Fund your Capption rollout: federal and state grants

Applications for federal and state funding for museum technology usually fail because reviewers fear "shelfware"—expensive custom apps and tool implementations that die as key staff depart and maintenance effort subsumes the tech's value. Reviewers handle these requests like parents saying "no" when their child begs for yet another awful plastic toy or digital unlock.

Instead, Capption provides low-cost, low-effort, high-impact accessibility layer that immediately and quantifiably solves severe equity and access barriers without the daily, weekly, and monthly care and feeding of standard SaaS tools and custom apps. We're exceptionally well-positioned for federal grants like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Inspire Grants.

We've crafted the templates below to automatically make three structural arguments grant reviewers look for:

1. The "curb-cut" effect: Prove that solving for vulnerable populations (low-vision, dyslexic) consequently expands institutional capacity to serve the broader public (aging demographics, ESL visitors).
2. De-risking compliance: Positions your Capption implementation project as a proactive risk-management strategy to meet formalized WCAG, ADA, and possible state-level digital accessibility regulations.
3. Domestic provenance: Highlights that Capption is 100% designed, engineered, and hosted in America by its founding US nationals, satisfying federal mandates to prioritize domestic tech capacity.

1. The 5-page IMLS-led narrative

The IMLS explicitly mandates that your 5-page narrative must be organized using three main headings: Project Justification, Project Work Plan, and Project Results.

Project title: Inclusive discovery (or similar)

[IMLS Project Category: Lifelong Learning]

Project justification

The [Museum Name] requests funding to radically expand our capacity for lifelong learning by reducing the visual, spatial, social, mobility, and linguistic barriers that currently exclude underserved populations from our exhibition spaces.

Since our founding in [Year], our mission has been to [Insert your official mission statement]. To fulfill this mission, we must ensure our collections are equitable for all residents, regardless of their visual acuity, physical ability, or native language. Currently, our exhibition spaces present information that inadvertently favors a narrow demographic: fully-sighted, native-English speaking visitors between the ages of 15 and 55. We recognize that 295 million people worldwide have moderate to severe visual impairment, 20% of Americans have learning or attention issues, 76.4% of American adults live with a chronic condition, and roughly 48% of permanent US residents have limited English proficiency.

When aging or disabled visitors want to read an exhibit label, they battle minimum focal lengths, low light, glare, and illegible text. When non-native speakers encounter English-only, they're immediately shut out. When visitors feel stressed and excluded, they enter "skim mode"—glossing over exhibits to avoid fatigue, anxiety, or the embarrassment of blocking other patrons. Paper only goes so far. Legacy digital solutions like custom apps, QR code-driven webpages, and audio wands only add friction. Without a seamless interpretive infrastructure, our capacity to provide experiential learning to these communities is woefully compromised.

Project work plan

To build our capacity to serve these excluded audiences, we will deploy Capption, a 100% US-owned and -made assistive technology platform. Capption replaces the friction of heavy apps with an invisible digital bridge: full exhibit context in one tap.

With one tap of their own smartphone, visitors instantly receive perfectly-formatted multimedia context. Capption automatically translates our exhibit text into 136 languages and natively inherits the visitor’s pre-established accessibility settings including text size, contrast, and screen reader preferences, all using a Braille Institute-designed hyperlegible font.

Internally, this project will be led by [Project Director Name], our [Title], who has [X years] of experience managing [Exhibition/Visitor Experience] operations. We have selected Capption precisely because it requires no coding or ongoing IT maintenance. To guarantee total project success, this grant request includes funding for Capption Professional Services—a turnkey implementation package that pairs our Project Director directly with Capption’s US-based onboarding team to execute content ingestion and tag deployment.

Risks and mitigation: The primary risk to museum technology projects is "shelfware"—the tendency for custom software to break down due to staff turnover and ongoing maintenance demands. We mitigate this with Capption's content-oriented (not app-oriented) managed SaaS model. Capption's administrative system was designed specifically for intermittent use (rotations every quarter). Since Capption's already built, battle-tested, and updates automatically, our internal staff can focus squarely on education rather than software.

