 |
| From The Fledgling Fund |
It's just over 24 hours until the deadline for our next round of funding.
We are imagining all of the enthusiastic, creative and struggling filmmakers, web designers and other creative media artists, who have been working on a project for months, sometimes years, balancing perhaps more than one project, with some semblance of a personal life and trying to figure out how best to tell Fledgling their stories - and to do it in the next 24 hours!
We, on the other hand, already know that we will receive well over 200 LOI's- many of them on mission, well presented and robust and yet, we will only be able to provide grants to a small number of these. How do we make these tough decisions? What are our priorities? How do we manage the process? We thought it might be useful to shed some light on these issues to clarify how we attempt to support the field of creative media.
There are three of us on staff and you have probably met one or more of us at various conferences, Good Pitches and festivals; Sheila Leddy, our Executive Director, Emily Verellen, our Senior Program Officer and me. We all look at the LOI's during the next few weeks and jointly decide whether they should be moved forward to the full proposal stage. This becomes increasingly difficult with each funding cycle as the quality of the applications increases, along with the number arriving at our cyberspace door. The list of projects that move to the next round on October 30th truly reflects a collaborative, joint decision.
Between the end of October and mid November, materials arrive from the applicants that we have asked to submit a full proposal. At this stage, we use similar criteria: first of all, is the material compelling? While our goal is to support media projects that target entrenched social problems, the story must engage. An issue, no matter how important, cannot be shared without a lively and well-told story. Second, does the idea lend itself to strong outreach? Can goals be set and outcome measures be determined? Are there clear target groups that already have an interest in the issue who are likely to participate in the community engagement? Is the timing right for the issue? Third, is the theme universal? An issue, for example, that might be key to a small community in Bangladesh may not be within our scope of interest but an issue in Bangladesh that has strong connection with other communities in other countries might well be of interest. Third, is the project at the right stage for Fledgling? Our "sweet spot" is to fund specifically at the outreach stage. Fourth, is the project innovative? Does it add to the national or international dialogue, push the field forward, present the problem and its solutions in an intriguing way? And fifth, is it relevant to our mission - to address the needs of underserved populations through media. This is important because in the end each grant decision needs to be justified to our Board.
No matter how clear we try to be about our criteria, the last few weeks in each funding cycle are tough. While we tend to agree on most projects, there is always lively discussion and sometimes disagreement on a number of projects and each one of these receives the time it deserves. We do reach a consensus, but this last stage is time consuming. As we review our decisions from one cycle to the other and work actively with our grantees, and try to better understand what worked and what worked less well, we hope that the process improves over time and informs the next cycle and the one after that.
Best wishes to all of you and it's time for us to get started!
