful applicant, you'll be asked in a much different way about providing evidence that you met that outcome. And in turn, the agency will be able to provide that to the decision makers that we answer to about the value of the endowment in its work. We're going to talk about innovative projects. You heard when the president in the State of the Union address, he talked about the importance of innovation historically to this nation and really had a challenge to us to think in terms of innovation. And innovation is very much a buzzword and essential concept at the endowment.

So it means two things, as a practical matter. Innovation is about new forms of art making that might be new forms of delivery in the case of eBooks, for example, and for consortium projects. So anybody who has historically looked at a consortium project informally, you sometimes call it a... It's like a bite of the apple. You partner with some organization. A significant change is that you will not be eligible for a consortium project unless it is an innovation project. We have very precise terms there. So if you were formally a publisher that applied for supporting of the books and marketing of your books and then your second application, your consortium project was that you were partnering with four other presses in a public library to have a reading series of independent presses, you will now to be eligible for that consortium project, you'll have to express how it's innovative and that's your argument to make.

Maybe your point of innovation is that these are bilingual readings, maybe it's the fact that you're podcasting, maybe it's the fact of the type of work that's being incorporated. You need to make a case for that. This is new for us just like it is for you. You'll be met with goodwill both from the panelists and the staff, but this has very specific language and if you get involved in consortium projects, again, we're not trying to discourage it, we are just trying to ensure that they are innovative projects.

So we're always happy to invest in best practices. We can't fund all the organizations we might want to, and one thing we can do is fund an innovative project that others might emulate. Okay, challenge America. Let me speak to two things about Challenge America. The deadline is in May and it is a faster turnaround in terms of hearing if you're accepted or rejected. It usually... I believe you would probably hear at the November council. I know you're thinking only in the government would six months be a fast track, but it is. What is quite useful to us and to you is if you apply for Challenge America, all the grants are $10,000.

So you either get the grant or you don't, but there's not the revised budget process and all of those activities. And something I should say about the Artworks categories that I just went through, there are two significant points to make. One is while we are still technically allowing grant requests to be from $5,000 to $150,000, you will see the insertion of a new sentence that says generally we will fund from $10,000 to a $100,000.

We are following that quite strongly. And if you historically ask for 5,000 or $7,500, I strongly encourage you to see if you have a project that is at $10,000 or more. And if you historically have been asking for years for $150,000 and you always get $70,000, I can just tell you that now the new guidance is from 10 to a 100 and you might want to bring your amount down accordingly. We also are making a note that for organizations that have an operating budget of $50,000 or less, that they generally might not fare as well in the Artworks category and we're strongly encouraging that you consider applying to Challenge America. It's set up to support projects of a smaller size.

I'm going to go very quickly to Our Town, and I'm not going to get into a whole lot of detail about this. This is a new initiative under Chairman Landesman and Our Town. These are projects across all the disciplines, and these grants vary in size from 25,000 to a quarter of a million dollars. And eligible applicants are county or local governments, as you see, nonprofit organizations. There is a partnership requirement, if you've been involved in consortium, you're used to such partnerships. But again, this case one must be a government entity. I'm going to turn it over to Amy Stolls in just a moment, but I want to say one last point and it's also one of the more important ones. I made the point about the 10 to a $100,000.

I also want to say that I wouldn't necessarily say that this is absolutely a philosophical change in endowment. It's something we've struggled with and it goes back and forth year to year, even within discipline. Which is, when you ask us for funds and we fund you, are we giving you enough to absolutely prosper or are we giving you just enough to survive and complete your activity till the next year? And it is something that Amy and I struggle with. On the one hand, we know our stamp of approval means a great deal. We know that if we give even $5,000 that you're associated with this has meaning to your boards, what have you.

But we also know that sometimes that just keeps you surviving. And that's not always enough for us to say that all we did was keep literature alive one more year. The philosophy that we're going to apply to our grants is that we're going to more fully fund the requests. So if you historically have asked us for $50,000, and these are all hypotheticals, this is not a rule by any means, but if you have historically asked us for $50,000 and you have always received $10,000, if I go to put that recommendation forward, I've only given you 20% of what you asked for. I will probably be asked by senior staff if I cannot find a way to more fully support it, that might be $30,000 or $40,000, or to decline to fund you and to allocate those funds to another group.

So that means that in applications, the reason a group that asked for $50,000 was getting $10,000, sometimes you had work samples and it just didn't work for the panel. But quite often if it's a journal, we say, give us your sell-through rates and some people leave it blank. We say, who's your distributor? And they don't say, and then lo and behold, the panel still believes in your work. They believe in the project, but you end up getting 10,000 rather 50.

