What Happens After You Get an ARDC Grant?

Congratulations! ARDC has just approved your grant application! Now, what? Below is a compilation of what you can expect.

What You Can Expect From ARDC:

Confirmation & Contracting

First, we will ask you to sign a grant contract and provide us with information to send you the grant funds. Once the contract is signed, we will issue funds via ACH payment or wire transfer. This may take several weeks. You can preview the contract terms and conditions here.

Groups.io

By joining our Groups.io community and then our grantees subgroup, you can talk directly with other grantees. It is a great resource to get advice on how to resolve roadblocks in your projects, tips for where to find equipment, or offer your unique expertise in fields like project management or volunteer coordination to individuals and clubs who are in need of assistance.

Grantee Gatherings

Several of our grantees reached out to us to ask if there was a way to contact one another and discuss their projects. In response to this, ARDC now hosts “Grantee Gatherings,” which usually occur twice per year. We have focused topics of conversation facilitated by ARDC staff, where grantees can come together to share their knowledge and experiences with one another. These meetings are completely optional and do not influence ARDC funding decisions regarding your project.

What We Can Expect From You:

Reporting

Grant reports are due once a year and at the end of your project. We will reach out to you to remind you when it’s time for a report.

Annual Reports

If your project will take longer than one year to complete, you will need to check in with us once a year. This can be as simple as an email letting us know how the work is going, or scheduling a 30-minute Zoom chat. Depending on the project, we may ask for a demo or other documentation.

Final Reports

When your project is finished, you can submit a final report through the same system that you submitted your application. Log in to view your in-progress grant project and submit the report. The online form includes a series of questions that will help us learn from your work. Your answers to the questions can be as long or short as you need to fully explain your outcomes.

We prefer to see photos, videos, demos, or walk throughs when possible. We may share your results on our website or in our newsletter if you provide us with visual material. Photos and videos help us to promote and explain your work to the broader public. Please note that media including persons under the age of 18 will require a signed copy of ARDC’s Photo Release Form prior to publication.

We understand that challenges will occur during the course of a project – if some aspect of your work did not produce the results you wanted, sharing what you learned from it is extremely valuable for us to be able to understand your work and help other grantees. We do not consider encountering and learning from challenges or dead ends to be a project failure; however, we do need to understand the full context and learnings, particularly if the project expects to request additional funding.

Outside of these required reports, you can send us informal updates anytime! We love to hear about how your work is going. Anything sent to our staff may be shared with our volunteers, reviewers, and board. In some special cases, additional information may be required (see below).

If our reporting structure doesn’t work for you and you’d like to communicate with us in a different way, please let us know. Currently, you can submit reports as:

written information,
uploaded files like PDFs,
website links,
photos,
audio file links, or
video links.

Final reports are used to make decisions about future funding. Be aware that failure to complete reports or to satisfactorily answer follow-up questions will result in your organization being ineligible to receive future grants. If you need assistance completing a report, please reach out to us.

Example final reports:

Small amateur radio project: Hampden County Radio Association (Final report) (Project Description)
Small amateur radio project: University of Arizona (Final report) (Project Description)
Medium education project: TOBB University of Economics and Technology (Final report) (Project Description)
Large education project: Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival (Final report) (Project Description)
Large research and development project: Rhizomatica Communications (Final report) (Project Description)

Additional Information Requests

In some cases, we may require more information about your project progress. This is particularly true for long term, high-dollar projects. For example, if you are requesting additional funds or a new grant, we may request additional financial reports or a demo of work to-date. We may also request additional information if:

We think something in your report is missing or unclear,
We have a concern about how the project is going,
We have a question from our auditor, or
If learning more from you could benefit our work or the work of our other grantees.

We will do our best to communicate any expectations in advance.

Why do you ask for reports?

There are several reasons we ask for reports on your project:

Your reports help us learn from your work and help us decide on what projects to fund in the future. Only you have the first-hand experience to tell us if your project succeeded and how much impact it made. What you share helps us advise others doing similar work and helps us decide where to invest funds in the long term. This is why we particularly like to hear about what did NOT work.
We want to make sure you have the time, money, information, and personnel you need to be successful. If you reach out to us to let us know you are struggling, we may be able to approve a change to your project or help you get the resources you need.
We have a responsibility to be good stewards of our foundation’s endowment. Our funds are intended to help the amateur radio and digital communications communities and the public in general. All funding decisions are made by unpaid volunteers from those communities. The only way we can know if we’re granting the funds in a way that benefits all concerned is if we ask.
We need to be transparent about how ARDC funds are spent, what kinds of projects work well, and what kinds of projects become learning experiences. We will use the information you share with us about your grant project to make our grants program as transparent as possible. You can see the 2023 annual report here.

Project Changes

If your project plan or budget changes, reach out and let us know! We are usually happy to accommodate changes, but significant changes require approval ahead of time when possible. You should let us know if you need to extend your project deadline, you’re changing a key team leader, or if you wish to change in a significant way how you’ll be using the grant money.

Small Budget Changes

If you want to make a small change to your budget, like swapping a piece of equipment for something similar, you don’t need to ask us about it. Just tell how you decided to make these changes in your final report.

Significant Budget Changes

If you want to make a bigger change to your project, like a change over $5,000 or 5% of your total project cost, we expect you to let us know in advance.

If you want to make a significant budget change, we may have you write up answers to some questions so that we can evaluate your request. In extremely rare circumstances, if the funds are being used in a way that doesn’t align with the original intent of the project or if there is a major flaw in your proposed change, we may say no or ask that you return the grant funds to us.

Applying for Additional ARDC Grants

If you are planning on applying for more funding from us there are a few things to keep in mind:

Be sure to complete your final report before submitting a request for a new grant. The final report will be used to evaluate your new request. If you are not yet ready to complete your final report, you can instead include a progress update in your application.
Each request for funding should stand on its own. It should clearly make the case for why it is needed and what work will be done. It is not sufficient to say that the new grant will “continue the work of the first grant.” Each request should fully answer the application questions and have distinct objectives and milestones so that we can assess its impact against new requests.

In the case of education or amateur radio licensing projects, this may be as simple as listing how many new students you hope to reach.
In the case of research and development projects, you should include a work plan showing what additional work will be done and why it’s needed to reach your end product.

If you are asking for continued funding for a large (six-figure), multi-year project, your overall project roadmap should be clear. You should have a defined end goal, and any continued requests for funding should show how they help get you to that end goal. Your road map should include a plan for what will happen when ARDC is no longer funding your project.
Past success does not guarantee future funding. Each time we review grant proposals our committees pick which are likely to have the most positive impact. We are unable to fund all of the worthy proposals that are submitted to us, even from groups who have done excellent work in the past.