SCOOP: How to get grant funding for your Canadian podcast.

What kind of podcast is most likely to get funding, and how to make your application worth your while.

Jun 11, 2024

June 10, 2024.

Grant funding for Canadian podcasts is a topic that came up as an area of interest for Pod the North readers way back in September 2022.

At the time I put out a resource that listed a variety of grants I thought would be accessible to Canadian podcasters. Immediately afterwards I got two interesting and divided replies on the Canada Council for Arts grant in particular, Canada’s largest public arts funder.

In an email to me, one indie podcaster called trying to get a meeting with the Canadian Council for the Arts an “an exercise in futility,” and told me that during his experience, ‘Canada Council’ “insisted that podcasters can get commercial revenue and are therefore ineligible for funding”.

In another email, one Pod the North reader told me that he had actually just found out that he successfully received a grant for his podcast, Interpreters. That was Anthony Del Col, New York-based podcast and comic book creator, and Pulitzer Prize Winner.

So what could have been the difference between these two experiences? Was it the Pulitzer Prize? (It wasn’t).

In August 2023, I reached out to Canada Council to ask them for more details on if and how they fund podcast, and they told me that they “do fund podcasts but it really depends on the type of podcast.” Since then, I’ve been chatting with folks in the community to find out what that means, and uncovering more and more podcasts that have been grant supported.

Here’s what Canadian podcasters know about getting grant funding for podcasts.

Yes, we fund podcasts…

2023 was a notable year for Canadian podcast grants.

In September, Creative BC announced the recipients of their Pilot Podcast program who each received around $10K. A large percentage of those recipients included audio dramas and fiction podcasts.

In November, the Indigenous Screen Office closed applications for their first Podcasting Program offering up to $30K to recipients. Last year, the ISO’s Isabelle Ruiz and I had a wonderful conversation about it, where she explained that “podcasting feels like a very natural home for a lot of Indigenous storytellers”.

Despite not having an actual podcasting program themselves, Canada Council for the Arts also dolled out funding to a number of podcasts last year, including Pippa Johnstone’s Expectant, a genre-bending podcast about the moral dilemma of having a baby during the climate crises. and Resurrection from Dane Stewart, a podcast sharing the stories of the earliest response to the AIDS crisis in New York and San Francisco.

It depends on the type of podcast.

What’s notable so far is the prevalence of scripted and narrative-style podcasts that are receiving funding. Narrative podcasts are typically expensive to make and so maybe there’s a sense that they could ‘use’ the money.

“I've had the most success with shows that have some sort of radio drama element in it,” Dane Stewart says. At the very least, that rings true for Anthony Del Col’s aforementioned podcast Interpreters, a fiction podcast series set in the world of three young interpreters attending the world's economic forum.

Expectant plays with the line between fiction and non-fiction while unpacking the timely topic of climate change, and Pippa says that might’ve been the winning combination to her funding success with Canada Council. “I do believe that we should be finding new creative ways to talk about climate, and I think the Canada Council feels the same way. There's a line that I always think about from Katherine Hak who says, ‘the best thing we can do about climate change is talk about it. To express the emotional sides of it.’ We really gotta connect as humans around this question, and I think that's why I probably got the funding there.”

One notable exception to the commonness of grant-winning scripted series’ is the ISO’s Podcasting Program, which announced its recipients in March of 2024 and allocated a total of $300,000 to 12 Indigenous-led podcasts. The majority of those 12 podcasts are conversational-style shows like Matriarch Movement, Actors and Ancestors, and Indigi-Demo-Itis. From my perspective, this feels like a progressive and informed decision, as Indigenous podcasters are widely underrepresented in the podcasting space, and producing chat-style podcasts is significantly more accessible.

The exercise in futility.

One of the main complaints for Canadian podcasters about submitting grants is around the lack of feedback that comes with a rejection. This is something I discussed with Isabelle at the ISO, who explained to me that it was a big point of interest for the team there. “We approach things in a very relational way, meaning that we have conversations with just about every single person who applies to every single one of our programs [...] I always encourage people to come talk and book meetings, and make myself as available as possible so that we can demystify.”

Outside of the ISO, Dane says that from his experience, most of the time candidates need to be prepared for rejection without cause. “I was rejected for a couple of the applications I just submitted. Typically they don't give you reasons why, but it depends on the funding body. [Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ)] has just changed their system, so you can now request feedback when your grants are rejected. If they can pull it off maybe the other bodies will start following suit.”

Dane says Canada Council in particular is quite tight-lipped on their rejections. “I have a friend who works for Canada Council and they are not allowed to talk to me about how the decisions are made or anything. It's very frustrating when you're an artist because you just get this rejection and they might even say in the rejection, ‘you met all the criteria for the program, your project was good enough to pass through the door but we didn't have money for it so sorry about that,’ and there's nothing we can do to get information about why it was rejected.”

