NOTICE: The Corporation for National and Community Service is extending the deadline to apply for College Student Social Media grants to Friday, May 9 at 5:00pm EDT for applicants that have initiated an application in e-Grants by 5:00pm today, May 7. We are taking this step because of intermittent outages in eGrants this week, which may have hampered the submission of some applications by the deadline. Any applicant that has already submitted their application and would like to revise it prior to the new deadline should contact me at lsahighered@cns.gov
The Corporation for National and Community Service (the Corporation) announces the availability of approximately $2.3 million of grant funding to support the facilitation of better engagement of college students in service through social media.
Some examples of social media include: social networking (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, Ning, or integrating social networking capacity into existing sites), wikis, podcasts, blogs, RSS feeds, mashups, social bookmarking, widgets, etc. Successful applicants must demonstrate how their program can use these tools to engage increased numbers of college students, especially in partnership with other nonprofit or for-profit entities.
The Corporation will make one-time awards of approximately $100,000 to $750,000 to an estimated twelve eligible applicants for a project period of up to three years. While all applicants can build in funds for subgrants as part of their program model, the Corporation expects to fund at least one partnership dedicated primarily to disbursing small subgrants (under $10,000 each) to seed student-driven projects. This awardee must promote, review, and award subgrants using social media. Under this model, it is expected that the grantee will allocate at least 80% of funding for subgrants.
Eligible applicants include higher education partnerships, defined as one or more public or private nonprofit organizations, or public agencies, including States, and one or more institutions of higher education. Thus, all partnerships must include at least one institution of higher education. Examples of such partnerships include: a national service-focused organization and colleges and universities where it has affiliated chapters; a national non-profit partnering with a Business School to run a national subgranting competition; a regional group of non-profit student organizations working with an institution of higher education which would serve as the legal applicant. Applicants should have demonstrable experience in planning and implementing significant service, volunteering or technology programs.