Project results

Our primary goal is to foster lifelong learning by delivering our curator's intended meaning to currently excluded classes, ultimately expanding our total addressable audience. We will deploy fully accessible digital context for [Number] core exhibits by [Date].

We will evaluate the success of this project across the four required IMLS performance measures:

1. Effectiveness: We will quantitatively measure Capption usage per exhibit for non-native and disabled visitors via Capption's anonymized backend analytics.
2. Efficiency: We will measure the labor-hours and expenditure saved by reducing translation, print, and digital costs associated with exhibition content delivery.
3. Quality: We will conduct a qualitative accessibility audit, collecting feedback that validates (or disproves) the experiential improvement and utility delivered by our accessible exhibit content.
4. Timeliness: The Project Director will monitor the milestones outlined in our attached Schedule of Completion to ensure on-time deployment.

Sustained impact: By the end of this grant cycle, the initial setup and professional service fees will be complete. The modest, fixed annual software licensing cost will be absorbed into our museum’s standard operating budget starting in Year 4, ensuring this investment creates a permanent, sustainable community infrastructure rather than a temporary tech pilot.

2. Schedule of completion attachment

The IMLS NOFO requires your chronological project timeline to be submitted as a separate PDF attachment (recommended 1 page per year), not inside the narrative. Use this structure as your guide:

Schedule of completion: year 1 rollout

3. Budgeting for IMLS and state grants

Grant committees want to fund launchpads, not permanent life support. We highly recommend structuring your grant requests as a 3-year rollout. This proves you have a plan to absorb the technology into your standard operating budget (OpEx).

IMLS cost share rules

If you are applying for the Inspire Grant specifically, you must follow these strict federal cost-share tiers:

• Small project ($5,000.00-$25,000.00): No cost share (institutional match) is required.
• Large project ($25,001.00-$75,000.00): You must provide funds from non-federal sources in an amount that is equal to or greater than the amount of your IMLS request (a 1:1 match). Note: If you fall into this tier and fail to list a 1:1 match on your IMLS Budget Form, your application will be rejected.

Other grants will have other cost structure requirements. Match your needs to their parameters.

3-Year funding structure

• Year 1: implementation and professional services. Request funds for the Capption software license and the Capption Professional Services implementation fee to install Capption on your primary exhibits. This proves you have the funded capacity to execute the launch. Reach out for exact numbers.
• Year 2: full exhibition integration. Request funds for the software license as you expand Capption into secondary and temporary exhibitions.
• Year 3: facilities, events, and exterior integration. Request funds for the software license as you expand Capption into its tertiary uses.
• Year 4 and beyond (sustainability): State clearly that by Year 4, Capption's annual fee will be fully absorbed into the museum's standard operating budget.

4. Proof of impact citations

Grant applications require evidence of market readiness and efficacy. Use these or other case studies in your applications to prove that Capption genuinely delivers:

• Speed to value: How the Putnam Museum deployed 37 accessible exhibits in 50 minutes
• Enterprise scale, community impact: How Mia achieved high accessibility usage without custom app downloads
• Preserving history and heritage: How the American Swedish Institute added digital accessibility without altering historic architecture

5. Vendor procurement details

Our official vendor information:

• Company Name: Capption
• Location: United States (100% US-based development, hosting, and data storage)
• Structure: Minnesota LLC
• Accessibility Compliance: VPAT/WCAG 2.2 AA statement

Downloadable assets:

• Download Capption W-9 (PDF) (Coming soon)
• Download Capption Sole Source Justification Letter (PDF) (Coming soon)

Need help with your application? If you are finalizing a grant application and need specific technical specifications, data privacy policies, or a custom pro-forma invoice for your budget attachments, contact our team today.