How to Write a Budget for a Grant

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from YoungWritersWorkshops. com and I'm going to talk about how to write a grant, a budget for a grant proposal. A good grant proposal will go into detail about the money that you're requesting, and how it will be spent. And that's what you have the opportunity to do with your budget section of your grant proposal. Now whether or not the grant, the funder's guidelines request it, I always recommend writing a budget narrative to go with whatever budget you have. So the budget might look like a spreadsheet, or a table with expenses broken down into operating expenses, personnel and project costs. And then for, and overhead. And then you would list specific amounts. But I also recommend having a narrative or a budget description, where you describe what each of these items is for. For example, if you have supplies, describe what the supplies are and how they relate to the project. This is going to help make your proposal seem very well thought out and it will help the funder to know what they're going, what their money's going to be going for. Now when you're putting together a budget, you want to find out if there are any expenses that that funder will not cover. For example, Federal, most Federal funding does not include air travel. So you want to make sure that you're not going to be asking for travel expenses if that's something that the funder excludes. Another thing to consider is what the overhead is going to be for doing the project. Depending on your situation, you might need to build that into your budget. Or if you know that the funder doesn't cover overhead, you need to make sure not to build that into your budget. But overhead is the cost for example, whatever your electricity. Whatever it's going to cost you to do this project as an organization, that's your overhead that you might consider putting into your budget. So to sum it up, you want to write a really thorough budget, and include a thorough description, so that the funder will have a clear idea of what the money that you're requesting is going to be spent for. Consider what's excluded from the funders' funding possibilities when you're writing your grant budget."