Well, I'm saying to you that I think leaving 10 or $20,000 on the table has always had consequences, but now we're saying that the 10,000 lower amount is less likely to happen. Don't misunderstand me to say that we're only funding large projects. That's not the case. Don't believe that we're only funding large organizations. That is not the case. You can come in and ask for 20 or 10 and get 10 or get 20. But it is a fact that if we're going to more fully fund the group and I have the same pot to work with that I normally do or I have less, to add $10,000 to 10 groups means a $100,000 dollars has to come from somewhere.

And you can't presume to know how to arrange it. But one thing you can control is to really fill out the applications. And it's extraordinary when we ask what's your accessibility and people leave it completely blank. And it does matter to us if people that are differentially abled are able to go to your performances or not. When we talk about the importance of innovation, we know from experience, you have great websites, you're using social media, you're on Facebook, you have eBooks, and it's not in your application. So a lot of what I'm saying to you is just tell us what we know you're doing and you're doing well. Okay? I couldn't stress that enough about social media marketing and engagement. That's essential. So I'm going to leave it at this and we'll go to the changes review.

Amy Stolls:

Here I am for the wrap up. I'm going to review the changes that Jon just told you about in quick bullet form and then I'm going to go over some helpful reminders. Since we're telling you to send in a kick-ass application, I'm going to help you do that. Changes, first one is don't be afraid. It's just a name change mostly. Okay? Those of you who are used to access to Artistic Excellence, it's now Artworks. A lot of that underneath Artworks remains the same. There is a shift in focus from goals to outcome. And Jon told you about that. Most of you, most of the organizations that come to us in literature will select engagement. Publishers, you're going to probably select engagement. It might seem a little odd given that you see yourself as being creators of art, the books, but if you look at our guidelines and you specifically look at what we ask for in your final reports, if you get a grant, you'll see that there is an opportunity to show how you've engaged audiences.

We will ask you for the number of artists you've engaged and then you'll tell us the authors of your books. And then in another place we'll be asking you how many people did you reach? That's your print run in print. And then we're going to ask you how many people you reached online. And then you're going to tell us through... There are various opportunities to tell us that. So in many ways, publishers create and engage. We're just probably steering you towards engagement. Jon told you about that. Innovation is encouraged for all projects. It is required for consortium projects. It is up to you to convince us that what you're doing is innovative. Technology is great, doesn't have to be technology. So just let us know if this is something you haven't done before. Does it sound risky? Does it sound innovative? If you're unsure, give us a call. But you're going to have to make the argument on that.

If you try something new and it's innovative, you probably get points for it being innovative. If it ends up failing, it's quite possible? Okay, because you'll learn a lot, that's where the assessment comes in. So that's okay. You still get points for being innovative. Grants will generally be between 10,000 and a $100,000. And Jon just spoke to that. Organizations with operational budgets less than 50,000 should either look towards Challenge America grants or call us. It's going to be a bit tougher for those organizations. Projects will be more fully funded and this may result in fewer grants. And to know that outside committees will be scrutinizing the final reports and products for Artistic Excellence in merit. And that leads to some of the helpful hints I'm going to talk about in terms of assessment.

So let's go on to the last slide, which is some of the helpful hints that... These are reminders for some of you, this is new material for some of you, this is some things that over the years we've seen and mistakes that were made in applications or the things that were overlooked. You don't want to overlook anything in these days.

So let's start with the budget. I put a lot of stuff in each and tried to think about it in different sections of the application. The budget. Don't include unallowable costs in your budget. In the past we probably would've just given you a little hand slap and said, if you got a grant, you have to take this out. But I would suggest that you not put it in the first place. Things like food, entertainment, fundraising, development, all of that is unallowable. Miscellaneous. If you have a line item that says miscellaneous, we have no idea what that is. Don't do that. Tell us. If you have a line item that says a consultant and you don't explain what that consultant is doing in your narrative or even in the budget. It's going to confuse the panel and it's not going to work in your favor.

Tell us that. Double check your math. We're all writers. I can't tell you how many times I've seen addition mistakes. Double check your math. Okay. The narrative. Speaking to innovation is imperative this time around that when you write your application, you tell us about your website, about your social media efforts, and other technologies is applicable. It's amazing how the number of applications I saw last year that didn't talk about the amazing things that the website was doing. And then when I'd call and I'd say, we'd talk about why a grant was rejected and they'd say, but we're doing all of that. And I'd say, it's not in your application. How would we know that? So do talk about those efforts.

