The Grant Lottery

I've learned a little about fundraising in the last couple of months. Namely...I suck at asking for money. I know my project, I give the pitch with passion, I present the slick, supporting proposal but when it comes to the direct ask, I wimp out. This is despite reading the chapter on private donors from Morrie Warshawski's pretty cool "Shaking the Money Tree" which tells you all about maintaining direct eye contact with your prospect as you say something to the effect of "I'd like $10,000 of your hard earned money to pay for me...who you've never really heard of... to go shoot interviews in Senegal."

In the same chapter, Warshawski has a sample letter showing you how to do the dirty deed, i.e. shake strangers down for cash. Of course the sample letter he picks is from Lily Tomlin. I don't mean to be picky but I think the Lily Tomlin letterhead is worth a couple points in getting the prospective donor's attention. So until I steal Rihanna's stationery to send out letters on, I've let the other folks on the project court the money and turned my attention to the crap shoot of applying for grants.

Basically, I like the grant route. This sort of diligent form filling is my forte. Lately, though, I've started to feel like I'm sitting in the dark waiting for my number to come in...but I guess..."you got to be in it to win it", right?

I have therefore been entering the little documentary project into everything I think it might qualify for, which isn't much because there aren't that many documentary funds around these days for international projects and those grants that exist are super competitive, not given to first-time feature filmmakers.

The exception to this is a new grant out of Europe specifically for third world filmmaking. I have been waiting for this call for proposals for months but now I'm pouring over it and thinking that asking perfect strangers to give me thousands of dollars might be preferable.

The grant application form is 50 pages long and like Christmas for bureaucrats. It asks questions like "What is the objective of the action?" "What are the estimated results?" "What are the main activities by results?" Good thing I have the manual and guidelines (68 pages combined) to help me through. So here I go slotting my little raffle ticket into the box. Pray that Lady Luck rummages around in there and pulls it out.