One reason why your application might be rejected is around whether or not you own the project. For Anthony, Interpreters is his first intellectual property, and that’s something that he highlighted in his application. Dane says that to receive funding, ‘typically you have to own the material that you are producing, or at least the majority of the creative rights.”

Grant-stacking 101

One of the smartest ways to approach applying for funding for your podcast is something that Dane calls “Grant Stacking”.

“If you're applying to the Canada Council, apply to your provincial body as well. If you're in a city that has a city arts council, apply to them as well. You've already done 50 percent of the work by preparing one grant application. Reuse your answers to the questions. Reuse your support material. I had applied initially to all three funding bodies, Montreal Arts Council, CALQ, and the Canada Council. I was rejected from all of them except for the Montreal Arts Council [and] they gave me $5000 to produce this podcast.”

Once Dane knew he could get $5000 in funding, he knew he should try again the next year, especially with little more runway to prepare. Dane then applied to as many funding applications that he could think of, “I called it Grantpalooza. I applied for eight or nine grants, just over $200,000 worth of funding. We were approved for, in total, $96,000 of funding.” Sure it isn’t $200K, but it’s certainly more than $5K!

Grant writing can be an arduous and exhausting process. It’s a good idea to make the most of that time and effort by staying away from putting all your eggs in one basket, and trying instead, to throw the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.

Apply to create, not to podcast.

Despite being 20 years old, podcasting still isn’t as widely understood as the process of creating art. That’s why, for now, you should keep an eye on the different types of funding that exist for creation, not necessarily for the medium of podcasting.

What’s been most relevant to podcasters looking at the Canada Council for the Arts is the Explore and Create program, which houses four production components that you can apply to. One component is Concept to Realization which funds a project’s “activities that will result in completed works that are shown to the public.” This is the component that funded the production of Expectant, Interpreters and Resurrection.

At first, Dane applied to the Research and Creation component but was unsuccessful. The next year he applied under Concept to Realization “and that time we were quite successful. That was my first ever Canada Council grant, so I was stoked when that happened.”

“There are other types of funding available too,” Dane says. “Travel funding can be super handy. I actually got travel funding to attend the Hot Doc’s [Podcast Festival] last year; a couple hundred bucks to cover my train ticket and hotel for two nights. And then professional development funding as well; you can apply for funding for a mentorship or an internship – I've always thought I should find someone who's a really good audio editor and get this grant to pay me for them to mentor me on how to edit a season.”

Outside of Canada Council, it can get tricky when funding bodies set up funding around specific mediums, or “disciplines”, because sometimes a podcast is considered “digital art”, and sometimes it’s not.

Resurrection is a documentary-style podcast, and Dane submitted it to CALQ through the ‘Digital Arts’ discipline, “because the Digital Arts discipline says ‘audio art’ is part of that discipline”. That application was rejected, and in the email they explained to Dane that he should have submitted it as a documentary film or theater piece instead because it didn’t “align with the values of the Digital Arts discipline’. The weird part was that Dane had actually already received funding for Resurrection from the Digital Arts discipline only 4 years prior. “I think they're all trying to figure out what to do with podcasts.”

CALQ now has an explicit question on their FAQ page that explains the eligibility of podcasts. Dane says this is really significant for the ecosystem; “this is the first time that I've seen a grant body really explicitly say, ‘you have a podcast, you can get funding.’”

Hold your adjudicator's hand.

Many funding bodies are still trying to figure out what to do with podcasts.

One told Pippa, “we don't fund podcasts because a podcast is just two people talking to each other,” and according to Dane’s experience, that’s unsurprising. “I think that the needle is moving on this a little bit,” he says, “but a lot of the time people will think of a podcast and they don't think of it as having artistic merit, or being creatively sufficient to warrant receiving grant funding. As the applicant to a grant program – and this is just my own advice – you have to assume that the person who is adjudicating your grant application is one of those people who thinks, “Podcast? Joe Rogan. No, that's not art”.

Pippa says that sometimes it feels like funding bodies aren’t “ready for this to be an explosive art form that is really pushing boundaries.” For that reason, she can’t recall if she had even called Expectant a “podcast” in her application. “I play around with words like ‘audio show’ and ‘audio series.’”

Dane says that “hand-holding” is something folks should have top of mind as they write their grant applications, and you can do that by making sure you’re ticking every “box”. “When you're writing your application, it's going to ask you a question like, ‘describe your project for us’. If you then go back to the website, the website will say [something like], ‘we are assessing you on artistic merit, potential impact and feasibility to produce the project’. Take the words from those criteria and put them into your answer. You want to make sure that you made it as clear as day that your project meets the criteria.”

