No. Grant Lab is designed to give you a repeatable process, whether grant writing is already part of your job or it recently landed on your to-do list.

You might be an executive director, educator, curator, board member, development professional—or simply the person everyone looked at when someone asked, “Who’s going to write this grant?”

What matters most is that you’re ready to build a more strategic and sustainable approach to grant development for your museum.

You don’t need one before you join. During the first week, you’ll receive a 20-minute 1:1 prospecting session with the Accession team to identify a real opportunity your museum is eligible for and competitive for.

That becomes the grant you’ll work on throughout the Lab—so you’re not practicing on a hypothetical application. You’re working toward funding your museum can actually pursue.

You’ll start with a 20-minute individual prospecting session to make sure you’re pursuing the right opportunity.

Then, each week, you can submit your work for personalized video feedback and line edits from the Accession team. Live sessions also include workshopping time to tackle questions and challenges with your actual application.

Plan for approximately 3 hours per week: two hours for our live Thursday session and workshopping, plus about one hour to apply what you’re learning to your grant.

That’s roughly 18 hours across the entire six-week Lab to develop a real application and build a grant system you can continue using afterward.

Yes. Every live session will be recorded and posted in the course hub within 24 hours.

You’ll have access to the recordings and course materials for six months, so you can revisit the training as you work on future applications.

Writing a grant from scratch can easily take around 20 hours, especially when you’re hunting down data, rewriting standard narratives, rebuilding budgets, and searching for attachments along the way.

Once you’ve built your Master Grant Narrative, Grant Vault, Data Bank, budgets, and other reusable tools, you could save approximately 8–10 hours on future applications, depending on the grant.

The goal isn’t to cram more grant writing into your schedule. It’s to stop doing the same work over and over.

During your individual prospecting session, you’ll work with the Accession team using Instrumentl and GrantStation—professional grant-research tools representing approximately $4,200 in combined database value.

You won’t receive individual subscriptions to the databases. Instead, we’ll use them during your prospecting session to identify and evaluate strong-fit opportunities for your museum.

Absolutely. In fact, Grant Lab is especially useful for museums where grants are only one part of someone’s job.

You don’t need a dedicated grant writer or development department. We’ll help you build a system that makes grant development more manageable, organized, and sustainable, even when you’re also managing programs, exhibitions, education, operations—or a little bit of everything.

Yes—but being strategic about where you invest your time matters more than ever.

With funding becoming more competitive and less predictable, this isn’t the time to chase every opportunity that looks remotely relevant.

Grant Lab teaches you how to identify stronger-fit prospects, decide which opportunities are worth pursuing, and build more competitive applications.

You’re not learning grant writing in the abstract. You’re building your museum’s grant system while completing a real application.

Grant Lab is designed specifically for museum professionals. Over six weeks, you’ll identify a competitive opportunity, develop your application with personalized feedback, and build reusable tools for prospecting, narratives, data, budgets, application review, and organization.

You won’t leave with a notebook full of ideas. You’ll leave with a completed grant and a system for the next one.

Absolutely. Grant Lab is professional development with an immediate institutional benefit: you’re not only learning a new skill, you’re developing a real grant application and reusable grant infrastructure for your museum.

You’ll leave with your Master Grant Narrative, Grant Vault, Data Bank, budget templates, prospecting process, and application evaluation framework—all designed to support future applications.

We can also provide a ready-to-customize professional development request to help you make the case to your supervisor.

Once your payment is complete, your spot in the 20-person Fall 2026 cohort is secured.

You’ll receive next steps by email, including onboarding information and everything you need to prepare for our first live session on October 15.

We understand that professional development budgets work differently from museum to museum.

If you need to discuss a payment arrangement, contact us before registering and we’ll let you know what may be possible.