Don't ask to fund books by board or staff members. We saw this also. We don't allow that, generally speaking. And pay attention to your evaluation and assessment. And this is important to us, has always been, but particularly now because we're so focused on outcomes. There's a section in the narrative where we ask you to write about what your plans are for evaluating your project and your assessment. Don't blow it off. Don't give us one sentence. Really tell us what evaluation techniques you're building into your project. So we know that you're going to have some lessons learned here. Okay. There's a section that we ask for called programmatic activities. This is usually we ask for a chart. I suggest you probably do a chart.

We ask you to include audience numbers and percentage of capacity. So here, if you are a festival or you are a reading series or you, I'm not necessarily speaking to the publishers here. I'm speaking to the presenters who are applying in August. Give us audience numbers and give us as the percentage of capacity in your venue. And that's very helpful. And if you don't have that information, I'd suggest you start collecting it. Funders want to know this sort of thing. Publishers, include sales figures for your past books. We ask you for a separate page on your print runs, your payment authors policy and your projected sales figures on the books you're asking us to fund. But in this section on the programmatic activities, we'd really like to know what your sales figures have been on the books that you're telling us about that you published in the last three years.

Make it clear what the figures are. Are they units sold? Are they dollar amounts? Tell us in a heading, if they're dollar amounts, tell us what their it's net or gross. Can be very confusing for a panel to try to work this out. And if they don't understand it or you're not giving us sales figures and you're saying that you're doing all this promotion, but we don't have any sales figures to go by or we don't understand your sales figures, we can't actually assess that the promotion you're doing is working. So brag, as much as you can brag about numbers, do that.

Work samples. We see a lot of people sending in, I'm speaking more probably towards the presenters here and less to the publishers, but we see often for the presenters for the festivals and reading series and all that, they send in video and audio clips of someone simply reading at a podium.

A lot of times that's in the application itself. So somebody is telling me that a particular poet has read last year and then they send in a video clip of the person reading at the... That's not enhancing your application. That's a little bit of wasting our time. What a really good clip does, and you don't have to send in a video or audio clip, but if you do let it enhance your application. So for example, you're telling us about your reading series and you're saying, we focus on diversity. Send us a clip that pans your audience to show that you have a diverse audience coming to your events. You reach out to... You're telling us that you're getting the numbers. Show us the audience. Show us the venue. Things like this are really helpful. Or a montage of photos. Maybe it's not that you're going for a wide impact, you're going for a deep impact and you only have a few people, but you have a great photo.

That's what works. And you have about a minute. Can't send us in a full two-hour session. When we meet, we're going to put up about a minute or two. If you have questions about this, give us a call. Okay? And the last thing I'll say is grants.gov. Register early and keep your DUNS and your CCR numbers current through the whole process, not just when you apply. If you get a grant, they're going to come back to you as you do your progress and final reports and make sure that those numbers are current and call us with questions.

Questions. Yes.

Speaker 8:

What suggestions do you have in an opposite scenario of the state literary journal consists on morals for a young literary journal that may be is primarily online that doesn't have sell through numbers and things like that and has a very small budget? You mentioned several different options that they perhaps go through. What would the best route be for the smaller organization?

Amy Stolls:

Yeah, how small? It's not-

Speaker 8:

I know we're with the university, but we're a primarily online literary journal. So our operating costs [inaudible 00:43:21] thousand dollars.

Amy Stolls:

Well, you have to have at least a one-to-one match. So even if you asked for $5,000 and we're encouraging you to ask for 10,000, you're going to have to match with 10,000. So you're going to have to have at least 20,000 for a project.

Speaker 8:

I guess my question is if we have a consortium with multiple different small organizations together under a consortium.

Amy Stolls:

For an innovative project for a consortium project, you couldn't combine your budgets. There's a lead applicant and they're going to look at the budget of that lead applicant and that lead applicant has a partner, but it's the budget of that lead applicant. Listen, we feel for you guys. Let me just say that we give a sizable grant to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. That's really how we're in one some ways helping you guys too. Yeah.

Jon Peede:

And to be clear, we have funded, what? I think the appropriate term is digital born journals, and we've been funding them for at least three years and they're a various size. But one thing that all the ones that are funded have in common is they're very precise about audience numbers and using, whether it's Google Analytics or another group, and you just need to make it a solid case.

