Most heritage projects are not short of ideas or even of money. They are short of a partner who can turn a grant into something that still exists when the grant closes.
The problem funders actually have
A foundation with money to give cannot easily tell, from an application, whether the organisation in front of it will deliver. Both proposals read the same: a worthy institution, an important collection, a sum of money. One produces a searchable archive. The other produces a final report explaining why not.
Funders learn this the expensive way, and the lesson makes them cautious with exactly the small institutions that need them most. That caution is the thing a credible delivery partner removes.
How the partnership works
We are not a grant-maker and we cannot apply for the money. In the United States the applicant must be a 501(c)(3) organisation or an educational institution. The institution applies; we are the named vendor in its budget, and the engineering record behind its promise.
- You hold the grant and the relationship. The money goes to your organisation, not to us. You own the result, the domain, and every file at the end.
- We supply what applications are usually missing — a defined scope, dated work phases, a line-item budget, and a vendor with a delivery record a funder can check.
- We write the technical and budget sections if that helps. You keep authorship of everything about your own mission and community; nobody outside your institution should be writing that.
Paid against delivery, not against phases
Our fee is fixed and milestone-gated, and every milestone is a countable artefact rather than an activity:
- A stated number of items recovered from the source media, with the count reconciled against what was found
- A stated number catalogued into the schema, with the metadata fields agreed in advance
- Published at permanent URLs, with items extracted reconciled against items live
- A written final report showing delivered against promised, in the form the funder requires
If a milestone is not delivered it is not billed. This is a clause your organisation can quote directly to a funder, and it is the structural answer to the failure mode that makes funders nervous.
We would rather show you than tell you
Machine-assisted processing has collapsed the cost of the first increment of this work. Something that was quoted in person-years five years ago can now be demonstrated in days.
So before an application goes anywhere, we will take a sample of your collection — a few hundred items — and make them recovered, catalogued and searchable at a working address, at little or no cost to you. The application then arrives with a URL attached.
A funder who has been disappointed before will fund a demonstration more readily than a promise. This is the single strongest thing a small institution can put in front of one.
The same work, across very different causes
This practice grew out of Hungarian-American institutional life, and that community’s record is not one kind of thing. Over thirty years we have built and run the systems behind six distinct strands, and the engineering underneath them is identical: recover what exists, give it a structure, publish it somewhere permanent, and keep it alive afterwards.
Museums and cultural institutions
Collection sites, catalogues and image archives — the American Hungarian Museum, the Hungarian Folklore Centrum, and the magyar.org portal and its family of sub-sites. The largest holdings we steward by a wide margin.
Academic and educational associations
Membership systems, conference and abstract management, journals and member directories for scholarly bodies — the kind of organisation whose records must survive a volunteer board that changes every two years.
Folk arts: dance, music, táncház
Ensembles, camps and the táncház movement: tiszaensemble.org, Bodó Band, the Aranykapu camp, Rózsafa, the Kodály Quartet, Amadinda, csárdás and the táncház sites. Performance schedules, repertoire, teaching material, photographs and recordings — a living tradition whose documentation is scattered across the people who happened to keep it.
Community gatherings
The Hungarian picnic, begun by AHEA and the Basa family, and the events calendar around it. Gatherings leave the thinnest record of anything here: photographs on somebody’s drive, a programme sheet, a mailing list. They are also what a community most wants back thirty years later.
Environmental campaigns
Save the Danube, the Tisza cyanide spill, and the campaign against cyanide gold mining at Verespatak. We built and hosted the sites that carried these efforts, at a time when a website was how a dispersed coalition organised at all.
Minority and human rights
Documentation, position papers and the public record of minority-rights advocacy across the Carpathian Basin.
Why campaign records disappear fastest
A museum’s collection has an owner who outlives any single project. A campaign does not. It generates press coverage, legal filings, photographs, petitions and correspondence — and when it ends, whether it won or lost, nobody owns the record. The coalition dissolves. The volunteer who held the files moves on. The domain lapses, and with it the only public account of how a thing was actually done.
This is the most urgent category we handle, and the least funded, because the moment of greatest need arrives exactly when the organisation that would have applied for the grant has just stopped existing.
If you are closing down a campaign, or have inherited the files of one that already closed, that is a conversation worth having before another year passes.
Funders beyond any one foundation
The Hungary Foundation is the most relevant funder for Hungarian-American institutional collections, and its terms are set out above. It is not the only route, and for several of the strands here it is not the right one:
- Environmental campaign records reach environmental foundations and, for work touching the Danube basin or Romania, European programmes.
- Folk arts and performance reach arts councils, folklore and heritage funds, and university ethnomusicology departments that want the material deposited somewhere citable.
- Minority and human rights documentation reaches human-rights funders and academic partners, who often care more about the archive than the originating organisation does.
- Academic collections frequently need no external grant at all — a university library partnership can carry the hosting and the permanence in exchange for the deposit.
We will say which of these fits your collection, including when the answer is that no grant is needed.
The Hungary Foundation, in detail
The Hungary Foundation remains the most relevant funder for Hungarian-American institutional collections. Its published terms, as they stand, shape what is worth proposing:
- Applicants must be US-based 501(c)(3) organisations or educational institutions.
- It does not fully fund a project. The applicant contributes meaningful resources of its own — historically at least a tenth of the total. Volunteer time and existing staff effort can count toward this; we will help you account for it honestly.
- Overhead is reimbursed up to fifteen per cent of direct costs, and there is no retroactive funding for work already finished.
- Grants may run up to three years, awarded annually.
- Reporting is mandatory — periodic progress reports, then a narrative and financial final report within sixty days of completion, with unused funds returned.
One point of practical importance: the dedicated website-development call is not currently advertised. The live route is an unsolicited one-page Letter of Inquiry, accepted on a rolling basis. Waiting for a request for proposals that may not return is the most common way these projects never start.
We do not treat any single funder as the plan. State humanities councils, university library partnerships, and an institution’s own operating budget reach the same work, and some collections are better served by one of those.
What we need from you
- Someone with authority to decide — a director, an archivist, a board member who can commit the institution
- Access to the collection in whatever state it is in. Boxes, a dead website, a drive nobody has mounted since its owner died: all normal here.
- A realistic account of what your organisation can contribute toward the match, including volunteer hours
- Lead time. Proposals should reach a funder about three months before the work starts, and board decisions commonly take six weeks or more.
What we will tell you honestly
If your collection does not need this, we will say so. If a commodity service would serve you better, we will name it. And if an application looks unlikely to succeed, we would rather say that before you spend a committee’s time on it than after.