Dane also says that writing in plain language and keeping your application organized could make a big difference. “I would steer clear of using industry jargon, especially with podcasts – don't use tons of audio jargon. This sounds so simple, but I use headings. I don't know how it's going to appear when I submit the form, so I put my headings in full capital letters. And then I organize the different sections of my answers to questions and say, ‘this is the story.’ It’s hard advice to give abstractly and really easy advice to give when you read an application.”

Don’t sell yourself short

Realistically, most podcast projects are working under scope and production cost that’s higher than what a funding body is prepared to dole out. Most funding bodies understand this, and that's why you definitely shouldn’t be applying for grants with the “budget-version” of your project.

Anthony says he always asks for the maximum amount that a funding body is prepared to give because “why not? We're in Canada. We're creating art. We're not doing it to buy houses in Toronto.”

Asking for the full amount can help to establish some credibility around your project, and present a (hopefully earnest) narrative that you’re prepared to commit to the time your project needs and to paying yourself and the people on your team fairly. Dane says that from his experience, people who are applying for their first grants – especially younger people – have a tendency to minimize what they need under the assumption that being “cheaper” will work to their benefit. It might actually be the opposite case. “They actually appreciate and they want you to be paying yourself and everyone involved a professional wage.”

If you’re not sure how to showcase fair payment in your application, you can reference the Government of Canada’s Job Bank webpage for labour market information and AIR’s Rates tool.

Start early

A successful grant application is one that is easy to understand in one sitting. Adjudicators should be able to capture what your podcast is about, the significance of your team and the story you’re telling, and a sense of what it might sound like. It’s a lot of information to compile, and it takes time to put it together in a concise and compelling way. Dane says he often thinks that writing a grant will only take him a day, when in reality it’ll take him around a week.

Practically everything you put together in your application will help your podcast in the long run. He says that starting early gives you a better chance to “beef up your application” as much as you can to add to your credibility. This is maybe more important for podcasters than any other discipline because you are trying to overcome that bias that exists in some adjudicators' heads.”

From Dane’s experience, typically applicants are asked to submit “supporting material,” and he recommends taking this as an opportunity for podcasters to create a high quality trailer – “A) they don't want a full episode, B) then you have a trailer, and a trailer is the handiest when you're networking or pitching a media company,”... or applying to more grants!

Armed with a trailer, you can start to build meaningful partnerships and get “buy-in” from folks like media organizations, a production team, mentors, and more. “Taking the time to put your idea into a grant format means that you have become capable of articulating your idea, hopefully. The first season of Resurrection, we had been in talks with Pink Triangle Press about potentially producing and financing the whole show, but what they ended up saying is ‘we can provide you with some in-kind marketing support. We can guarantee you that we'll include it in the newsletter and we'll put some display ads on the website.’ So we got them to write a letter that said ‘we're providing X dollars of in-kind marketing support to the project.’ That just boosts your credibility. You could do the same thing with an editor [or] someone who's really legit in the industry who's gonna be mentoring you anyway.”

So how early is “start early”?

It’s certainly enough time to include the production of a trailer and an entire networking campaign, but you might even have to look further than that and find the “sweet spot” for your production timeline. Dane says that with some grants “you have to apply X amount of time before the project starts. The other thing I find really challenging about grants is the timelines for results [...] If you want to know if you have funding before you start the project, you have to plan it out really far in advance.”

From Anthony’s experience, finding out whether or not he’d get funding from Canada Council took about 8 months; ”I applied in October of 2021 and I got the thumbs up in May or June of 2022”.

Ask for help

“For the actual grant writing, pull in help,” Pippa suggests.

For the most part funding bodies try to make themselves pretty accessible to help applicants throughout the process, and talking to them as early on in the process about the right disciplines and programs to apply for is something that Dane really recommends. “The Canada Council can be a little tough to get a hold of, but my experience is actually great.” Anthony had two conversations with Canada Council pre-application, in which they were “quick to get back to me, to return my phone calls, they were very proactive on getting me answers, they helped me out immensely. They seemed intrigued and they seemed interested in [podcasting].”

Another hot tip about getting in touch with the Canada Council for the Arts in particular is to reach out to them over the phone instead of sending emails.

You can also hire a grant writer, which Pippa says “is a wonderful idea” and to “compensate them, if possible, generously because it's hard work – which is not gonna help with accessibility whatsoever. I do believe that it's gonna get easier.

Ultimately Pippa, Dane and Anthony all stress how reaching out for support from peers is a massive benefit. For Anthony, a friend of his was “able to share his answers to all the questionnaires and that really allowed me to tailor my responses to his.” He says when it comes to applying for grants, “it's not a competition, we're all here to make great art and tell stories and have as many people listen to it.”

What do you want from a Canadian Podcasting funding body?

I’m curious to hear how you think grants can be supporting Canadian podcasting better, and what you imagine a funding body dedicated to Canadian podcasts to look like. Let’s keep this conversation going and leave your comments below – you never know who’s reading them!

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