Amy Stolls:

Yeah. Hits. Individual hits. That's another one that people fudge a lot.

Speaker 9:

[inaudible 00:44:47] and I was just wondering, are those under the Challenge America? You said you funded some other [inaudible 00:45:00].

Jon Peede:

We have funded digital magazines under our... But they would apply in March just as this pending deadline is. And I expect that they will come in again under this deadline and it would be under Artworks.

Amy Stolls:

Yeah, but you're asking if you're a small organization and it would be hard with a small budget, could you apply for Challenge America? Look at the guidelines for Challenge America. They are looking specifically for grants going out to underserved communities and so they have a little bit of different language than we have. And sometimes the journals might not fit under that. But look at our guidelines for Challenge America, there's also a contact on our website or call us. But you can potentially apply under Challenge America, but maybe you'd have to see and talk to them.

Jon Peede:

We're being realist. But at the same time, I don't want there to be this pattern of thinking, we're small, so this isn't going to work for us. We're not allowed to talk about applicants that weren't successful. But it's a matter of public record of those that were successful. So you can look at Rattapallax. They do great innovative, whether it's poetry on the web, online film festival. Rattapallax in New York, you certainly see them online. Small grants, if you look at the grant amounts and small requests, but innovative in every sense of the meaning and the meaning that the NEA means it, with a capital I and just in the way it's meant in the general sense, and they have fared well for a number of years.

Alan.

Speaker 10:

We submit for books that have an audience of possibly 10,000 readers and for books that have sales of more like 500, do you want just our successes or do you want a mix that reflects the kind of application you're saying and identifying this is a daily writer, this is a better established writer, this is what we can do with people who have a reputation, this is what we can do or introduce?

Jon Peede:

I think those are both successes with two different size audiences. And I think that's the case I would expect you'd make, right? You would say, here's my author who's well-established, received great reviews and we expect he or she will reach 10,000 people. And you're also saying, here's an experimental poet from Poland that we're translating and we believe that 500 readers is the upper limit. So if you, frankly on this one I just made up on the Polish-

Speaker 10:

For the past numbers, do you want that same mix?

Jon Peede:

Well, the past number, yes. We're asking for your past sales. So in that sense, you're giving us your past sales. If you're a university press and you publish 400 titles, talk to us. We probably won't make your accountants dig all that up, but you're giving us both. Absolutely.

Amy Stolls:

Okay, I have two answers for you, Alan. I'm assuming you're saying you do so many books, you're not giving everything, so you have to choose what you're telling us, right? So what do you choose? I would suggest that if you're coming to us with a mix of books of experimental and... Give us a mix so we can see how you do with your experimental, it should reflect what you're asking us. And the second answer to that is tell us. If you're going to give us in this chart, it's going to be all over the place, that you're going to have 10,000 and 500 and you think our panel might not recognize the title that only got 500, put in parentheses that this was an experiment. So any information is going to be helpful, but I think that if you're coming to us with an experimental writer, let us know how you're doing. And we applaud you. Panels are like you, they're going to applaud you for taking the risk. And it's not a failure to have only 500.

Jon Peede:

But to be clear, if you publish 15 books, you're putting the 15 down. You're not just putting the three that sold over 5,000 copies because that looks better. That's why I say if you're the huge university presses and if you're reprinting 40 back lists or something, have a conversation with us. But otherwise you're giving us your-

Amy Stolls:

And to date. If you're giving us sales figures from a book that was published three years ago, we're assuming that the figure you're giving us is to date and not for that period of time.

Speaker 11:

Trying to parse, you've been very generous talking about fledging or moving away from creation and toward engagement. And so here I sit, literary press publishing 15 books where by far the largest part of the budget is printing and publishing and releasing 15 books. On the other hand, we're also moving toward taking the whole front list and then back lists, entering them into eBooks, doing fun things with our website and so on. That's the creative part. That's the innovative part. I hear what you're saying and I know what to do, but what do I do with the backbone? Do we then exclude that, the publishing costs, the printing costs from our application?

Amy Stolls:

No, no, no. All of that is still in there.

Speaker 11:

Traditionally.

