America's Public Television Stations

January 14, 2019

Each year, public television and public radio stations across the country work hard to secure federal and foundation grant funding for exciting projects and initiatives. At the Grant Center for Public Media, we remain committed to providing our members with the tools, resources and expertise to facilitate grant success, especially during times of uncertainty. This year, we took the idea of personalized, one-on-one service to a new level. Here is a review of the resources and services our members had access to during 2018.

More Relevant Grant News Delivered to Your Inbox

We continue to keep stations on top of important developments and trends in the grant world. In 2018, the Grant Center for Public Media adopted a new strategy for tracking station development priorities and notifying our members about relevant funding opportunities. In addition to our regular newsletters, we are sending personalized emails to individual stations about grant opportunities if we find something specific to your local needs. We are already hearing positive feedback about this service from current members and encourage member stations to keep us updated about your current funding priorities.

We also launched the Foundation Funding Roundup, delivered directly to members’ inbox and as a news item on our website. This new feature highlights foundations running limited grant competitions around priority areas for public media. It also includes new data, research and insights to help you make your case for funding. Contact Anthony Collebrusco to make sure you are subscribed.

After a comprehensive review and overhaul, the Grant Center refreshed and streamlined all of the foundation profiles in our grants database. These changes were made to help members more quickly assess whether a foundation is a fit for your station initiatives by concisely summarizing its giving priorities. New sample grants were added to many of these pages so members can see what kind of projects the foundation is likely to support. Finally, we included information about eligibility and the initial recommended approach for each foundation. As always, our foundation database highlights major national givers to public media as well as local and regional funders from every state in the country. Use the GC Search Tool to search our database of nearly 500 grants for foundation and federal grant opportunities relevant to your station. Members can also request deeper dives into foundation opportunities by requesting custom prospect research.

Making a Plan for Success

The stations that are having the most success using the Grant Center’s resources have taken the time to sit down and make a plan for how to best use the service to meet their station’s needs. This is easy to do with a conference call and a virtual tour of the website as we begin our work together. We will make sure that all of the relevant members of your team have access to our website, are subscribed to the newsletter, know how to search our database of nearly 500 grant opportunities and understand all of the resources available to them. We also want to make sure that we have a good understanding of your station’s development priorities for grantseeking, as well as relevant partnerships in place and internal capacity. In many cases, it’s helpful to put a communication plan in place, whether it’s a formal conference call monthly, a quick monthly check in or just regular email with a key contact. The more we know about your station, the better we can help you reach your goals. We will always make time to set up a call and reassess our plan for working together.

Custom Prospect Research to Meet Your Needs

One way we help can help you reach your goals is by helping to identify funding prospects through our custom prospect research service. After you have done a full search of the grant opportunities in our database, we will schedule a call to learn more about your project, how much you need to raise, funders you have already approached and any other relevant information. This free service for members can help find funding support, from major national foundations to local and regional funders in your station's backyard, for a wide variety of project types. In 2018, stations requested research on regional funders to supplement state and county support for a statewide education project, a survey of local funders to help expand the scope of a capital campaign, national funders for a documentary of national import, and to produce a prospect list to demonstrate the fundability of a project to a principal financial backer. Grant Center members have commended these reports for helping them identify new funders in their community and yielding promising leads for funding support. Contact us to get started on a report for you.

Supporting Professional Development

Professional development for development staff remained a priority throughout 2018. Meegan White produced two sessions in the philanthropy track of the popular PMDMC meeting in July 2018, bringing a much-needed discussion of grants to this key conference for development professionals in public media, and the Grant Center for Public Media was again a sponsor of these sessions:

• Extending Education Services Through Grants, featured a panel of education professionals who have built their departments and created K-12 content for PBS Learning Media through grants. We also featured a Q&A with NSF program officer Sandra Welch. 
• The Accidental Grantwriter 2.0 featured an interactive discussion with a panel of experienced grantwriters: Karen Avery (PBS Foundation), Kay Coz (Thirteen/WNET) and Gina James (Public Radio Exchange).

We continued to build grantseeking knowledge and skills through webinars for members. Our webinars covered a variety of topics this year, offering members information about trends in grant funding, highlighting grant opportunities with a fit for public broadcasting, and giving stations the opportunity to hear directly from program officers at federal agencies and ask them questions directly. Click here to view all of our webinars on-demand.

New Resources

In 2018, we remained committed to providing members with useful resources and information. At the annual PMDMC meeting, we released our new guide for K-12 Education Funding. In this guide, we offered a sampling of the major federal grant programs that have supported this work, along with national foundations with a history of giving to public media. This guide joins our growing collection of funding guides in our resources section.

We also shared trends and grant opportunities in workforce development under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), a USDA guide to federal support for opioid response programs, advice for the “accidental grantwriter,” tips for grant research and relationship building, and much more.

A Look Toward the Future

We are continuing to plan great content and resources for members in the coming year, but we also believe in the value of providing our members with customized, one-to-one engagement. To learn more about how we work together or to fill us in on a new need at your station, visit www.apts.org/grantcenter, or contact Meegan White and Anthony Collebrusco. We are excited to hear more about your station’s development priorities and initiatives so we can help your station fulfill its mission through grant funding in 2019.

Thanks to all of our members for a great year. We look forward to continue to work and grow your mission together.