- Now, how do you come up with a budget for your grant?
This is a really, really good question,
because if you're like me,
when you got started out, you really had no clue
as to where you'd begin for such a thing.
Music school they also did not give me a class
on creating budgets for my projects.
That might be something to think about down the road,
perhaps they'll offer those,
but they weren't around when I was taking these classes.
So there are some guidelines to help you in this process.
It's not rocket science and it's pretty easy once you get
into it to see how your budget will grow.
Basically you need to make sure that your numbers are real.
If you're say going to give yourself a salary
which is completely appropriate,
some kind of a fee for your effort
in whatever project you're doing,
you need to base that on some kind of a benchmark.
Say for instance, you're a member of a string quartet
and you want to find out appropriate fees
for each member say for a concert,
you could contact your local union
or you probably already know your waging scale
by heart and base it on that.
And remember all of our union rules boil down
to their establishing minimums.
So you could escalate your fee as much
as you feel brave enough to do,
as much as the grant might allow,
that might be an area where you can inflate it somewhat.
But be careful,
I'd say be conservative no matter what you do.
Other areas that you can include in your budget,
performance space, for instance, publication materials.
These are all extremely worthy things to put
in a line item budget.
I mentioned in another clip,
organization volunteer attorneys
and accountants for the arts.
This is another wonderful place to go
and get advice on creating a budget.
One rule of thumb with the budget, round up your numbers.
We did a joke proposal over at Baylor
amongst my little clan of writers,
just to, for the fun of it,
because we'd seen so many bad things come
across our desk that we had to laugh.
And one of the joke things we did
is we created a budget that included snacks for instance
and of course this would not be appropriate.
And the budget was so detailed
that it was just mind boggling.
I think our final figure we were asking
for was $1,758,000.33.
We don't do that.
So round up your budget numbers, group budget items.
If you say you need to buy paperclips and staples
and so forth, put it in an area called office items
and batch those numbers together.
So you need to be precise in your budget,
but you don't need to be overly so.
It's simply needs to be clear what you're asking
for in the way of cash.