Amy Stolls:

Okay. Let me explain, there's two different things that I was talking about. When I say that most of you are going to choose engagement and that you both do create, publishers create and engage, but for the purposes of an application, you're going to choose engagement. It's for the purposes of choosing an outcome so that when you do your reporting on your final report afterwards, you're going to tell us more about engagement. When you apply, we fully understand that what you're doing is creating an engagement. To that extent, we expect you to have printing, publishing, all the nuts and bolts of, and you'll be judged on the creation of the books that you have, the past. You can just give us work samples of your books and five page manuscripts of what you want to publish and the creation of that work. So there's a difference between it's all about... We understand you're creating as part of the application, but as far as reporting, we're asking you about the engagement once the art is out there.

Jon Peede:

Let me touch on one side of that that's related to both some of the changes in existing. Let's say that you say engagement and as you describe what you're going to do, you say, we're going to publish these 15 books and we're going to have a tour of our authors across the country or what have you. And so when you talk about what you're going to do in engagement, you're saying two things, produce books, tour authors. But when we get to the actual budget, the actual budget is only about royalties or artist fees, which might truly be much more in creation. Two things, which is we're only funding what's in the budget. Sometimes somebody has a narrative, and this has nothing to do with the changes. You have a narrative that says, we have a writers in school program. We do this, free books for prisons. We do 15 books. But when we get to the budget, it says direct marketing campaign. And the panel has no idea what to do because they love the narrative, but they can only fund what's in the budget.

And again, how does that group that asks for 50 get down to 10 and maybe next year zero, by something like that. So that happens a lot. Maybe your accountants aren't talking to your writers. I don't know. But anyways, those things happen and should be avoided.

Speaker 12:

Can you apply for Challenge America and Artworks?

Amy Stolls:

No.

Jon Peede:

No.

Speaker 12:

Okay. So it's exclusive, only one or the other?

Jon Peede:

Correct.

Speaker 12:

And is there a budget maximum for the Challenge America?

Amy Stolls:

$10,000.

Jon Peede:

$10,000 is the grand award.

Speaker 12:

[inaudible 00:52:29] organizational budget.

Jon Peede:

You have to at least achieve a one-to-one match. But I'll say this. If I was the director of Challenge America and you had a $300,000 project, I would seriously question as I believe the panel would [inaudible 00:52:43] how our $10,000 is transformative to that. So I'm not saying don't make it over 20,000. And a lot of people say, does it help us on the grant to put that others are contributing? Absolutely. The panel loves to see that you have this foundation, that foundation, this corporate sponsor, and sometimes to show that you go far beyond a one-to-one match, you go three to one, four to one, but it's within reason. Okay? Make sense? Others?

Speaker 13:

When is Our Town deadline?

Amy Stolls:

You are actually allowed an application under Artworks or Challenge America and Our Town.

Jon Peede:

Anything else?

Amy Stolls:

Questions?

Jon Peede:

Yes.

Speaker 14:

Yeah. Is there still this... I know that you can apply for what's now called Artworks and then also applied for the audience development.

Amy Stolls:

Yeah, it's audience development in August, publishing in March are both under Artworks. Artworks used to be Access to Artistic Excellence. Our Town is something else.

Speaker 14:

The question is can you still apply under Artworks for the-

Amy Stolls:

A regular grant plus an application under Artworks for consortium that's focused on innovation? Yes.

Jon Peede:

And one important part of the change, and it's very applicant friendly, is the fact that the arts education, and sometimes it was known to you as arch learning, their deadlines have now been aligned with the core discipline deadlines. So that means that if you did submit to literature and we looked at it and we thought, that's just not going to fare well with our panel. What they're trying to do would be better over in arch learning, we can transfer it over there. We'll say to you, "Hey, this is what we want to do. We think it's for to your advantage." We presume you'll say, "Yeah, absolutely." But we did not always have that option on the previous alignment of the deadlines. Other questions? Yes.

Speaker 15:

I have a question about the board member and staff publications.

Jon Peede:

Yes.

Speaker 15:

And my question just has to do with our process thinking about publishing where we're planning to publish an anthology of poetry that's by all of our authors, but it's going to be co-edited by a board member and a staff member. Is that something that's considered authored by a board or staff member?

Jon Peede:

It is considered that, and while we do not make a absolute prohibition, we make a statement that it's generally discouraged or avoided, and in our experience, it can lead to rejection. What I would say to you is, if you're going to ask for support for five books and that book might have that many consequences, why not ask for support for four books as well as the administrative cost to paying the salary of the staff members? I think you have to take the approach that we're trying to seek federal funding for our endeavors, and yes, you have a project. I would not personally add in anything that I thought would work against that goal, but if you did that, you could try to explain it as much as you could. But it is awkward. Okay. Thank you very much.

Amy Stolls:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

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