A colleague and I just finished a grant request for funds for our new facility at National Capital Trolley Museum. The package came in at 68 pages for the original, plus six additional copies of those 68 pages. All of which has to be punched with a three hole punch. The actual application and budget were about 10 pages, but the funder also required copies of our IRS 990, audit report, resumes for the parties involved, and our initial IRS determination (non-profits status letter) as part of each package. Oh, did I mention two sets of supporting documents including our 24-page lease with the parks department?This seems like a lot of paper for a grant request that is under $100,000. In our case, the funder was the county arts and humanities council. Anyone have similar experiences? Wesley

Par for the course. One of the programs I administer for my employer is grant funded, and we've generated about three of those 68-page monsters this fall for grants of 20k to 45k each.Call it blow-back from scam charities. A few bad apples run scams, such as inflating the value of donations, or hiring soliciation firms that keep 90 cents on the dollar donated, and then suddenly every funder wants 68 pages of due diligence so they can say "the charities that get our dollars are legit, see?"