Every grant application is different. Depending on the priorities of a given funder, they may ask you a wide variety of questions about the work that you’re making, but there are some questions you can expect to appear (in some way, shape, or form) on all grant applications. While grantmakers usually use pretty clear language for these questions and you should answer them straightforwardly, there are always ways to delve deep in your responses, addressing important aspects of your work and how it’s a good fit for the grantmaker’s funding priorities. I’ve put together 6 questions, below, that you’ll often see in grant applications, and provided some tips for how best to answer them:

by Jason Tseng, Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas On the Boards TV was recently named a 2015 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards honoree for their pioneering work in providing high definition video content to the contemporary performance world. On top of that their business model shares half of its profits directly with the artists. Project leads Lane Czaplinski and Monique Courcy sat down with us to talk about how they’re bringing contemporary performance into the Netflix age.

by Jason Tseng, Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas Fractured Atlas recently recognized The Laundromat Project as an honoree of the 2015 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards for their pioneering work in connecting communities to their creative potential. We interviewed Executive Director Kemi Ilesanmi to find out just how The Laundromat Project is able to use artists to engage people with art when they least expect it.

This blog post is sure to get a ton of hits because here’s where I’m talking about the world’s sexiest tax document of all time: Form 990!

New Year. New You. New Mission. As the month of January reaches its blizzardy conclusion, let’s check in and see how those New Year’s resolutions are holding up. Well, maybe you haven’t exactly joined a gym or learned Spanish or finished reading Infinite Jest yet, but I’d like to slip in one more resolution for all you arts entrepreneurs out there to consider. Re-visit your mission statement. Or, you know, write one to begin with. Lots of artists and arts organizations seize the New Year as an opportunity to take stock of what’s working for them and what’s not. And so often, one thing that’s not working is their mission statement.

It's easy to get excited about the prospect of grant funding : grants carry with them a certain amount of prestige and the assurance that your work is (at least somewhat) funded, not to mention the fact that, if a funder is willing to give you a grant, they respect your work.

Ever wonder what it takes to attract and retain really great staff who can move your organization forward? The video below asks 26 really smart people working across sectors to tackle that very question. Last October, I was speaking with one of Fractured Atlas’s incredible Board members, Amy Wrzesniewski. Amy is an expert in Management and Organizational Behavior, and is a professor at the Yale School of Management. Anytime I need to bounce HR questions off of someone, Amy is at the top of my list. While we were meeting, three things dawned on me: (1) Amy Wrzesniewski is a genius. Also, exceedingly kind and generous. (2) The issues around attracting and retaining really great people are universal. They transcend sector. They’re not a cultural sector challenge, or a technology sector challenge. They’re not unique to for-profits or not-for-profits, the military or government. Every organization deals with similar issues. (3) Attracting and retaining great people is the key to solving the seemingly intractable problems facing so many companies today. Following our conversation, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to gather some really smart people from across sectors to discuss this topic? (Yes, that is what I consider fun.) I began mentally listing all of the people I wanted to ask and quickly realized that the scheduling hurdles would be Herculean. Then I remembered that I co-host a little-watched internet television show — #SKYNOVA: Featuring Culture Warriors In Their Native Habitat — and we own all of the video equipment needed to create a virtual conversation.